The Heart of Our Work
Presence isn’t something that you create or generate… it’s a relationship that you allow. This is also to say that God is not an idea, but the reality of every moment of our lives. Where we let go of our ideas about God and life, where we surrender our self-created identities, is the inner place of stillness where we are in relationship with the true nature of reality.
We often try to do something to get into this state of presence; we try to prove we’re worthy, we’re doing to attain something, something that makes us feel that we’re enough to earn our way into heaven. We’re trying to earn God’s grace.
It’s not about doing more to get more presence. There isn’t anything you can do that’ll get you to the state of presence we’re talking about here.
If this holy ground is beyond creation and dissolution; if it already, always, exists within us, why don’t we realize it? How do access it?
“The path cannot be a path of attaining because nothing’s missing. The ground is this infinite generosity of God completely being given to us as the depth of ourselves. Therefore, the path has to be one of becoming detached from what hinders us from realizing it.” James Finley
This is the way of self-emptying that we may be absorbed into the Great Mystery to which we already belong. We let go of our persistent holding - our clinging to certain perspectives, emotions, circumstances - that we might be free of who we think we are and come to know ourselves as who we are in God’s eyes. Who we are is not something we can know with our rational minds, we can only experience who we really are. We’re attempting to share here the mystery of the ineffable and how it is that this great mystery is not far away but is intimately relating to us, as the very fabric of our everyday reality.
Presence isn’t something that you create or generate…
it’s a relationship that you allow.
And how do we talk about this, which is unfathomable, without getting lost in some new dogmatic doctrine? And how do we share without being bound up by the words? And how do we practice prayerfulness without getting lost in the rituals of our prayer?
It’s not about being perfectly present all the time. It’s more about the art of recovery. We may make mistakes, leave the holy ground of presence, divorce ourselves from the true nature of reality, become attached to our false narrative… But can we not double the burden by blaming and shaming ourselves (or others), punishing ourselves (or others) back into wholeness? Can we see the child in us that has made a simple mistake, and gently soften our clinging. Let go of our persistent holding. Let ourselves be empty of our attachments to false ideas, dogmas, gods.
This is a moment by moment practice. A daily coming into greater presence in all our moments. Letting ourselves be absorbed into a living presence, and thus living from a greater presence.
We work with the base material of our everyday approaches to life, our dysfunctional patterns, our disharmonious states as fuel for the fire of the transformative process. The transformative process of becoming who we truly are — discovering the nature of our Nature — in the depths of our being-ness, where our being and God’s being are one. The transformative process of coming into deeper union with our Beloved.
