It’s the Season of Giving ….

By Prof. Johanna Sophia

“Come NOW, please,” Fiona’s husband said. “I had planned for next week,” Josie replied. “It may be too late.” – “Oh -- I’ll fly tomorrow then.” And immediately Josie packed her bags. Memories flashed through her mind.  A whole childhood, youth, young adult adventures unthinkable without Fiona! Where was that picture of the two of them in pajamas making kissy mouths to the camera that night in the old cloister hotel in the South of France, roses from the curtain call stuck in their disheveled hair the night after their best performance ever on tour with the London youth symphony, where was that again? was it in the famous city of Cannes? They were so full of butterflies, first for the performance and then for the French boys who had insisted on kissing them… oh what glorious times at the age of 15! And now she was dying. Where was that picture?? One more time Josie wanted to relive those moments with Fiona – there! The picture was in the old album!  How young they were! But then again, sometimes she still felt so young – yet, at 34, Fiona was dying.

Not for a moment did Josie consider just mailing the album or getting on Skype, she needed to be there in person. She would spend thousands of dollars for that one more look into each other’s eyes seeing that unique smile, holding hands, hugging. Why? Why is it so important to be there in person? Don’t we have all the technology to be ‘virtually’ present in sound and image?

Great Aunt Bee

Great aunt Beatrice Green is 94 and just decided to avail herself of my life-coaching services. “I learn so much from you,” she tells me repeatedly, as I prepare her dinners. Tonight we’ll have butternut squash soup, sunflower seed crackers, and a veggie-burger on greens.  She always loved salads, but the prepared meals she gets delivered from her care service are lacking in fresh, vitamin and mineral rich foods.  She loves my organic raw vegan dishes!  In my life-coaching work, I have learned to appreciate the importance of family in peoples’ lives, may they be blood relations or families of friends. Families who collaborate and appreciate each other will enhance wellness, and families who are critical or antagonistic will stop the wellness progression of someone who has decided to gain in health and longevity. Beatrice represents a ‘modern’ woman of the 20th century who has made the most of her years and is continuing to do so: she studied, when women rarely did, had a career in administration, traveled the world, learned to appreciate other cultures and cuisines, and learned that learning never ends. Though she is the one who never had children, she is the one who brought a wind of sophistication to her cousins, nieces, grand nieces, and nephews and the great grand generation. Around her, they have formed a family structure spanning four generations.  ‘Great Aunt Bee’ knows much of that extraordinary century and she is sharp as a whistle.  “She remembers everything,” they say.  Her mother owned a ‘Model T’ Ford, the first mass produced car, she tells me, that any family member could drive without license – “the boys just jumped in without bothering to open the doors, and I had to crank it by myself, if I wanted to go for a ride!”  She was there for the first general fashion of trousers for women, she experienced the sense of importance bestowed upon female office workers when she was elevated to ‘Government Representative,’ and she decided to travel around the globe by herself when her beloved husband suddenly died at the young age of 75.  She stood on the Chinese Wall and walked to the Taj-Mahal, she sat on the stone steps of the Colosseum, and swam with the whales in the South Pacific.

Being present in Bee’s antique-filled home and partaking in her elegant lifestyle provides examples.  Aspiring to her standards may at times seem hard for the young ones, but just by embracing her, they share in some of her energy, her love for life and culture, and her appreciation of beauty.  When conflicts arise between generations or different interests of family members, Aunt Bee calls them together and discusses the resolve “in congeniality.”

Hugs and Kisses

So many families walk in and out of each other’s lives every day and are not really present to and for each other. Parents don’t listen to their teenagers and children don’t know (yet) how to break into their parents’ physical presence to get their ear or at least more hugs. I once knew a family where the parents never hugged their children. They felt they had no right to do so, or that it was inappropriate or that there was no need for physical affection since the children were adopted. Talk about misconstrued “respect for privacy;” to this day I cannot fathom it. All I know is that their children loved, loved, and sought sitting on my lap, just as my children could at any time, hugging, tugging or quietly being there when their parents were not looking. The 12 year old daughter wrote me a love letter, calling me ‘Mama’ like my children do.  I did not have the heart to show it to her mom or to discuss it. Their father was particularly adamant about us having the wrong approach to parenting. So they removed their children from our influence.  Oh dear Linka and Danny, I do hope that you’ll find wonderful love partners one day with whom to make up for all the lost hugs and kisses in your childhood!

