The Joy of True Meditation

FOREWORD BY KELLY BOYS Life has a simple and fiercely kind invitation for us: to be as we are the in the face of what is. True meditation, an easily disappearing yet well-worn path on the journey home to ourselves, is both difficult to define and predictably trustworthy in its unfolding. It encompasses a genuine encounter with all of who we are, as well as all of who we take ourselves to be that won’t hold up in the light of honest, compassionate inquiry. The path unfolds along essential lines, along emotional and existential crevices and outcroppings that life displays within and around us. To accept the invitation to this essential journey home requires courage. Oddly enough, sometimes that courage shows up as a desperation, a surrender, an up-giving… or as total and complete ‘cowardice’ as we can’t bear to look, to feel, to experience whatever is here. And yet, here we still are. Asleep, awake, leaning in, leaning out, encountering this present moment. Just as we are.

This gesture invites us to embody a warm, holding presence, an unflinching capacity to fundamentally welcome and be all of the beautiful muck and mess of the human life. It is deeply intimate and leaves nothing out. It forsakes nothing, and includes everything. The moment itself contains within it the seeds of all we need to meet the moment. As we meet and welcome whatever comes, feeling our breath, bodies, the pulsing existence at our core, we become welcoming itself. We discover, as we lean in, that this welcoming presence is essential to who we are.

The clear seeing that comes from this kind of radical welcoming presence can usher in with it compassion, ease, shocking insight, laughter, loss of a sense of self and prior orientations, and relief. Deep relief—from the game, trap or prison of our minds. As we lean in to our breath, feelings, emotions, sensations, and thoughts, we discover things aren’t as we thought they were. The fear is less scary than it seems, the anger less threatening. Our disowned, unwanted, unloved parts begin to come home, to be just as they are in a space that does not refuse them. We offer them a place in our heart, mind, and being that is free from the violence of self-refusal. Even self-refusal is welcomed; in fact…

What I have seen and experience in myself and in others is that we share a longing for this simple welcoming presence in which to meet our tenderness, vulnerabilities, hopes, and fears. In the…

There is good news: a deep trust arises as we embrace this path. We learn, whether over time, or because we have no other choice but to learn quickly and suddenly, that trust comes in each step, each breath, each plunge we take into the present moment without our former scaffolding. It’s like falling back into your friends’ arms without looking—it’s scary but deep down you know you will have a soft landing. The truth of things, the rawness and reality of life in all of its display, becomes far safer, far softer, than our ideas ever were. The fear, the anger, the heartache may not…

Jeff weaves us into and out of every corner the mind creates to defend against the simplicity of this moment, displaying the tapestry in all its fullness so we’re sure to remember that life is so much wilder and more free than we could ever have imagined. These thoughtfully and bravely written pages include many invitations: to our aloneness, to our freedom, to our deep rest which we may have so long held at bay. His words beckon…

By being who he is: a poet, lover, and madman in the best sense of the word, Jeff offers words of encouragement whispered into our tired ears and minds, meant for our dazzled, wild hearts to receive.

The Light of meditation. The Light of Oneness. The Light of my true self. Mine is a story perhaps not dissimilar from your own. I believe we are all ultimately on the same journey back home… to the present moment. To the here and now.

I was exhausted all the time, profoundly tired on a very deep soul level. Entire school holidays I would spend hiding in my bedroom, numbing myself with computer games, movies and food, and generally longing for a different life. I ached and had tensions all over my body, which I saw as an enemy and was repulsed by.

I had given up on all my hopes and dreams. From an early age I had wanted to tell stories, make movies, inspire people, maybe even change the world, but I was petrified of failure and rejection, and dreaded my shameful insides being seen, and so I blocked off these risky creative passions. I lived outside of my body and outside of the present moment and in the fantasy world of the time-bound conceptual mind, in daydreams and nightmares, in convoluted philosophies and distant worlds, in pasts and futures, and always, always in regret and anticipation. I was homeless, divided from my true sanctuary and place of refuge. I had become separated from God, alienated from the Life Source, wrenched from the Divine Mother.

And then, one ordinary day, all my defences against life, all my resistance to being alive, all my conditioned protection against the pain and pleasure of raw experience, started to break down. All the repressed unconscious material, all the thoughts and feelings and desires I had held down in order to appear ‘normal’ and ‘civilised’ started leaking, then pouring, then gushing into conscious awareness. Pandora’s Box had broken open inside of me. I could no longer run from the darkness within, no longer push life away and seek refuge in the conceptual mind; there was no longer any safe haven to be found there. I was being called to face life.

