Stop Chasing Feelings. Start Sourcing from Being
What Cynthia Bourgeault (channeling Kabir Helminski) wants you to know about real presence—and why your feelings may be sabotaging it.
Some of us chase spiritual highs the way others chase stock tips. Always hoping the next meditation, teacher, or workshop will finally fix our mess and lift us into the clouds. But Chapter 6 of Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, titled “The Power of Being,” is a loving wrecking ball to that approach. Cynthia Bourgeault, drawing on Kabir Helminski’s Sufi framework, invites us to unhook from our addiction to experience and instead ground ourselves in what she calls Being—the living, breathing, stabilizing force of presence itself.
She doesn’t just describe it. She builds a case for why almost all of our spiritual frustration comes from not knowing how to source from Being. The problem isn’t that God is hiding. The problem is we’re still checking our spiritual pulse every five seconds looking for a sign instead of trusting the quiet radiance that’s already here.
Let’s get into it.
Your Feelings Are Not the Truth
Bourgeault opens with a much-needed gut check: our feelings are real, but they’re not always true.
In contemplative language, this is called disidentification—learning to feel what you feel without fusing your identity to the storyline. The idea that “I am my anger” or “I am my fatigue” is a trap. Most people in spiritual practice never fully escape it because they mistake intensity for depth and assume that whatever they’re feeling most strongly must be the most honest thing about them.
Spoiler: it’s not.
Feelings are like weather—they come, they go, and sometimes they throw a tornado warning just to see if you’re paying attention. But the self that notices? That watches? That gently waits instead of reacting? That’s the beginning of Being.
Sourcing from the Deep Well
Bourgeault uses the word Being with a capital B to signal something deeper than the personality or even the ordinary sense of “self.” In Helminski’s Sufi terms, this is the Essential Self—the part of us that’s stable, spacious, and rooted in divine reality.
Most people are living from what Kabir calls “the reactive self.” We’re like foam riding on the surface of the ocean, constantly tossed around by whatever wave comes next. Sourcing from Being means you stop living at the surface and start living from the deep well inside. Not because it makes you feel better (though it might), but because it’s true.
And truth, it turns out, has its own gravity. You can learn to trust it more than your emotions. More than your thoughts. More than your next dopamine hit from that “spiritual” podcast you listened to while scrolling Instagram.
The Shift from Horizontal to Vertical
Here’s where Cynthia gets subtly revolutionary. Most of us are trying to fix our horizontal life. Better relationships, less anxiety, a more fulfilling job, deeper spiritual insight. But the real transformation doesn’t happen on the horizontal axis. It happens vertically—by awakening to Being and letting that quality filter into every horizontal moment.
Think of the vertical axis as your soul’s umbilical cord to the Source. When you’re sourcing from Being, you’re not just reacting to life—you’re radiating something into it. The horizontal gets infused rather than fixed.
Virgin Monk Boy would say it like this: “Trying to rearrange the horizontal without accessing the vertical is like feng shui-ing your prison cell and calling it freedom.”
Embodiment Over Abstraction
This teaching is not just philosophical—it’s felt. Cynthia emphasizes embodiment again and again. The body is not a distraction from presence. It is the anchor. She says:
“The more deeply we are in our bodies, the more capable we are of bearing the intensity of Being.”
You don’t learn presence from thinking about it. You learn it by feeling the difference between being fused to your mood and observing your mood with kindness. You learn it when you sense your feet on the floor, your breath in your belly, and you realize: Oh. I’m still here.
That moment is not exciting. But it’s honest. And that’s where Being lives.
The Traps of Spiritual Narcissism
Let’s talk about one of the most uncomfortable insights in Chapter 6: the self-absorption of spiritual growth.
A lot of folks in the “woke and wounded” crowd secretly think that suffering = depth. They believe that if they’re going through a dark night, they must be on the fast track to enlightenment. But what if that’s just another performance? Another identity?
Bourgeault gently exposes how we can use our suffering as a way to remain in our small self. And she dares to ask us to let go of the drama.
Not by bypassing. But by turning our attention toward the still, silent presence that already knows who we are, without the wound-story.
This doesn’t mean you don’t feel pain. It means your pain isn’t the compass anymore.
You Don’t Have to Wait Until You “Feel Ready”
Chapter 6 ends with a liberating reminder: you don’t have to feel ready to show up in Being. In fact, you probably won’t. You’ll probably feel unsure, scattered, overwhelmed, or underwhelmed. And none of that disqualifies you.
Presence isn’t something you achieve by feeling perfect. It’s something you consent to—right now, in the middle of your cluttered desk and unanswered texts.
You give your attention to it like you would to a sleeping child or a candle flickering in the dark.
And slowly, it starts to burn brighter.
Final Word from the (Virgin) Monk
If you’ve made it this far, congrats. You’ve already begun. Because presence isn’t a concept you learn. It’s a dimension of being you remember. Chapter 6 is a reminder that God isn’t hiding behind your trauma, your mood, or your circumstances. God’s hanging out in the very center of them, quietly humming the frequency of Being—and waiting for you to tune in.
The less you try to feel something, the more you realize something’s already here.
So stop chasing the vibe.
And start sourcing from the Real.
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🙏😌♥️♥️♥️ Beautiful truth. ♥️ Thank you for helping us to embrace Presence more and more over performance. 🙏
Great post. I particularly like “Trying to rearrange the horizontal without accessing the vertical is like feng shui-ing your prison cell and calling it freedom.”