Working on an intellectual level with clients can miss the mark when wanting to create the conditions of effortless transformations. Many of the important beliefs or implicit memories about self and other have emotions attached to them and are held in the limbic system and can’t be accessed via the intellectual understanding.

I like to make the distinction between and intellectual understanding and an emotional understanding. An intellectual understanding is usually second-hand knowledge. An emotional understanding comes from the experiential insight that involves emotions.

There is a huge difference between an explanation that is generated from rational thinking versus an explanation that comes from the experiential insight that spontaneously arise when deeper emotional connections are made.

The intellectual understanding does not lead to effortless transformations, whereas the experiential emotional understanding does lead to or is the effortless transformation itself.

The Inner Presence Inquiry work factors this important distinction into the equation to effectively access beliefs and implicit memories to gain experiential insights.

In keeping with the principle of guiding clients into becoming and staying emotionally connected with what is emerging, one of the more powerful ways to accomplish this is to make the session experiential.

In a supportive context, there seems to be a strong tendency for people to‚ “talk about” or go into a “stories about‚” their experience. Others want to speak from a detached spiritual stance devoid of feelings all the while believing that indicates level of some sort of non attached equanimity.

There are lots of techniques and methods for making the sessions more experiential that I incorporate into the Inner Presence work to create the conditions for meaningful transformations to occur.

Tending to context means making sure the session has a context, noticing when it changes and requires a re-focusing or when it changes to deeper related context that needs to be explored.

In an Inner Presence Session, a context allows focused attention to connect with something specific, while at the same time, there is an openness for anything to emerge when connecting to such contextual information. Generally the client will generate the specific context. The facilitator will honor that context and bring attention back to the context when the session goes off on an unrelated tangent.

Also, the facilitator will learn to know when it is effective to allow the context to change to something that is deeper, yet related to the original context. All of these protocols makes for an efficient and effective session.

Pathological regards happen both on the part of the facilitator and the client. In our psychologically literate culture, clients come fully armed with their psychological self-labels.

Professionals can use psychological labels that might have been part of their education. Using such pathological labels with clients, or allowing them to use them on themselves, tends to inspire them to form an identity around such label. Implied in such self-identification is there is something wrong or that are bad in some way.

Same happens in spiritual circles: Some regard anger is unspiritual, or anything other than being calm means acting out of ego which is deemed as bad or unspiritual. Whatever is defined as unspiritual is a label that invites the inner or external ego police.

These pathological regards don’t serve the intention to inspire effortless transformations. The Inner Presence work has found a way to be free of such labeling and is still highly effective.

There are many ways in which helping professionals can convey “they know what is best” during a session which can preempt or overshadow the client’s innate intelligence. Inner Presence Inquiry protocols have many safeguards to prevent that from happening. We want the client’s bodymind system to precisely and accurately convey specific contextual information that is important to the client’s system of meaning instead of routinely superimposing our system of meaning or education onto the client.

The most impactful discoveries come from the client discovering on their own unconscious constructs instead of the helping professional telling them. It’s a question of how to use one’s expertise to create the conditions for clients to discover these construct on their own. Creating a non directive space invites the client’s inner wisdom to be a willing participant.

Also, the Inner Presence Inquiry work adopts an attitude on the part of the facilitator of allowing the clients bodymind system to direct the flow and depth of inquiry. Creating safe space, working with protection in gentle ways is more effective than kicking down the door of what some professionals call client resistance. The more safety, the more depth.

Prescribing what clients should or shouldn’t believe or what they should or should not be doing in their life are two ways in which we can unwittingly superimpose our values onto the client. There are so many ways in which we can consciously and unconsciously prescribe our values or superimpose our own system of meaning onto the client to mention here. This is why it is so important to support from a high degree of presence where there is only attentiveness to the clients values and system of meaning.

There are many facilitation protocols in the Inner Presence Inquiry work which, if followed, will keep this tendency to prescribe what clients should be doing.

Working in the present in an Inner Presence Inquiry session means we attune to, engage and hold presence for whatever is organically emerging in clients experience during a session.

Some approaches hold the past or future are not relevant. Other approaches are focused on the healing the past or creating a better future. With this kind of focus there tends to be neglect of what is happening in the present.

This not to say the past or future are not relevant, but these memories and future projections take on a different dimension when they arise and are connected with presence in the present in a natural way. There is a quality difference in being totally identified with a past memory or future projection with no awareness and inviting past memories and future projections into the here-and-now awareness for consideration.

So how do we know when a client has transformed whatever they came to get support to transform? Do we trust our evaluations and perceptions? Do we take the client’s word for it?

This question of “how do we know” points back to the particular definition of transformation and the particular transformational markers that are used to indicate transformation has happened.

The Inner Presence work incorporates checking questions in the inquiry process.  It gives facilitators feedback about our effectiveness so we know for sure we are making the optimal contribution to clients.