But I did not die. In fact, I was beginning to heal. The old, unhappy ‘me’ was beginning to break down. My no to life was burning up and my true self was coming alive. Something deep inside me was starting to say yes—yes to being alive, yes to not knowing, yes to the joy and the sorrow of existence, yes to the mess of being an imperfect human being, yes to the darkness and the light, yes to all of it!

But feelings are always safe. It is our defences that hurt so much. I will say that again. Our feelings are safe, no matter how intense they are. It is our tensing-up around our human feelings, our rejection and refusal of them, our unconscious efforts to destroy and annihilate and purify them inside of us, our shaming of our vulnerable inner life and the smothering of the inner child, which causes so much pain and suffering. Not the feelings themselves.

And when I couldn’t allow them, when the resistance felt too huge, when the inner rage felt volcanic, when grief came in waves and seemed like it could tear me apart, I felt something bigger bearing these energies, holding them, allowing them, something ancient and strong and infinite and eternal and loving and wholly unknowable to the mind. Even when the moment seemed unbearable, I could always bear it. Something inside me was indestructible. It could not be killed. It was soft, vulnerable, radically open and receptive, but it was also stronger and harder and more valuable than the most precious diamond, and brighter than a billion suns. I was beginning to discover my true nature; who I really was, before I had been taught to distrust myself, before the self-hatred and fearful conditioning, before the Fall. I was discovering my true identity as Presence-Awareness itself. As the Light that never goes out. As the Love that never dies. The great inextinguishable Fire within. At the core of my separation-shame-abandonment-death wound, new hope was born. At the heart of duality, nonduality. In the midst of darkness, in the belly of the beast, new life. A resurrection. A forgiveness, a second chance. A new beginning.

Some days I felt ecstatic joy and terrible despair in the very same moment. I was a glorious mess! A wild, inconsistent, unpredictable and uncontrollable mess! There was so much room in me now. So much life. So much space. Sometimes I thought I was going mad, with all this freed-up energy moving inside. Some days I thought about checking myself into a mental hospital. But maybe we have to go ‘insane’ to heal. Maybe ‘normality’ or ‘conformity’ was the disease I’d been suffering from my whole life. Maybe the straitjacket of ‘adaptation’ was finally burning up in a fever of healing. And I was learning to trust myself again. Learning to stay close to my own experience, without judging it, without trying to fix it, without trying even to be free from it.

I survived the death-rebirth process, began to be able to tolerate previously intolerable thoughts and feelings. And I gained new strength, found new courage, touched inner resources I never knew I had. I started to fall in love with life again on this strange planet called Earth. All of life, the joy and the sorrow too, the boredom and the confusion, the disappointment and the doubt and the longing and the loneliness. All was sacred now. All was beloved and fascinating to me, like it had been when I was very young. I no longer wanted to be free from my feelings, I wanted to feel them all, experience them all, taste them all. I was no longer afraid of my thoughts, I wanted to think up entire universes, create entire galaxies of imagination. I was an artist again, as I had been when I was very young, in love with all of creation, seeing life through new eyes, eyes full of innocence and wonder. I was a vast ocean of Consciousness, learning to love all of the waves of thought, feeling, sensation…

I wanted to be broken and whole at the same time. I wanted the positive and the negative of existence too. I wanted the bliss but also the heartache. I wanted the expansion but I also wanted the contraction. I wanted the “up” but I also wanted the “down” of life. I wanted desire and lack of desire. I wanted feeling and I wanted to feel the absence of feeling too. I was hungry for all polarities of being. The yin and the yang. The comedy and the tragedy. The agony and the ecstasy. The storm and the sunshine. The flaws and the imperfections and the unbearable perfection of it all; I wanted all of myself, the mess…