Science has shown that babies’ brains develop slower and with delays when physical contact with humans is insufficient.  We send huggers, gentle strokers, and soft singers into intensive care units because we know it will help premature or injured infants to survive. In fact, we need physical expressions of love at all ages. My daughter Soraya shared her hugs and cuddles recently with the children of an orphanage in Ethiopia.
16-year old Mystique, a Rwanda massacre survivor saved by her father from the machetes that erased the rest of her family, her father carrying the 3-year old on his shoulders while running for days to the next border, missed gentle, healing touch all her childhood. Her father, an awesome artist, became an alcoholic, and she was sullen and considered withdrawn and even ‘retarded;’ that is until we came along and ‘adopted’ her for the few weeks we were there. Not only did she now laugh and speak, she also performed brilliantly in the 10th grade play I staged at the Waldorf School of Windhoek, in Namibia. And suddenly her classmates could embrace her, too. Needless to say, her academic performance took an immediate upswing as well.

Matter over Mind?

We are used to giving things.  This is the Season of Giving, we say.  We give many, many things.  We use some, throw away some, but mostly we hoard.  We pile up the things we were given, we stack things we OWN, we hoard memorabilia, we hold on and on and onto items for dear life until we lose our own life – why? Why does it feel that it makes our life worth more? Why do we actually feel better when we look at, touch, or just think of all those THINGS we have?  And I know I am no exception, I too love those items that carry memories. I love the knowledge of items I own somewhere in different cities, in other countries, on far away continents.  Is it because we don’t have anything else to make us feel we belong with the people who gave them to us?

Yet, we may realize that it’s not really the things, it’s the awareness of our existence of those who gave them that we crave.  It’s the thought that tells us that we exist in other people’s consciousness that sustains us and that we need for our own sanity. 
So how did we get so stuck in this cycle of more and more material presents instead of Presence at the time of giving?

My parents believed in ceremony and solemn celebration. We sat cradled in their arms on the floor before the hand-carved little family in the mossy arrangement under the branches. They told fairy-tale stories, sang songs in harmony with each other and lit the REAL bee’s wax candles on our REAL tree decorated with REAL red apples. The room smelled of cinnamon and spice because the cookies were laid out on open plates behind us and you were not allowed to touch them until tomorrow...  there were no material presents in sight the first night. But my parents’ present of being present in that space was so thick and satisfying for all our senses, you could never forget it. The cookies lasted until the kings had come. But often we kept them much longer, for they were unique and only for this season of the year.

The Power of our Presence

“Sometimes my history is not based on logic,” one of my friends says.  “It’s just that my mother taught me and she was taught by her mother and by her grandmother and so on.” ALL of our history and our existence is based on culture and “Culture is always stronger than reason.” Until we make a change.  And only at the moment of that change do we experience progress and do we realize our individual power. “And that’s a good thing,” my friend says. “Not necessarily,” I say.  “We can also use that realization of our power for the oppression or destruction of others. As soon as we have consciousness of it, we can say, I want more of that sense of power of changing others into submission or of changing my circumstances toward superiority, and I can use logic to get me there: I can say logic tells me that when I give people a sense of fear, or even a sense of gratitude for an imagined benefit that I sell them, it will make me richer, it will place me in the position of superiority in their lives and I will have more than they, because fear and or dependence will allow me to take from them or they will give ‘voluntarily’ because they believe that inferiority is their place on this planet.  They will hand over responsibility to me, the maker of their cosmetics, their medications, their fashions or their enemies. And they will surrender their own sense of self so I can have a grander sense of self, a larger than life persona, who in their minds never sits on the toilet and lets out a loud fart.  Think about it.  We allow the ‘reverence’ we should have for all life and all beings on our planet to be so misconstrued that we allow this victimization.  We have done so for generations, for centuries and for millennia.  Maybe we have done so for eons. But now is the time that many of us are waking up and realizing that we indeed have choices.  Not just the choices in the supermarkets and dollar stores.  We have real choices. We can be present in our own lives.

