by Jeff Foster
FALLING IN LOVE
WITH WHERE YOU ARE
A Year of Prose and Poetry
On Radically Opening Up
To the Pain and Joy of Life
Jeff Foster
Non-Duality Press
FALLING IN LOVE WITH WHERE YOU ARE
First English edition published December 2013 by Non-Duality Press
© Jeff Foster 2013
© Non-Duality Press 2013
Cover design from an idea by Nic Higham. Layout by John Gustard.
Author portrait (back cover) by Liya Matiosova: www.matiosova.book.fr
Jeff Foster has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission
in writing from the Publisher.
ISBN:978-1-908664-39-6
Non-Duality Press | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ
United Kingdom
For Sherie,
forever in my heart.
I will not forget you.
I have held you in the palm of my hand.
– Isaiah 49: 15-16
The bad news is you’re falling through the air,
nothing to hang on to, no parachute.
The good news is there’s no ground.
– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
FOREWORD
In your hands you hold the potential for a total re-ordering of your life as you know it.
In my work in the publishing industry over the last 20+ years, I’ve had the rare opportunity to get to know and work with hundreds of the world’s most respected and realised spiritual teachers, psychologists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists and artists. From time to time, a new voice comes onto the scene – unfortunately for all of us not often enough – with something that is utterly alive, emerging out of the unknown, opening a portal into the ever deepening mysteries of love. Jeff Foster is one of these voices.
Over the last few years, I have continued to be inspired by Jeff, both as a writer and someone who cares deeply about the lives of those around him. I have witnessed Jeff sitting with those in deep despair, profound fear and raging anxiety – even on the brink of suicide – struggling with what it really means to be a human being. I have also seen Jeff meet the most devoted spiritual seekers, creating a home for them to come to rest, finally, from the weariness that seeking spiritual enlightenment so often brings. In each of these meetings – through his words, through his silence, and through his loving attunement – Jeff shares the gift of presence, wisdom, clarity and kindness, never giving up on the preciousness and potential of each and every unique person, and of the very human journey itself.
As so many have observed over the last few decades, while the world’s great nondual spiritual teachings offer a vision of crystal clarity into the true nature of the eternal Self beyond that which comes and goes, these very same traditions can become stale, worn out, second-hand, and just, well, inhuman. We sometimes forget that the essence of spirituality is a cosmic embrace of the relative, the dual, the very messy, sticky, gooey nature of human life. The light we seek is not ‘elsewhere’, but already shining through the appearance of a separate self, pouring out of our intimate relationships and illuminating our most disturbing feelings and emotions. As Jeff reveals so clearly and provocatively, light is alive even in the darkness.
One of the most important contributions Jeff makes to the spiritual conversation is his uncompromising demand that we honour our humanity and that we take the risk of seeing how sacred “ordinary life” really is. I whole-heartedly recommend this lovely new book of poetry and prose, and sincerely hope that through Jeff’s words – and through the space between them – you come to see the magnificence that you are, and begin to consider the real possibility that you’ve never actually left Home.
Matt Licata, Ph.D. (alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com)
Boulder, Colorado
October 2013
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Who knows who wrote that song of summer
the blackbirds sing at dusk? This is a song of colour,
where sands sing in crimson, red and rust,
then climb into bed and turn to dust....
– Kate Bush, Sunset
Why do I write books about the wordless essence of life? Why do I try to say the unsayable?
Perhaps ‘why’ is the wrong question. It seems that the deeper the inner silence, the more naturally and effortlessly the words flow, finally liberated from their shackles, set free from the prison of conformity and correctness and the need to be liked or even heard. Out of purest stillness, this delicious music erupts, these creative and playful notes of myself, vibrant expressions of that pre-verbal silence at the core of everything, inviting you to intimacy with your present moment, here and now. My words are your words are the words of life itself, ever offering themselves in remembrance of that which is never gone and is endlessly shining.
I do not write nor speak by myself, for myself, nor am I myself written or spoken, I can only remain radically open to the unexpected eruption of words. I am a house, ready for the children who call me Home to come running back from school, their cheeks rosy and stuffed full of chocolate and expectation, and ready to let them go, as they finally leave for destinations and adventures unknown.
It’s like asking the blackbirds why they sing in summer.
Friend, if you are experiencing stress, sorrow, physical or emotional pain in your life right now, it doesn’t mean that your life is going wrong, that you are broken and sinful, that you have failed as a human or spiritual being, or that you are far from awakening. You may just be healing in your own original and unexpected way. Sometimes we need to feel worse for a while. Sometimes the old structures, things that we once defined and identified as ‘me’, need to crumble. Sometimes we need to be brought to our knees before we can stand again. Sometimes illusions need to die. Sometimes our sacred plans and hopes, our schemes and dreams of “how things were going to turn out”, need to burn to ashes on the ruthless yet ultimately compassionate bonfire of the present moment.
As we open up to life and love and healing, as we awaken from our dream of separateness, we meet not just the bliss of existence, but also its pain; not only the ecstasy of life, but its agony too. Awakening doesn’t always feel good or comforting or blissful or ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our deepest fears and darkest shadows – those parts of ourselves that we have cut-off, denied, repressed, numbed ourselves to all these years, and the meeting can get messy to say the least.
But eventually we come to trust the process of no process at all. We learn to see even our deepest sorrow as an intelligent movement of life, not a threat to life. We remember that we are vast enough to hold all of it – the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, the light and the dark, the agony and the ecstasy. We are not nearly as limited as we once imagined. We are life itself.
Falling In Love With Where You Are offers a simple but radical invitation: Stop waiting for the world to make you happy. Stop making your inner joy dependent on external things – objects, people, circumstances, experiences, events – that are out of your direct control right now. Stop playing the happiness lottery. Give yourself a break from seeking and discover the natural happiness that you are and have always been, the in-built contentment that doesn’t depend on life’s ever-changing ‘content’.
The prose and poetry in this book, harvested from two years’ worth of journal entries and Facebook post
s, is designed to guide, challenge, encourage and perhaps inspire you on your lonely, painful, ecstatic, crazy, exhausting, blissful and confusing pathless journey to the Home that you never, ever abandoned: the present moment.
Read the following pages slowly, mindfully. Spend twelve months soaking everything in, meditating on the words as the seasons change within and around you. Or, whenever the mood takes you, allow the book to fall open at a random page. Let the words in this book live with you, month after month, year after year. Feel the silence, the presence, the warmth underneath the words, in-between the words, surrounding the words, holding the words.
Let go of the destination. Savour the ever-changing seasons of your journey. Be present to each step. Remember to breathe.
Know that you do not walk alone.
With love,
Jeff Foster
Brighton, England
September 2013
… it is so precious, just to be able to sit in this open space together, where nothing needs to be resolved or solved; where we don’t need to fix ourselves or be fixed; where our burning questions don’t need to be answered; where, finally, our questions are allowed to just be questions; where our uncertainty doesn’t need to be transformed into certainty; where our doubts are finally given permission to just be doubts. Here, in this warm embrace that we are, in this place of true meditation without a meditator, without a destination, without a controller, we don’t need to find the answers, we don’t need to come to any mental conclusions about life, we don’t need to work everything out, we don’t need to ‘know’, because finally, all our wondering and our wandering, our trying-to work-it-all-out and our trying-to-make-it-all-work, our exhausting seeking and searching and our desperation to find answers, is all just allowed to be here, exactly as it is…
– Jeff Foster, from a retreat in Glastonbury, England, 2012
JANUARY
Ever since happiness heard your name,
it has been running through the streets
trying to find you...
– Hafiz
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU
Friend, from the very beginning, you were not broken. You were not born into sin. You were not destined for the garbage heap. There was never anything fundamentally missing from your life. You just thought that there was. Others tried to convince you that you were not good enough, because they too felt not good enough. In your innocence, and with no evidence to the contrary, you believed them. So you spent all those years trying to fix, purify and perfect yourself. You sought power, wealth, fame and even spiritual enlightenment to prove your worth as a ‘me’. You played the Build-A-Better-Me game, comparing yourself to other versions of ‘me’, and always feeling inferior or superior, and it all became so exhausting, trying to reach those unreachable goals, trying to live up to some image that you didn’t even fully believe in anyway, and you longed for the deep rest of yourself…
But you were always perfect, you see, from the very beginning. Perfect in your absolute imperfection.
Your imperfections, your quirks, your seeming flaws, your weirdnesses, your unique and irreplaceable flavours, were what made you so loveable, so human, so real, so relatable. Even in your glorious imperfection, you were always a perfect expression of life, a beloved child of the universe, a complete work of art, unique in all the world and deserving of all the riches of life.
It was never about being a perfect ‘me’. It was always about being perfectly Here, perfectly yourself, in all your divine strangeness.
“Forget your perfect offering,” sings Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
A LOVING PROMISE
“I will always listen deeply to you, but I will never try to fix you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you second-hand, memorised answers. I will never pretend to be ‘the one who knows’, ‘the enlightened one’ or some missionary for a conceptual truth so far removed from real-time, immediate, first-hand present experience. I will not get into drama with you, I will not indulge and feed your stories and mental conclusions and fears, I will not mistake who you are for my story about you, my dream of who you are.
But friend, I will meet you in the fires of hell, I will hold your hand there, I will walk with you as far as you need to walk, and not turn away, for you are myself, and in the deepest recesses of our experience we are intimately each other, and we cannot pretend otherwise.
And so, if you feel confused, feel confused now. If you feel frightened, feel frightened now. If you are bored, let’s get profoundly bored together. If you are burning with rage, let’s burn together awhile and see what happens.”
When we break the mould, interrupt the outdated pattern, and make the unexpected commitment to dignify our present experience by radically connecting with what’s really here, without judging it or pushing it away, perhaps great healing is possible.
THE BOOK OF YOU
On every page of a book, behind the words – no matter what the words are describing, no matter what is going on in the story – there is the whiteness of the paper. Rarely noticed, even more rarely appreciated, but absolutely essential, so that the words can be seen.
The paper itself is not affected by the story that is being told – it is only there to hold the words, without condition. A love story, a war epic, a gentle comedy – the paper itself doesn’t mind.
The paper does not fear the ending of the story, nor does it long for an earlier time in the story. The middle pages do not need to know how the story ends, and the final page does not mourn when the main character dies. The paper doesn’t even know that the story is ‘over’. The paper holds time but is not bound by time.
You don’t know how many pages are left in the book of your life. You don’t know how this autobiography will end. From the perspective of the mind, ‘your life’ is not yet complete, and thought is constantly trying to work out how to end your story in the best way. How to solve things, neatly? How to resolve the unresolved problems? How to tie up all the loose ends? How to fix everything?
But from the perspective of the paper – that is, from the perspective of your true identity as consciousness itself – life is forever complete as it is, and there is nothing to resolve, and the unknowability of things is their resolution. The story does not need to be ‘completed’ in the future for consciousness to be fully present now.
The paper simply meets the words exactly as they are.
From the perspective of the paper, even if the story is an epic one, from the first page to the last page, nothing has actually happened at all. The entire story has unfolded in perfect, unchanging stillness. The most incredible story never told.
LOSING YOUR RELIGION
Okay. So you feel peaceful, blissed out, in the flow. You’re manifesting perfectly and life is going to plan. You’re okay with everything that happens. You can’t imagine ever suffering again.
Cut to the next scene in the movie of your life. There’s been some kind of loss, shock, bolt of lightning from the blue. You’re lying in bed, sick with pain, or grief, or despair. This was unexpected, unplanned. You’ve tried everything. Nothing’s working.
Where did your awakening go? Weren’t you supposed to be the one who was okay with everything, who met every experience with equanimity and an “effortless yes”? Where did all your spiritual progress go?
The spiritual ‘me’ feels humiliated and beaten up. Were you a fake, a fraud, a liar? Were you always kidding yourself? How do you get back to where you were?
Don’t go back. Stay with it. You’re awakening from another dream. The dream that present experience could or should conform to any image or expectation. You’re discovering your own inner authority.
This scene is not a mistake. The movie of your life is not broken. You’re rediscovering how vast you are, how much you can hold.
You don’t have to feel ‘okay’ all the time. You don’t have to be free from all resistance all the time. You
are bigger than that, unlimited in fact. There is no ‘all the time’ for you. You are the space for the okay and the not-okay, the acceptance and the resistance. You don’t need any fixed and unchangeable image of yourself. You don’t need to be the enlightened guru or the spiritual warrior. You don’t need to be the peaceful one, the awakened one, the strong one, the highly evolved one, the one immune to suffering. All are false limitations on your limitless nature. Simply be what you are, not ‘this’ one nor ‘that’ one, but The One, the space for all of it.
Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again, until you lose all interest in being on pedestals.
BE GLORIOUSLY UNRESOLVED
You’ll never reach a point in your life where everything is solved, all neatly tied up in a bow. That’s the point. There’s no ‘final scene’, only the on-going adventure movie, forever unresolved. You learn to love the mess of your life, its constantly changing nature, its unpredictability. And you stand as the immutable silence in the midst of the storm, the wide open space in which joy and pain, ecstasy and agony, boredom and bliss, can arise and subside like waves in the ocean. There are no problems when you know yourself as the space for it all.
TRUE ACCEPTANCE
Saying yes to this moment, exactly as it is, saying yes to yourself, exactly as you are, doesn’t mean giving up on the possibility of change. It doesn’t mean that answers won’t arrive, that sadness won’t disappear, that pain won’t ease, that intelligent action won’t happen in the next scene. It means a total alignment with the present scene, which contains the intelligence of an entire universe. It means deep trust in this instant of life – the only instant there is – and letting go of promises, and ideas of how life ‘should’ be.