The First Greeting (Or, How to Meet Everything)

This morning, I was in my office creating an audio assignment for the Nature-Based Therapeutics program at NESBEM. The assignment is called The First Greeting Protocol. The intention for this assignment is to provide guidance to a student on how to enter relationship with a living being that they are just coming to know, whether it is a a particular tree, a particular animal, a particular patch of ground. The protocol moves through six gestures in a deliberate order, arrival, acknowledgment, introduction, receptive presence, offering, and closing.

Typically, when I create audio assignments or soundbites, they are generated off the cuff and more from a feeling than a script. I tend to speak in the way I would to someone standing right beside me. Consequently, I can often get lost in the liminal moment of the thing. This morning was no different and when I got to the part where I remind the listener that they are not the center of this encounter, they are entering it, and it is the synergy of the meeting that becomes the center, something I was feeling into captured my attention. I held onto it as I finished the recording and then took a few moments to sit with the thought that had bubbled up.

What would our social world be like if we used a similar protocol for our general daily relationships? Even the relationships with ourselves? What if it wasn’t only a protocol for meeting a tree but a protocol for meeting everything?

The third place

Consider how we tend to meet the world these days. Most of the time, and I include myself fully in this, we move through our days in one of two postures. Either we consume what is in front of us, as if the person, the task, or the moment exists for what it can do for us. Or we brace, defending, managing, and steeling ourselves for the impact of what we feel as undesirable or unpalatable. The hurried email, we quickly send off without a thought, is the first posture. The difficult conversation we rehearse in the shower is the second. Both of these postures are tiring, both of them are a little lonely, and neither of them is actually a meeting.

The First Greeting protocol invites us into a third place. If you know me, you know I am a fan of the third places. It neither consumes what it meets nor defends against it, it simply enters into relationship with what is there. That third place, the one between consuming and bracing, is where something becomes possible that neither of the other two postures allows. It is where coherence lives, because living systems do not generate coherence through domination, nor do they generate it through retreat. They generate it in relationship, in the meeting itself.

We are living in an age tuned to I, me, and mine. And whether we chose that frequency or not, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it hums underneath the way we shop and scroll and measure our worth and run our days. It is the consuming posture raised to the scale of a whole culture, and its quiet cost is that we have grown a little out of practice at the oldest human skill there is, which is simply the ability to be with. Being with ourselves, without rushing to fix whatever we find when we get quiet. Being with the people in our own homes, who are so easy to manage and so much harder to actually meet. Being with the living world that holds us steadily whether or not we ever turn to notice it. As I finished my the recording I realized The First Greeting is a protocol for relearning that skill, and I felt inspired to hold it in my own awareness as a practice and then write about it as an invitation to pique curiosity for others. I would love to share it with you.

Here is what I’ve discovered happens in us, between us, and beneath us when we make each of these gestures, because a greeting is at once a psychological event, a social one, and a spiritual one.

Arrival

The first gesture is arrival. Here is where I invite the student to slow their walking before they reach the place where their kin lives, to let their steps shorten, to notice that they are arriving somewhere rather than passing through. Arrival is the body setting down the agenda it has been carrying in order to be present to what is actually here.

Something specific is happening in you when you do this. Your nervous system runs, for much of the day, in a forward-leaning, goal-pursuing gear, the part of you that is always three steps ahead, scanning for the next task. Arrival is the deliberate downshift of that gear. When you slow the body, soften the eyes, and let the breath lengthen, you send your nervous system a signal that it reads as safety. Stephen Porges has spent a career mapping how that signal is the very thing that opens us into genuine engagement. You cannot meet anyone, a person or a problem or a feeling, from inside the chase. Arrival is the body remembering that it has arrived, and it is the precondition for everything that follows.

Acknowledgment

The second gesture is acknowledgment. In the protocol, I ask the student to stop several paces from the being and to let themselves feel the simple fact that this kin is already there, already alive, already living its own life whether or not anyone arrived to witness it. This being does not exist for you. It exists in its own right, with its own day, its own story, its own web of relationships that has nothing to do with you.

This is an important shift from our typical way of being in today’s world. It is one we almost never extend to each other. Martin Buber gave us language for it nearly a century ago when he distinguished between meeting the world as It, an object to be used and categorized and managed, or meeting it as Thou, a presence encountered in its own right. Most of our days are spent in the world of It, and there is no blame in that, it is how a busy life gets run. But in this protocol acknowledgment is the threshold into Thou.

