Absence of Presence
For the part of you still waiting for someone to simply stay.
Where the quiet began
You may know it as a hunger that seems to belong to someone younger, a hunger for contact, for reassurance, for one word of encouragement that actually lands, and as a restlessness that arrives the moment life goes still, so that you reach for the phone, the fridge, the next thing on the list, anything that keeps the quiet from settling in around you. Often it turns the other way as well, and you become the one who gives the people around you the very presence you long to receive, the one who notices, who stays, who asks how it is going for them. For me this is the hardest of the five to point at, because it began with something that stayed quiet, and the love that didn’t appear later in life we are still looking for, but we actually don’t know what it looks like. I call this imprint Absence of Presence, and it has a way home that runs through the heart and into the internal landscape, which is where this door opens onto.
Questions to breathe into
When life goes still, what do I reach for?
When someone gives me their whole attention, what happens in my body?
When I pour my presence out all day, who is it really for?
When I breathe the words absence of presence, what stirs, and what pictures arrive?
What the child expected to flow
A child arrives expecting nurture, touch, reassurance and encouragement to flow as easily as breath, and asking for them stays out of reach, because the child simply assumes they will be there. Children don’t ask for attention, she is saying, hey, I’m having an experience, look at me. So wherever the grown-up drifted elsewhere in body, mind or heart, the child carried on, and a longing stayed behind for a love still waiting for its name, a quiet field the cells remember and keep circling back to. This is the part of self that didn’t get love. This is the part of self that wasn’t seen. This was the part of self that when it reached out, no one was there.
Leaning toward the light
Through the study of Syntropy I have watched a seedling in the understorey lean every leaf toward the one gap of light in the canopy, and keep leaning that way for years after a far wider gap has opened right beside it, because the cells of that little tree remember where the light once came from and keep organising the whole plant around that memory. The hunger you carry works the same way, and it performs a function with purpose, since the restlessness and the reaching and the giving away of your own presence are all a young part of you still leaning toward the place the love was supposed to come from, and the question I want you to ask is the question I ask of everything, which is what function is this performing, and what is it showing me. Resolving this one begins with the simplest thing there is, which is somebody finally staying.
Staying, and asking the name
This young one has waited a long time for someone to simply stay, so I want you to just begin by staying. Sit with them in your mind’s eye, close enough to feel, and let the quiet between you warm, and then speak to them the way the grown-up should have spoken on the day it went quiet, in that grown-up’s own first person, something like, hey, I am here with you, and I will stay as long as you want me to. Let that land, and when it has, ask the question that opens everything in my experience, which is whether they feel willing to accept that what happened happened, that the presence they waited for stayed away. The answer may be a no, and that is beautiful and relevant, because then we can thank that part for saying no, I’m not willing, and stay anyway. Then ask gently, will you share with me your name? The name, once it arrives, is a sound that belongs to her alone and the first step of re-membering her back into the whole of you, so linger there, because your presence is exactly what she has been waiting for.
Afterwards, gently
Here the practice and the medicine are one, and the young one who waited for someone to stay is healed by someone staying, and that someone is you. Rest a hand on your heart, feel the ground holding you, breathe slowly down into your belly and stay with whatever arrives, and afterwards drink some water and take a walk under the sky. Whenever more opens than you wish to hold alone, I am here through a written or live Dream Interpretation or the Syntropic Embodiment Journey, where I go there with you and walk a stretch of the way beside you, and when another of the five speaks louder than this one, all five doors stand open together at Healing the 5 Primary Imprints.
The part of self always knows.