Almost Here
On presence, listening, and the chair we keep leaving.
It’s early. I’m in my favorite chair by the fireplace, watching the dogs do what they do every morning with the same enthusiasm and uncomplicated joy.
And I’m smiling. But I’m not really here.
My mind has already left the room. It’s somewhere between what I should have said last week and what I need to figure out by the end of the day today. Replaying one conversation, rehearsing another.
I’ve sat in this chair thousands of mornings. I’ve counseled and coached hundreds of people. I’ve studied the nervous system, the body, and the breath. I teach presence.
And still.
Most of us are walking around almost here.
Physically in the room, mentally somewhere else with the mind planning, replaying, and worrying. We’ve been told this is ambition. That the mind that never stops is the mind that wins.
But what I’ve learned from decades of being with people in their most difficult moments is something softer and more inconvenient than that.
The single most important skill in every relationship, with others and with ourselves, is the one we practice the least.
We tend to over-focus on communication, boundaries, and self-awareness.
But if we really want to go for change, listening is the key.
I’m not referring to the fake listening we do. The nodding while composing our response. Desperately waiting for a pause to offer the perfectly timed insight and the “let me fix this for you” responses. All just anxiety wearing a helpful costume.
I’m talking about listening from the belly. Full-body. No agenda.
Its absence is at the root of so much of what breaks in our relationships, our health, and the inner spaces we never let anyone see.
We say we want to be heard.
Everyone does. It’s one of our most universal human cravings.
Just see me, just get me, just let me be real for a second without you trying to manage me.
But if everyone wants to be heard, who’s actually doing the listening?
Real listening requires getting quiet inside. And quiet is terrifying for most of us. Because quiet means we might feel something. And feeling something means we might have to do something about it. Or worse, we might not be able to fix it.
So instead, we perform, position, and protect. We become very skilled at looking like we’re listening while actually managing our image, their feelings, and the discomfort of just being with someone in their mess.
I’ve done it, and our culture rewards it.
I’ve also learned that my body has been listening this whole time.
While our minds have been time-traveling and our mouths have been performing, our bodies have been taking careful notes.
The tightness in our shoulders that never quite leaves.
The sleep that doesn’t restore.
The low hum of irritability we can’t quite explain. The fatigue that coffee stopped touching months ago.
That’s the body saying, “I’ve been trying to tell you something. Are you going to listen, or should I get louder?”
The nervous system is talking. The gut is talking. The patterns of tension, the emotional reactivity, the energy crashes. All of this is data, and it’s a conversation our bodies are trying to have with us.
Are we willing to hear it?
After more than 25 years of fully listening to people, I’ve noticed that those who are the worst at listening to others almost always have the worst relationship with their own interior life.
This is simply a nervous system pattern.
When we haven’t learned to be with our own discomfort, grief, anger, confusion, and longing, we can’t sit with someone else’s. So we rush to fix and reframe it. We feel the pressure to say something, so the silence doesn’t swallow us whole.
And in doing that, we take the other person’s experience away from them. We make it about our need to be useful rather than their need to be witnessed.
I’ve been on both sides of that, as I’m sure you have too. The one rushing to say the right thing and the one who desperately needed someone to just stay.
The moment we stop trying to manage how someone feels or how we look, we open up. We soften. We slow down, and we start noticing the feeling behind the words. And they feel it. Without us doing much at all.
That’s presence. And presence is the most healing thing one human being can offer another.
So I’m back in the chair. Dogs playing. Fire going. Mind somewhere between last week and next month.
And I catch it.
There I go again.
Before judgment surfaces, I simply notice this moment and realize I’m not here.
And then I come back. All it takes is one breath. Just one. Just a moment of choosing the fireplace over the mental movie.
That’s the practice. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside.
But over time, it changes everything. Our relationships. Our health. The capacity to be with hard things without running and choosing to actually enjoy the life we’re building instead of perpetually preparing for it.
Learning to listen to our bodies, our emotions, and the people we love is one of the hardest, most consequential things we will spend time on.
And it starts exactly where we are. In whatever chair we’re in. With whatever morning we’re having.
—Tawny
It made me think about myself as a doctor and it absolutely applies to doctors, though in a slightly different way.
We’re trained to listen with a purpose: diagnose, interpret, act. That instinct is vital, but it can mean we move too quickly to fix or reframe rather than simply stay with what’s being shared.
So it’s not a lack of listening, but a different kind, more clinical than relational. Time pressure, responsibility, and emotional load all push us in that direction.
But the doctors who are comfortable with their own inner world, the ones who can tolerate silence, uncertainty, and emotion are often the ones patients remember most.
Not because they had the perfect answer, but because they didn’t take the moment away.
They stayed. And that kind of presence is quietly powerful.