by Jeff Foster
But however much money you make, or don’t make, you will be making a unique contribution to the world, doing something that nobody else can do, at least not in the same way as you, creating something original and fresh, giving something back to life, honouring your total uniqueness and your own talents, and so you won’t feel second-hand, a slave to others, a piece of wood, and a deep trust of life may replace your fears of failure and poverty, and your cynicism and jealousy of others may die completely.
Sometimes you will doubt what you are doing, and you may romanticise the old days when things were easier and more predictable, but then you will suddenly remember that the old way was false and never worked for you and that’s why everything had to change.
Yes, it’s a risk to donate your life to what you love and what moves you and brings you joy, but it’s absolutely worth it, because having a comfortable and predictable life pales in comparison to feeling deeply, passionately alive and meeting each new day with fresh eyes and an open heart.
Honour this life that is trying to express itself in and as and through you. You are not nearly as limited as you may have been led to believe by those who have not yet come alive.
THE LIVING ROOM
It’s about coming alive. It’s about waking up to grace. It’s about unconditional friendliness and infinite kindness to yourself. It’s about making it safe, finally safe for all of those unloved, un-met, unseen waves of the ocean of yourself to crawl out of the depths, out of the darkness, out of the corners and holes and crevices of experience and come into the light, blinking and full of wonder.
It’s about giving birth to yourself, so that all thoughts are finally allowed to flood in, all sensations, all feelings, all sounds, all those waves that we used to label ‘dark’, or ‘evil’, or ‘negative’, or ‘dangerous’, or ‘sinful’ – fear, anger, boredom, doubt, confusion, frustration, helplessness – are finally allowed to come to rest, to breathe, to be fully themselves in the space that you are. They are not separate entities or enemies, they are intimate appearances of you, and so they cannot hurt you, even if they hurt, and this is what we forget sometimes in our rush to ‘fix’ or at least ‘normalise’ ourselves.
Yes, all of those swirling, pulsating energies of that which we call ‘life’ are welcome in the unlimited room that you are, the vast Living Room in which all of creation sings and dances and paints itself into the ever-changing picture of this extraordinary moment.
SACRED WORK
Cherish your doubts. They are the seeds of Mystery.
Embrace your sadness. Great joy lies within.
Turn to face your fears. At their core lies peace beyond words.
Celebrate your boredom. It is radically alive.
Hold your grief. Let it break your heart wide open.
Befriend your anger. Know it intimately as the life power that burns suns.
Acknowledge your pain. It is the body’s plea for kind attention.
All feelings are deeply intelligent.
Get out of their way.
Let them do their sacred, universal work.
THE KEY
We seek some kind of permanence; a person, a philosophy, a feeling, a state, even a spiritual identity, to hold on to. But the fleeting nature of all experience ensures that everything we grasp eventually slips through our fingers – including our attempts to stop grasping. Until we recognise that impermanence is actually a dear friend, and fragility gives life its beauty, and this seemingly ordinary day – with its waking, its washing, its breathing, its joys and even its pains – is the dear friend we have always longed for. The Beloved calls us home in any way she can, and this ‘ordinary’ life is her ingenious invitation.
You are imprisoned in grace, dear friend, and the key was never made.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
The death of a beloved parent. A break-up with a long-term partner. An unexpected injury. Lost love, lost success, and the loss of dreams.
Your suffering is never your own, although it damn well seems that way sometimes. Your despair does not belong to ‘you’, a separate individual divided from the whole, but to life itself.
For whatever you are going through, others have also experienced it – perhaps not in the exact same circumstances, but certainly in the same pain. Loss, break-ups, disappointments, illness, death – these are not ‘yours’ but ancient rites of passage, cosmic rituals that all humans, if they are honest, have been through and must go through if they are to be human at all.
In times gone by – and we can argue forever over whether this was a good thing or not – our lives perhaps had more structure, more tradition, more of a framework, and there was more of a sense of community, tribe, sangha, peer support, and more guidance from elders, wise ones, healers, who had been through these universal life trials and come out the other side, and had returned to guide us through our own trials, reminding us, ‘however intense it becomes, know that you are not alone, and this is meant to happen, and many others have been here before.’
With the fall of traditional religion and the rise of the religion of science and technology and atheism, we are so very connected and ‘switched on’ these days, but perhaps we are even more alone than ever, and even more desperate for deep human connection.
Who will take us by the hand when a parent dies or our partner leaves us? Who will hold us when our dreams turn to dust and everything falls apart? Who will be there at our deathbed to whisper gently in our ear, “Do not fear, child, this is only an ancient rite of passage, a natural part of the journey, to be expected and to be embraced, and all is well”?
Through the eyes of this ancient universe, nothing in your life story is a small event, nothing is insignificant and unworthy of loving attention. There are zero ‘ordinary’ moments when seeing through these ancient eyes. Everything is ‘religious’, everything is sacred, everything has more significance than you could ever hope to imagine. And this way of seeing beyond the ‘I’ can help take us out of our self-pity and obsession with our own problems, and into a place of universal connection and deep compassion for all those brothers and sisters who, in their own unique ways, are on exactly the same journey as we are.
We may live apart, but we do not go through life alone.
LOVE’S FAIR WARNING
It is devastation.
It takes no prisoners.
Everything you think is yours
It will destroy in a heartbeat.
It is unsentimental.
It will strip you of your pride
And crush your dignity.
It specialises in the end of childhood dreams.
Its methods are brutal
But its intention is loving.
It only longs to wake you up
And look through your eyes
At its own marvellous creation.
NEVER ALONE
I dived into the ocean of my own loneliness
And I found there the loneliness of all beings
So many beating hearts longing to reconnect
Imagining their separation from source
I felt the sorrow and the joke of it
And suddenly the loneliness was gone
Replaced by a joyous impulse
To dive deeper
Alone
WIDE OPEN SPACE
I would never say that I am ‘awakened’. I would never say that I am not.
Why? Because I cannot find any solid, independent entity here that could ever be one or the other. No story about myself can stand here in the vastness. No story can take root, no conclusion can settle.
All I find here, when I take a fresh look without prior assumptions, is a wide open space in which the dynamic scenery of life plays itself out – an alive space inseparable from that very scenery, a vast and unlimited ocean inseparable from its myriad waves, from thoughts, sensations, feelings as they arise and fall.
And so any claim of enlightenment or awakening or their absence is wonderfully irrelevant here, in
the already-awake vastness that belongs to nobody at all.
A DIVINE MESS
Fall apart completely
Make a mess
Get it all wrong
Open up to your glorious inconsistency
Embrace the perfection of your fabulous imperfection
And you will be able to say:
I was there!
I was alive!
I was willing!
JUNE
You need not leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen, simply wait.
Become quiet, and still, and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.
It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
– Franz Kafka
THE CHILDREN
When there is fear, pain, confusion or sadness moving in you, do not despair or come to conclusions about yourself. Be honoured that these misunderstood guests, at once both ancient and timeless, weary from a lifetime’s lonely travel, have finally found their home in you. They are children of consciousness one and all, beloved progenies of yourself, deserving of the deepest respect and friendship. Offer them the deep rest of yourself, and let them warm their toes by your raging fire...
A UNIQUE FLOWER
You are a unique flower, with your own irreplaceable scent, your own way of moving in the world, your own uncopyable creative dance in the breeze.
A rose does not say to a lily, “I wish I was you, I wish I had your scent, your curves, your colours, the way you attract the light...”, for it knows that in essence they are one and the same being, consciousness itself, one flowering as two, and that the unity of consciousness manifests as diversity and difference and astonishing variety, a variety which is itself a call to the remembrance of unity. A rose sees its own essence in the lily, and the lily in the rose, but they also know to honour their own uniqueness and irreplaceability, their temporary flowering in time and space.
Be the essence, and love your flowering, love the taste of yourself, your unique flavour, your special dance that cannot be replicated, never feeling superior or inferior to another flowering, never longing to delete your own flowering, never blaming other flowerings for the way you flower or do not flower, for other flowerings are wildly uncontrollable too, forging their own path towards the light.
GRIEF’S HIDDEN SECRETS
Loss contains within itself a beautiful yet painful reminder of inseparability, and a hidden call to remember who you really are. Grief can shake you and wake you up and bring you face to face with a fundamental fact of existence that you will have to learn eventually.
In the beginning, when someone you love dies, or leaves you, or is taken away – and the end of a relationship is very much like a death – you feel as though you’ve ‘lost’ the one you love. Your mother, your father, your partner, your guru, your pet, your child, they went away, perhaps never to return. You feel helpless, powerless, impotent, a victim of life’s cruel and irrational and unpredictable ways. You grieve over a missing person, an absent being – the one who was separate from you. The pain can seem unbearable, unmanageable, insurmountable. You feel the absence of your loved one so strongly and you can’t do anything about it right now. Their absence, and your cosmic helplessness, is powerfully present, filling all space.
Sinking deeper into the grief, you may discover that you haven’t actually lost something or someone ‘outside’ of yourself at all. You’ve actually lost a part of yourself, a part of you that made you feel fully yourself, and that’s why it hurts so much right now. You don’t feel fully yourself anymore. You feel broken, incomplete, like a fragment of ‘you’ is missing, like a piece is missing from the jigsaw of your heart. How can you be fully you, without them? How can son be son without father? How can wife be wife without husband? How can brother be brother without brother?
You begin to wonder if, in fact, the part of yourself that you ‘lost’ was really ‘you’ at all. How can you truly lose a part of yourself? If you can lose a part of you, was it actually ‘you’ in the first place? You begin to wonder who you really are – or who you really were – beyond your dream of yourself. You begin to wonder who they really were, beyond your idea of who they were. Is it really true that they were present, and now they are absent? Who or what exactly is absent? Are they truly absent from your present experience?
As we sink deeper through the layers of grief, we may discover a strange kind of inseparability from the one we thought we lost. What was lost actually was a dream of how things would be, a dream of the future. Who you truly are cannot be lost – it is still fully present, despite the changes. And who they truly are cannot be lost either, despite the cessation of the heartbeat.
At the very bottom of grief, you find love, a total inseparability from your loved one, and a true meeting with the One you cannot lose. Death cannot touch this. Their absence becomes their presence, which is your very own presence. In this timeless presence, who is lost?
At the pulsating heart of grief, we find unconditional love, a love that is not even dependent on physical form. Grief contains its own end. And it doesn’t mean that we forget our loved ones. It doesn’t mean that we are not visited by them in memory and feeling. It doesn’t mean that sadness disappears overnight. It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel all kinds of things. But we realise deeply that we have not lost anything fundamental to us, and the world has not stopped, and they are not truly ‘absent’ in the way the mind thought they were. The pain of emptiness can even become our joy.
The ghost of loss no longer frightens us – it is a friendly ghost after all. We have only been given the experience of knowing our loved one, feeling them, touching them, smelling them, feeding them, holding them, even witnessing their passing. What a privilege. Life cannot take that away – it has only given, and it continues to give, if we have eyes to see it. Perhaps their life and death unfolded in the only way it could have done. Perhaps they lived the path that was right for them, even at the end. Perhaps they died exactly on cue.
At the living core of grief, we find deep connection, and humility, and not knowing, and gratitude, and compassion for all humanity, for all who have loved and lost. We encounter the unfathomable Mystery of it all.
Yes, in fully facing ourselves as we are, we discover all of humanity. Although in the beginning it seemed as if we were facing personal loss, in the end, grief can deeply connect us once again to something that cannot be lost, something impersonal and universally true. Grief is a tough teacher, to be sure, a relentless and seemingly cruel mentor, but it is compassionate at its core.
The device of our torture becomes our salvation. Remember Jesus on the cross.
When faced, and not turned away from, our raw grief can serve as an ancient and timeless nondual spiritual teaching, a dynamic and alive teaching, a wake-up call to that heart-breaking compassion for all of humanity the likes of which we once could have only dreamed. The impermanence of things is natural and neutral, and everything passes, and that in itself is not wrong or bad – it is the way, and has always been the way, and will always be the way. Loss is only a rite of passage. It is when we forget or deny the impermanence of things, and dream of permanence and try to fix our future, and then our dreams are shattered by impermanence, that we suffer and fight the way of things.
We all face loss – that is the way – but if we can turn towards our loss, and listen to it, and stare it in the face, then it may reveal hidden gold, and we may end up seeing ourselves and our loved ones reflected more clearly than ever. Grief is only love in a strange disguise, and it constantly invites us to come closer... and closer still…
NOTE FOR A FRIEND
“I held you in my arms as you passed from this world, but you never passed, and you were never of this world. I never felt for one moment the disappearance of your presence, dear friend, for I never felt the loss of my own, and I know we are One and the same, be
yond time and space. The love in which I held you is the love in which you will always be held, throughout these sacred times, as I walk the dog, take the kids to school, encounter all the ups and downs of the dream you never left, and eventually lie in bed for the last time to pass, never passing, never of this world, always held so tenderly in your arms, it ending the way it began. They say there is no death, dear friend, and it is true, it is really true...”
INSTANT FORGIVENESS
Everybody is doing their absolute best, from their own relative perspective.
Because of what they believe, their worldview, their perceived limitations, their fears, their wounds, the extent to which they’ve forgotten their true nature, the unique way in which they are healing or trying to heal, or not healing at all, they have no choice but to be the way they are right now.
Great forgiveness can arise from seeing that everybody is a slave to their own opinions until they wake from them. And you cannot wake someone until they are ready, and perhaps not even then.
They know not what they do.
A HEALING CONVERSATION
Sadness: “Sorry, awareness, I know I shouldn’t be here. I’m so sorry. I’ll be leaving soon. I know I’m a stain on your perfection…”
Awareness: “No. Wait. It’s okay. You’re allowed to be here! Relax! Stay awhile! Invite your friends!”
Sadness: “You mean, I’m not a stain on your perfection?”
Awareness: “A stain? Perfection? Whoever gave you those words? How could I be stained by you, or anyone?”
Sadness: “But they told me I shouldn’t be here!”