Presence Therapy 

Therapy with an open roof

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This style of talk therapy allows you to talk about anything that feels charged for you without losing touch with the present moment. It can be past memories that impact you today or unpleasant feelings and images that seem less rooted in a story-line. It can be applied to trauma or around issues of lesser intensity. 

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Talking is not helpful when it repeats and cements the same thinking-feeling structures without an openness to the aliveness of now. Conventional talk therapy might feel relieving temporarily but may not find a deeper integration for the restless pressure underneath. Presence Therapy connects the conversation directly to the felt-sense impressions that emerge in the present, when a topic is touched upon, keeping the present moment and the unfolding sensory experience as the prime orientation. While the topic may be old or known to you, the experiencing itself is always fresh, new, and infinitely resourceful.

 

Committing 1 hour to this shared intention is a powerful way for opening up to your innate resources - inviting inner landscapes to unravel by themselves, often revealing what had been overlooked before.  

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Concrete elements that might be part of a session:

• Inquiring into your felt sense experience.

• Allowing memories, thoughts and emotions to surface and discharge. 

• Describing a specific memory while pendulating attention between opposite sides of the body.  

• Gently exploring nodes of suffering from the periphery, then closer to the center.  

• Exploring unconditional qualities that seem or feel distant (freedom, home, innocence, beauty etc.) and welcoming them into present moment experiencing. 

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Having experienced conventional therapy myself, I remember feeling partly helped by talking and partly confirmed in my role of being 'someone with a problem'. This therapy explicitly keeps the door open for an unbounded sense of Self and holds space for exploration beyond roles and personality, while at the same time bolstering personal boundaries, needs, and preferences. 

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Presence Therapy goes well in combination with TRE and SSP to involve the nervous system more deeply in resolving and releasing tensions and trauma.