Body Presence and Contemplative Awareness Practices

​ "Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people–in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside." - Eugene Gendlin
Our bodies are warehouses of our life experiences and they connect us directly to the rest of Creation and to God. Getting in touch with how our bodies react to our daily experiences leads to integration and healing while also opening us up to a direct connection to Creation and God "In whom we live and move and have our Being" (Acts 17:28). Experiencing directly what we genuinely feel in our bodies leads us to a depth of Contemplative Awareness; that loving experience of what's real in the moment and to a source of Intuition and Knowing that we would otherwise be unconscious to us. The integration of repressed energy diminishes our reactivity and allows us the freedom to experience and respond as our genuine selves.

There are many different methods of Body Presence. Though some are presented as spiritual practice, all have a therapeutic aspect to them. On this page I provide a brief background and resources on three of these methods that I'm grounded in and am available to assist individuals and groups with:
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  • Welcoming Prayer - a method developed and taught by Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. which acknowledges the Body as the warehouse of the unconscious.
  • The Presence Process - a method developed by Michael Brown originally as a result of his own work to facilitate his own healing from a debilitating physical condition which he discovered was due to the emotions he repressed in his body.
  • BioSpiritual Focusing - Fr. Ed McMahon, SJ and Fr. Peter Campbell, SJ further developed and wrapped Christian spiritual understanding around a method first developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin.

The common thread and the power of each of these methods is that they bypass the intellect and rely fully and directly on being with the Body feeling or emotion that's being experienced.

All of this work resonates with the insights of Rumi, the 13-th Century Sufi mystic, scholar and poet who invites us to a welcome with hospitality whatever emotion or feeling we encounter within ourselves throughout the day. Each of these guests, Rumi observes,  is a guide from beyond...
​Rumi’s Guest House
Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
 
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
 
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
 
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
 
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
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What Comes From Being With The Experiences We Carry In Our Body

Before getting into the specific methods of Body Presence, I'd like to share a wonderful TED Talk describes the power of being present to what we carry deeply within our bodies, the wisdom held there and the healing resulting from simply being fully present to it.

The methods I describe below each can lead, in their own way, to the healing talked about here.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children… We shouldn’t try to get rid of our own pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach. When we can hold our pain consciously and trustfully (and not project it elsewhere), we find ourselves in a very special liminal space. Here we are open to learning and breaking through to a much deeper level of faith and consciousness. Please trust me on this. We must all carry the cross of our own reality until God transforms us through it. These are the wounded healers of the world, and healers who have fully faced their wounds are the only ones who heal anyone else. – Richard Rohr

What is true is already so, owning it doesn't make it worse. Not being open to it doesn't make it go away. And because it is true it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. - Eugene Gendlin.

Welcoming Prayer

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.  - Victor Frankl
​As with the other practices developed by Contemplative Outreach, the Welcoming Prayer practice is meant at "dismantling the false self" and open us up to our True Self. It is a process of 3 movements:
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  1. Feel and Sink Into (fully experience what we're feeling in our body) - When the first indications of an emotion or physical upset arise, focus on the sensation in the body. Where in the body is the emotion felt? Feel it without judgment. Don’t think about why the emotion is there or what it means, don’t tell stories about it or analyze it– just feel it.
  2. Welcome (the feeling and God's presence and action there) - Welcome in the awareness of the presence of God into the feeling. It is the feeling that was felt in the first step that is being welcomed, NOT the situation that brought it on. By doing this, an inner hospitality and unconditional presence is developed. Welcome in the awareness of the presence of God into the feeling. It is the feeling that was felt in the first step that is being welcomed, NOT the situation that brought it on. By doing this, an inner hospitality and unconditional presence is developed. Welcoming the feelings and sensations means opening yourself fully to them and resisting any urge to reject or suppress them.
  3. Let Go (of the obstacles to experiencing the feeling and embrace it fully) - The letting go step incorporates the attitude of unconditional acceptance of life as it is, rather than as we think it SHOULD be. Surrender requires us to leave behind our personal agenda and our egoic preferences in order to experience the peace and bliss of knowing our oneness with God. In this step, you need not rush to let go. Rather, stay with the physical sensation, alternating between observing and welcoming. Gently and willingly let go of the need to fix anything, to attach stories to the feeling, and wait until the emotional spike has passed.
​Welcoming Prayer is a Spiritual (Prayer) Practice because it inherently invites God's presence and action (Grace) to interrupt what Thomas Keating envisioned as the "false self in action" as illustrated in the figure to the right. 

