Staying open-hearted and grounded in tough times. Jeff’s heartfelt, supportive 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘿𝙚𝙚𝙥 𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝘾𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚: 𝙈𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙋𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙐𝙣𝙧𝙪𝙡𝙮 𝙈𝙞𝙣𝙙 & 𝙎𝙤𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙑𝙪𝙡𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙃𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙩 is now open for enrolment at >> www.jefffosteronline.com. Six authentic live sessions with Jeff, honest talk on healing and awakening, guided meditations inviting you into Deep Rest, and playful Q&A on finding the calm in life’s storm. Plus a free 50-page book, guided meditation CD and 80-minute video. ❤️ We’d love for you to join us. Full and partial scholarships available. Starts 17th April. ... See MoreSee Less

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1 day ago  ·  

MY LOVE, YOU WILL FIND ME IN THE DANCE

It’s not a performance.
Nobody is watching and nobody cares.

Always remember that, my love.

Okay.
Lights off.
Eyes closed.

Listen:
You will dance with all of yourself tonight.
Broken, shattered by the world, I know. Me too.
You don’t know where you’ll get the strength. Me neither.
But you will dance.
I promise you that.
You will dance.

So begin.
Following nothing but the body tonight.
The guts. The spine. The kidneys.
The blood and the bile.
The wolf and the tiger.
The male and the female in you.
Let them guide you, move you forwards.

You do not need to know
anything more
than you know.

First steps. Tentative.
Slow to begin.
Feeling into the music.
Limbs coming alive.
Blood flowing. Muscles awakening.

The dance has begun.
You slow down and speed up.
You connect and you disconnect.
You lose yourself in the mind.
In what others think.
In what you look like.

It’s okay.
It’s part of the dance too.

So back again now. To the drums.
To the raw pulse and sway and shake of it.
To the throb and the perspiration.

It’s like sex.
You lose interest, you find yourself again.
You push too far, you pull back.
The hard is soft here, the soft is hard here.
Reality is upside down, inverted in the dance.

So let the music guide you inside of it.
And become the music, enveloping all.
And surrender to somatic knowing.
And rest in the maelstrom.

You laugh. You weep.
You tense up, you relax.
You stop and you start.
You take a break, return, leave again.
You are one with the Universe my love, you always were.
Your dance is a hot mess but you are in love with it.
You have forgotten every other dance you ever danced.
This is the first one.
This is it. The first dance.

The world is yours and the world has gone away now.
Flailing, gasping, heaving.
Stretching, jumping, spinning tonight.
Catching a breath, inhaling a cosmos.
Exhaling all of your fear.
All of your damn fear.
And grieving out all your regrets.
And vowing to never forget this moment.
You have disappeared into life.

You have forgotten your premeditated moves.
You can’t remember what’s in fashion anymore.
You are beyond the world now.
You have become wild again, ephemeral, light as dust.

Heart pounding. Sweat flying.
Broken and whole at the same time.
Caught up in an exquisite erotic yearning.
Drenched and aching and ecstatic.

I will not be with you much longer, my love.

I must leave the physical.

You will find me in the dance.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

3 days ago  ·  

A HUMBLING PATH

Awakening is not a path for the faint of heart.

You will be humbled. Oh yes. Brought to your knees. Many, many times.

What you thought you knew will occasionally dissolve into nothingness.
Your most brilliant insights, your astonishing expertise, your life’s work, it may all crumble to the ground, without much warning.

You will be asked to begin again, and again, and again.

And again.

(Did I say, this is not a path for the faint of heart?)

Oh yes, you will touch the bliss and joy of existence, for sure!
You will laugh at the simplicity of things, some days, of course!

But you will also be asked to confront your deepest fears, face the darkness and the night within, go to the places where the unloved creatures dwell.

You will step into pockets of grief you never knew were there.
You will cry a billion tears for the lost and abandoned children, within and without.
You will rage to the sky, to your parents, to all the teachers who failed you, to the lies you were fed, to the ones who never showed up when you needed them the most.
You will tremble with fear some days.

Some days the ground will open up and swallow you and spit you back out.

Sometimes you will think you’ve reached the end of the path, and then you will find yourself back at the damn beginning.

Sometimes you will feel like giving up.
Sometimes you will feel like you’ve made no progress at all.
Sometimes you will curse the day you started out on this journey.

But you are healing.
Yes, you are.

You are thawing, undoing billions of years of karma. Fear-based conditioning is melting away, and you are meeting life in the raw.

You are returning to nature, to the Garden, to the wild, where you were conceived.

It’s not always easy. It’s not always peaceful.
It’s not always the spirituality you were sold.
It’s not always love and light and joy and positivity and pure undisturbed Awareness.
(These are only dreams for frightened children.)

