From Enlightenment to Enlivenment

*“The Energy of Embodied Enlivenment” – image by Paul Fryer*

Part Four: Whole-Body Mystical Presencing

Think of a time when you felt really alive. What did that feel like in your body? What brought it about?

Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

I have always felt drawn and a bit intrigued by that statement. What is abundant life?

Speaking as the Christ, as Jesus often does in the book of John, I believe he is speaking of the presence of divine spirit in our lives. The life of God, the divine life, interfused and intermingled with our human being. As Christ lives in us, the energy of God, we are enlivened with the divine spark from within.

I have come to understand and experience this life abundant in the felt sense of embodied enlivenment that comes when this spark catches fire within my being. It brings an energy that I can best describe as a feeling of being more fully present.

This is Christ consciousness—the embodied aliveness of divine energy incarnated throughout our whole being. A dynamic presencing of God enfleshed in us. Spirit flowing through.

What does it feel like to be more fully alive?

How do we welcome and invoke our enlivened presence in awakened spirit consciousness at any moment in our lives—not just in the peaks of our best moments that inspire us to feel more alive, but also in the re-spiration of any breath?

“Enlivening Life” - art by Christy Thrasher

Cultivating Enlivenment with Immanent Spirit

Whole-Body Mystical Presencing is a practice to fan the flame of our divine spark within. To catch fire with enlivenment in the immanent and present moment. The more we attend to this inner flame, the more it will spread and fill our being with radiance and intensification. This might feel like warmth or vibration. Or a greater sensitivity to the spiritual and energetic realities surrounding us. It might feel like love or bliss.

It might also be painful—for the more conscious we are the more we will see and feel. Much of what serves as entertainment and fun in our society and culture today are things that dull and desensitize us, that make us less conscious. This numbing can have a soothing and comforting effect, but it does not make us feel more alive. The choice of presence is not just consciousness of sunshine and roses.

If we decide we want to engage more actively and fully in our lives with the immanent presence of divine spirit, if we choose to welcome the enlivenment of spirit immediacy, there are ways we can cultivate the flame within. All of these methods fall under two categories: conscious engagement and attuned receptivity. In the first, we are actively stepping into presence. In the second, we are creating the posture and sensitivity to receive presence as a gift.

Sometimes we light the fire and sometimes the fire is given. In a sense, we are attending to the spark (which is not of our own making) and giving it the air, kindling, and tinder it needs to grow in us—the energy of the divine fire itself is inexhaustible and always available.

“The Fire of Enlivened Presence” – image by Paul Fryer

Conscious Engagement – Choosing Presence

One way that we move into presence is through conscious choice. A moment of decision, an initiative of will, a thought or impulse, to move toward. To lean into the depths within. To touch the flame of indwelling potential and let it burn. To invite vitality and motivation from the spark at the ground of our being.

This movement is not just a thought in our head. It may begin that way, but this is a more holistic engagement than recall. It is more than traditional mindfulness practices which rely on focus and attention—though those can be a good start.

We come into embodied, enlivened presence when we consciously connect with the deeper source. The practice last week helps bring us into more regular heart presence, and the one before that invoked the divine wellspring from our womb center to flow whenever it may. When we choose presence, we are tapping back into the felt sense of divine energy and spirit flow from the depths of our embodied being. We are calling the wellspring into our whole being. The act of recollection that “brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God” as Thomas Merton describes it.

We are welcoming inner enlivenment—however subtle the feeling might be. It may even be almost imperceptible at first. As John Heron describes it, “Enlivenment is responsiveness to the ground of our incarnate being.” We become responsive to this not just through thinking and remembering to do it, but also through the primary energies of our bodily life. With closeness to our human impulses—to breathe, move, sleep, speak, rest, relate, eat, drink, and be sexual. “These are all gateways to a spiritually grounded, fully embodied, distinctive and inclusive way of living-in-connectedness.” We open to the direction of flow coming forth within us, full of possibility and potentiality, into our whole embodied being in whatever we are doing at the moment.

One way to image this is like connecting the circuit to the source of energy flow at the root of our being. When it is disengaged, sparks may fizzle and show up occasionally, but when we join the base to the body, the “electric current” can rush throughout our whole being—as Frank Laubach described it. A vigorous “surge of plentitude” as Teilhard puts it, “a focus of loving energy” that transcends mere human happiness into something more, where “every man [sic] will one day understand that, at all times and in all circumstances, it is possible for him not only to serve (for serving is not enough) but to cherish in all things (the most forbidding and tedious, no less than the loveliest and most attractive) a universe which, in its evolution, is charged with love.”

