About Living Presence
Living Presence is a contemplative space exploring the mystical dimension of being and the practice of presence within daily life.
Drawing from various wisdom traditions, we approach the contemplative path as a movement beyond concepts and dogmas, and into a direct relationship with the living reality that many traditions have called God, Presence, truth, or the ground of being.
Living Presence is not a new system, method, or technique, but a simple way of pointing toward reality and a life lived in conscious relationship with it.
Through silence, dialogue, meditation, movement, contemplative films, tea ceremony, and shared inquiry, we enter into the work of shedding what obscures this deeper reality within us — while gradually coming to rest in the inherent wholeness that already is.
Over time, the spiritual life becomes less about becoming something new, and more about awakening to the living Presence already here — until presence itself begins to live our life.
Whatever your background, language, or practice, you are welcome here.
What unites us is a sincere and receptive heart.
Our Approach
Living Presence welcomes people from every spiritual background—or none at all.
We gather around a shared willingness to listen deeply. The wisdom traditions become companions, not because they ask us to adopt their language, but because each points toward a Reality that can only be known directly.
The contemplative traditions speak in many different languages, carry out different practices, work with different symbols and methods. Even the names given to ultimate Reality differ. Yet beneath these differences, they each invite us beyond concepts into direct participation in Reality itself.
Our own approach has been shaped through years of contemplative practice and accompanying people in the midst of suffering, healing, and transformation. At the heart of our approach are three essential aspects of the contemplative life as we have come to know and practice it. They are not stages to complete, but dimensions of a life gradually being transformed by Reality itself.
Rest in Presence
A regular practice of silence and stillness.
Meditation is resting rather than striving. We are not looking to achieve a spiritual experience or figure Reality out conceptually. We simply let go —or self-empty — allowing ourselves to be gradually absorbed into the living Reality that has always been here.
As we stop trying to grasp Reality with the mind, we come into contact with the Real which has always been sustaining us. This is a kind of daily dying: a continual surrender of the false self and its habitual ways of knowing. It is also our daily bread: being nourished by Reality itself.
Practicing Presence
The silence does not end when meditation ends.
As we move through the ordinary rhythms of life, we gradually learn to return again and again to the stillness that remains untouched beneath every circumstance.
Every conversation, every relationship, every step, every event, condition, and circumstance becomes an opportunity to return to the still point—to remain rooted in the unchanging truth of our own being, even as life continues to move around us.
This practice begins to reveal both the places where we remain at rest and the places where we do not.
Willingness and Purification
As we remain faithful to this way of life, the places where the false sense of self still holds sway gradually become illuminated.
Fear, attachment, resistance, and our conditioned ways of seeing begin to reveal themselves—not because we are searching for them, but because the light of Presence naturally reveals whatever obscures it.
Rather than seeing this as failure, we come to recognize it as part of the purification process of the path.
Again and again we are invited to let go of what is false. As these patterns are seen and surrendered, the false self gradually loses its apparent authority, and our lives become increasingly sourced and oriented from ultimate Reality.
Gradually, areas of life once clouded by fear and struggle become transparent to the truth that has always been here.