How Do You See Me?
Someone recently asked me a simple question: “How do you see those you sit with?”
I found myself answering without much hesitation. I said that I see their true nature. Their heart. Their being. Their essence. Their light before conditioning, before personhood, before limits and contraction.
At the time, the answer felt complete. It still does. And yet the question stayed with me like an echo, not because the answer was wrong, but because it was spoken from only one level.
What became clear afterwards is that the answer came from the most fundamental place. From what feels most essential. From what matters most to be met, in any of us. In many ways, it is the ground from which presence in this world moves.
But we do not meet one another on only one level.
There are many layers of seeing happening all at once.
There’s the deepest seeing, being recognising being. Heart meeting heart. Light knowing itself before story, before history, before identity has tightened around experience. This is not something done deliberately. It’s simply how perception moves when it is no longer organised around assessment or improvement. More fundamentally even than that, when experience is not organised around a small self at all. Being sees prior to narrative.
And within that seeing, other layers naturally arise.
The human is seen too. The nervous system that has learned certain strategies to survive. The tenderness shaped by love and loss. The places of contraction, and the places still learning to trust. Temperament, personality, language, edges, habits of mind. Where someone is in their own unfolding, and what’s asking for patience, what’s asking for honesty, what’s asking for gentleness.
None of this contradicts the first seeing.
It all appears within it.
Sitting with the question days later, what came into focus was the recognition that these layers were not forgotten in the moment of answering. They simply were not led with. The response arose from what must be met first. Because when that deeper recognition is present, everything else can be held without distortion.
When essence is seen, the human does not become a problem to fix.
And when the human is seen within essence, it does not need to be bypassed.
This feels close to the heart of what matters here. Not collapsing the human layers into something abstract, nor becoming lost inside them, but holding a space where all layers are welcome, while never losing sight of what is untouched by them.
The question stayed with me because it quietly revealed something true.
We see one another on many levels, all the time. And yet there’s something that settles when we’re met first in and as what we truly are, before the layers are named or interpreted.
When that seeing is present, the rest does not need to be managed.
It can simply unfold.
And perhaps that is what was really being asked, even if it was never said aloud… “How do you see me?”
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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen