About quality of presence

Quality of presence has to do with feeling heard even without saying anything.

Being “read” between the lines or in facial micro-expressions. Being “known” by the other.

Experiencing someone's present presence may seem redundant. It's an expression that I use in different contexts, whether with students in the classroom, with friends in casual meetings, or with family, when we are with a lot of people. Sometimes, when we are among many, we can “butterfly” and land in different places, flying high, fast, and not necessarily capturing the details of being there.  A different way of flying would be to fly softly and slowly, observing what happens inside and outside of you, capturing, with your whole body, the entire experience of being there.

In recent times, some professional experiences reminded me of the importance of this rare and powerful present presence, and made me return to the beginning of my journey as a psychotherapist. During my internship in Clinical Psychology, I listened to my patients with the premises of Carl Rogers, father of Humanism and the Person-Centered Approach. I didn't have any great intentions or theoretical formulations in my mind, I just believed in the “updating tendency” of those who sat in front of me and tried to listen with empathy and reflect what they heard, helping the other person to understand themselves even more, expand their experience and feel what appeared in their internal world. During consultations, many images came to my mind, which I shared with my patients, almost like what today I would perhaps call metaphors or scenes/representations of experiences. At the time, I wanted to explore that in supervision. Were they metaphors? Was it intuition? What were those images? My supervisor recommended the book “When the Heart Speaks”, by Carl Rogers, to try to give some form to that experience.

The recent professional experiences I referred to above were experienced in a Workshop on Interpersonal Mindfulness with Manoela O’Connell that we had the joy of experiencing at CEFI, in continuing education seminars for health professionals who work at Grupo Hospitalar Conceição and participation as a speaker at the commemorative event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Food Bank. The workshop with Manoela really invited us to listen to each other, connecting look with look, with a genuine presence. For the GHC seminar, on “Self-Care Tools for Lifestyle Change”, I ventured to invite them to train beyond the Motivational Interviewing methodology: they tried 2 exercise moments. In the first, the speaker brought a complaint and the listener listened in silence and then told what to do and how to do it. In the second exercise, the orientation was to listen to the other person with your whole body, like someone contemplating the sunset, observing the details as if they were looking at it for the first time. At the Food Bank event, the invitation was “Cycle of life: welcoming and active listening”, and the guiding thread was precisely the present presence. The slideshow featured faces of people of different ages and different facial expressions and the invitation to the public was to “read” those faces and welcome them, as I was sure that everyone knew within themselves how to welcome.

The reports and feedback were as powerful as the greatness of a quality of presence. My own experience in some contexts was transformed with this exercise of proposing to be in places with all my body and mind (unnecessary division, but didactic :).

Nowadays, in addition to practicing gratitude daily, I have tried to practice this quality of presence with my husband, daughter, extended family, patients, co-workers or friends. The difference in the quality of being present (no cell phone, no problems to solve) versus being in any way screams too much.