There is increasing recognition of the importance of living in the present moment. Across many therapeutic, spiritual and contemplative traditions, we are invited to let go of the past, release the future and return to the only place life is ever truly lived: here and now.

And yet, for many of us, another question quietly remains.

What prevents us from trusting the present when the present is safe?

If, in this very moment, our basic needs are met, why can something within us still feel as though everything could disappear?

Perhaps the answer is not that we struggle to be present.

Perhaps something much older is asking to be met.

When we think about trauma, we often think about relationships, abuse or loss. Much less often do we speak about poverty. Not simply poverty as the absence of money, but as something lived through the nervous system.

What happens when a child grows up not knowing whether there will be enough food, whether the heating will stay on, or whether the home they fall asleep in tonight will still be theirs tomorrow?

Would we go to sleep cold and wake up hungry?

Would there be light when darkness came?

Through these experiences, the body learns what life is. It learns that safety cannot be relied upon, and that survival depends upon never fully letting go.

This way of being protects us for a very long time, and we often mistake it for resilience rather than recognising it as the body’s extraordinary attempt to protect us.

As life begins to soften, and we slowly allow ourselves to loosen our grip, we often expect peace. But sometimes something very different happens.

When the protective layer begins to shatter, it can feel as though the heart itself is breaking open, and it becomes difficult to breathe. Despite the present moment being safe, we are flooded with the grief of carrying so much for so long.

What may then rise is not simply fear, but terror.

The terror of not knowing whether there will be enough.

The terror that everything could disappear.

The terror of not knowing whether we will survive.

For a child whose basic needs cannot be relied upon, survival is not an abstract idea. It is a lived experience. If the adults around them are unable to protect them, or the environment itself does not feel safe, the child is left carrying something no child should ever have to carry alone.

And then shame rises.

Somewhere along the way, the experience of poverty becomes internalised.

There must be something wrong with me.

I am less than.

Shame has a way of building upon itself. We feel ashamed, then ashamed that we feel ashamed. Ashamed of our home, our family and our circumstances, until eventually the shame no longer feels like something we carry. It begins to feel like who we are.

For many children, poverty becomes an experience of comparison.

Feeling different.

Learning to hide.

Shame isolates.

And so survival protects us not only from fear, but also from being seen.

Perhaps this is why the journey towards presence can feel so frightening. Within the stillness of presence, the aspects of ourselves that have remained hidden beneath survival are finally able to emerge and be witnessed. Perhaps what prevents us from trusting the present is not a lack of mindfulness, but the presence of a younger part who has never known what it feels like to be safe.

Many people speak about their relationship with these younger aspects of themselves as one of frustration, or a longing for them to disappear. For many of us, however, there may not even be an awareness that these parts exist within us. Survival has become so familiar, so woven into the fabric of our lives that we mistake it for who we are. We simply keep moving forward. Moments when grief or fear begin to surface may quickly be followed by the return of the survival state, before we have had the opportunity to remain with what has begun to emerge.

Perhaps presence is not something we achieve or develop. Perhaps it is what we have always been beneath the many layers of protection that have helped us survive.

It is through our growing willingness to remain with these younger aspects of ourselves that something begins to soften.

As these protective layers begin to loosen, we do not become someone new. We begin to recognise what has always been here.

And as our relationship with these younger aspects of ourselves deepens, something else begins to emerge.

A quiet tenderness.

Love and acceptance.

And perhaps, above all, a deep desire to protect them.

To keep them safe.

And perhaps, quietly, almost without noticing, we begin to remember that alongside survival there has always been something else waiting.

Wonder.

By Serena Maren