“You are not alone with this. What you are feeling is a real experience, even if we do not yet know what it means.”From Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta
Let us begin where this really begins: in an ordinary place. A kitchen, a dark bedroom, the seat of a parked car. You are praying, or in silence, or simply still after a long day. And something changes.
It is not an idea. Nor is it an emotion you can name right away. It is something simpler and stranger: a peace you did not manufacture begins to weigh in your chest, as if it had a body. Your breathing slows down without your slowing it. A warmth rises or falls along your back. Your eyes fill with tears that do not come from any sadness. And for a few seconds, or for a whole hour, what you had always lived inwardly is also happening outwardly, in your flesh, in your pulse, in your skin.
Then it passes. You go back to washing the dishes, answering messages, being you. But something was left different, and sooner or later you ask yourself the question with which this whole path begins:
What is happening to me?
You are not alone with this
If any of this sounds familiar, the first thing you need is not an explanation. It is a fact: what you are feeling is real as an experience, even if we do not yet know what it means.
People from very different traditions, and people with no tradition at all, have told in their own words of surprisingly similar things. A peace felt in the chest or the belly the way you feel the warmth of a cup between your hands. A breath that grows deep, or almost disappears, or takes on a rhythm you did not choose. A gentle pressure on the forehead or the crown of the head, or a spaciousness, as if inside you there were more room than fits in your body. Tears with no sadness and no reason, which leave you clean rather than tired. And sometimes, too, old emotions rising just now, when your inner life is deeper than ever.
But above all, a feeling that keeps growing clearer: your body is taking part in your spiritual life. It is no longer only the place you pray from. It is something that responds when you pray.
None of this sets you apart from what is human, and none of this makes you someone special. These experiences are more common than people say out loud, precisely because almost no one knows where to tell them.
Neither dismissing it nor inflating it
When someone dares to tell it, they almost always receive one of two answers. Both arrive quickly, and both fall short.
The first one dismisses it: “It’s nerves. It’s suggestion. It’s stress. It’s nothing.” Whoever tells you this wants to protect you from exaggeration, and sometimes they are partly right, because the body also speaks when we are tired, anxious or sleeping badly. But when that answer is used to close the conversation, it leaves you alone with something that is in fact happening, and teaches you to distrust what you live.
The second one inflates it: “It’s an awakening. It’s a special gift. You’re on another level.” Whoever tells you this wants to honor what is happening to you, and I am grateful for that. But this answer turns your experience into a spectacle, pushes you to seek more phenomena, and distracts you from the only question that really matters, which is not how special this is, but what it is asking of you.
I do not want to take you to either extreme. I propose something slower and more honest: first describe, then understand. A sensation of warmth is, before anything else, a sensation of warmth. Tears are tears. No sensation in the body, however beautiful or intense, proves on its own that something spiritual is happening, and no hasty explanation deserves what you are living. What we are going to do is take it seriously.
What you found above
At first, the spiritual life looks like climbing. You seek, you read, you pray, you rise, and your deepest moments feel like leaving the everyday behind for something higher. Much of the spiritual language we have inherited speaks of that climbing.
But there is another half of the path that is spoken of far less: what you found above has to learn to live below.
Many people, perhaps you, reach that point without anyone warning them. The peace you only knew in prayer suddenly appears in the supermarket line. The silence you only reached on a retreat begins to stay in your home. And your body, which was always the one left below while you climbed, begins to tremble, to grow warm, to weep, to grow still, like someone receiving news.
That movement is what I call the Descent. And what makes itself present, so as not to impose a name on you, I call simply Presence.
About that name I owe you a clarification, which is also a promise. When I speak from the heart, I call it God. Perhaps you do too. Or grace, or Spirit, or Christ. Or you do not call it anything, because naming it feels like too much. I have not come to correct you. The word Presence does not replace yours; it only lets us speak of the same movement without asking anyone to change their faith. The name of God belongs to you.
What I will not ask of you
Trust is built at the beginning or not at all, so I will tell you three things now.
I will not give you techniques for producing experiences. If you are looking for more warmth, more light, more phenomena, I tell you with affection that this search usually drives away the very thing it chases. Here the goal will never be to have more experiences. It will be for what you have already received to be able to stay and live with you.
Nor will I take the place of your doctor or your therapist. The body speaks many languages, and not all of them are spiritual. When there is doubt, body and mind are cared for first, through the means that already exist to care for them. The spiritual reading can wait, and the true one knows how to wait.
And I will not ask you to believe anything you do not recognize in yourself. I try to place each new word after the experience it names, not before. When I do not know something, I will tell you so, simply: I do not know.
From visit to dwelling
You do not need to understand the whole map yet, but you deserve to know where we are going. Something descends, and it feels like Presence. At first it usually comes as a visit: it arrives, touches you deeply, and seems to withdraw. Along the way there are thresholds, places where the process pauses for a while because something in you, a fear, a story, a habit, still needs to be integrated. Stopping there is not failing.
Your body responds in its own way, and we are going to learn to read that response without exaggerating it and without despising it. If the process continues, what you received takes root in your concrete life, in how you eat, how you rest, how you walk across the floor of your home. One day you notice that the visit no longer leaves: it has become a dwelling. And later, not even a dwelling: it has become what is natural. Then what lives within you begins to express itself outwardly, in your voice, in your decisions, in the way you love and set limits, in the way you walk into a room.
Perhaps you have already lived spiritual moments that were true and unforgettable, and even so your character, your reactions and your body stayed more or less the same. Perhaps you have reproached yourself for it in silence. It is not a reproach. It is the most important clue of all, because having an experience and being transformed by it are not the same thing.
What touched you in that ordinary place does not need to come back stronger. It needs to be able to stay and live with you.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's book Yoga del Descenso · Libro Puerta · Part I