We can understand that what is driving our need for dependency is our longing for appreciation, our longing for love; or, phrased differently, our longing for existing in the other beings’ consciousness.  We may realize that we are longing for the exchange of positive thoughts that we have about each other.  We hope and work for having others think good thoughts about us.  We hope that someone on the road thinks we are looking fine or beautiful or strong as they are passing and throwing a fleeting glance at us, never to see us again.  But that one thought a total stranger may have about us, feeds our self-esteem, our soul, our sense of being, our ‘raison d’être.’ That thought, the feelings accompanying it, and those millions of thoughts of others about any aspect of ourselves, may indeed be what sustains and nourishes us.

The Science

Our physical and emotional body and our thoughts are represented in the energy field around us. The magnetic energy field is measurable not just by lie detectors but by all sorts of scientific instruments.  Consequently, our thoughts have a different impact depending on whether we are far away or in the same room or physically touching.  Never can we be quite as enthralled with a musical performance, a laughing crowd, a smiling face as when we’re in a live performance.  There’s that magic – no longer just a mystery because we can actually measure it in heart beats and in adrenalin rushes – that only happens when we are in the physical presence, breathing the same sweat in the air, so to speak, out of your lungs and into mine! Yes, we are breathing each other’s air when we’re in the same room! Indeed sharing the air you exhaled, inhaling it into my physical existence and vice versa.  Throw out your germo-phobic paranoia!  it is a wonderful thing that we indeed all share the same thin layer of breathable oxygen air on our planet. And the closer we get to each other, the more of that energy carried within the air, that communal, that shared existence can be experienced.

When there is no fear in that presence with each other, there is no negativity but rather reinvigorating joy. We increase our sense of existence when we allow ourselves to experience it as a gift: Being present with each other in the same room, in the same spirit with love for each other becomes the greatest of all gifts on planet Earth.

Being ‘in Touch’ and Localism

What does this all have to do with Localism? ‘Local’ is where you’ve settled and spend the majority of your time, not necessarily where you were born, then again often both. In local suburbia, however, we often see hundreds of people at the supermarket or in the mall and don’t know or greet a single person during a half hour visit, even though they live in your ‘neighborhood.’  What our new Localism is seeking is that we make an effort to know our farmer, our grocer, our weaver, our tailor, and our family members again. However, this time, in this new era of conscious Localism, we make the connections intentionally, not just following family and village traditions.  And that again makes all the difference: we are intentionally present.  This intention of ours renders our present of being present a true gift to each other.

Presence as the Essence of Existence

The incredible gift that is to be fully consciously present as a person, as a human being, as a relative, as a friend, as a consciously and emotionally being with each other in the same space, or, to a lesser extent via voice lines, phone lines, Skype lines, but being there intently for each other and understanding that this presence of human existence on planet Earth is THE gift per se to humanity, in fact, has given us humanity, has given us all that is life on Earth and therefore is a quintessential gift of all times to ourselves and to each other. So, the present of being present becomes the core of all gift giving.

In so many ways we extend material gifts as an extension of ourselves, giving to the other person of ourselves may have been the original concept of gift giving; sharing what we have, letting the other person know that we care, that we indeed want to share, want them to feel happy, valued and more appreciated.  And we ourselves feel enriched by our giving of a present to them.  And yet it all would not be possible in the first place, were we not present in their lives.
In conclusion, let us be more aware of the importance of Being Present.  On invitation cards to my children’s birthday parties, I used to write: Presence is more important than presents. I herewith reiterate that thought and wish you all a wonderful holiday season full of human presence!

Johanna Sophia and her learning center can be reached at 607-229-2308 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .