What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Free Article
A Doorway to Freedom
When was the last time you felt spontaneous joy or peace?
It might have arisen at the sight or sound of something beautiful — sunshine on snow, a loved one’s smile, the extravagent colors of sunset, a child’s laughter. Or it might have come at the end of a long, exhausting day, or even in the aftermath of intense feelings of sadness or anger.
Whenever it was, and whatever appeared to have caused it, the spontaneous awareness of joy, peace, and spaciousness is your natural condition.
That may be hard to believe. Most people spend most of their lives caught in experiences of frustration, anxiety, and reaction to others’ behavior. But it’s true nonetheless, and in my work with clients I am moved and humbled, over and over again, as they discover — remember — for themselves.
Do you remember the last time you felt that spontaneous sense of peace, joy, and expansiveness? Do you remember how it invited you to rest there, to experience Silence and stillness? Take a moment to recall how you felt, not just what you were thinking or doing. Remember how that feeling resonated in your body, your emotions, and your being.
Since the experience appears to arise out of nowhere, causeless and spontaneous, you’ve probably never been able to figure out how to get there — how to recreate the feeling. And so you may have discounted it as unreal, unsustainable, or an unfulfillable fantasy. Over time, as many of my clients have described to me, these moments may have become more and more rare, until ultimately you even doubt your memory of them.
Nonetheless, that is your natural condition.
Look back into your memory with curiosity, and you will almost certainly discover a single common factor. In those moments of clarity, peace, and stillness, everything was ok. You weren’t trying to change anything, achieve an experience, or reach for something you didn’t have.
You were simply allowing everything to be exactly as it was.
The contrast you feel between this expansive peaceful awareness and your contracted feelings of disconnection and struggle is your pointer to a deeper understanding of what’s really true for you. The expansive awareness is “true north,” and everything else is, quite simply, a distortion.
What does this mean from a practical standpoint? I’ll write in more detail about this next time. Here’s a brief overview.
An invitation
When you notice that contrast between spaciousness and contraction, it’s your invitation to look. Your usual reaction when stress, frustration, anger, or other supposedly negative feelings arise may have been to avoid them. You may have pushed them away, tried to convince yourself you weren’t really feeling them, or any of a host of other denial tactics. Of course, that doesn’t work, as you’ve probably noticed.
Instead, accept the invitation to observe and notice what’s happening.
Be with it
Allowing yourself to just be with a feeling may be strange and unfamiliar for you at first. It may not even make sense initially.
Being with a feeling is exactly that: just experience it. Think of a time when you just were with a friend. You weren’t doing anything, you weren’t going anywhere, you weren’t even talking. But you were there with each other, you were aware of each other’s presence.
That’s what it means to “be with” your feelings. There’s nothing to do, nothing to transcend or change. Just be in the experience of what you’re feeling, whether that means allowing tears, shudders of fear, the tension of anger, or whatever else may arise.
Observe
As you allow your feelings to arise, observe what’s attached to them, or what they’re attached to. What thoughts, experiences, or beliefs are associated with what you’re feeling?
In observation, you step back from “being” the feeling into “having” the feeling. The feeling is not who you are; it’s something that’s arising in you in this moment.
Allow movement
Just as being with your feelings means not pushing them away, so it also means not clinging to them. As you sit with and observe your experience, notice any tendency to interfere with its flow. For example, you may find yourself hanging on, trying to immerse yourself as deeply as possible in the feelings in order to convince yourself that you’re really experiencing them.
But that’s not necessary at all. Instead, when you allow movement to happen, the feeling will usually, and quite naturally, dissipate by itself.
In my next article, I’ll talk about what to do when movement doesn’t happen, or when you feel as if a deep, persistent feeling or belief is haunting you and refusing to release.
In the meantime, drop me an email and let me know your experience with this. It’s a powerful approach that helps my clients relax into deeper experiences of awareness and what’s true for them, and it’s my hope that it will do the same for you.
“You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.” Malcolm X, 1925-1965, African-American Muslim minister, speaker, and activist.
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