Practice 17 Presence: A Self-Reflective Way of Being
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Melissa and Sandra position self-reflection and presence as a starting place for learning and unlearning the layers of coloniality and other forms of cultural oppression that can seep into relationships with clients. This ongoing personal and professional practice enhances therapists’ cultural humility and authenticity in support of equitable and culturally safe environments for the people and communities they walk alongside. This chapter offers nurturing practices for helping professionals committed to decolonial care and relational care. The choice of themes arose from Melissa’s own evolution as a psychologist and reflects gaps in learning along her educational journey. The first thematic cluster relates to self-reflection and includes embodiment, therapist healing work, and vulnerability. The second cluster centres relationship with a focus on prioritizing relationship over skills. Next Melissa and Sandra address ethical decision-making, including presence and relationality, resistance, professional boundaries, and intuition. The section on self-care considers self-care paradoxes, burnout, community care, and supervision and mentorship. Each section of the chapter includes reflective prompts to invite readers to lean into presence through experiential learning and unlearning. Melissa and Sandra position a presence-focused journey as part of life-long learning as healthcare practitioners, and they invite readers to embrace discomfort as part of their continued personal and professional growth. The invitation to action at the end of the chapter focuses on collective empowerment, inviting readers to identify their own circle of support to continue their decolonizing healing journey. Melissa and Sandra appreciate the contributions of following co-authors to this chapter: • Gwendolyn Villebrun introduces the Hakomi method that focuses on mindful, body-centred therapy, which aligns with Indigenous Worldviews that value a relational process and the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. • Kitana Connelly shares an ink on wood painting in which she envisions the energies from Spirit reaching down and taking her troubles back to Grandfather sky. The image speaks to trust and releasing control. • Gurmukh Aujla invites consideration of the invisible shackles (i.e., mental, emotional, and societal systems that dictate how we think, feel, and behave) and provides guidance for disrupting these systems and their impacts. In a second contribution he speaks to self-care, which is a central focus in his own journey and his healing work with others. • Alexandra Zúñiga speaks to the importance of relationships and community in her work with Melissa. She reflects on how to hold space for one another with openness and relational accountability as part of community care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".