No, it’s an authentic awakening. You are a warrior of realness now, tired of the bullshit and the false promises, weeping and raging and laughing your way into the terrible, wonderful wholeness that you are.

All your old dreams have crumbled, but you have not.
The voices of fear and shame and doubt may still be with you, but you are bigger than them now.
You have days where you feel tiny, yes, but you have days where you can hold the whole damn Universe in the palm of your hand.
You have gone insane to be normal, you have cracked to be whole, you have traded the old security for a life of adventure, and given up the sad old dogmas for the thrill of not knowing.

You are finding safety in the darkest places, and beauty in the loneliest places, and love in the places you thought had been forsaken by love.

You are never abandoned by life, friend, for you are life, and even when you fall to the ground, you are completely supported by unknowable forces.

And so what. So what! You fall! You bruise yourself. You feel ashamed for a while. You weep out the old dream. So what! You cry out the expectation and you turn to face the reality and it is never, never as bad as you’d feared.
You pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, you get back on the path, and you walk on.

You never left the path, if truth be told.
For the path never left... you.

For the path forms itself under your very feet, in every Now, with each step that you take or do not take, rejoicing in your unique journey, celebrating you exactly as you are today, bowing to your failures as well as your victories.

So, begin again, friend.
Begin again.

And walk on.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

4 days ago  ·  

TO A FRIEND IN CRISIS

Friend, I don’t know how to help you.

I don’t know how to take away your pain.
I don’t know how to remove your heartache, your fear, your anxiety, your grief, the longings that burn deep inside.

I have known these visitors.
I have never found a way to annihilate them in myself.
I am as broken and as lost as you are.
My answers have crumbled too.

Yes, I know the yearning and loneliness you speak of.
I ran from my pain for years. I tried every fix, every solution, every addiction.
I tried to drink my loneliness away, sex it away, eat it away, meditate it away.
I tried to surround myself with people to distract myself, became addicted to people and still the loneliness haunted me.
I tried to hypnotise myself with religion, spirituality, dogma, belief and false hope.
There were times I came close to suicide; sometimes that seemed to be the only answer.
I tried to medicate away my loneliness, ignore it, bury myself in work and useless activity.

“Just keep moving”, I begged myself. “Don’t stop”.

Loneliness banged on the door in the middle of the night.
I heard her cries in my daydreams and nightmares.
I ran until my feet were bloody and raw.
I ran until I could not run anymore.

And then, life forced me to stop.
Through illness, through exhaustion, through the sheer pain of running.

It was only when I stopped… that true healing could begin.
I turned towards my loneliness and let it fill me up.
I thought I would die, but at the heart of loneliness I only found love, and more life, and more light.
And a deeper connection to the Divine.
And near-unbearable compassion for my fellow brothers and sisters.

The ‘darkness’ within me had only been a lost child, longing for love.
She was lonely for me.
She had been waiting.

It was a beautiful reunion.

Now, loneliness and I live together, as One.
We breathe together. Walk in the meadows together. Sit under the sky and laugh and weep.

I have found my love in the darkness.

Now, friend, I sit with you.
Still. Present. Here.
I see your fear, your exquisite brokenness, your yearning heart, and I bow to these gifts, these strengths of yours.
I trust your ability to meet yourself.
I have lost all interest in fixing you.
I don’t know how to help you.
But in your “helplessness”, a fire of healing!

I cannot fix you, no.
But I can love you
as much as I love myself,
which is a lot.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

5 days ago  ·  

THE HEART-POUNDING TRUTH

Truth is often not easy, or comfortable.

Truth can make you sweat.
It can make your legs shake, your heart pound.
It can pull the rug of certainty from under your feet.
It can destroy comfort, the status quo.

But it can make you feel alive like nothing else.
It can rip your heart open to love.
It can connect you in ways you never thought possible.

Live your deepest truth today, even if it means losing everything - your pride, your status, your image, your way of life.

For the lies, the half-truths and the burden of unspoken things will eventually suffocate you and everyone around you.

Know that you can only lose what's non-essential, anyway.

Give up everything
for a truthful existence.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

6 days ago  ·  

THE FIRST PRAYER

Invite curious attention to wash down through the throat, the chest, into the pit of the stomach; let it infiltrate the raw, tingly, fluttery, alive sensations there.

Let attention drench your sorrow, your loneliness, that sense of abandonment you’ve been running from. For a moment, provide a sanctuary for these ancient ones, these beautiful fragments of a great puzzle you understood long ago. Let this present scene of the movie of your life be sanctified with attention, with this kindly awareness called love. This is prayer.

“I am here. I am here. And it’s okay. Even though it doesn’t feel okay, it’s okay. My sadness is intelligent. My fear is ancient, and sacred, and worthy. My longing burns with life. Even my doubts are my kin. Nothing is wrong here; all is held in love.”

Life is so short, yet love is infinite, and bountiful, and ever-present, and closer than the next breath. Do not look for love; do not wait for it; do not expect it on-demand. But know it. Know its presence, the intimacy of it. Feel it whispering in your ear...

“I breathe with you, my love. Every inhale, every exhale, and the spaces inbetween. When you are on your knees, exhausted by life’s chaos and uncertainty, I kneel with you. When you are exalted, held up high by this fickle world, I rejoice with you. When you feel lost, and you cannot go on, I have already found you. Here. Here, always here. I am so very near. I laugh with you, cry with you, bleed with you; your blood is mine. Your voice is my voice, your silence my silence, and I would go to the ends of the Earth to find you, to fight for you, to bring you home.”

You cannot escape love; that is why you cannot grasp it.

And so if I had a prayer, it would already be answered; the prayer and the resolution as One; the gift given long ago.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

7 days ago  ·  

THE MIRACLE OF CHANGE

What is the point
of arguing with life as it is?

Here is the miracle and paradox of change. When we tire of our internal violence, when we are no longer at war with the way things are now, when we no longer argue with the present scene in the movie of our lives, we come to rest. And then, from a place of rest and a deep connection to the ground of Now, new vistas open up, unexplored forests of possibility reveal themselves. New connections are made, new solutions emerge. From a place of equanimity and acceptance, things that seemed certain are now not so certain, blocks are no longer solid blocks, old futures begin to collapse and new futures become possible. Energies that seemed intolerable a moment ago are now allowed in, allowed to move, to express and release their creativity and healing power. Because our eyes are open, new details are apparent in the present scene, details that we had become blind to, in our rush to "a better future".

From a place of deep internal peace, we can more easily take the next step. And sometimes the next step means taking no step at all, but falling deeply in love with where we are! This is NOT the same as giving up. This is not passivity or indulgence in the 'negative'. This is not the same as abandoning all hope of a better future. There is no abandonment here. This is true courage: The willingness to slow down, be present, drink in all the richness - the joy and the sorrow, the doubt and the creativity - of the present scene of the movie of our lives.

The movie of “I” has not been written yet; it writes itself as we go along. And in resisting the present scene, you are actually resisting the entire movie. Resistance can only breed resistance.

Sometimes, the point of arguing with life, is to get you to a point where you are tired of arguing with life! And then perhaps, exhausted from the war, you sink deeply into the present moment, resting in its embrace, trusting the way of things, accepting your own imperfections. And then everything seems possible, and everything feels alive as you feel alive, and real change can come. Perhaps slowly, perhaps in a great tidal wave. But you are no longer pushing for change. You are letting it happen. You are aligned at last, no longer part of the problem, but already an expression of the solution.

Sometimes you need to stop trying to change the moment, for the moment to change all by itself.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

1 week ago  ·  

Stand still, my love, and breathe,
breathe into the chaos of this world.
You are only witnessing the passing of form.
What you are cannot pass, will not die,
shall not be ended when everything ends.
This is only a play of noise and shadow,
light and silence, and you, forever,
rooted, at its core, so still,
never witnessed, yet witnessing
through child-like eyes, invisible.

Storms will always break.

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

2 weeks ago  ·  

IN THE MIDST OF DEATH WE ARE IN LIFE

In Iran, they have been digging massive burial pits for the dead.
In northern Italy, elderly relatives disappear into ambulances, never to be seen again, no final goodbyes. There are no funerals there anymore. Doctors and nurses go without sleep, work on the verge of physical and mental collapse.
Here in the UK, cruise ships have docked in London, ready to be used as giant 2000-bed field hospitals.

We are living in unprecedented times.
So much to process each day. So many feelings to feel.
In our vulnerability, we are being forced to adapt to a new way of life.
To open our eyes, without getting blinded.
To see the truth, yet stay kind.

Some say this virus is here to awaken and heal the planet. Some say we are going through a mass transformation of consciousness. Some say if we can just shift into the light, fill ourselves with high vibes, take the right supplements, repeat the right mantras, the virus will not be able to touch us. Some say we have manifested the disease with our karma or negative thoughts. Some say we can stay immune with positivity and the right spiritual practice.
I don’t know. I am not qualified to comment on these ideas. I have no conclusions, no answers for you.
I lost my answers long ago, answers only bred despair.
I found my home in Presence instead.

I can offer no comforting words today.
I can only offer today the way of devastation.
The path of crucifixion.

Allow yourself to be broken, friend. Be ground to dust in this time of crisis and made new.
Let yourself be made soft, open, childlike, grateful.
Be humbled in the face of the maelstrom.

We are always in crisis.
We live in permanent crisis.
Crisis is the way and the truth and the life.
The only permanence, friend:
Death and rebirth. Death and rebirth. World without end.

Terrible and ancient energies have been swirling deep in the Unconscious for so long.
These energies were here long, long ago, aeons before the current form of crisis.
These circumstances have not created them, only invited them to emerge.
They are emerging now. The vast terrors of the deep. A profound, volcanic rage that could tear universes asunder. Longings, yearnings, dark desires, unspeakable.
An awesome grief. Yes, the grief of knowing that we are all going to die. All of us.
Maybe not today. Maybe not this year. Maybe not this decade.
But one day. One day, death will come.

Yes, the fear of death, rumbling underneath all.
Wild thoughts and majestic feelings of the night we ignore in times of “normality”.
And then normality shatters, rots, decays, turns to dust, because it must.
And a part of us wants to run.
Wants to rush to conclusions, false hope, empty positivity, a new world.

“This is all for the best! We are headed towards the light! A great and wonderful transformation is happening! How beautiful it all is!”

But we skip the night at our peril.
Bless the sun, yes, but surrender to the moon. Bow to the grief in your guts that’s been longing to be felt for decades. Turn, finally, to the anxiety that’s always been lodged in your belly and chest, without trying to fix it, or change it, or get rid of it, or transform it.
Drop the “positive” façade and embrace the night.
After a lifetime of running, make room in yourself for the dread, the powerlessness, the dark mystery of it all, and your wonderful unknowing, and the miracle of existence itself.

Yes, behold the miracle of life, right where you are.
Bless each breath, each movement of your lungs.
In, out. In, out.
Turn to face the terror and the ecstasy.
In, out. In, out.
One moment at a time, digest the undigested.
In, out. In, out.
You will find no internal enemy.
No truly ‘dark’ thing here.
You will find only a lost little child inside, crying, “Mother? Father? Are you there? I am scared. I don’t know what’s happening. I cannot hold myself today. Will you hold me?”

We may very well be in the early stages of a mass transformation of consciousness.
We may be undergoing a global awakening.
This may all be for the “best”, ultimately.
I don’t know.
But there are horrors to face and feel, too. There is the night-time to pass through. Great terrors rumbling inside all of us, only waiting for our compassionate attention.

By all means, keep busy. Fill your time. Start new projects. Find ways to relax and recharge and help your fellow humans.
Stay positive, wash your hands, do what you can to strengthen the immune system.

But don’t forget to surrender to the horror of it all.
Don’t forget the night-time. The pulsating, swirling, mysterium tremendum of existence.
The emptiness and the despair.
The overwhelming shock and awe of life itself. Each and every moment of it.
And death rumbling underneath it all, all our projects, big and small.
And life is intertwined with death, always, and death renders each moment of life exquisitely fragile, precious, naked, whole.

And there is a little child inside of you, utterly bewildered by it all.

Will you take their hand?

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

2 weeks ago  ·  

If you wish to reduce your psychological suffering by roughly 99.99999%, simply cease to imagine things that haven’t happened yet.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

2 weeks ago  ·  

NONE OF US ARE IMMUNE

It’s going to be okay.
It really is.

We will face this situation together with love, humour and patience.
We will weep together, we will laugh together.
We will discover togetherness in our apartness.

And the worst of it will end one day.
And we will have learned so much by then.

We will now be called to face very difficult feelings inside of us.
Fear. Grief. The loss of an old way of life. Our devastated plans.
We will learn to face ourselves. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Nowhere to go except within.

A sacred quarantine.

We will learn to face our boredom. Our restlessness. The part of us that wants to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else, having some other experience, in some other Now, living in some other life.
We will let go of the wonderful future we had planned.
We will let the fantasy future die, release it, and grieve it.
We will return to the solidity and warmth of the present.

We will make the present into our home.
We will begin again, here, build a new house on new soil.
We will explore a new way of life.
Strange, at first. But full of possibility.
Slower. Kinder. Quieter.

We will talk to each other honestly about death, and life, and impermanence, and how we feel about all the changes that have come to us and our loved ones.
We will learn to value life a little more.
Yes, perhaps we will learn to value life a little more.

And live with our hearts cracked slightly open to the elements.
And lean into uncertainty, and find our salvation there.

None of us are immune to change.
To rupture. To the shattering of old, familiar forms.
This is the way of things, this has always been the way of things.

From this perspective, nothing has gone wrong.
Crisis simply means “turning point”, and none of us are immune from the turning.

The breaking of the old makes way for the birth of new.
It has always been this way.

Love. Humour. Patience. With these things, we will come through.
Stronger than before. Renewed. Ready.

I am sending you all my love, my friends.

❤️

- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less

3 weeks ago  ·