THE MEANING BEHIND AND THE PURPOSE OF THE TOTAL PRESENCE WORKSHOP

Total Presence

The meaning and purpose of the workshop

by Alan Lowen, founder of The Art of Being®

In the lives of all of us, there are certain times when it matters to open ourselves beyond what we have become used to, both within ourselves and in the ways we relate with people and life. If we accept the invitation and allow ourselves into situations and settings that bring about our opening, we discover that the way that we now experience life is in itself fulfilling, and this is regardless of anything we consider to te our successes or failures. The fact is that trying to be successful is not nearly as interesting when we are deeply connecting with existence. And the whole point of opening to ourselves is so that we can have a richer relationship with everything and everyone we encounter in daily life. The reason success is not what we are busy with is that WE ARE FULFILLED by the life we are living! Interestingly enough, because our approach to life becomes so engaged and conscious, we are very creative – we bring real presence to whatever we are doing – and as a result we find ourselves anyway being more successful than ever! This isn’t as surprising as it may first seem: the most successful people are not those who are obsessing about success; they are those who are fully engaged and in love with what they are doing, which is how we live everything when we are open and connected to all our inner resources.

What are these inner resources? Our awareness, our passion and longing, our intuitive faculties, our inventiveness and the playfulness in us that seeks for solutions and discoveries, our heartfulness that makes us care about the meaning of what we are doing in our life, and most mysterious of all, our magically unique individuality that has its own songs to sing and dances to dance in existence and so brings out of us contributions to existence that perhaps nobody else could have made. Our songs don’t have to make celebrities of us. They don’t have to be heard by the whole world. They may be as simple as smiling at a child or planting a vegetable garden, or bringing flowers to the office or bathing naked under a waterfall. We aren’t interested in stardom because we aren’t fixed on the result or the product or the goal. We are in love with the singing! What matters is being present with all our inner senses and sensitivities turned on, and all our personal attributes alive and humming inside us including some that till now we didn’t even know we possessed. We are high on the life we are living because we are deeply touched by and in touch with it. It doesn’t run us; it serves us. Living so, we are fulfilled anyway.

How does this happen? First, it happens because we long for this. For many people, the longing is awakened through finally becoming deeply tired of a life that is missing this kind of lightness and brightness. A small inner voice is asking, “Isn’t there more than this to life?” Or it happens because our marriage or relationship breaks down, or our job application is rejected, or things are just going wrong in our lives and we are left feeling that something deeper is involved. Or it can happen because something touches us deeply and we suddenly have a glimpse of how much we don’t normally allow ourselves to feel and experience. Whatever brings it about, we look at ourselves and the life we are living, we long for something different, and we finally realize that it’s not about changing the outer circumstances. We are ready to meet ourselves. This in itself is an act of trust; we can have little idea of how profoundly we are going to be changed by the meeting. We just want to give it a try because we’ve more or less tried everything else. This is why the journey of inner awakening and personal transformation usually doesn’t begin until people are at least in their late twenties, and often much later. We have to have had time to indulge in the goodies of the world, run after success, do the whole performance number where we are busy showing everyone how good we are, or time for the opposite, making a mess of one thing after another until we finally have to sit down and wonder what it’s really all about. Or we actually become the great success story, and after some years realize that although we’re rich and famous, we’re still not happy. We need time too to admit to ourselves that behind our cool style we feel insecure, that behind our bravado we’re afraid and behind our social veneer we’re secretly quite lonely. Loneliness is the malaise hidden inside our multi-media hi-tech culture; it’s as normal as it is unaddressed; it’s everybody’s secret! We can be thoroughly hooked on our work and the life-style it buys us without an inkling that we are lonely. We just keep using the world so we don’t have to feel it. Only when we start to wonder why we’re not really happy does our personal awakening begin. Our real soul-journey is underway!

By our opening we are transformed and awakened. The result is that we experience a life that many others, including plenty of successful people, have no consciousness of at all. There is nothing arrogant in this either. It is simply so, that when we find the willingness and the passion to open beyond what we have become used to, we become available and receptive to phenomena that were previously unknown to us. This gives us a quality of life that leaves mere success in the dust. We have vision, passion, playfulness, humour, compassion, love, integrity, originality and joie de vivre in abundance. WE ARE HAPPY!

Opening is without exception an adventure. How could it be otherwise, when it require us to encounter our limits – whether of fear or of feeling or of understanding? At our limits, we either turn back and settle for comfortable normality, or we open ourselves to that in us that up to now we have not known, encountered, embraced and befriended. As we learn to trust opening, we become conscious of happenings that up to now went right past us. We just didn’t know, we didn’t see, we didn’t sense or feel an existence that is going on all the time but beyond our limits – which are our limitations! To awaken to all of this is to discover a life that is magnificent to be in, and that is as unlimited as our potential for being. This is what awakening is all about!

As an aside, it strikes me personally as one of the loveliest laws of being that in order to realize more of our potential we must always deepen our trust . It doesn’t matter how much we know or how clever our techniques, there are no tricks we can pull to circumvent or imitate what it is to trust opening to our inner being. Simply, if we pretend, then opening doesn’t happen, and we can’t discover and become what we don’t open to! No surprise that the rewards when we accept this adventure far outweigh the challenges. Success is irrelevant, and there is no such thing as failure, because if we fail, what is asked of us is to embrace and befriend the experience we are having in failing. In doing so, we are opening more deeply to ourselves, befriending what we were not in friendship with, and awakening and becoming more of our hitherto untapped potential. We have become more, and this becoming is our never-ending journey into the infinite present!