Being present with one self

Here again is Amanda sharing some experiences of how she experiences being and becoming present in a dialogue.

Not exactly ‘doing nothing’, by Amanda Zamparo

Being present is different than doing nothing. While I am doing nothing with my family, for example, on a Sunday afternoon, this means we are actually watching a movie, talking about life, seeing the sunset, lying down on a hammock, petting the cats or something along these lines. There is no attachment to a desired outcome, there is no job to be done and there is the possibility to rest.

In doing nothing, there is a state of relaxation that is similar to what we experience in a Collective Presencing session. We don’t need to be vigilant any more; we can relax our nervous systems. And as we relax, there is the possibility for something else to emerge; something that has wanted to emerge. But it is different than doing nothing: we are together with an intention, an openness to the unknown… The intention is to be present with each other, with a shared inquiry (there is curiosity!), with the observation of our deepest impulses, feelings and sensations.

While I am listening to other people in the circle, I’m just relaxing, taking it in… Having goose bumps that come from my heart, and different parts of my body. Sometimes I feel a deep sense of love for the people in the room. Sometimes my mind starts traveling through time, listening to others speaking (sometimes not understanding every word, sometimes just listening to the voices as if it were music) and also listening to my own body, memories, feelings emerging. Suddenly, I am surprised by my own body: it wants to speak something! It has something to say. Maybe I know what it is, maybe I don’t. Suddenly, the relaxation becomes a rush of adrenaline to step up, take the talking peace and speak! What happens now is something that I can best describe as: everything that was stuck in my body suddenly finds a way out, in a way that makes me feel good about myself: relief and sometimes pleasure.

This experience of somehow feeling in your body that something wants to be spoken through you – even if your conditioned mind doesn’t agree or shies away from it – is typical of the kind of sharing that we invite into the circle. We do want a dialogue that includes all kinds of knowing, also subtle noticing, intuitions, crazy ideas etc. next to scientific facts and more conceptual ideas, and lived experiences. We invite both the yin and the yang side of our human knowing.

Now let me introduce you to Cheryl, a young woman living in Canada with Chinese ancestry. She mentions this experience of being spoken through and becoming more porous.

Finding my feet, by Cheryl Hsu

I attended Collective Presencing for the first time with no idea about what I was stepping into or why (I would later describe that I felt called or strangely attracted). I remember the group of about twenty people checking in, and then we were asked to speak to and through the middle. I will not be able to tell you about the content of what happened, or exactly what we spoke of — but I knew I was extremely nervous, and I knew I had to go back. Something about it felt like the exact medicine I needed to hold and metabolize the intensity that gripped my body.

I wrote about the first six weeks of my experience here, with out-of-character vulnerability and fawning enthusiasm that I would later attribute to someone falling in love. (I both smile and cringe when I re-read the puppy-love innocence of my first love letter, just like I will inevitably cringe at writing this second one here).

I’ve been attending Collective Presencing consistently ever since, first simply learning how to speak to the centre.

And the truth is, there is also something weird and spooky about embracing the sensation of being moved or spoken through. What was previously solid becomes more diaphanous and ghostly, separation between self and the other is more porous.

And when I am in Collective Presencing, I begin to notice that just as the “self” is fluid, the territory of what we know, or reality is always shifting, changing – it feels alive. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m being haunted, possessed by the unseen subtleties in the dark forest. Yet, as I stretch in my capacity to become more porous and receptive to the people and environment around me, I feel more – more intensity, more joy, more grief. And I also feel over-sensitive and irritated.

Deep listening to self

This form of dialogue is one big ask to listen deeper; deeper to one self, deeper to others and even deeper to the whole – of the group, and including the surroundings, world events etc. These two entries by these ladies speak to this deeper – subtler – listening to one’s self, to what is authentically you beneath the conditioning we are all familiar with. You could capture it in: being non-egoic, while being fully engaged.

In order for this to happen there are a couple of prompts that we give to participants at the beginning of each dialogue session. The first one is that we invite silence: we are not afraid of having seconds, or even minutes of silence during the dialogue. We can even use our turn to speak – as we pick up the talking piece or un-mute ourselves in an online session – to ask for silence, whatever the reason is that we would need or like that. As we move away from our conventional conversational style, silence is first of all good to slow us down, to get out of the habitual groove, to be comfortable with it and let some whispers or inklings come through.

The second prompt is also about breaking our habitual way of sharing. We invite people to hesitate a while before they want to finish their sharing. These seconds or minutes can be used to sense deeper in one’s self, in one’s body, if there is something more to share that comes from a deeper or subtler place within. It turns out that this way of sharing does increase people’s self-awareness as we try to dive a bit deeper than our normal ways of sharing.

Different people use different words to name this, but in essence it is about speaking from a place that is different from the thoughts and ideas that were already formed in your head before you entered the circle. You can name this as speaking from a felt sense, from source, from spirit, from mystery… whatever words you feel at ease with. This kind of subtle sensing brings in a knowing that complements your mental and conceptual intelligence. It will enhance your inner knowing of what next step to take in a project or what is going on under the surface.

We all have access to this subtle sensing, what some people call the liminal (more on this in the last section of Part 3). As Cheryl mentioned it can feel spooky that you are able to articulate words and sentences and draw up images that have never before crossed your (conditioned) mind. I surely felt very weird when I started doing Automated Writing – now many years ago – let alone to later speak to others what new ideas or insights had come up. While practicing in this way, we are getting used to it… and we start to understand the wisdom that it holds.