Real Healing: Practicing “Unconditional Presence”

Do you sometimes sit at home on gloomy, overcast days and ponder vacantly the security of being in a warm, cosy, sheltered home, protected by walls and a roof from the elements? There’s some feeling of indwelling sanctuary our inner child experiences as we watch the effects of the wind blowing and the rain falling. We’re caught up in it; it’s mesmerising and rather cool. Then there are songs that take us right there…

The Seekers’ Malvina Reynolds tells of her song ‘Morningtown Ride,’ and the fact that it’s a song of safety for children:

“Once in a while I have something in particular to say [to children]--well, let’s take a song like 'Morningtown Ride.' I remember how it was when I was little. I know youngsters hate to go to bed at night because it seems like, as far as they’re concerned, it is the end of the world. Going to sleep means you are going to be cut off from everything, and I wanted to help them understand that they were heading somewhere, when they got into bed, that they were heading for morning. And strangely enough, this song became a grown-up hit all over the world. It really amazed me...”[1]

“Morningtown Ride” worked out to be a lullaby for all ages. When you listen to it you get that cosy sense deep within you; it’s deep, rich in fantasy, even inspirational. It takes us on the journey to ourselves. It ameliorates all our fears. It connects us and it involves us, intimately, with the workings of our soul, and with those things we don’t like (like going to bed all night, for a child), making them somehow okay.

And this brings us to the wonderful safety of unconditional presence. This concept is “the capacity to meet experience fully and directly, without filtering it through any conceptual or strategic agenda.”[2] It’s meeting life head on--on reality’s terms. Though it’s not that simple is it?

Our lives, if we’re normal, are based upon some level of ‘contraction.’ We’ve learned since childhood, says Dr. John Welwood, how to deny or avoid certain things in life as a form of self-protection. We’ve developed stories that reinforce our realities providing us comfort and security; stories that ‘contract’ our thinking and perception. The stories compound a false perception and we’re sort of closed minded toward ourselves and our view of things. “Although we swim in this sea of pure awareness [which is how things actually are, a.k.a. unconditional presence], our busy mind is constantly hopping from island to island, from thought to thought, jumping over and through awareness, which is its ground, without ever coming to rest there.”[3]

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We essentially need to unlearn our default patterned ‘contracted’ thinking. When we’re asked what we think of this or that, we’ll often answer according to the ‘island’ of thought we’re presently on. No wonder we are often confused afterwards as to what we really think. We attribute this to mood, and partially, this is correct. If we were asked our view and instead reserved our thinking, and pondered more deeply about it, we’d come up with different thoughts and responses--the groove of thought might consider a broader perspective. We might even venture into our fearful, emotional responses and question why.

Welwood continues, “The full presence of our being is healing in and of itself.”[4] And he continues, “We all need to heal our separation from reality and our struggle with it. The whole world is in need of that.”[5] Genuine compassion on ourselves comes as an indirect result of knowing and tackling the truth. The truth can set us free.[6] This is summarised as the ‘beginner’s mind,’ a willingness to meet things freshly. We must resist being experts in the experience of life. We’re experts of nothing but our own flawed perceptions, half the time, and that’s okay.

When we approach unconditional presence and “fully acknowledge, allow, and open to our immediate experience just as it is, without agenda, judgment, or manipulation of any kind... we are at one with our experience, without the subject/object barrier... this is an innate capacity of our being, yet we usually have to learn to cultivate it at first, because the habitual tendency of EGO always involves grasping and rejecting, which reinforce separation and counteract authentic presence.”[7]

Balthasar Gracian said, “To be master of oneself one should know oneself.” Being unconditionally present is seeing as we’re designed to see; no filtering just pure truth.

Copyright © 2008, S. J. Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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ENDNOTES:
[1] A quote from Malvina taken from a radio interview given at the 1977 Pied Piper Music Festival. The entire interview and workshop notes appear in Patty Zeitlin’s book A Song Is a Rainbow: Music, Movement and Rhythm Instruments in the Nursery School and Kindergarten: Scott, Foresman, 1982. Source: http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/MALVINA/mr112.htm
[2] John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Boston, Massachusetts: Shamhala, 2000), p. 116.
[3] John Welwood, Ibid., p. 143.
[4] John Welwood, Ibid., p. 145.
[5] John Welwood, Ibid., p. 146.
[6] The Gospel according to John 8:32.
[7] John Welwood, Ibid., p. 307.