What if self-love isn’t just how you feel about yourself, but how you stay with yourself?
What if being there for yourself is actually a form of self-love?
When you’re afraid, you don’t abandon yourself.
When your body tightens, you don’t override it.
When you’re overwhelmed, you don’t immediately disappear into the story.
You notice.
You breathe.
You feel.
You stay.
That is love.
Presencing is the practice of doing this.
Let’s talk today about how to be there for ourselves, or what I call presencing skills. I’ll start with explaining what presencing skills are by guiding you into them. I really want to invite you, as you’re reading this today, to try to see if you can have any moments of presencing.
What Is Presencing?
What presencing is—what we’re doing—is we’re coming into the present. Coming into the present is becoming aware of your body and your breath, and really anything that you’re aware of, any feelings that you might be having in the moment.
For example, I’m going to invite you to bring your awareness to your breath. Really, if you can deepen it—most of us don’t really take deep breaths. So if you’re coming into the present moment, use it as an opportunity to take a deep breath.
I’m also going to invite you to bring your awareness to your feet, to your legs, to your seat, your belly, your chest, your back, your arms, your shoulders—really, your whole body. Bringing your awareness to your whole body, continuing to have an awareness of your breath.
You might even notice, Oh, I’m feeling relaxed right now. Or you might notice – Oh, my diaphragm is tight, and I’m feeling some fear.
So, what presencing is—you’re bringing your awareness to your breath, to your body, to your feelings. It’s not really going into feelings and dissociating from the body and going down memory lane. That is not presencing. Presencing is—I’ll give an example of a difficult feeling: I’m feeling fear. Oh, I’m feeling fear. Okay, I’m noticing that my diaphragm is tight. So I’m going to breathe into my diaphragm and I stay connected to my diaphragm. I’m going to feel, notice if anything comes up about this fear, or maybe it just releases.
So this is presencing. Presencing is awareness of the moment, of your body, of your breath, of any sensations— Oh, I feel light in my chest. Oh wow, okay. This lightness in my chest, I feel a lot of ease. Or, I feel like my hands are clenching, oh, there’s something happening here, I’m going to relax my hands so that they’re not clenching. But I’m also going to just pay attention to how this feels: Is my wrist feeling tense? Is it coming from my back? Do I need to breathe into it?
Presencing Is a Way of Being With Yourself
What we’re doing with presencing is inner parenting. For example, if you’ve been around kids, young kids get hurt. If there is a caring caregiver, they’ll go to that caring caregiver, they’ll cry. Or, they’ll give them their hand where they got hurt. They wait for some sympathy, some love, some attention, some care, and then they’re off running happy again. They just think—Okay, thanks for the attention. I needed that for a moment. It’s just a little ding, and then they’re off, and they’re back to the joy, back to the happiness.
So for presencing, we are stepping into the role of our own parent. Because we recognize that as adults, there isn’t somebody that we can go to every time we have a little feeling who’s going to give us that care, love, and attention. We might have that in certain relationships in our lives, which is lovely. But many of us—what do we do when that person isn’t present in the moment, when we need that care and attention? We still need it.
So presencing is a way of parenting the different experiences that we have. It’s a very important skill for us to build so that we can move through challenges in life. Now, many people will say, I can’t do it, it’s really hard. And it is hard. It’s very simple, and it’s very hard. It’s very hard to build that muscle that brings us here. Here. Here.
We Can Learn to Stay With Ourselves
When we see a kid who is trying to learn how to walk, they will grab onto something to try to get up, and they will fall. And they will try again to get up, and they will fall. They will try repeatedly to get up, and they will fall. They will try to stand up—they’ll actually stand up. One, two, fall. Eventually they persist, persist, persist, and they are able to stay standing up. And soon they’re walking, and they’re running.
So as adults, when it comes to presencing, most of us don’t have the skills. We don’t have them. We don’t know how to give ourselves that attention, that awareness.
So really, what I tell people is: If you want to presence, do it. And celebrate every moment that you’re able to be present. Set some reminders—you know, if you’re just starting out. Five times a day, let’s say. Presence. You’re watching a funny video? Presence. Notice the one who’s experiencing the funny video. Oh, how does it make you feel in your chest? How does it make you feel in your heart? How does it make you feel in your body? Does it relax? Does it deepen your breath?
If you’re walking from one side of the room to the other, feel your feet on the ground as you’re moving. Instead of thinking, instead of getting lost in emotions, you’re learning, Oh, I’m here. I’m feeling my foot.
The Practice of Coming Back
So presencing is a skill, and we have to take it on as a practice. For example, as I said, five times a day you can remind yourself to presence. It might be a really good beginning to the day: you wake up, and before you even get out of bed, breathe. Feel your body. You’re here.
I’d love to hear, should you decide to take this on as a practice, how it goes for you. Just a quick warning, for lack of a better word: the ego is going to resist. It’s going to tell you—it’s going to say, I can’t do it. It’s going to look at all the times that you failed. That’s not it. Presencing is celebrating every moment that you stop. Stop as in just stop the loop of the stories. Come here now. Until you build that into your inner parenting where you don’t even have to stop—because there’s a part of you — no matter what you’re doing in the world, that doesn’t leave you. That stays present with you. That’s the goal.
I wish you much grace through this. Presencing as an intention, as a skill. And I’d love to hear how it’s going for you. You can put it in the comments. And really, if you need any support because you realize, Wow, this is very hard, I don’t know why I can’t do this, feel free to reach out to me. This is what I do.
May you land now.
If this resonated — if you recognize how hard it can be to stay with yourself when things get difficult — I’m here to support you in building this practice.
I offer a free 20-minute consultation for those curious about this work. Available to California adults for somatic psychotherapy, and worldwide for psychospiritual integration.
If this article resonated, you may also find support in these reflections:
- Why Does Meditation Sometimes Feel Harder? — on what gets stirred when we open to ourselves through practice
- Our Deepest Trauma Isn’t What Happened to Us — on what we lost of ourselves when we couldn’t stay present with what arose
- Good Person Syndrome: Reclaim Your “Bad” Self — on allowing the feelings we’ve been taught to repress