An Applied Presence: Foundations student recently asked a question in the monthly Q&A about what the felt sense of "Availability" is like in the body. Availability, one of my Four Spectra of Presence, is a felt dynamism in response to the world's invitations to act. I introduce the Four Spectra in On Autopilot.

Here’s what I said, describing my own experience. I’m going to keep searching for good handles for it.

• My body is energised, but relaxed, like my muscles and soft tissues have become more springy.
• I want to move and sway a little if I’m standing, as if I’m dancing without actually moving. When it’s really clear, it almost feels like the world is a dance partner, where we are both leading and following at the same time.
• The world feels more participatory. When I’m looking at people, I recognise that they are having a similar experience of me.
• There’s a general sense of dynamism and ‘aliveness’. I feel more playful, less serious—yet still perfectly sincere.
• Where I sometimes have a sense that I would have to disengage a brake in order to act, that brake vanishes when my availability is high, such that I could act spontaneously in response to anything happening.
• Going a little more esoteric, availability feels like it increases my sense of not-separateness from the world.

There is a thing that it’s like to be attended to in different ways. For example, being attended to with grippy attention in a contracted field of awareness feels different from being attended to with un-fixated attention in a wide field of awareness.

I think people generally don't realise this or recognise the subtleties of how their mode of attention affects others.

I have pointed out in the context of 'dating and attraction' that a lot of people—and I suspect especially men—can unknowingly use a kind of attention that may be perceived as predatory or creepy.

Contracted awareness, fixated attention and 'leaky desire’—which are very much perceivable by others, even if these dynamics are not consciously accessible to either party—feel oppressive and threatening.

Open awareness, free attention and what we could perhaps call ‘owned’ or ‘boundaried’ desire feel much more pleasant to be beheld with.

And, of course, all of this is visible to a third party as well.

In the absence of being able to name what’s happening, we default to speaking about vibes.

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