In this way, we are even presencing this ever-present love as a universal participant through our distinct personhood. We are filled with the divine life of cosmic proportions—not just our singular spark—but an entire burning sun.

Attunement – Receptivity of Presence

Another way we are enlivened into embodied presence is through cultivating a posture of attunement. A sensitivity to the invitations which come from outside of ourselves. An openness to receiving deeper spirit presence as offered by the world around us. We are receiving the call to presence that is given to us in countless ways, at nearly any moment, if we are only tuned in to sense it.

Here, we may use the metaphor of a tuning fork. If we are attuned to the sound of divine energy humming around us, we will vibrate with resonance in response to the hidden bells that are chiming before us at any moment.

*Tuning Fork Sculpture in Bregenz, Austria*

Attunement is not a passive movement though. Just as a tuning fork will not resound if it is clamped down, held tightly, or constricted, so too will we be unable to resound when we are locked in on ourselves, wrapped up in our minds, insulated from the clear air of the call of spirit. There are many ways we can restrict our capacity for attunement. Releasing and opening our presence in relaxed receptivity makes attunement possible.

We cultivate this posture of attunement with the practice of Whole-Body Mystical Presencing, which heightens our relational sensitivity, and not just to humans. It is an embodied receptivity to picking up the hidden-in-plain-sight divine permeation in any and all things.

We may think of nature and art, beauty that strikes us and almost demands us to stop and pay attention. But it can also be much more subtle than that. The more we nurture our sense of attunement, we will hear the invitations to presence even in the seemingly mundane clattering of life as usual. Over time, our attunement can broaden its frequency to the point where even “distractions” resound within us. Disruptions can become invitations that resonate with the call to presence rather than reactivity.

When I lived in a new monastic intentional community, I lamented that we didn’t have the traditional bells to call us to times of prayer like a traditional monastery. To drop what we were doing and go to the chapel to pray. Instead, living in the inner city, we constantly heard sirens blaring to and fro. Eventually, I decided to stop trying to tune them out and hear them for the invitation they were. A new bell calling me to prayer, not in a chapel, but right where I was in that moment.

Anything can be a call to engagement when we are attuned in the midst of our everyday lives, with the substance of embodied life with its common and ordinary circumstances. Presence comes wherever we are and in whatever setting we find ourselves.

But it isn’t just about receiving. It is also about bringing to the forefront the fullness of our energetic presence and divine being in response to what has been put before us as invitation. We still consciously engage with our response of attentive presence, giving space for the bell to resound—receiving the invigorating vibration in the space within and between us.

Presencing to our collective resonance, coming into embodied enlivenment in mutual presencing will be the focus of the next part when we continue this series in the future.

*“Divine Attunement” – image by Dalmo Mendonça*

A Practice of Whole-Body Mystical Presencing:

WBMP is a process that is practiced all throughout your day. It is a turning at every possible moment in which you can remember to do it—or when it comes upon you as a grace.

These practices do not work if just thought of at random. It is like opening an inner eyelid. If we have not learned to look for this inner presence, our eyes remain shut. The more we consciously open them, the more we will begin to see with the light of divine presence within and around us.

It will take specific intention and dedication to develop new neural pathways, and then over time, the grooves are established so that the practice flows more naturally. But intentional, committed repetition is necessary to get to this place.

Embodied Responsive Attunement into Presence

In receptive attunement, deeper presence is offered through an invitation originating from external stimuli, whatever that looks like. As we cultivate our receptivity, we become more attuned to noticing and responding in resonance.

We may experience this first as an act of awareness, most often in our mind. In this practice, when the point of contact comes, let your body respond in whatever way it feels drawn. Let the internal reality of deeper presence find expression in your immediate present experience in your body.

Let yourself express presence with any posture, gesture, movement, sound, or physical manifestation coming forth from within you. This embodied response comes in many forms.

It might be a sudden energetic shaking throughout your whole body. A turning open of the hands. A mudra. A hand to the heart. Goosebumps. A jump or skip in your step. Falling to your knees. A hum. A song. A widening of the eyes. A holding of a blink.

Whatever expression flows from your body, let it come. And then receive the deeper invitation to presence it is offering.

With more practice, you’ll find an ease of responsiveness emerge. This somatic engagement helps establish the neural patterning in your body to cultivate a more natural sense of attuned presence over time.

You may also develop a “lean ritual” of primal gesture. Such ritual is free of any explicit theology but holds an embodied meaning of divine presencing for you. A repeated movement or action which is your body’s natural responsiveness to attunement.