As an educator and interfaith/interspiritual director who journeys with people from all walks of life, all religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, I realize that not all people who serve others in a care-giving way feel comfortable or well equipped to companion others who believe differently than they.
For nearly 20 years I have been honing a protocol that caring professionals can use to provide non-judgmental, unconditional, compassionate presence to individuals from all walks of life, including every spiritual persuasion. I have successfully used it in my private practice with clients (seekers) over the past seventeen years and with my students in The Spiritual Guidance Training Institute and through The Graduate Theological Foundation. I've encouraged the spiritual care professionals I mentor to use it too. I call this method “Pure Presence.”
For nearly 20 years I have been honing a protocol that caring professionals can use to provide non-judgmental, unconditional, compassionate presence to individuals from all walks of life, including every spiritual persuasion. I have successfully used it in my private practice with clients (seekers) over the past seventeen years and with my students in The Spiritual Guidance Training Institute and through The Graduate Theological Foundation. I've encouraged the spiritual care professionals I mentor to use it too. I call this method “Pure Presence.”
Pure Presence™ is rooted in both the Eastern and Western traditions of body-mind science and contemplative spirituality. It serves and benefits the spiritual companion as well as the seeker (or client) simultaneously. Pure Presence allows an individual to listen deeply; to offer the deepest empathy and spiritual care to whomever they are with. This interfaith and interspiritual approach to formal presence training is the most comprehensive way I know to both deepen and advance spiritual understanding and care in our homes, neighborhoods, workplaces and religious communities.
Pure Presence is praxis based. It requires deep intention and a strong desire to eliminate what separates us one from one another, particularly in light of theological differences. It also requires practice, consistent practice in self-awareness, because our thoughts and feelings about those who may be different from ourselves are deep seated, and it takes time to uproot beliefs or actions that do not serve us well. With transparency and good self-awareness, we can transform limiting beliefs through the practice of self-compassion.
Fully integrated self-compassion ultimately leads to compassion for all beings with whom we interact. And when mutual compassion is present, barriers are overcome, wounds are healed, and all who sip from its cup are made better from the partaking.
Fully integrated self-compassion ultimately leads to compassion for all beings with whom we interact. And when mutual compassion is present, barriers are overcome, wounds are healed, and all who sip from its cup are made better from the partaking.
Pure Presence is a systematic method for care-giving professionals to be fully and compassionately present to anyone of any spiritual persuasion, ethnicity, or belief system. The “burden” of establishing presence, if you will, falls upon us, first and foremost, to do the good work of self because without having done so, we will always be dominated by ego, the volatility of the false self, that convinces us of the superiority or rightness of our view. Presence dwells in the ‘spiritual heart’, as yogic sage Ram Dass calls it; within the ‘true self’ as Thomas Merton explained it. Indeed, it is the journey of a lifetime to empty oneself, to eliminate one’s own small idea of what someone should believe or how they should live; to bear loving witness to the wonder and Mystery of an individual’s spiritual formation and unfoldment.
Learn more about
The Pure Presence Practitioner Training Program
Pure Presence™
©2023, Janice L. Lundy
All Rights Reserved
©2023, Janice L. Lundy
All Rights Reserved