Keating envisioned that within our unconscious, was stored the Energy Centers which stored our programs for happiness built around our exaggerated needs for Security/Survival, Affection/Esteem, Power/Control as well as our Socially Conditions beliefs. There is a huge amount of psychic energy (resident in our bodies) around these Energy Centers as they are typically created by repressed/undealt with traumas from our youth.
Figure - the false self in action.
We usually don’t realize how much of our vital life energy is bound up and unconsciously leached away in those “energy centers.”… The energy of our being remains bound, at a frequency too slow and too self-preoccupied to sustain real inner awakening. – Cynthia Bourgeault
We develop Conscious Attachments and Aversions that drive our values and behaviors in order to avoid experiencing negative feelings associated our these Energy Centers. When an exterior event triggers directly challenges our Attachments or Aversions, we experience negative energy bubbling up from our  (a body sensation) and some frustrating emotion begins to surface. This is the point (5A) where Welcoming Prayer is most helpful. if we're able to Welcome, Feel/Sink Into and Let Go of our Resistance to being with the feeling, and instead be with it with God, God's action (Grace) allows the underlying energy in the body to shift and be integrated thus reducing the psychic charge and the aspects of the false that go along with it. If we allow the resulting (Afflictive) emotion to get away from us, it sets off a chain of events that reinforces our false self reactivity and the unconscious psychic energy repressed in our body.

Feeling and Sinking often starts by becoming sensitive to the emotion, but, with experience and practice, we being to notice the body sensations that set off our emotions, that is the repressed energy associated with that emotion stored in our bodies. Welcoming is an expression Loving acceptance of the feeling and a Consent and Awareness of God's presence and action within us. Letting Go is facilitated at the third (Letting Go) movement of Welcoming Prayer with the following sentences:

I let go of the desire for security, affection, control.
I embrace this moment as it is.

The prayer reminds the ego to let go of the the desires which enforce the "false self" and to embrace the (body) experience of the moment. The presence to what is allows us to experience God's action, otherwise known as God's grace, to shift and integrate the underlying body feeling.

Books and Resources:
The following is a full-length wonderful workshop delivered by one of my Contemplative Outreach mentors and a long-time Welcoming Prayer practitioner and teacher, Therese Saulnier, about a year before her passing:

Here's a helpful video from Cynthia Bourgeault that provides some further clarity on Welcoming Prayer.

Personal note: I'm not a proponent of naming the feeling or sensation too soon as that locks it in too soon with a label that might not be appropriate.

The Presence Process

Unless we are prepared to reach back through time and space and rescue our child self by bringing it into the safety of the present moment, where we can give it the unconditional love and attention it is calling for, we as adults will never experience authentic peace.  - Michael Brown
Why is it so difficult to respond consciously when we are upset? Why do we instead resort to hurtful, repetitive, unconscious, reactive behaviors?

The Presence Process (TPP) provides an understanding to answer these questions and a process to begin a journey to conscious emotional response where you experience greater peace of mind, a real sense of connection to your authentic self, deeper gratitude, reverence for live and begin living a more conscious life of loving and accepting yourself and others. 
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At its core TPP is a systematic way of approaching the emotional healing of our childhood woundedness. It is a self-facilitating approach to emotional growth, development and integration which opens our ability to be present with our feelings in order to integrate our unresolved pain from our childhood emotional development. According to Michael Brown who developed TPP:

These videos are a good introduction to the Presence Process in Michael's own words:
The journey of TPP is not an easy one. It is one which Michael feels people take only through inspiration and guidance and not before they are really ready for it.