Something happens in us when we cross it. Dacher Keltner's research on awe describes what he calls the small self, the felt sense that arrives when we encounter something vast enough that we cannot fold it neatly into our own concerns. The small self is not a diminished self but one that has stopped insisting on being the center, and Keltner's work shows this is precisely the state in which we become more generous, more connected, and less caught in the grinding loop of our own rumination. To acknowledge that your daughter, your colleague, your grief, your aging body exists in its own right and not merely as a problem assigned to you, is to step out of the center of your own story long enough to actually see what is in front of you. The thinking mind resists this, because it would rather be the center. The rest of your systems are relieved when it is not.

Introduction

The third gesture is introduction. In this protocol, I invite the student to offer who they are, honestly, silently or aloud. I am here. This is my name. I have come to learn from you. The being is not testing your eloquence. It is registering your presence, your tone, your truthfulness.

What happens here is the quiet drop of the mask. So much of our energy goes into performative self-monitoring, managing the impression we are making, presenting the version of ourselves we think the moment requires. In the world of Humanistic Psychology, Carl Rogers identified this as the difference between self-congruence and incongruence.  The alignment between who you are and who you are showing yourself to be is the pivotal place where real relationship is possible or not possible.

To introduce yourself truthfully, even to a tree, even to a hard feeling you would rather not name, is to stop spending energy on the performance and to let yourself be actually present and actually seen. There is a particular relief in it, the relief of no longer holding up a self that was never the real one.

Receptive presence

The fourth gesture is receptive presence, and it is where the greeting stops being something you do and becomes something you allow. Having arrived, acknowledged, and introduced yourself, you now simply receive. You stop reaching. You let the being, or the person, or the moment, register on you.

This is a different quality of attention than the kind we use to get things done. Most of the time our attention is a narrow focus, aiming, hunting for relevant details. Receptive presence is, instead, a wide, open field of attention. Researchers who study meditation call this open monitoring, the attention that holds a whole field rather than spotlighting one part of it. This is the first step towards what Dan Siegel identifies as attunement, the felt experience of feeling felt, the resonance by which one nervous system can settle another. This is the gesture in which you let yourself be changed by what you are meeting, instead of only acting upon it.

Offering

The fifth gesture is offering. This is the place where the student gives something back, a breath, a song, a word of thanks, a small token, a promise to return. There are no rules about what should be offered, the encounter is not a transaction rather it is an exchange.

Reciprocity is the oldest architecture of relationship we have. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied how the gift, freely given and freely returned, is the thread that holds an entire social fabric together, and Robin Wall Kimmerer has written beautifully about the honorable harvest, the understanding that we are always in exchange with the living world and never simply extracting from it.

Something in us already knows this. When we give rather than only take, our body answers with its own chemistry of bonding and warmth. An offering does not have to be large; it only has to be real. To leave a moment having given something to it, rather than having only mined it for what you needed, changes what the moment was, and it changes you on the way out.

Closing

The sixth and final gesture is closing. It feels important to never simply walk away. Instead, pause and complete the encounter. Acknowledge that it is ending, offer your thanks, mark the threshold on the way out the same way it was marked on the way in.

We are not, as a society, very good at this one. We leave conversations dangling, days unmarked, transitions unmade, and our nervous systems carry the open loops. Our minds hold onto the unfinished more tightly than the finished, and a body that never receives the signal that the encounter is complete will keep the cycle running long after the moment has passed.

This is part of why ritual exists across every human culture we have ever found. Even small rituals of ending have been shown to reduce anxiety and help us metabolize what just happened. A clean closing is how the whole system knows it can settle, integrate, and be ready to return. To close an encounter well is to honor that it happened and thus leave the field intact. Then we have something to come back to.

What greets you back

Notice that not one of these six gestures asks you to fix or control anything. There is nothing here to manage or optimize or correct. The First Greeting protocol is a way of entering and being with and closing relationship.

Notice, too, that a true greeting is registered by all the parts of you. Your body feels the arrival in the slowing of the breath. Your mind feels the acknowledgment in the loosening of its grip on the center. Your emotional system feels the offering land. Your soul feels the reverence that runs underneath the whole thing. And the larger field, the one you are part of and quietly contribute to, feels you enter it differently. The mind alone can fake a greeting. The rest of your systems can tell the difference, and so can whatever you are greeting.

So here is a passionate invitation. Tomorrow, choose one thing to greet, just one. Maybe, the first person you see. The first task on the list. The cup of coffee in your hands. Better yet, your own face in the mirror. Arrive before you reach it. Acknowledge that it exists in its own right. Introduce yourself, honestly. Receive it before you act on it. Offer it something. And when you are done, close well.

That is what it is to be with something, rather than to consume it or brace against it. In an age that keeps reminding us of I, me, and mine, choosing to be with what is in front of you is its own quiet act of coherence, and it begins the moment you stop being the center and start entering.

I wonder what will greet you back?