Presence Is Who You Are. Integration Is How You Stay.
- Tammy Waldron
- Jan 24
- 3 min read
If you do this work—personally or professionally—you’ve likely noticed the same pattern.
You can access insight, regulation, and even deep moments of presence.
And yet, when emotional intensity rises, familiar patterns return.
The reaction you thought was resolved shows up again.
The coping strategy you believed you’d outgrown reappears under stress.
The presence you can touch in calm moments becomes harder to sustain in real life.
This isn’t a failure of awareness. It isn’t a lack of effort or commitment. And it isn’t a sign that the work hasn’t worked.
✨ It’s a capacity issue. ✨
Presence isn’t something you create:
Presence—what many traditions call the True Self—is not something you achieve through healing or earn through practice. It is already here.
It is the steady, witnessing awareness beneath emotion, thought, and role.
You can access it in moments of stillness, prayer, awe, or deep connection—even while parts of your emotional world remain unfinished or unresolved.
Presence doesn’t disappear when you struggle.
What disappears is your ability to stay.
Capacity determines what happens under emotional load:
When emotion intensifies, your nervous system is asked to hold more sensation, more information, and more energy at once.
If that load exceeds your system’s current capacity, it does what it has learned to do:
You revert to familiar patterns
You tip into overwhelm or shutdown
You reach for story, strategy, or control
Not because something is wrong—but because something is too much.
From this lens, recurring patterns aren’t failures. They’re signals. They show you where it has become too much to stay.
Repair happens by untangling emotion from story, trauma from present-time sensation, and survival responses from identity.
As these entanglements soften, feeling can be experienced more cleanly in the present moment.
This is how feelings become teachers.
They don’t tell you what’s wrong with you.
They show you what is ready to be repaired so staying becomes possible.
Emotional integration doesn’t mean eliminating emotions or transcending them.
It doesn’t mean being calm all the time or healed enough to stop reacting.
Integration is the growing ability to remain present while feeling—in your body, in real time—without being overtaken, disconnected, or fused with the emotional identity.
As your capacity expands, and your integration deepens:
You can feel without losing yourself
Sensation can move without driving behavior
Presence becomes livable, not just accessible
This is the foundation of Emotional Presence:
Emotional Presence is your capacity to stay here with what is arising—without rushing to meaning, story, or solution.
It is the middle path between overwhelm and numbness.
Between being flooded by feeling and cut off from it.
Between knowing and embodying.
This distinction is foundational to the work we explore inside RISE—whether you are a therapist seeking to reach the root of recurring patterns, a practitioner deepening your craft, or someone committed to your own healing.
Presence is who you are. Integration is how you stay.
From here, we begin to explore how feelings themselves—and the stories they are entangled with—become guides rather than obstacles.
One layer at a time. One feeling at a time.
Step Forward with an Open Heart
If you feel called to go deeper, join my next free Healing Circle. It’s a space for healing, connection, and expansion—because you don’t have to navigate this alone.
💛 You are here for a reason. The world needs your light, your truth, and your gifts—now more than ever.
Are you ready to Rise?
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