Michael Brown has, in my view, provided another practical tool for developing your experience of present moment awareness.
His work as presented in "The Presence Process" is, in my perspective, a direct progression from Thich Nhat Hanh, Eckhart Tolle, Genpo Roshi, Jon Kabat-Zinn and many others.
The specific contribution of Michael Brown's work is that he recognises and addressses the deep seated emotional and physical blockages that many of us carry.
What Michael Brown has done with "The Presence Process" is to provide us with a route map that very specifically helps us to identify and deal with our "baggage" and thus be able to enter the "felt sense" of mindfulness.
Michael Brown - Introduction To The Presence Process
Michael Brown - On Healing The Inner Child And Dealing With Unresolved Trauma
Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, raised as a Buddhist monk since boyhood, has done much to bring the practise of mindfulness or present moment awareness out from its Buddhist origins and into a space that transcends any particular faith-tradition or cultural background.
Eckhart Tolle is of a younger western generation and he has brought these teachings and practises to an even wider audience using a different and arguably more modern and culturally western framimg and articulation of teachings on mindfulness practises.
In the "Big Mind" process, Genpo Roshi has provided us with a cognitive tool for developing and extending our range of access to our many different internal states and in this context for directly entering the state of present moment awareness more or less "on demand".
In "The Presence Process" Michael Brown places a big emphasis on healing the inner child. Brown demonstrates that unresolved trauma experienced as a child [and that doesn't nessarily have to mean physical or sexual or any other extreme abuse], and held within our emotional body in an energy form, is a major determinant of recurring patterns in adult behaviour.
These unresolved energies (Eckhart Tolles refers to them as our "pain body") are a major obstacle to our capacity to developing mindful awareness.
Or to put it another way, I am sure you'd agree that all of us carry within us varying degrees of "baggage" or what the therapeutic world refers to as "shadow material" or in terms of "Voice Dialogue Therapy" ignored, denied and thus suppressed aspects of ourself.
All of the aforementioned mindfulness teachers place great emphasis in their teachings on applying mindfulness to these dark and troubled aspects of our nature.
"The Presence Process" is a physical process (or series of processes) and as such addresses a dimension that is often overlooked in traditional meditation practise.
I have not undertaken all aspects of his process as laid out in the book, as I had already undertaken many of the major elements of it before discovering "The Presence Process", and based on that prior experience I can commend it to you as a very powerful tool for identifying and clearing up your previously unidentified "emotional baggage".
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