I started to speak my truth. Shaking, sweating, heart pounding, dry mouth sometimes, nauseated sometimes, deeply embarrassed and ashamed to speak my truth, but I spoke it. The raw, wild, messy, inconvenient truth of myself. Some ‘friends’ disappeared. Some stayed. New friends, new family, arrived, a new…

wrong thing, make mistakes, show awkward feelings, speak inconvenient words, and they wanted…

discovered: Presence. Deep Acceptance. This non-dual reality, this loving field where every thought and feeling is no less than divine. Where even our urge to die contains intelligence, consciousness, life. Me, who’d been the most frightened person on Earth, sharing with others from the depths of my heart! How unexpected! Soon I was talking to thousands of people all over the world in meetings and retreats, in one-to-ones and even online broadcasts, never knowing what I’d say, but trusting this inner voice anyway; never knowing what to teach or how to help, but allowing this ancient teaching to flow through the open and transparent channel of myself. Without a plan, without a clue about what I was doing, the path unfolded in front of me, step by step, moment by moment, and the role of ‘teacher’ was born—although I have never really seen myself as a teacher, more like a friend and ally. Someone who’s not trying to fix or heal you. Someone who just wants to meet you as you are. Someone who’s here to remind you of something you’ve always known.

What an epic journey it has been, back to the utter simplicity of this moment, back to the Garden of Eden, to this unique instant of life, the place we inhabited before we innocently stepped away into the sorrows of time.

The more I have learned to befriend, embrace and soothe my own sorrow, bliss, loneliness, anger, fears, my weird desires and wild uncontrollable urges, learned to love all the crazy voices in my head (without confusing them with reality), the more I have been able to accept and not fear them in you (and therefore be able to be…

I have found a great compassion for humanity by meeting my own pain. I have found a great compassion for others by first finding compassion for myself. Throughout all of my struggles, I had never been alone, for a single moment. There was never anything wrong with me, and there is never anything wrong with you. We are not born into sin, only a forgetting. We are taught to hate ourselves. We can un-learn this self-aggression. We can un-forget. We can remember what we always knew. We can heal from the most profound self-loathing and fear of living. We can recover from even the most…

The healing journey is not about “getting rid” of the unwanted and “negative” material within us, purging it until we reached a perfect and utopic “healed state”. No. That is the mind’s version of healing. Healing is not a destination. True healing involves drenching that very…

What we see as ‘wrong’ within us, our fear, our doubt, our loneliness, is just a part of us calling for our tender attention, like a baby crying for her mother —then screaming, then wailing, until she receives what she wants. Love. It is love—kind, mindful, non-judgemental, warm and curious awareness—that truly heals even our deepest wounds. Throughout this book I invite you in so many ways, through words and through the silences between them, back to this tenderness, back to this…

Every moment of your life, there is always the wonderful possibility to slow down, breathe deeply, and get curious about where you are. To begin again, to see life through the eyes of not knowing. To stop thinking about your life in the abstract, to stop seeking some other state or experience or feeling, to stop running towards another moment, and really fully experience this unique instant of existence.

and lovingly illuminating our own first-hand, real-time, authentic experience in the fire of present awareness. This is true meditation, the kind of meditation that can save your life: Pure fascination with this moment, exactly as it is.

1. THE MIRACLE OF BREATHING In any moment of our lives, we can become aware of our breath. It is our most wonderful anchor to Now.

Can you spend a few precious moments following them with your attention, up and down, up and down? Let the breath be as it is. Rising and falling, rising and falling, like a wave in the ocean. Don’t try to alter the breath. If the breath is shallow, let it be shallow. If it is deep, let it be deep right now. If it feels tight and restricted, or smooth and spacious, just be with that too. Don’t try to make the breath into something that it’s not. Don’t compare today’s breath with yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. Be with the breath as it is, in this moment, at this hour, on this day.

See! For a moment, as you pay attention to what’s here (and don’t pay attention to what’s not here) you are not caught up in the thought-constructed story of your life! For a moment, you have dropped out of the mind, the complex and dramatic narrative called ‘me and my life’, and into the living body. You have left the known world of habit and conditioning, and descended into the Unknown, into a great living Mystery.

And if you lose yourself again in the madness of the world, you can always ask the breath for help. You can invoke the great and timeless question, “Breathing, how are you doing, right now?” You can touch the mysterious ‘Breathing One’ inside with the greatest tenderness and fascination. And notice, ultimately you are not doing the breathing: you are being breathed.

2. How True Healing Happens

We were taught to fear and reject parts of ourselves, see them as ‘dark’ or ‘negative’ or ‘dirty’ or ‘sick’ or even ‘sinful’. We were taught to distrust ourselves, distrust the present moment.

