Presence
There is something ineffable about being held in a space that is hosted. One of the key things that simply can’t be taught in any facilitation training is “presence.” It’s possible to talk about it, to model it and even to help others connect with it, but you can’t transmit it. It is not a technical piece. It is a practice.
I make a lot of connections between hosting practice and martial arts practice. Today, looking through some of the handful of martial arts weblogs I read, I discovered this post:
Regardless of how many years you’ve spent in the dojo, the possibility always exists that you’ll encounter something you’ve never seen before in your training. So how do you avoid this ugly scene before it happens? Believe it or not, this starts by how you present yourself to the world. If you appear arrogant and look for trouble, there’s no doubt you’ll find it. However, if you perceive yourself as a victim or a loser, you’ll end up for sure as someone’s target practice. The key is to combine equal amounts of humility and confidence that you have developed from your training into your daily life. Humility and confidence are the yin and yang of the martial artist’s persona. The great swordsman/strategist Miyamoto Musashi once said, “The warrior must make his warrior’s walk his everyday walk”. This is a quality of living that can’t be faked, and its essence can be felt even by strangers. I’ve read accounts of how martial artists should carry themselves in public; exuding grace, good posture and so on, but I believe that there’s an ineffability to the martial artist that goes beyond the physical.
You can discover more advice from Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. I’m always curious about how others describe this ineffable part of working with people. What’s your practice?
In 40 years of martial arts practice, 20 years of clinical work, and about 30 years as a teacher/learner, I now appreciate presence as never before. It is the sum total of experience of each person in each moment. Presence is both more than the energy exuded by another and less. It is that special comingling of one person with another. Receptivity, reciprocity and respectfulness apply. It is neither humility nor chest puffed aggression; we are all of strength and of areas requiring growth. Presence is felt/intuited by that animal part of us all. It is the preturnatural aura that is receptive/open to the energy of others while calmly asserting a semi-permeable boundary between. It seems to me it is easier to understand and describe presence once you have experienced it, in yourself or another. It is produced through sweat and toil of the soul as much as of the body. Martial Arts is often the vehicle used to make the journey since it offers opportunities for conscious competence which can transcend into preter-conscious (sic) competence. The strike that became a billion technical complexities becomes an artistic extension of the soul unconcerned with outcome.
In my experience very few posses this quality. One of my mentors described it to me this way, “Doug, you will be lucky to encounter perhaps one tenth of one percent of humanity that will walk the walk. It is a lifetime of hard work to be a soul in progress. It is that small percentage of our brothers and sisters which also exude an ability to create space for joy in many of the moments of their journey.