We live in a global culture that pushes things, and we’re hit with that flaunting 24/7 in an always-on digital world we’ve come to normalize. It’s even more prevalent during the holiday season, especially in the West: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day and After-Christmas sales. It can feel overwhelming, and while malls aren’t as packed as they once were before Amazon and Etsy, it’s hard to hide from the frenzy. In our business, we’re not immune. We’ve run Black Friday sales on our courses, memberships, books, and jewelry.
Even though I’ve sent half a dozen gifts to people we care about, Anthony and I have decided not to give each other gifts this year. In a culture shaped by achievement, acquisition, and accumulation, love is often expressed through effort, output, and things. Although I love finding a unique gift I know will be appreciated by someone I love, and, truth be told, wrapping the box in decadent ways feeds my creativity, lately it has felt more like masculine energy to me, up there with solving problems and offering solutions.
What the soul longs for is not more doing, but deeper being. We’ve been conditioned to think otherwise, and Google and ChatGPT algorithms reaffirm that collective thinking, accentuated this time of year, naturally, to drive corporate profits.
This is where presence enters as a state of consciousness. Presence is embodied awareness. It is consciousness choosing to rest in relationship rather than control it. And at its deepest level, presence carries the signature of the feminine principle: receptive, spacious, intuitive, and attuned to life as it unfolds in front of our eyes. It’s easier to be present when we’re calm and centered, and the person in front of us is too. But what about when there’s tension or sadness in the air?
True Presence Listens and Attunes
The feminine principle of consciousness does not rush to fix or dominate experience. It listens. It receives. It holds, regardless of how long it takes. When we are truly present with another, we don’t impose meaning or extract value—we allow truth to emerge organically. This kind of presence says, “You do not need to become anything else for me to be here. You do not need to change your views if they’re different than mine.”
During a recent membership call with our community, people shared their experiences with non-physical gifts. BTW, these were also gifts they received from a situation by pausing to reflect on what was emerging for them. In other words, that precious gift of presence can also be taking a step back and apologizing to someone you yelled at when you were feeling wounded, overwhelmed or perhaps in physical or emotional pain.
The truth is that everyone has more triggers this time of year, and this is true across cultures as well. Whenever you have a holiday that gathers family members together—regardless of your belief system—triggers will arise. Memories resurface. Perhaps a grandparent or sister has passed and is no longer part of your celebration.
From a spiritual perspective, consciousness itself is neutral, open, and embracing. It doesn’t grasp. It witnesses. And when consciousness is embodied through the feminine quality of presence, love becomes something that happens rather than something that is performed. It’s not an outbound action but a heart-bound feeling of innate knowing. This is why presence feels so nourishing: it mirrors the original intelligence of life, which is created not by force, but by allowing.
Yesterday, I attended an online movement class, and the facilitator said, “It is simple kindness that grows us.” It stopped me in my tracks because it was a universal truth I could feel in my body. He later asked us as we were moving through our emotions, “In difficult times, what does your body remember?”
The feminine principle and way of showing up in the field could be seen as a felt field of being. The feminine principle has always been associated with the field rather than the form, the womb rather than the product, the silence rather than the sound. It is the unseen ground in which all things arise.
Physical gifts belong to the realm of form. Presence belongs to the realm of the unified field.
I’m not suggesting that everyone’s posts are disingenuous; I’ve found great healing and wisdom from writers’ words and artists’ images on various platforms, including this one. That said, digital platforms, physical gifts and sending money are outward-facing. Albeit all tangible, they don’t pierce the soul like actual presence. A hug. A gaze in the eyes without turning away. Acknowledging you care. Seeing others for who they are, with no judgment, regardless of their skin color, religion, political orientation, or belief systems.
In the work we do, this message often comes through us: Touch one soul at a time. While it may not seem very efficient, the ripple effect on that one soul can indirectly impact thousands, even if we don’t see it immediately or perhaps ever.
When someone offers you their full attention . . . attunes to you authentically without distraction, your body relaxes. Trust is expanded, and when it does, your breath deepens. Your inner world feels safer to reveal itself. In presence, we are no longer performing, proving, or protecting. We are allowed to be . . . as we are, not as someone we think we ought to be.
This is why presence is at the heart of all spiritual traditions. Whether through prayer, meditation, contemplation, or mindful service, spirituality ultimately trains us to be here—awake to this moment, this breath, this encounter. Across cultures, esoteric wisdom emphasizes the present moment for a reason: it’s all there is. Presence is love in its most unadorned form.