We were taught to confuse our vulnerability with weakness, and see our sensitivity as something to be ashamed of. Hiding our true feelings, repressing our authentic selves and creating a conceptual ‘me’, an image, a persona (mask) or character to win love and approval, and becoming something we were not—this became a matter of necessity, survival. Yes, in order to survive, in order to win love, we brilliantly and creatively did all we could to push down, suppress, numb or destroy the unwanted, ‘dangerous, threatening, unsafe’ energies inside us, de-pressing our true selves and creating a role called “me” to please the world, to avoid punishment or ridicule or neglect, to win attention and praise, to keep our primary relationships intact. We became performers, doing anything we could to distract others from our ‘dark’ insides. We pretended to be strong when we felt weak, up when we felt down, confident when we felt scared, controlled and cautious when we only longed to express our silliness and spontaneity and creativity.

Unfelt and suppressed energies can become destructive and wreak havoc on our immune systems, feeding all manner of diseases, mental and physical. We may simply feel “dead while alive”, and not know why. We may turn to addictions and compulsive behaviours—alcohol, drugs, sex, internet, television, shopping, overthinking, overworking—in order to find temporary relief from ourselves. As Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” He was perfectly describing the experience of trauma. Jesus also said: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” Through this ‘bringing forth’, flushing our wounds with loving awareness, which is the essence of true meditation, even the deepest inner pain and trauma can be transmuted into medicine. In the presence of a safe friend, or therapist, or in the presence of God, ourselves, the mountains, the vastness of the oceans, or even a loving animal friend, we can find the courage to let our persona ‘break down’, and reconnect with the unloved parts of ourselves, ‘bringing forth’ those split-off shadowy energies into the Light of Awareness.

As the re-integration of healing happens, we may no longer be able live up to the image of the “cool, calm, collected spiritual practitioner”! We may scream, shake, weep, sweat, speak new and surprising words, or fall to the floor in exhaustion or in gratitude. We may look messy and broken and wild and ‘crazy’. We may feel and think things that seem ‘not like us at all’. We may feel we are about to die, or go mad, or lose ourselves completely. People we imagined were our friends may run from our chaos, or shame it, or try to ‘save’ us (to save themselves from their own discomfort). Our external lives may fall apart. Relationships may break up. Old reference points may disappear. New friends, new family, new lovers may arrive to support us in our process, to stay present with us as we fall apart and fall together and fall in love with our wildness again. As we return to the Garden. As we discover who we truly are, day by day, baby step by baby step. In the midst of the crisis of healing, in any moment, we can leave the story and return to simplicity, the ever-present field of meditation. We can feel our feet on the ground. We can breathe. We can let old and powerful energies move through us, like the ancient sky allowing a storm. We can begin, moment by moment, to trust the body and its mysteries. We can remember our Divine Capacity—how much life we can hold, painful and pleasurable, violent and gentle, positive and negative, sacred and profane. All thoughts and feelings have a home in us. All parts of our humanity are lovable, sacred, natural.

Whatever is alive here, just for a moment, can you bless it with your undivided attention? Can you be here with this anxiety, without trying to fix it? Can you stay with this emptiness, without trying to fill it? Can you flush this loneliness, this joy, this doubt with non-judgemental attention? Can you behold this present moment as an artist would behold his subject, as a lover would behold her beloved? Not as something to change or mend, but as something whole and fascinating in itself? And if you can’t be here, if you can’t find a place of allowing, can you be with that feeling—of restlessness or resistance or frustration or refusal—just for a moment, without trying to fix it, or heal it, or transcend it, or make it go away…?

3. FROM DEPRESSED TO DEEP REST Every human being on this planet, however happy they seem on the outside, is to some extent depressed, pressed down (‘de-pressed’) by the false self, exhausted on a deep soul level by their frustrated attempts to hold up an image, to play a character that isn’t really who they are. We simply long to stop performing and be authentic again. We long to wake up from the performance of separation, take off our costumes and make-up and tear up the script forced upon us by our family and our culture and simply be. When we repress our true feelings, desires, urges, longings, banishing them into the unconscious, living as a mask in this world, playing a cartoon version of ourselves, we become depressed, lethargic, numb and even suicidal. The experience of depression is not a mistake, then, but deeply intelligent. It is a wake-up call. Depression is an ancient, yet highly misunderstood, invitation back to deep rest, slowness, presence, truth. It is a call to come out of the mind and its fears and anxieties and resentments, and back into the living body and its senses and its spontaneity. It is a call to ‘kill’ the false self, the character we’ve been playing and be exactly what we are. To let go of the image. To stop running from the living moment. To touch into our wounds and traumas with great gentleness. To mindfully drench our intimate, first-hand experience with loving attention. To awaken to our brilliant rage, our awesome grief and our astonishing hidden terrors. To walk our path, to forge ahead with courage. To speak our unique truth out loud. To stop de-pressing the wildness and creativity inside. To come out of hiding and allow ourselves to be seen. To die to the false, and awaken to the real.

