Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting

a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about why presence

can be perceived as both compelling but also threatening by other people.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the

bells.

Okay, so let's talk about presence.

I wrote a whole book on presence.

It is a quality of being that is dear to my heart and it is something that I think is

very compelling in the world to see more of, compelling to experience ourselves and compelling

to see in other people.

There's something that's refreshing about it.

And yet there's also something that can be threatening to other people.

And so let's explore why that might be.

This quality of presence asks us to move beyond our normal ways of relating in the world,

our normal patterns of conditioning, our normal ways of just being caught in the story of

who we are, where we're going, what we have to achieve, what's essential, what's not

essential.

We all have a different story and I think we're all familiar with what it can be like to

be caught in that on automatic pilot.

All of these defenses that we put up, the job titles, the stories, the labels, whatever

it might be that lets us live in a particular way to feel safe, important, have a certain

...