The Practice of Loving Presence – Applied Buddhism
The Power of Loving Presence in Therapy
by Donna Martin
Introduction to the Practice of Loving Presence
by Ron Kurtz and Donna Martin
"Earth’s the right place for love. I don’t know where
it’s likely to go better."
(Robert Frost)
Loving
presence is easy to recognize. Imagine a happy and contented
mother looking at the sweet face of her peaceful newborn baby.
She is calm, loving, and attentive. Unhurried and undistracted,
the two of them seem to be outside of time… simply being
rather than doing. And, gently held within a field of love and
life’s wisdom, they are as present with each other as any
two persons could be.
When someone offers loving presence in relationship, it has a very
powerful effect on another. Possibly without even noticing it,
the other feels safer, feels heard, appreciated, and even understood.
When that happens, healing has already begun and is most likely
to continue in a fruitful direction.
Loving presence is a state of being. It is pleasant, good for one’s
health, rewarding in and of itself. It’s a state in which
one is open-hearted and well intentioned. In its purest form, it
is spiritually nourishing and sensitive to subtle energies. It
is also the best state to be in when offering someone emotional
support.
By emotional support, we mean support for the processes that create
and sustain a healthy, happy emotional life. One look around will
tell you that this is desperately needed. A healthy emotional life
requires a safe place to express and someone loving to bear witness.
It requires the release of old emotional hurts and an opening for
new paths to pleasure and joy.
Loving presence and emotional support are big parts of relating
to each other. In all areas of life, whether personal and professional,
their presence or absence is significant. We have all experienced
the difference. Loving presence is not only easy to recognize,
it is easy to teach. We have taught it experientially to hundreds
of people in the past few years. It is taught using the following
steps.
As the sequence of exercises unfolds, we first become aware, in
a gentle way, of some of our habitual agendas around relationship.
We then learn to relax our attachments to these agendas. This relaxation
brings an opportunity to establish a whole new sensitivity to others.
As we do this, we begin to experience loving presence, a pleasant,
relaxed, present-centered, open-hearted state of mind. Finally,
we practice relating to each other from this state.
As in the Hakomi Method generally, we use mindfulness to discover
and study our habits. Mindfulness is a state of consciousness in
which we turn our attention to the flow of our experience, with
the added and unusual condition that we have no intention to control
what happens. For most of us, this is not our usual state of consciousness.
In mindfulness, we are not just reacting. We are also noticing
our reactions. We are participating as observers of our own behavior.
We are at least one step removed from anything that seems to happen
by itself in our experience.
In the Hakomi Method, we use evoked experiences in mindfulness
to study and understand ourselves. We may use little experiments
to evoke such experiences. The first thing that happens is that
a mindful state is established. Then, while in that state, something
is introduced (it may be a statement, a movement, a touch etc.)
and whatever experience is evoked by that is studied and discussed.
This method is used to study the habits that organize our experiences.
Since most of what we do and feel and think is habitual, these
habits are very close to who we are. Habits reflect our images,
assumptions, and beliefs about the kind of world we live in and
who we are within it.
Mindfulness is also a traditional method of spiritual practice.
In distancing oneself from all that creates the everyday habitual
self, one begins to recognize the Self that does not change, the
powerful and universal Self that permeates all. There is a basic
freedom that comes from relaxing our attachments to who we think
we are and how things should be. There is a lightness of being,
a peacefulness, a kind of spaciousness that makes room for humor
and compassion.
This spacious mind is about celebrating mystery and humor and a
Self beyond the limits of the ordinary ego. One aspect of this
spaciousness is the ability to see things with a wide-angle lens
and from many different angles. It is acting without controlling.
Not being attached to particular outcomes. Being sensitive and
open. Lowering the noise of internal chatter and the preconceived
ideas that generally interfere with clarity, insight, and intuition,
as well as with true acceptance and understanding.
From mindfulness, to spaciousness, we begin to see more clearly,
and to open to new possibilites of how to be nourished, to feed
the soul. This kind of non-ego centered nourishment fills us up
and radiates out as loving presence, providing the ground and context
for healing to unfold spontaneously.
These are the steps we move through to cultivate the practice of
loving presence: mindfulness, self-study, relaxation and spaciousness,
seeing clearly (perceptual wisdom), non-egocentric nourishment,
and loving presence.
