This is Part 3 Week 8 of a collection of posts about my experience of "The Presence Process" by Michael Brown while doing the process for the first time. For more posts about this experiment, consult The Presence Process — Table of Content.

Feeling the bite of the wind in Week 8

Again I welcome you for an other field report on an other week of the Presence Process. If you read my last post, you probably can tell that Week 8 didn't go so well. To be honest, I kind of wish panic attacks counted as cardio training because then Week 8 would feel like a very intense training boot-camp…

Let's get started. Just like Week 7, Week 8 starts off with a Water Session as the first part of our activation. I did quite a few Water Sessions in Week 7 and 8, they are in part relaxing and do intensify the result of the Connected Breathing sessions.

After the Water Sessions comes the Mantra for the week:

"I Forgive Myself"

Something we all need to learn to do. Week 8 Mantra felt like a break from the preceding Mantra but that might be because self forgiveness is something I have been working very hard to do in the past. Simple to remember and something worth repeating each time we have a second, this Mantra was a good tool with this week challenges.

What is Week 8 about

In this week material, the author invite us to rediscover the presence of peace all around us. Peace is everywhere on the planet, whether we are aware of it or not.

Peace, he explains, is the state of reality once we have removed, peeled away, all the drama. Peace doesn't need to be "made" or created in anyway, it simply needs to be rediscovered, unveiled, in our experience. We don't "do" peace or "think" peace, we feel peace. Peace is something we perceive through our emotions, through felt-perception. We find peace when we are able to put aside the hustles and bustles of our situation and simply see beyond it.

If we take any conflict and remove all human beings, we discover that what remain is a resonance of peace. No matter what we do or think, no matter what happens in the situation, peace will stay in the background waiting to be rediscovered.

To rediscover peace, the author explains, we must first choose to feel peaceful for no one else can feel emotions for us.

Next the author reminds us that Love and Attention, much like peace, are not things that we can "get" or "achieve". Unconditional love and attention is not something we earn or deserve through some merit. There is no need to chase after Love since unconditional love is our birthright, it simply "is" what we already are.

Unfortunately, he goes on to tell us, our childhood experience of "unconditional love" was, by the nature of the world we live in, very conditional. Through the example we witnessed watching our parents interact with us, each other and other peoples, we internalized this conditional definition of love.

From there on, whenever we seek love as adult, we unconsciously manufacture scenes and dramas that recreate the emotions we experienced during our interactions with our parents as a child. So long as the resulting emotions are familiar to us, even if they are anything but pleasant or comfortable, then we feel at home. If when we wanted love as children we experienced abuse instead then abuse is love to us and we will seek abusive situation so to get closer to what we, unconsciously, believe love is. Of course, this kind of love hurts. But hurting is not love, hurting is a condition while love is a state.

The author reassure us by reminding us that the emotional growth we are engaging in while doing the Presence Process is meant to help us lift the conditional imprinting from childhood. As we keep working through the process and integrating our charged emotions, more of the conditions lift and we start looking at love through our present moment awareness.

As we get more aware of our imprinting and our relationship with Love, we realize we have been looking for love in the wrong places and in the wrong ways. Not only were our search pointless but we also realize we didn't know what love truly look like and so were never looking for unconditional love in the first place, only the mirage of what we thought unconditional love is.

This is where the author invite us to forgive ourselves, and others, for our misguided and often hurtful behavior on our quest to reach the mirages of love. Forgiveness becomes the necessary step for us to take so that we can move beyond the mistakes of our (and other people's) past and into the learning of what unconditional love really is.

And as we forgive ourselves and others and start to slowly melt our sets of conditions regarding love, we start a journey that commence by giving ourselves the attention and love we are seeking from others. By feeling our experience of each moment without placing conditions or judgement onto it, we start to feel love toward our child self and so toward ourselves. By giving our inner child love through feeling every aspect and every discomfort of our emotional body, we give our child self the example it needs to learn what real unconditional love is. And as our child self learn, we slowly start to gain the capacity to give unconditional love to others.

My experience of Week 8

As Week 8 built on top of the left overs from Week 7, things became very stressful. The panic attacks that had started with the Mantra of week 7 became a constant guest into my days and nights.

After the crushing falling apart that had happened on the Monday before Week 8, I thought some calm would be finally coming in and that I could maybe start breathing again. Was I wrong or was I wrong…

Tuesday was filled with a low background panic attack that slowly built into a crescendo. By the evening I was having palpitation and considering the option of getting some calming herbal tea to help me go through the work I had to do.

Wednesday was slightly better with only the background panic attack for most of the day until talking with friends made me loose my composure and I started to feel claustrophobic.

Thursday morning started in a jolt as I jumped awake from my heart racing in panic. As the claustrophobia of the preceding day got worse I decided it was best not to stay home and went off downtown to try to cool down and get some fresh air.

By Friday afternoon I was taking calming herbs just to get through my day and wishing that panic attacks could count as a Cardio in my exercise plan. Saturday was a yo-yo controlled only by how much herbs I had taken in the morning so to be able to go through the stress of the work. I ended the day falling asleep on the couch as soon as I walked in the door and then sleeping a lot more at night.

All the sleep from Saturday night must have been good because by the end of day on Sunday things were starting to calm down. Again I allowed myself a lot of sleep and as Monday came around again I felt burned out but finally on the other side.

Conclusion

I have been questioning myself about how feasible it would be for a person working full time to do the process. I suppose it depends how deeply the whole thing would affect you personally but for anyone that would be as affected as I am, I am unsure a full time job would be easy to handle.

I am actually feeling very lucky to be able to have a very flexible schedule while I deal with the process. While there is time where requests for my time and energy are high, the low times happen often enough for me to rest and recover. I am looking forward to see the process done and see how I feel when life return to normal.

For more posts about this experiment, consult The Presence Process — Table of Content.