PRESENCE and PATIENCE are my keys to teaching, training, and building deep, trusting relationship with my animals. 

Presence is being here, being now, being in your body, awake and aware of everything that is pouring into your senses. It’s being with who you are, and everything you are experiencing, moment to moment. The comfortable things, the neutral things, the uncomfortable things. All of it.

It’s deep, relaxed, fluid situational awareness in all dimensions – physical. emotional, mental, and the subtle energetics of the situations and circumstances you move through as you create your life.

Presence and patience? Presence breeds patience. Patience supports presence. They are best buddies, peas in a pod.

Let’s have a look at some definitions.

Presence: ‘a state of active, relaxed awareness of all of one’s self and one’s environment in all dimensions and with all sensory modalities’. The older meaning includes: ‘state of being in a certain place and not some other’.

Patience: ‘implies the bearing of suffering, provocation, delay, tediousness, or other challenges etc. with calmness, kindness, and self-control’. The older meaning includes: ‘quiet or calmness in waiting for something to happen’.

So then – presence and patience is a state of refined awareness, anchored in your body, sensitive to all sensory input, being here, being now, while calmly, quietly waiting for whatever is happening (or not happening) to unfold – all without pushing or forcing anything whatsoever.

How to cultivate strong presence and patience…

I have been working at cultivating presence and patience for about 5 years now – actively, every day. Funny thing is, I didn’t really understand that this was what I was doing. How I do this is simple, but not always easy. However, I do it no matter how easy or hard it is on a given day. Doing the practice is the point.

My daily, many times a day, anywhere, anytime practice is the Whole Energy Body Balance™ Method Somatic Embodiment and Energy Connection process. In essence, it’s a three-step process where I become aware of and gently align my posture, then continually bring all of my awareness into and throughout my body while being present with everything I am experiencing, and then wake up my awareness of natural energy flows through my body, so I am filling my ‘energy cup’ to overflowing all the time.

I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve done it multiple times today already. I’ll do it tomorrow, and every day until I die. It has built my presence to strong, resilient levels, and I will keep on growing into more of that. And it’s also naturally made me way more patient – because I have to be patient with myself as I practice this again and again, on good days and bad.

One other thing that supports deep, resilient, tireless patience for me, especially when it comes to working with my animals, is letting go of outcomes, of how and when my animals learn things. Yes, there are things that they need to learn for safety and so they are a joy to live with. But it will take as long as it takes.

And it may take me explporing 2, 3, 10 or more different ways of teaching or inspiring my animals to do the thing that they need to do (or that I desire them to do). The more I can let go of needing to control how my animals learn and grow, the better everything works.

Presence and patience not only make your life a WHOLE lot better, they make your pets happier, and your relationship with your pets exponentially stronger. It’s real work to do this. Sometimes hard work. But incredibly worth it!