The Presence Process

The Presence Process is an actionable 10-week program to become more present and consciously respond to situations based on breathing practice, insightful text, and observing your day-to-day experience.

This notion is as comforting as it can be scary. Comforting because, once you accept it, you’ll start valuing all emotional difficulties as opportunities for growth. Scary because, all of a sudden, you have no incentive to run away and distract yourself from your feelings.

Michael Brown often emphasizes that this work on our emotions is not about “feeling better” but about “getting better at feeling.” By embracing all feelings that arise in your life, you practice the attitude of equanimity – a central concept from Buddhist tradition. Brown rarely refers to it explicitly, but many of his ideas fit Eastern spiritual tradition.

Another one is recognizing our present experience as a result of past conditioning, also known as the concept of karma. From this perspective, any emotional discomfort we feel today is a mere reflection, a memory of something hurtful that happened to us in the past.

Seeing difficult emotions from this point of view allows you to stop identifying with them. You can now see them simply as temporary experiences you happen to have. You can consider your feelings as “messengers” that help you unravel the aspects of yourself which you got used to turning your back on. Sounds a lot healthier, doesn’t it?

A basic skill Brown teaches is to respond to your experiences instead of reacting to them. What’s the difference?

A reaction is an unconscious behavior we act out based on patterns we’ve established in the past. Reactive behavior we display in a moment of emotional discomfort is usually an attempt to defend ourselves or attack another, even if we don’t realize it. The themes of reactive behavior are “automation” and “drama.”

A response is a conscious behavior, chosen based on what we perceive in the present moment. It arises when we are consciously aware of our emotional state, but choose not to project this state onto someone else. The themes of responsive (aka responsible) behavior are “awareness” and “choice.”

Being aware of these two possible modes of operating will radically change the way you approach each emotionally challenging situation. You’ll cease blaming anyone for what is happening, including yourself. Instead, you’ll deal with reality as it happens and choose responsible actions.

This realization is nothing else but accepting the natural law of cause and effect. But it’s an important one, because we’ll finally understand that our behavior in any given situation plants the seeds for our future circumstances.