by Jeff Foster
And because all concepts of past and future, before and after, yesterday and tomorrow, then and now, happen Now too, Now knows nothing outside of itself, no boundary, no opposite, no ‘other’. It is prior to time. It is the place where concepts of ‘Now’ dissolve.... into a silent, wordless Wow.
GOLD
If we run away from our sadness,
If we turn our backs on anger,
If we deny fear its inherent right to be here,
If we kick our pain out onto the cold, dark streets,
How will we ever know
That these weren’t precious gifts made of gold,
Forged in the fires of ourselves long ago?
KISSED BY LIFE
we will sit for hours together
and let the scenery of life
break our hearts into millions of tiny little pieces.
and then we will watch, astonished, as
in the space between two heartbeats,
the very same scenery
fuses those pieces back together again.
as if we’d been kissed by life.
and then we will go for a coffee, or do the dishes,
or pick up the kids from school,
or dance in celebration of the fullness of things,
our hearts pregnant with bittersweet mystery.
HOW TO SIT WITH A SUICIDAL FRIEND
When you sit with a deeply troubled friend, you are a witness to a spiritual crisis, not merely a medical one. Understand that your friend’s longing for death is really a longing for Home. They are trying to awaken from a nightmare. Their crisis is their opportunity.
Understand that they cannot kill the Self, the One that they are, they can only kill the small and limited ‘self’, the one they have imagined themselves to be up until now. Their longing to ‘take their own life’, ‘leave this world’ or ‘kill the self’ is their secret longing to destroy false identification with the bodymind, and awaken to Truth. Their longing to die has intelligence and creativity to it, and is worthy of respect. It is not a mistake, aberration or enemy, it is a yearning for authenticity.
Hold them, embrace them, as the urge to die – which is the urge to live in disguise – burns fiercely in them. Validate the place where they are right now. Don’t try to control them or stop them feeling what they are feeling. Don’t try to cheer them up or tell them that everything is really okay, or give them pre-packaged answers as a way to escape your own discomfort. They are sick of second-hand answers! Go to the depths with them. Meet them in their aloneness without trying to fix them, without even trying to convince them that their desire to die is wrong, sick or invalid. Hold their hand. Go where nobody else has dared to go. Remember, you are only meeting yourself, meeting your own fear of death, or perhaps even your own secret longing to die.
Don’t speak to them as healer to victim, or as teacher to student, or as expert to novice, but as friend to friend, as intelligence to itself. Meet them beyond the divisive roles.
They are going through a profound crisis of identity, an essential rite of passage. Healing always involves crisis – sudden and unexpected change. Something in them, some ancient pain, longs to be felt, touched, validated. This is a cry for love as old as humanity. Who will listen?
They long to live, but don’t know how. They long for intimate connection but can’t find it in ‘this life’. They long for deep acceptance and profound rest. Even though right now they feel like leaving, touch them with life, show your willingness to stay. Remind them that deep human connection is possible here, in this life, in this moment, in this place. Show them that even in the depths of their despair, they are not alone.
Be present at their crisis. Your presence says more than words ever could. Your fear is not necessary here. You are witnessing something sacred and intimate. Offer all of yourself.
Perhaps you don’t need to know how to fix or save them. Perhaps that is not your true calling.
Whether they will live or die, meet them now in that strange place of not knowing. Spend a conscious moment with them. Offer your deep listening. Remember, they are healing themselves in the only way they know how.
AUGUST
If the path before you is clear,
you’re probably on someone else’s.
– Joseph Campbell
THE GREATEST RELIEF
Face it. Your life is never going to work out.
Hallelujah.
That is, the story of your life is always going to be imperfect. That’s the nature of story – always incomplete, always searching for a conclusion, always bound to time and change.
In the movie of your life, things won’t always go according to plan. People won’t always understand you. They will mishear, misquote, and misrepresent you. They will form their own ideas and opinions about you, no matter how clearly you try to represent yourself. Your success can turn to failure. Your wealth can turn to poverty. The ones you love can leave you. Problems that get fixed can lead to new problems. No matter how much you have, you can have more, or lose more. It’s never going to work out in the story of “my life”. And even if it does work out, whatever that means to you, you will still be here, in this moment, now. This is the only place where things can ‘work out’, if they ever do.
In actuality, things have already worked out, beyond the story. For in this moment, in reality, there is already no goal, no image of perfection, no comparison, no ‘should’ or ‘should not’, and the thoughts, sensations, feelings, sounds and smells appearing right now are entirely appropriate, wonderfully fitting and beautifully timely for this moment in the movie of your life.
Without a script, how can this moment go off script? Without a plan, how can life not go according to plan? Without a path, how can you stray from the path?
Realising that your life is never going to work out, and that it cannot ever work out, and that it isn’t ever supposed to work out, is the greatest relief, and brings the greatest ease, drawing you deeply into the sacredness of things as they actually are. Your life may be an imperfect mess, but it is an imperfect mess that is perfectly divine – a work of sacred art, even if you forget that sometimes.
Humiliation turns to humility in the space of just a heartbeat, and all that’s left is to fall on your knees with gratitude for what is given, and what has not yet been taken away.
FAITH
I do not believe in anything.
I have no religion. I have no god, including the gods of money, science and atheism. I hold no fixed theories about reality, including that one. I see heaven and hell, karma, reincarnation and the search for enlightenment as beautiful fairy tales. I have no guru, no lineage, no teacher, and so everything teaches me. I see doubt and profound mystery as my most trusted companions. I walk no path except the one appearing directly in front of me. I have no home except my own presence. I trust nothing at all, except what actually happens. I find no meaning in life except the fearless living of it. I know that today could be my final day. I feel grateful for all that was given and all that was lost to time. I see the inherent limitation of language and yet love to play with it. I see the joke in using the words “I”, “me” and “mine” and yet delight in using them. I realise that I am not my story, and I realise even that is just a story.
I find it impossible to say anything about myself, for experience is constantly changing. I find it effortless to talk about myself, for who I am never changes. I know that on the deepest level I am profoundly equal to you. I know that all these sentences are pale imitations of truth.
I do not believe in anything. I have no religion.
Except the in – and out – breaths. And endlessly deepening wonder.
LOVE WITHOUT NEED
The most brutally honest, loving and freeing sentiment:
“I love you. I respect you. I love being with you, spending time with you. But I do not need you for my contentment. You are not responsible for my happiness. You have never been to blame, nor will ever be to blame, f
or my unhappiness. You are already released from the intolerable burden of having to live up to my expectations, of having to change to fit my unending needs, of having to be the one to complete me, for I am already complete as I am. I love you. I respect you. As you are.”
A RUDE AWAKENING
When a loved one sheds their physical form, or an unexpected diagnosis comes, or a relationship ends, or we experience some kind of deep shock or loss, we can be ‘rudely awakened’ from our slumber, shaken by that dear old familiar friend, grief. “This was not in the plan”, we say to ourselves. It feels like life has gone ‘wrong’ somehow, that the universe has been knocked off course, that “my life” is perhaps over and recovery is impossible.
What has really happened, though, but the loss of a dream? What has really died, but our seemingly-solid plans for the future? We dreamt of walking off into the sunset with each other, we dreamt of all the things we were going to do together, all the fun we were going to have, all the things we would accomplish. We were living for so long with those dreams, those plans, those expectations, that we forgot we were only dreaming, and we took the dreams to be the reality of “my life”. Now that the dreams have crumbled, what is left?
But these movie-futures were “never going to happen anyway”. It’s not that our plans and dreams, about to come true, were then ruined by our incompetence or bad luck. It’s that they were never going to happen anyway. Why? Because they didn’t. That’s reality, however much we would like to argue with it.
That is a huge difference. It’s the difference between the irreversible loss of something that was “mine”, and the realisation that what was “mine” was never mine at all.
We are literally grieving over our own lost identities, lost images, lost selves. It feels like we are grieving over something or someone ‘out there’, but really, the death is much closer and more intimate than that.
And life’s invitation is this: Stay with that internal death. Stay with the mess, as I often say. Do not make a single movement away from present experience. There may be gold hidden there, and you will never know if you try to move away. Stay close to the grief, to the universal pain of loss, so that it doesn’t solidify into bitterness and depression, into a belief about how terrible the world is, how cruel life is, into a heavy story about “my horrible luck” that you carry around for the rest of your days. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Life itself is not cruel, for life is all. It is the loss of our dreams that feels ‘cruel’ at first. But contained within that loss is a secret invitation – to wake up from all dreams. To see the inherent perfection in all things, in all movements of life, not as a concept or fluffy belief, but as a living reality. To see that life itself never really goes wrong, for there is no goal to miss, and that even the intense grief that we feel is a movement of love, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.
It is because we love life and each other so much that we feel everything so intensely. And we are vast enough to contain it all – the bliss and the pain, the joy and the grief, the plans and the destruction of those plans. Who we are is not broken, and who we are is never lost. Only our dreams, only our innocent hopes, are smashed.
And so every loss is a little invitation to let go of those dreams that were never going to work out anyway, and to see life as it actually is. It feels like suffering and depression at first, but it is really a kind of cosmic compassion the likes of which the mind has no hope of understanding.
Right at the heart of every experience of loss is the possibility of discovering the joy of letting go, and the relief of not having to hold on anymore.
HALF BIRD
Sweet, un-tetherable bird,
Half a mile up from solid ground,
Half a world away from home,
Do not fear getting lost.
You will always find me
Infinitely close to yourself,
In the half-light,
In the still gap between the flapping of wings,
In the impossible shadows we cast on the ground, unknowingly.
Lose yourself in flying,
Sweet un-tetherable half-bird,
Forget all imagined limits of flight.
Tether yourself to me,
And let us swoop in silence.
AWE AND WONDER
Everything you have ever longed for is already present, here and now – which, of course, is the last place you’d ever look. How ingenious that is. Every breath. Every sound. Every sensation surging through. That which has already been allowed in. That which cannot be blocked out, ever. Even pain, even boredom, even despair, even those seemingly unwanted and unloved waves of oceanic experience, they are finally allowed to flood into the space where ‘you’ are not, and have never been. The emptiness is brimming with life.
The paradox is this: none of it can touch you anymore, not even the greatest sadness. You are Cosmic Teflon, and everything slides off. And yet even that is not true, for you feel it all more intensely than ever before, unable to block any of it out, unable to turn away from your own children, your own flesh and blood – waves of yourself. Who would turn away, and how, and from what? This is life in its intimate fullness, no holds barred. It is the eternal crucifixion of That which cannot be crucified.
What is left but gratitude? Gratitude for the fact that anything has ever happened at all. Gratitude for the mystery of it. For the adventure of it. And if nothing ever happens again, know this, dear reader – you have been here to witness it all. You have known it. Tasted it. Felt it. Smelled it. Seen it. The reflection of a waning moon in a car window. The taste of still water. The fragrance of cotton. The silent depths of meditation. The fierce intensity of fear. The shock of pain. The drama of romance. The bliss of solitude. Your grandmother’s bones. It has been enough.
Oh, it has been more than enough! It has been too much, in fact. Too much grace. Excess grace. Undeserved amounts of grace. The separate self turned away in fear from the vastness which it could never comprehend, not in a million years, and looked for more, and held onto what it thought it had, seeking a future salvation or enlightenment that never came, and cannot come in time.
But life never stopped singing its love song written just for ‘you’.
Awe and wonder, my friend. Awe and wonder.
TODAY
There is only one day you will ever live. There is only one day you will ever have to face. And that day is today, this living day, this One day, this eternal day, the only day that matters at all. It has never been lived before and will never be lived again. It is unique.
We can pin all our hopes and dreams on tomorrow, we can wait for a future salvation or saviour and pine for an eventual enlightenment or afterlife that may or may not come, but let us not ever forget today, this living day, as it overflows with life.
Let us not forget this moment, this breath, this beating of the heart, this vibrant aliveness we call ‘the body’, the closeness and intimacy and presence of things as they are, this grace-mystery that moves in and through and as us.
For in reality the here and now may be all we actually have, and all there actually is, and we may be dead tomorrow without any hope of continuity, and that’s what makes the here and now so infinitely precious and joyous and fragile in its beauty, and deserving of our kindest attention and deepest respect and gratitude.
It is only through the contemplation of the possibility of death that life is affirmed and given perspective and meaning, and made worth living and even celebrating, on this day of all days.
You see, ‘There is only Now’ is not some clever philosophy or word-game or belief to be proved or disproved or argued over, but a profound and open invitation for all human beings to deeply savour the taste and fragrance of this precious life, not ‘as it should be’ but ‘as it is’, perhaps for the very last time, and perhaps for the very first time.
This day is yet to be lived. It is pregnant with potential.
THE ROOM
You
are a vast room. Thoughts, images, sensations, sounds, feelings, are your contents. Your contents are constantly moving, shifting, changing, rearranging themselves, but the room of you always remains in perfect stillness. You are never limited, trapped, defined or contained, completed or threatened by your contents. You effortlessly contain and embrace thoughts, sensations and feelings, as a mother embraces her new-born baby, as the universe embraces the birth of stars.
Knowing who you are – the unconditional embrace of this moment’s content – is true content-ment.
REMEMBER YOUR PRESENCE
Who are you? What sees out of your eyes? What hears out of your ears? What breathes?
You must be the one who is reading these words right now. You must be the one aware of present sounds and sensations. You must be the one present in the midst of every breath; present, always, here and now, not anywhere else, or at any other time. So the story of “a person with a past and future” is not, and has never been, who you truly are. Your true identity lies in this very moment, not in history or dreams.
Who is aware of thoughts as they come and go? Who knows the arising of feelings, and the passing of them? Who understands the passage of time? Who watches as the body ages?
You. You are the one who has always been here. You are the one who sees the creation and play of ‘self’. You are the one for whom the universe dances. You are the presence in which thoughts, feelings, images, even these words, arise and dissolve like waves in the ocean. You are not in a world – a world appears for you, in your presence.
Your own presence is the most intimate, simple, obvious thing, unchanging and undramatic, the silent backdrop upon which life dances. All questions and answers sink back into you. All dreams fall into your embrace. All things originate in you, and to you they return. And what we call ‘death’ is only total relaxation into your own presence.