Authentic presence is a practice of radically owned honesty. This means disclosing yourself completely while taking full responsibility for your experience.

Authenticity here doesn’t require a “unique essence” or a “real, true core”. It is rather the absence of such a core that makes resistance or separation groundless and brings forth a vibrant void through which an untethered life can reveal itself.

This practice of availability brings all the former ideas together. 

We practice it as four broad skills. 

First: to be intimate with myself, on the level of sensations. 

I notice that most censoring happens through my mind, but my body seems to be more untethered and resistant. On the level of my intimate sensations lies another world, another truth about myself, waiting to be revealed.

 If I carefully listen to my body, it speaks to me and tells me a story that I often already know, but that I rather not hear. If you want, you can do it right now. Just take a moment to breathe. And without controlling the breath, just listen to the body.

 How does it feel to be you? Are there any sensations or feelings? Just take your time to be with your body. And from here, is there anything you know to be true about yourself?

Second: to reveal myself with radically owned honesty.

When I've touched myself intimately, I can share this truth with others, reveal how it is really like to be me, how it is like to be with reality as it is. And the practice we propose here is radically owned honesty. In all honesty, disclose my experience while taking responsibility for it.

Owning my experience means that I come from the perspective that the way I experience others and the world is my own responsibility. It is the answer to the question, what is it in me that makes it difficult for me to be with reality as it is?

Third skill: to be intimate with others

To listen so deeply that I can be touched and deconstructed by their experience. Feel the world as they feel it. Experience it as they do. To come as close as possible to experiencing how it is like to be another, as is possible for me. So it requires curiosity, interest, postponing judgment and assumptions, and accepting without resisting.

Fourth: to be with what is.

And from being intimate with others automatically flows the last skill to be with reality as it is, without trying to change anything, without trying to make anything happen or avoid anything from happening, both at the inside and at the outside.

This practice of availability is reflected in the morning prayer at House of the Beloved (see end of booklet)