###### 🔑 Presence is effortless and always here No amount of striving can bring [[💡 Presence|Presence]] forward because Presence is already and always here. The idea of being "in Presence" or noticing whether Presence or (in [[⭐️ Internal Family Systems|IFS]] terms) [[☀️ Self-Energy]] is "here," is a linguistic mistake and a common misconception. Whether it’s tea, soda, coffee, or juice, water (like [[💡 Presence|Presence]]) is always there. Presence doesn't come and go – [[💡 Parts|Parts]] do. It's not whether Presence is around, but whether Parts are [[💡 Blending|blended]], like a drop of ink in a glass of water. [[💡 Presence|Presence]] does not arrive as much as it is released through [[🕯️ Unblending|unblending]]. It's not a matter of "getting into Presence," as much as it is helping our [[💡 Parts|Parts]] trust that it is safe to relax and [[🕯️ Unblending|unblend]]. > [!NOTE] The Golden Buddha > >"During the mid-1950s in Bangkok, a huge clay statue of the Buddha began to crack due to heat and drought. When some monks arrived to investigate, they shined a flashlight into the largest of the cracks. What they saw surprised everyone. Deep under the gray clay was the gleam of gold. > > > >No one had known that inside this popular but ordinary looking statue was a solid gold Buddha. As it turns out, the statue had been covered with plaster and clay six hundred years earlier to protect it from invading armies. …the golden Buddha, its beauty and value covered over, had survived untouched. > > > >Just as the monks disguised the beauty of the golden Buddha in order to protect it during dangerous times, we cover our own innate purity and goodness as we encounter a challenging world. As children, many of us were criticized, ignored, misunderstood, or abused, leading us to doubt that gold within us. As we grow up, we increasingly internalize the judgments and values of our society, further losing touch with our innocence, our creativity, and our tender hearts. We cover over the gold as we seek the approval of others, looking to them to measure our worth—to determine whether we are good enough, smart enough, successful enough. And if we are part of a nondominant group in our culture, we take on additional layers of protection to help us face the violence of social injustice and oppression. > > > >Adding layer after layer to protect ourselves, we become identified with our coverings, believing ourselves to be separate, threatened, and deficient. Yet even when we cannot see the gold, the light and love of our true nature cannot be dimmed, tarnished, or erased. It calls to us daily through our longing for connection, our urge to understand reality, our delight in beauty, our natural desire to help others. Our deepest intuition is that there is something beyond our habitual story of a separate and isolated self: something vast, mysterious, and sacred." > – [[👤 Tara Brach]] - [[📖 Trusting the Gold - Uncovering Your Natural Goodness]] [[🛡️ Presence-ing]] is more of a *doing* — it [[🔑 Presence is effortless and always here|🔑 takes effort]] and can be exhausting. If we're efforting to be [[💡 Presence|Presence]], or if we're striving to embody the [[Qualities of Presence ☀️]], we're [[💡 Blending|blended]] with a [[🛡️ Presence-ing|🛡️ Presence-ing Protector]]. ###### See Also - [[💡 Wu Wei]] [^1]: