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

better at life. I'm your host, Corey Miscara, 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 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 felt sense of self-esteem,

and many people live their entire lives like that.

If you're listening to this podcast, it probably means you're interested in something a little

deeper, not to fully deny that way of being, but perhaps just a disillusionment

with it. And so this is where, you know, the practices of mindfulness, meditation, different

contemplative practices come in, and we get to taste just what it's like to drop beneath some of

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