MEDITATION IS LIFE!
Don’t meditate in order to relax. Don’t meditate in order to silence your mind. Don’t meditate in order to get into a “meditative state”, to become enlightened, or to transcend mind and body.
These are all second-hand ideas about meditation.
True meditation is kinder, simpler, more heartfelt and without a goal, so it’s impossible to fail.
Meditate for meditation’s sake. Meditate like a spontaneous dance, for the pure experience and joy of it. Taste your own taste, feel your own gentle being amidst the backdrop of a chaotic world. Meditate playfully, like a child who lives totally in the present. Let your meditation become a deep embrace of your flaws, your imperfections, and even your inability to meditate properly. Drench it all in fascination, and don’t even make fascination into a goal.
Meditate because it’s who you are. Meditate because you are in love with the fleeting moments of life. Meditate as gently or as fiercely as you want. Meditate on your relaxation and your struggle.
Meditate away your concepts of meditation, but love your concepts too.
Meditation is life, your true self.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
21 hours ago ·
BE MY VALENTINE, WORLD
Love is not a feeling.
If love were a feeling,
it would come and go,
like in a great drama.
Love is not a thought.
If love were a thought,
it would have an opposite.
Love is too huge
to be contained in thought.
Love is not a belief.
If love were a belief,
you would doubt it.
And who would believe that?
Love is not a state.
If love were a state,
you could enter or leave it.
Or fall out of it.
Love is not an experience.
If love were an experience,
it would begin and end,
and you would long for its return.
Love is not something you find.
If love were something you found,
you could lose it too,
so you'd have to cling to it for dear life.
Love is simpler, kinder, closer, less dramatic.
Less urgent, more present.
Love is the space in which everything appears.
Every thought, every sensation,
every feeling, pleasurable and painful,
blissful, boring, erotic, gentle and intense,
all are held in love's vast embrace.
Yes, YOU are the space for it all,
spaciously intimate with every breath,
in love with every beat of the heart,
every sound, every smell,
every sensation in the body,
every moment of life.
Feeling like you're in love
or not feeling like you're in love,
either way, you are in love
with the bliss and the boredom of existence,
with the certainty and the doubt of it,
with the pleasure and the pain,
with the success and the failure,
with the seeking and the resting,
with every sacred movement
of this astonishing dream-world.
All that can be held, can be lost.
All that you can gain, can be taken away.
All that you can build up, can turn to dust overnight.
All that can be created, can also be destroyed.
Only love remains. Only love.
Not a feeling, not a thought, not a belief,
not a state, not an experience,
not something that you 'have',
not something that you're 'in' or 'out' of,
not something that you 'get' from others
(despite the romantic myths we are sold),
but the endless embrace of all of this.
Love is you. You, before you were named,
before you were even born.
You. You are the One.
The One you have always sought.
The unsilenceable call of the heart.
The cry from deep within.
The fragile silence in the middle of the night.
You will never abandon yourself again.
Be my Valentine, world.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
3 days ago ·
WITH OPEN EYES
You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will diminish. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is in truth impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away.
Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes.
But right now, in this very moment, you stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this simple thing is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you.
Everything is present.
The universal law of impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heart-breaking gratitude.
Loss
has already
transfigured your life
into an altar.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
4 days ago ·
My first ever book of poetry will be released July 28th. ❤️Can’t wait to share it with you! You can pre-order it now from all good bookshops. Published by Sounds True. ... See MoreSee Less
6 days ago ·
THE GATEWAY OF NOT KNOWING
When you Don't Know,
there is a crack in the delusion of mind.
And you can be penetrated
by an entire Universe.
Not Knowing is not ignorance.
Nor is it stupidity.
It is Curiosity. It is Wonder.
It is the relaxation of the separate 'I',
and the presence of great Compassion.
When you Don't Know you can be entered
by a tired sun exploding into reds and oranges,
by a yellow moon and a trillion distant stars,
so far yet so close,
so distant yet so Here.
Knowledge will not bring you to it.
The 'I' cannot understand it.
Not Knowing is its gateway.
Surrender to the moon.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
1 week ago ·
THE AIR IN YOUR LUNGS
Consciousness is pure nakedness, intimacy. It has no body, but takes shape as all bodies. Yours, mine.
Consciousness is pure knowing. It has no religion, no nationality, but manifests as all religions, nationalities. We are all brothers and sisters, the same God looking out through every pair of eyes.
Consciousness is pure love. It is lover and beloved, the seeking of love, the finding and losing of it. Requited, unrequited, conditional, unconditionally present.
Consciousness is pure courage. It is you, living your life, facing what you have to face, moving forwards, walking on, air in your lungs.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
2 weeks ago ·
Courage is not the opposite of doubting.
You have to face your doubting.
Go into it. Infuse it with awareness.
Breathe into it. Give it a home.
You have to stand in the midst of its storm, naked, like Lear on the heath, crying out,
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout!”
You have to embrace your doubt like this.
Let it rage. Breathe into it and let it rage and keep breathing and remember how vast you are.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
2 weeks ago ·
DARE
Today...
Dare to allow yourself to be seen.
Dare to tell the truth.
Dare to stop pretending.
Dare to stay present
to the secret fire that burns inside.
Dare to be wildly inconsistent.
Dare to let another in.
Dare to let go of the image.
Dare to never be prepared.
Dare to give everything
for the awakening of love
Dare to fail.
Dare to mess everything up.
Dare to fall to the ground,
humbled again, laughing.
Dare to dream and let dreams die.
Dare to honour the past but not cling to it.
Dare to give an honest Yes and an honest No.
Dare to be wrong.
Dare to be right.
Dare to be real.
Dare to be here.
Today.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
2 weeks ago ·
ON GRIEF
When you look into the eyes of a loved one, you know that they will die one day, and "one day" could be today, and so it breaks your heart a little bit each time you look into their eyes.
This is not an error but the way it’s meant to be. True love brings an awareness of the loss of the beloved.
And so you stay with your grief today, you breathe into it and make a home for it in your heart, it hurts your chest and your throat and your tummy but it feels so alive, this grief, this loneliness, this yearning for home, and you feel so alive and awake in the hurt, and you want the hurt to stay with you because you want to keep your heart open to your loved one today. You don’t want to shut off to the "mysterium tremendum" of existence, and you don’t want to cling to that which will surely pass. You love your loved one through the grief, through the tears and the broken heart and the awareness of mortality, you live close to contingency and impermanence and change, and each moment with your loved one is rendered infinitely precious. You celebrate their presence today yet stay rooted in their passing. You embrace this living day, knowing it could be the final one, your final chance to meet.
Good. Let it all be final, then, and hauntingly alive in its finality.
Death is in life, not at its end. Grief is your constant companion, your guru and guide and lover, not a negative or depressing thing but a misunderstood doorway to cosmic compassion, to extraordinary hope and a deep and enduring love of life. All things will pass, all things are dying and changing in one way or another, everything we love and all that we don’t flows through our awareness unstoppably, ceaselessly, like sand through an hourglass, like hot blood through veins. We cannot stem the flow of holy grief but we can learn to endure it and even love it, let it break us open to more life and more laughter and more willingness to stand where we stand, feel what we feel, know what we know, even if it hurts and we long for escape, even if we want to die ourselves sometimes from so much life.
I am eternally grateful to grief and her shattering and her unplanned losses, for they have brought me kicking and screaming into a clear awareness of the one thing that cannot be lost.
Let us die into life, my love.
Let us die into life.
- Jeff Foster ... See MoreSee Less
2 weeks ago ·
