This reflection is part of an ongoing series inspired by the audio course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, taught by Cynthia Bourgeault and rooted in The Power of Being, a chapter from Living Presence. As with earlier essays in this series, the intention here is not to summarize the teaching but to stay close to its inner pressure, to notice where it unsettles our usual spiritual assumptions rather than reassuring them.
This chapter does not give us a new practice to master. Instead, it quietly removes one of our most deeply held habits: the belief that spiritual transformation happens by fixing ourselves. What it offers in its place is far more disarming. It suggests that what changes us is not effort, but seeing.
The Reflex to Fix
Most of us are conditioned to believe that change comes through effort. When something feels wrong, uncomfortable, or unresolved, our reflex is immediate and unquestioned: it must be addressed. Something is off, so something must be done. This assumption runs so deep that it rarely appears to us as an assumption at all. It simply feels like common sense.
Spiritual practice often absorbs this reflex without noticing it. Prayer becomes technique. Awareness becomes discipline. Presence becomes something we try to maintain, measure, or improve. Even mindfulness, which begins as a doorway into immediacy, can quietly turn into another form of management, another way of keeping ourselves under supervision.
But The Power of Being introduces a claim that cuts directly against this pattern. Transformation, it says, does not come from fixing or forcing. It comes from seeing. And seeing is not something we do over time. It is not cumulative. It is not gradual. Seeing happens all at once, or not at all.
Seeing Is Not Mindfulness
One of the most important distinctions in this chapter is the difference between mindfulness and seeing. Mindfulness, as it is usually practiced, unfolds in time. It strings moments together, asking us to slow down, regulate attention, and sustain awareness across duration. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it operates within sequence and continuity. It depends on rhythm and pace.
Seeing does not.
Seeing happens in an instant. It does not require calm conditions or inner order. It does not wait for the nervous system to settle or the psyche to cooperate. You can see yourself being reactive while you are still reactive. You can see yourself rushing while you are still late. You can see yourself grasping without first letting go.
And when that seeing happens, something shifts immediately. Not because the behavior has changed, but because illusion cannot survive direct perception. What was previously fused with identity becomes visible, and the moment it becomes visible, it loosens its grip.
Spiritual Life Is Not a Fixing Project
This is where the teaching becomes genuinely destabilizing. We tend to assume that awareness is valuable only if it changes conditions. If noticing does not lead to improvement, we quietly judge it as ineffective. But Bourgeault, drawing on Helminski’s work, keeps pointing us back to a more radical truth: spiritual life is not a fixing project at all. It is a seeing project.
When we see without resistance, without commentary, without the reflex to intervene, something in us stops tightening. The false self, which survives by believing it must constantly manage reality, loses its fuel. We stop rehearsing explanations. We stop narrating ourselves. And in that release, being enters—not as a feeling or a mood, but as a field in which experience can be held without distortion.
Mistaking Force for Presence
This helps explain why so much of our effort leaves us exhausted and unchanged. We often mistake force for presence, intensity for depth, and activity for aliveness. A life can be packed with meaning, responsibility, and even spiritual ambition, and still be strangely hollow. Another life, outwardly constrained by grief, limitation, or unfinished business, can feel deeply alive because it is rooted somewhere deeper than circumstances.
Being does not erase emotion. It does not bypass grief or flatten experience. It holds it. And from that holding, action begins to look different. It becomes quieter, cleaner, less driven by urgency or the need to prove something.
Seeing in the Middle of Chaos
One of the most liberating implications of this teaching is that seeing does not require ideal conditions. You do not need to slow down in order to see. You do not need to become mindful first. Seeing can happen in the middle of chaos.
You can notice your agitation without calming it. You can notice your hurry without slowing it. You can notice your anxiety without resolving it. The noticing itself is sufficient, not as a tactic, but as a revelation. Something in the structure of consciousness reorders itself the moment truth is allowed to appear without resistance.
The Power of Being
Once this is glimpsed, even briefly, the spiritual path changes. The question is no longer how to manage your inner life, but whether you are willing to see what is actually here without trying to make it acceptable. When that happens, something fundamental shifts.
The moment you see, everything changes. Not because the moment itself is different, but because you are no longer hiding from it. And that, quietly and unmistakably, is the power of being.
A Virgin Monk Boy Insight
Here is the quiet heresy hidden inside all of this, offered in the tone it deserves:
Presence is not something that arrives when conditions are finally right. It is what becomes visible when the habit of looking away relaxes. Seeing does not wait for readiness or self-improvement. It appears the moment resistance loosens.
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Speechless so here’s a go - feeling so much resonance with every single piece of those simple, common, everyday life experiences & there’ve been those (what feel to me miraculous) moments where everything changed once i became aware. Presence. And perception shifted while action may not yet, but the entire moment(s) connected me with a new way of existing. Beautiful & so so helpful in guidance when this happens & itz an out-of-the-blue ( or seems so) shift…..I’ll stop there with describing (or failing to). Landed with perfect timing before fun at the pain management doctor’s office & some extra corporeal shock wave therapy that i actually can enjoy sometimes. I need this almost as much as coffee (wink). Throwing gratitude randomly hoping the wind sends most to you for teaching changing ways of being from what the world teaches.
I see you VMB. Seeing without narration sounds good but, gosh, not easy even though it is simple. If you notice yourself seeing and being does this become narration? It does sound like deep level stuff, I'm mostly on the surface - today cursing the dog for shedding hair (just being a dog) all over the bathroom floor that I'm cleaning.