The Heart of Our Work
Presence isn’t something that you create or generate…
it’s a relationship that you allow.
Presence isn’t something 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 come into 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 strive to attain something that will make us feel like we’ve finally arrived — like we’ve earned our way into heaven.
But it’s not about doing more to get more presence. There’s nothing we can do to earn the presence we speak of 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 we 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 — so that we might be free of who we think we are, and come to know ourselves as we are in God’s eyes.
Who we are is not something we can grasp with the rational mind. We can only experience who we truly are.
What we’re attempting to share here is the mystery of the ineffable — and how this Great Mystery is not far away, but intimately relating to us as the very fabric of our everyday lives.
And how do we talk about this — which is ultimately unfathomable — without falling into another dogmatic doctrine? How do we share without being bound up by the words we’re using? How do we pray with our whole being—without reducing prayer to memorized techniques or hollow rituals?
The Zen monk D.T. Suzuki and the Christian monk Thomas Merton once gathered with their students for a tea ceremony. The students sat in quiet anticipation, watching their teachers with reverence and expectation. As the ceremony began, Suzuki poured the tea — but spilled it across the table. The students gasped. Suzuki smiled, turned to Merton, and said,
“You and I both know — it was never about doing it right.”
It was never about pouring the tea without a spill or performing the ceremony flawlessly. Never about saying the right words, or praying the right way.
Technique alone cannot transmit what is real. You can perform every gesture beautifully and still miss the point entirely.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux shares this story with a young nun discouraged by her own sense of inadequacy on the spiritual path. She describes a small child at the bottom of a staircase—her father waiting at the top, arms outstretched. The child, full of longing, tries with all her might to climb the stairs. But she cannot even make it up the first step. Still, she tries again and again.
Finally, the father, moved by love, cannot bear the distance any longer. He runs down the stairs, gathers her in his arms, and carries her to the top.
It’s not about being perfectly present all the time. It’s more about the sincerity of our attempt.
We leave the holy ground of presence. We divorce ourselves from the true nature of reality. We fall into old patterns, false narratives, stories of not-enoughness.
And in the moment we see our mistake, can we resist the urge to shame or blame ourselves — or others — back into wholeness? The invitation is not to fix ourselves, but to release our grip. To let go of the idea that we must climb to God by our own efforts. Even in all our discipline, devotion, and ritual, we were never going to make it there by will alone.
A sincere attempt is often nothing more than admitting: I cannot make it up even one step on my own. I can’t free myself by my own hand.
And in that honest admission, we make contact with a greater reality — an infinitely loving presence that longs to meet us where we are.
In the end, the tea is poured through us. And in full liberation, it no longer matters whether it spills or not — because it is no longer you doing the pouring.
This is a moment-by-moment path. A daily self-emptying — or, as Thomas Merton says, ‘forgetting ourselves on purpose.’ Letting ourselves be absorbed into a living Presence, and thus living from that Presence.
We work with the raw material of our lives — our dysfunctional patterns and habits — as fuel for the fire of the transformative process. The process of becoming who we truly are. A returning to the nature of our Nature. To the depths of our being, where our being and God’s being are — somehow, mysteriously — one. And we are drawn, again and again, into quiet union with our Beloved, who has been here all along.
Connect with Us
Location
6672 Shetland Circle
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Phone
James (801) 808-9591
Kayla (714) 345-5360