Presence Cannot Be Willed. Your Availability to It Can.
Showing up Presence is a state of consciousness. Learning to return to it is the real inner work.fully is something you learn, not something you receive at birth.
We tend to imagine presence as something a few rare people are born with, as if certain temperaments come preloaded with spiritual clarity and the rest of us are left improvising. But the inner tradition tells a different story. Presence is not a temperament. Presence is a state of consciousness that reveals itself when attention becomes steady, gathered, and willing to be here. This reflection continues our journey through Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, drawing on Cynthia Bourgeault and Kabir Helminski’s teaching that presence cannot be forced or manufactured. What we cultivate is our availability to it.
Most people assume presence is either a natural gift or a personality type. Calm people seem present and reactive people seem absent. But presence has nothing to do with temperament. It is not inherited. It is not emotional restraint. It is not a superior disposition. Presence is the deeper field of awareness that becomes perceptible when we stop living through automatic reactions and begin to inhabit the moment consciously.
You do not create presence.
You do not generate it.
You stop leaving it.
Presence is the underlying state of consciousness that becomes visible the moment attention returns.
Temperament Is Not Presence
Some individuals give the impression of being naturally centered. They listen well. They move through conflict quietly. They respond instead of react. But none of this means they are present. Temperament may shape how someone behaves, but it does not determine the depth of their awareness.
Calm people can be deeply asleep in consciousness.
Expressive people can be fully awake.
Presence belongs to the level of being, not the level of personality.
Personality reacts. Presence sees.
The transcript makes this unmistakably clear. Our default mode is not presence. Our default mode is automatic functioning. Most of our inner movements are conditioned responses that run before we know they have begun. In that condition, presence remains buried beneath habit.
Presence does not arise from quietness or introspection.
Presence arises when attention stops collapsing into automatic life.
Presence Appears When Automatic Energy Lets Go of the Steering Wheel
Automatic energy interprets life for us long before awareness gets a chance. It reacts. It defends. It explains. It assumes. It takes over the moment with a speed and momentum that work against conscious awareness.
Presence appears when this automatic momentum pauses.
Not because we force it to.
Because attention has stopped chasing the noise long enough for a deeper awareness to reveal itself.
Presence is not something we enter through strain.
Presence is the natural state of consciousness that appears when attention widens.
When thought quiets.
When reactivity softens.
When awareness no longer collapses around the object of attention.
Presence is the field beneath the surface mind.
No One Is Born Present. Everyone Learns to Stay Available to Presence.
People often describe certain individuals as if they were born more enlightened. But what looks like natural presence is usually the fruit of a life spent learning to return. They have learned to sense themselves interiorly. They have learned to interrupt habitual reactions. They have learned to stay in contact with themselves instead of letting emotion or thought run the show.
No one arrives in presence by temperament.
People arrive in presence through availability.
Presence is not a personal trait.
Presence is a state of consciousness that becomes stable when a person stops leaving the moment.
Will Does Not Create Presence. Will Opens the Door to Presence.
This is the center of Cynthia’s teaching in the transcript. You cannot be conscious automatically. Consciousness requires a choice. Not a dramatic choice. Not a heroic choice. A simple willingness to be awake.
The will is not trying to manufacture presence.
The will is what keeps you from drifting away from presence.
It is the willingness to be aware of yourself.
The willingness to remain in the moment rather than escape it.
The willingness to let the deeper field of consciousness come forward.
Presence is revealed, not produced.
The will makes a place for revelation.
Presence Feels Like Effort at First for Only One Reason
Presence itself is not effort. Presence is clarity. Presence is simplicity. Presence is ease. But when we first begin working with attention, it feels like effort because we are shifting out of automatic functioning, which has been our home for most of our lives.
The effort is not presence.
The effort is disengaging from everything that covers presence.
As this deepens, presence begins to feel natural. Awareness opens by itself. The inner quiet becomes familiar. Your sense of identity shifts away from thought and into the deeper knowing beneath it.
The early effort disappears because the state of consciousness becomes stable.
Presence Deepens Through Returning, Not Through Technique
Because presence is not a method, the only real way to deepen it is by returning to it again and again. You do not practice presence as if it were a skill to master. You practice availability. You practice remembering. You practice not leaving.
Here are the simplest openings.
1. Notice when you drift.
This noticing is already presence.
2. Feel the body.
Sensing interrupts automatic functioning and brings awareness into the moment.
3. Include yourself in the field of awareness.
Awareness widens when you stop losing yourself in the object.
4. Stay in awareness for one full breath.
A single conscious breath stabilizes attention.
5. Return without judgment.
Presence grows through kindness, not pressure.
These are not steps toward presence.
These are ways of letting presence step toward you.
Presence Is an Act of Love
More than anything, presence is an act of love. It is the moment you choose to be faithful to what is real in you. It is the moment you stop abandoning yourself. It is the moment you turn toward the deeper field of consciousness that is always here beneath the noise.
Presence allows you to live from clarity instead of conditioning.
Presence allows your actions to come from essence instead of habit.
Presence allows the soul to come forward.
You are not born present.
You are born with the capacity for presence.
You learn to access what has always been yours.
Each moment of unwillingness to drift opens again into the consciousness that never leaves.
Keep the Scrolls Unrolling
The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.
Share the Scrolls
Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.
Become a Supporting Member
Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.
Tip with a coffee
A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥
Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.
Follow (or troll) Virgin Monk Boy
Recommended Reading
(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)
Your clarity always makes me smile. Such a gift carries your love, knowledge , kindness and devotion to my heart and I thank you.💜
Could you expand on #3. To use another art reference - are you saying to see yourself doing it rather than being engrossed in the doing?