While I have received authentic gifts over the years—a necklace, a framed photograph with me and a dear friend, or a bag that has traveled with me to many countries—the memories that break me open with a big smile or a flood of tears have always been a deeply connected moment with someone.
I remember tearing up one night in a bar with a small group of journalists at CES many years ago. My first thought was embarrassment. My second thought was, “How unprofessional of me.” But I couldn’t hold back, and as I went to that self-critical place, an editor of a technology media outlet quietly said as his eyes also teared up, “Thanks for your vulnerability. I know how you feel, and I rarely allow those emotions to come. You’ve just given me a gift.” And then he looked around at the others and said, “I imagine you’ve given them a gift too.” I learned on that cooler-than-normal January evening that when we’re vulnerable, we give others permission to do the same.
Gifts can be given and forgotten or purchased out of a sense of duty, rather than from the heart. I’ve never forgotten that precious moment in some run-down Las Vegas bar I’ll never remember the name of. His presence on that remarkable night healed me, and my vulnerable moment healed him in ways we couldn’t put into words, but we didn’t need to—everyone felt it. Presence reshapes the nervous system, rewires trust, and restores coherence. It creates a relational field in which healing, insight, and intimacy naturally emerge, without any effort. It’s seamless and beautiful as love always is when it touches the soul deeply.
This is why presence cannot be rushed or manufactured. It requires inner stillness, or as I love to say, the still point. True presence asks us to dismantle the constant outward projection of attention and return awareness inward, to the body, the breath, and the moment itself. To the person in front of you. Attune to them and feel what they feel. Breathe into what they know. Sense what they want to say but perhaps don’t have the tools to understand how.
In this way, presence is a profoundly feminine spiritual act—even when embodied by men—because it honors being over becoming.
In other words:
I am not here to impress you. I am not here to solve your problems.
I am not here to fix you. I am not here to direct you.
I am here to meet you.
This meeting is a sacred moment; it restores the ancient wisdom that love is not transactional and can never be transactional, nor can it be something we need to earn or measure. It can only be felt.
That’s why I love the words of wisdom from my movement class this week so much: “In difficult times, what does your body remember?”
When we’re running and doing rather than sitting and being, we are detached from our bodies and how they feel. The body is a magnificent vehicle with wisdom beyond words.
In every moment, what does your body remember? What can it tell you?
Presence as Remembrance
This remembrance is what many spiritual traditions point toward, though often in different language: the return to wholeness, to union, to the simple intimacy of being alive together. To the interconnectedness of All That Is.
In a world that rewards individualism, productivity and performance, presence is significant, even radical. It is an act of spiritual resistance to the idea that worth must be proven.
- To offer presence is to embody conscious love.
- To receive presence is to be welcomed home.
And in honoring the feminine principle of consciousness—receptive, relational, and whole—we rediscover the truth that no object, no matter how beautiful, can ever replace the power of simply being here, together. And now, breathe into that.
How Presence Heals Us and Others
Many years ago, I gave a graduation gift to a friend’s 18-year-old daughter, and her mother asked me for the receipt because she wanted to return it. It was what I was told she wanted. Apparently, she wanted the money instead, but had her mother reach out to me instead of telling me directly. I get it—it’s an awkward thing to ask. The part that hurt more was that I never received a thank-you from either of them, and the item was also a bit pricey for me in those days. The whole thing felt like a superficial disconnect.
Presence is connection. It cannot be purchased. It does not glitter or make noise. And yet, it is the one gift that changes everything. It heals individually and collectively. As a result, collective consciousness expands.
To be present is to say, without words, “I am here with you.” Not distracted. Not rushing ahead. Not mentally elsewhere. Presence is the sacred act of meeting life exactly where it is, with an open heart and an attentive soul.
Moments of presence remain alive in memory and in the nervous system, like that moment in Las Vegas many years ago, or the words I heard at my movement class just yesterday. We remember how someone made us feel seen and heard. We remember the way time seemed to soften—or even disappear—when someone truly listened. We remember the warmth of being met without an agenda or judgment.
An expensive gift cannot replace eye contact, and a busy schedule cannot excuse emotional absence. A big check won’t compensate for a closed heart. Many of the deepest wounds we carry are not from a lack of things, but from moments when we were unseen, unheard, or emotionally abandoned—often while surrounded by material comfort.
