The Gift of Presence

At this time of year, there’s a lot of emphasis on physical present buying with many shopping guides and ‘top ten best gift’ lists, not to mention the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday hullabaloo, all designed to encourage buying more and more ‘things’ for Christmas.

Yet, one of the most meaningful gifts we can offer to ourselves and to others, is the gift of presence. This can be an antidote to physical present buying and the buying of more stuff and clutter, usually for the sake of it. This is about our mental, physical and spiritual presence; offering our company, our attention, fully and whole-heartedly.

It’s easy to forget how important and meaningful genuine presence is and how that feels in our multi-distraction world, where our attention is constantly stretched and vied for by apps and advertisers.

Many of us hold conversations with each other while still scrolling, multi-tasking, half-listening, or mentally elsewhere. Genuine presence has become a rarity, so much so that offering someone your full attention stands out and can be a form of generosity, where we can offer something helpful, meaningful and much needed.

Listening with presence and from the heart is a skill. When was the last time you had a meaningful encounter and conversation where you felt genuinely seen and heard, listened to and understood? How did that make you feel, or how might that have felt, if you can’t remember the last time?

Chances are it felt meaningful, fulfilling, connecting and nourishing. Imagine offering those qualities to someone else, simply by turning off your phone and turning your attention fully to the other person?

Generosity of presence with others doesn’t mean draining our own energy through over-giving or over-stepping our own boundaries and needs either. True embodied presence encompasses being present and responsive to the needs of both ourselves and the other person. By tuning into our body and needs we can get a sense of how resourced we feel and can set our boundaries accordingly. We can then communicate our needs to others which enables us to preserve our energy when needed. For instance, a shorter, meaningful fully-present encounter and conversation with another is preferable than over-stretching then drifting off.

So, presence is also a form of self-care. Presence is when we slow down enough to be present in the moment for ourselves so we begin to notice what we’re really thinking and feeling. We will hear more clearly the messages our body is sending us, and become more aware of what we’re feeling emotionally, what our needs are and how to respond to them.

When we practice presence and become more skilful at it, there’s a natural play or give and take in shared presence, an ebb and flow of our needs and the needs of others – each taking a turn to come into the foreground, into focus, then dissolving into the background. When two people are in presence together, there can be an even flow of listening and responding in turn, holding space in presence for ourselves and each other in balance and harmony. It’s a beautiful thing if it can be named, shared and practised with another person.

Becoming more present through increasing our awareness with curiosity and compassion, can help us to notice the signs well before we become drained, exhausted, overwhelmed or burnt out. When we tune into our inner world with increased awareness, we can slow down and often discover we have more options available than we thought.

We may find it becomes easier to say yes when we mean yes, and no when we need to. Our boundaries can come from confidence in our awareness, clarity, self-compassion, and needs of self and other, rather than from a default setting of guilt or people-pleasing.

When we protect our own energy with this kind of awareness and honesty, we’re also directly benefiting others and protecting and improving our relationships, especially if we remember what we do for ourselves, we genuinely do for others too.

Presence is also an invitation into a deeper relationship with the natural world. When we pay attention we can tune into and align with the energy of the seasons. In winter, Mother Nature is showing us how to rest, conserve our energy and tend to our roots. Meanwhile, our culture’s commercialised Christmas traditions of brightly lit busy-ness goes directly against our natural urges that align with the seasonal cycles and can create tension.

So, connecting with presence and awareness to nature, the land, plants, trees and animals around us can help us get in touch with what we truly need, rather than what we think we should be doing at this time of year.

Even if we have limited choices due to work restrictions and social conventions around Christmas, greater embodied presence can make it easier to choose connection over distraction, nourishment over pressure, and alignment over obligation whenever we can.

This time of year, presence can be the simplest and most meaningful gift of all. It can create and strengthen our connections without stretching the bank balance or or energy reserves.

There are many simple exercises for increasing presence. It can be as simple as bringing our awareness to our breath for a minute and noticing and naming the sensations in our body, whatever we are doing.

We can practice remembering to take a slow breath (even during a conversation,) and even send energetic roots into the earth for grounding. When we need to realign to presence we can say to ourselves: “With this breath I am fully present. With this breath, I notice my needs. With this breath, I offer my presence.”

We can even say things like: “Let me turn my phone onto silent and take a breath, I want to be able to be fully present with you and listen to what you’re saying.”

This year I’m going to make a list of people who I will make time to be fully present with. We don’t have to tell people about this or make a grand gesture that could sound patronising, we can simply decide we value presence and set intentions to listen with care and respond from the heart as an offering of appreciation for our connection to those around us.

The quote below expresses ‘presence’ as a Buddha quality, aligned with Enlightenment that I’ve always found inspiring:

“We express our presence through our body, actions, movements and speech. We express it in our bearing, our posture and the way we do things. Our presence expresses itself in the way we take our place in the world, the way we ‘take our seat’. 

We are not ashamed to exist, we take our place with dignity as human beings and we respect ourselves because we respect all human beings. Being fully present means to be awake, alert, dignified, confident, relaxed and connected.

It means being fully present in our body, being physically present, grounded, centred. It means coming down from too much thinking, being firmly and whole-heartedly present, awake and alive. 

Only being fully present can we respond appropriately to the situation in the world around us.”

Lama Shenpen Hookham, an extract from the booklet: Heart of Meditation