The first two sections of TPP book are to prepare you to understand the value and commitment involved in undertaking the journey of the TPP. And to familiarize us with the challenges and changes that would lie ahead if, one in fact chooses to go on, and do the next 10 weeks. Then if you have chosen to go ahead with the actual process there are ten one-week programs you would do that are geared to change your life and perspective in a major way. It is really about becoming fully present in each moment without the filters of the past. Then knowing and expressing our true authentic selves we find our Unity with all. 
Here are some other videos that address some of Michael's insights around what's discovered as a result of the Presence Process.
Books and Resources:

BioSpiritual Focusing

BioSpiritual Focusing takes the methods described above and adds dimension, depth  and an invitation to gentle, unconditional presence to them while explicitly defining the role of a companion in the process.
What makes BioSpiritual Focusing significant today is that it offers a fresh and holistic approach to spiritual transformation and healthy, vibrant living. It raises the possibility that people can find freedom from those places in their lives where they are stuck. Old patterns and habits can be transformed. New strength can be found in dealing with the myriad of personal addictions that have arisen because of the inability to be with strong or negative emotions in a healthy way.
In addition, BioSpiritual Focusing offers a new opportunity for individuals and communities to deeply connect with the “More” that sustains us. The habit of BioSpiritual “felt-sensing” is an embodied spirituality that can be life-giving, healing which leads to an inner peace as well as peace with all those who inhabit this earth with us.

Focusing, the Exeprience of Being with the Felt Sense

During his student days, Eugene Gendlin, a philosophy student, had participated in a Counseling Practicum under the direction of Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers had identified “congruence,” the ability to feel one’s feelings physiologically and allow them to symbolize themselves accurately, as a key to human growth. The lack of such congruence brought profound inner disconnection within the person, which in turn disrupted external relationships and perceptions, causing all manner of pathological conditions. (I invite you to get a sense of Carl Rogers' companioning presence in eliciting congruence from those he worked with in the YouTube video shared here).

Gendlin set out to learn about how the   inner experiencing process led to congruent, connected living. He noted that meaning is never just thought in the mind alone. Meaning is also felt in the body. He further realized that the body was more than a mere pipeline of emotion, feeling, and physical sensations rather, the body added it’s own unique, implicit knowing and felt meaning to sensory input! It was not a mere passive agent, but a dynamic player in the drama of human evolving. Gendlin named this new awareness, “felt sensing.” It was a knowing “felt” in the body, yet “sensed” not like the five senses, but more like, “She makes good sense,” where “sense” is a meaning word, including but also containing far more than physical sensation or emotion alone. Gendlin developed a teachable process for accessing felt senses, which he named, “Focusing.”

the habit of ‘noticing’ and ‘nurturing’ all our important feelings.

Peter Campbell PhD and Ed McMahon PhD had been trained as Jesuits. With this common background they could appreciate the evolutionary spirituality of the two Jesuits, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner. It is the human body which provides our most grounded spiritual link, both to the details of daily living as well as the mystery of an evolving universe. Our body, is itself our conscious bridge into immortality! It is our precious “link” to the universe as a whole--and beyond! 
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In the early 1970’s, Campbell and McMahon set out to explore the link between Focusing and spirituality. They found that the body’s ability to experience felt meaning is our forgotten bridge into the experience of spirit and, as the poet William Wordsworth so eloquently proclaimed, the resource within consciousness for our, “Intimations of Immortality.” Body Meaning, they learned, came as spontaneous gift or surprise. Felt sensing was not a byproduct of logic and reason. It could neither be predicted nor controlled. There is a transcendent, “graced” quality to the felt sense as it unfolds meaning in the body. McMahon and Campbell widened Focusing to emphasize this gift dimension, linking the mind-knowing of our information-based culture with our spirit-based body wisdom, opening a whole new paradigm of human consciousness for exploration. 

They initially called their synthesis, “BioSpiritual  Focusing,” adding the prefix “Bio-” to highlight the body’s central contribution to the experience of gift or grace in human life. In more recent years they have come to realize that the critical key which unlocks this evolving human awareness is an ability to develop the “habit” of noticing and nurturing all important feelings, together with the body’s “felt sense knowing” that is implicit within our feelings.

The Basics of BioSpiritual Focusing

There are a few key points about BioSpiritual Focusing:

  • BioSpiritual Focusing emphasizes bringing a Loving-Caring presence to our important feelings (e.g. emotions & physical sensations), and the “Felt Sense”, meaning, and wisdom to which they are a doorway. It is learning to listen to the story that our body carries and wants to tell us. 
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  • ​The Process followed is like this:​​
  1. Take a few minutes to allow yourself to come to a quiet, centered place.
  2. Clearing a space inside you, perhaps by noticing what you are carrying within and “putting it aside just for now,” or perhaps by grounding yourself in the body through body awareness and mindful breathing. 
  3. Noticing what it is that most needs your loving, caring presence in this moment, and how/ where this Felt Sense is experienced in the body.
  4. Being with the Felt Sense by acknowledging its presence, checking if it’s OK to be with it and, if so, tapping into the body’s innate affectionate response to let this part of you know that “I am here, I care, and I am listening.”
  5. Nurturing the Felt Sense, thus allowing it to speak in the symbolic, metaphorical language of the body – perhaps body sensations, images, memories, emotions – and following it as it perhaps shifts and deepens.
  6. Bringing closure to focusing by savoring any felt shift in the internal Felt Sense, by thanking the body for what it knows and has shown you, and perhaps by letting the newly noticed and nurtured part/s of you know that you will be back to listen again.

  • Though focusing can be done as a self-guided process, a Companion is a big help in the process. A companion is simply present to the focuser and holding space for the Focuser to notice, be with, and nurture whatever is within them, by reflecting back what the Focuser is experiencing, and by supporting the Focuser to stay inside with the Felt Sense in their body.

  • The Focuser, is in charge, and can a Companion as much or as little as you want of what they are noticing and experiencing, though it’s helpful to at least occasionally let the Companion know something of what is happening. Anything shared is held in confidence, and the Focuser can end the focusing whenever they like; the experience is meant to be safe and private.

  • The Focuser is encouraged to take whatever time they need to get in touch with a Felt Sense and then to nurture and listen to it, making sure that any words or images echoed back resonate with their body, and feeling free to correct a Companion if they don’t. 

  • t takes time to learn how to notice and nurture our Felt Senses, and there is no wrong or right way to do this. There is a gentleness and compassion to Focusing. The Focuser must Trust the body if it doesn’t want to go somewhere or divulge something; trust it to lead them where they need to go; trust the unfolding over time of a new body habit, wisdom , presence, a “body-feel for grace,” and a sense of connectedness to a Greater Whole. In BioSpiritual Focusing the Focuser can be directly with the feeling, of if that's too difficult, to be with the feeling at a comfortable distance or even to be with the resistance to being with the feeling.
Process Skipping is an understanding that BioSpiritual Focusing has advanced of how we develop addictive behaviors that prevent us from paying the attention to difficult feelings our bodies are carrying. Experience with Body Presence Practices invite us into becoming aware of these feelings and finally give us the capacity to be with them to allow for integration and healing.
Books and Resources:

In Via Lumen, LLC Can Help You Embrace Body Presence Practices

Mike Smoolca is Commissioned by Contemplative Outreach to teach workshops on Welcoming Prayer and assist people to integrate this Prayer Practice to support their Spiritual Journey. Mike has developed a facilitated workshop that help groups experience the Presence Process together and would be delighted to offer this program to interested groups or to companion someone as they go through the process themselves. Mike is a BioSpiritual Focusing Companion and teacher associated with BioSpiritual.org and the Genesis Spirituality Center BioSpiritual Focusing team and companions folks individually and can also teach you or your group about Focusing.
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    Please Contact Us if You're Interested In  Body Presence Practices