My grandfather once told me I would feel a chain around my legs from object overload as I got older. The truth is, we have a lot of beautiful things because I love art, and have collected amulets, statues and other cultural remnants from my travels around the world. I love the beauty I breathe in from these items, all of which are filled with memories.
The irony is that when I look at a painting on the wall, what I remember most is not the beauty that it emanates, but the meaningful conversation I had with the artist or photographer and that deep connection is what made me buy it in the first place. The same goes for nearly everything in my house; each item carries a story of someone’s soul. Their creativity. It’s their beauty moving through them, making its way onto canvas or a piece of wood. It was their presence that connected me to them and to their creation.
It’s a similar feeling you get when a child draws a family scene with a sun overhead and a dog at someone’s heels. The child explains the drawing in detail and delights in all the visions she had while making it. It hangs on your fridge and emanates beauty, but even moreso innocence, love, and connection.
Presence is what gives meaning to everything else. Without it, even abundance feels empty.
To cultivate presence is to practice reverence for life itself. During these tenuous times, when things feel so divisive, we need to pause, slow down and feel our own breath. When we engage with others on Christmas Day, listen without rehearsing a response. It involves letting silence be sacred instead of awkward. It means choosing being over doing—even for a moment. Ahh yes, the feminine principle breathing its way into existence.
Each time you offer presence, you gift someone a quiet miracle. You interrupt the trance of busyness and remind another soul that they matter—not for what they produce, achieve, or provide, but simply for who they are.
Presence costs nothing, yet it is priceless. It leaves no clutter, only communion. In choosing presence, we align with something eternal: the truth that love is not something we give through things—it is something we give through ourselves. Our Higher Selves, or as I like to say, our Soul Selves.
And in a world hungry for attention, your presence (and acceptance) is the most radical, healing, and holy offering you can make this holiday season. While it may seem in that moment that your presence is a gift for another, you will find a gift for yourself in that still point. In that moment of awareness, let gratitude wash over you and allow that beautiful, tender moment to fill the room with love. Trust me friends, everyone will feel it.
Renee Blodgett is the Founder and Managing Editor of We Blog the World, a global travel, culture and lifestyle publication exploring the world through the lens of meaningful experiences, human connection and cultural depth. Having lived in 10 countries and traveled to 95, Renee has spent much of her life immersed in the people, traditions, landscapes and ideas that shape how we experience the world.
Since launching We Blog the World in 2007, she has written and produced extensive editorial coverage spanning boutique and luxury travel, culinary experiences, arts and culture, wellness, adventure, technology, spiritual traditions and transformative travel. Her work is rooted in the belief that travel is about more than where we go—it is also about what a place, culture or encounter awakens within us.
Renee brings more than three decades of experience across journalism, photography, media, brand strategy, technology, wellness and global storytelling. She has worked with companies and organizations around the world on brand positioning, communications, product launches, media strategy, speaker positioning and storytelling. Through Blue Soul Media, she works with authors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders and purpose-driven brands to clarify their message and expand their impact, which includes speaker coaching/training for high-profile stages such as TED and bringing authors’ work to market while retaining authors rights.
She is also the co-founder of Blue Soul Earth, an educational platform exploring consciousness, ancient wisdom, spirituality, healing and the intersection between science and the nature of reality. Renee is the producer and host of the award-winning Blue Soul CHATS, a conversational series bringing together leading voices in science, technology, consciousness, wellness and spirituality.
Her growing body of work also includes Blue Soul Living, which extends her interest in consciousness and well-being into the spaces we inhabit, exploring how intentional design, energy and environment can support greater harmony and connection.
Renee is the award-winning co-author of the bestselling Magdalene’s Journey and founder of the Magdalene Collection, inspired by women’s voices, stories and wisdom across cultures and generations.
A longtime photographer and storyteller, Renee has documented people, places and cultures around the world and produced photographic collections focused on destinations including the Galápagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome and Ecuador. She also co-founded Traveling Geeks, an international initiative that brought entrepreneurs, journalists, creators and technology leaders together with their counterparts in other countries to exchange ideas and explore innovation across cultures.
Renee’s work has been recognized by Forbes, the United Nations and others for her influence in media and social storytelling. Across her work in travel, media, consciousness and culture, a common thread remains: curiosity about the world, the stories that connect us and the ways meaningful experiences can change how we see ourselves and one another.
