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for a few weeks involving one email exchange per week. I had such a strong sense of this person, not just in the way they had described themselves to me but fully, almost physically, as if we had just been in the room together working faceto-face. At this moment, doubts I had had about the value and authenticity of online counselling were completely dispelled. Through my experience of presence, I had experienced the clientcounsellor relationship and realised that this could be as powerful and therapeutic as face-to-face. I’m writing here about my experience rather than theory but I see presence as operating at different levels: • Having an online presence; for example having a website or Facebook page. Being known about or seen but with no interaction. • Experiencing the sense of someone you have met as having ‘presence’. You remember them for some reason. They have had an impact on you. This is presence seen and felt. • Presence as an instinctual ‘gut’ feeling; for example, knowing that you are being watched by another being (animal or human). This
is presence unseen but strongly felt, at more of a distance but with awareness that someone is focussed on you. At one level ‘presence’ is clearly visible but not felt, at another level, not at all visible but strongly felt. The latter can happen when two or more people are deliberately tuned into each other (not necessarily at the same time) and have a connection - in this case, their writing, which is deliberately written and sent specifically to each other. It is thought and feeling coupled with intention, focussed like a beam towards another person which carries presence through the written words. Here, presence is energy around
and attached to the words. The words carry presence across time and space, between computers and people. Words are thoughts (energy) given form and purpose. Through this they crystallise presence. This beam of presence can also carry the very essence of the sender and whether their words were written simply as the ‘right thing to say’ or with true feeling. What is then transmitted with this writing becomes much more than the words. I think this is one reason why words and phrases can be ‘misinterpreted’ by the recipient of them; not only are they reading them within their own context of beliefs and life experience but the words come wrapped in the ‘energetic state’ of the
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