"Presencing" is my term for the practice of cultivating purposeful awareness of body in environment in the present moment. I say "presencing” rather than “being present,” because it is very much a process, very much a practice. It is a process and practice of cultivating wholeness, because we become disconnected from our wholeness when part of our experience is rejected. Presencing allows us to practice getting back in touch with our experience right now, allows us to learn to listen to our wholeness.

The miracle about this is that we do not have to feel whole right now to successfully practice presence. We do not even have to feel like presencing right now. A feeling of despair or resistance is good enough. So is a feeling of excitement or bliss. The ache in your hip is perfect. So is the warmth of the sun on your face. The detail of the veins and bruises on a leaf. The sound of the wind in the trees. Or of traffic in the distance. The texture of your lovers skin (or your own). All grand places to start.

Taking a moment to pay a gentle and bright attention to something, anything, that you are experiencing right now is presencing. When you start to worry or drift off or tell a story about it - or in any way stop paying attention - you can notice what you’re thinking, what worrying feels like, where in the body you can feel that thought. Or you can gently direct your attention back to the rock under your hands, or the insides of your feet, or the feeling in your back you were attending to before.

Presencing is akin to meditation. It may be thought of as a kind of meditation. The Buddhist teacher Osho says, “Whatsoever you do with awareness is meditation.”* Presencing is cultivating awareness. It is not sitting still and experiencing nothing, as I used to think meditation was when I was a child.

Presence, like wholeness, is paradoxical. Wholeness remains, and yet we can have the felt experience of being divided, of something being missing. If dissociation is physiological, we may be said to really be disconnected. We can also reconnect again.

Like wholeness, presence of body in space and time is a fact that remains whether we are aware of it or not. We are here now, wherever here and now are for each of us at this moment. And yet it is also experientially true to say, “I’m really not here today,” “I’m just not present,” “she’s out to lunch.” When we say these things we are describing a lack of whole-body awareness. The work of presencing is practicing awareness of presence.

The word “presence”, then, is often used to describe what is really whole-body awareness. That is why it is possible to say “I’m not present today” even though I am physically present wherever I am in space and time – the word presence is being used in two ways. Using the term "presencing" creates a linguistic distinction between lack of awareness and lack of actual presence (the later of which is impossible), in order to avoid the implication that it is possible to be separate from one’s body.

You are here, embodied, now, and all you ever need do to become aware of that fact is to become aware of the sensations your are experiencing right now - whether it be something you see, feel, hear, taste, or smell.

Welcome Home,

~ Layla Messner, "Elf Girl"

* Osho, Meditation: The First and Last Freedom (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 4.

This article is an excerpt from my M.A. Thesis and is Copyright © 2006 by Layla Holguin-Messner. Osho's quote, of course, belongs to him.