Depression was my unique call to discover the deepest kind of cosmic rest within myself. I am eternally grateful to the gods of the Underworld for making me so miserable that I started to question who I’d taken myself to be, and started to fall in love with the ground upon which I stood. I did not need to destroy my body or kill my mind. I needed to kill my image of ‘self’, to stop confusing a picture of ‘me’ with who I really was. I…

great paradox of awakening. We must ‘die’ in order to really live. We must ‘kill’ (let go of) everything we are not, in order to flourish as who we really are. We must die to the false notion that we are not One with the stars, the moon, the migrating swallows at…

4. STOP WAITING FOR ABUNDANCE When you were young, you loved to dream and let go of dreams. You dwelled in the Now. As you got older, you started to take your dreams, end-points and goals way too seriously, and your happiness became bound up with the future, and destinations became more important than the journey itself. You simply forgot how precious it was to be alive, each and every moment. Dream about what you want, of course. Have a vision for an extraordinary future, of course. But learn to let your dreams go, too, let them float off into the river of life, and then bring your attention back to the place where all dreams begin and end, are born and die: the present moment. Don’t use a dream or a hope as an excuse to disconnect from where you are, because where you are is way too valuable. Learn to love the place where you are. Lean into the in-between moments. Embrace the ordinary steps on the path. The moments of ‘nothing’. The seemingly inconsequential instants of life. The uneventful moments, the ones where nothing seems to be happening at all. Learn to love that nothing, the delicious sense of waiting, yearning, longing, seeking and anticipating ‘the next thing’. Learn to dance and breathe in the space between the wanting and the getting, the dreaming and the fulfilment of dreams. Learn to love not having what you want right now. Learn to appreciate the movie scenes in-between the dramatic ones. The tremendous sense of potential there, the beauty and fullness of the space, the delicious sense of absence, the pregnant and fertile void, the something of the nothing. Realise that ‘lack’ is only space, resisted. And even an ‘incomplete’ feeling, a feeling of emptiness, is so complete, a welcome visitor in the heart. Breathe into the belly, the chest, the tired head. Drench a sense of ‘lack’ with curious awareness. Infuse the body and its heaviness with light, saturate it with attention, fill it with love. Feel the weight and fullness of the torso, the shoulders, the neck, the legs, the entire body, abundant with sensation and the stillness between sensation. Even when…

5. STOP TRYING TO FIX ME. LOVE ME INSTEAD “Please, don’t try to fix me. I am not broken. I have not…

I know your intentions are loving! I know you really want to help. You want to serve. You want to take away people’s pain when you see it. You want to uplift, awaken, caretake, educate, inspire. You truly believe that you are a positive, compassionate, unselfish, nice, good, kind, pure, spiritual person. But I want you to know, honestly, friend, I actually feel deeply unloved when you try to ‘love’ me in this old way. It feels like you’re trying to relieve your own tension when you attempt to fix me. I feel treated like a broken object that needs mending. Under the guise of you being ‘kind’ and ‘helpful’ and ‘spiritual’, I feel suffocated, smothered, rejected, shamed, and completely unloved when you try to fix me. I feel abandoned in your love. Do you get that? I feel like you don’t actually care about me, even though on…

Without your pressure, your demand for me to abandon myself and be different, healed, transformed, enlightened, awakened, mended, ‘better’, I can better see myself. I can discover my own inner resources. I can touch my own powerful presence. I feel safe enough to allow and express my true feelings, thoughts, desires, hold my own perceptions. I no longer feel…

My senses feel less dull. Healing energies emerge from deep within. I feel light, free, liberated from your disapproval. I feel respected, not shamed. Seen as a living thing, not able to be compared with an image. You help me so much when you stop trying to help me, friend! I need my own answers, my own truth, not yours. I want a friend, present and real, someone to hold me as I break and heal, not an expert or a saviour or someone trying to stop me going through my process. And do you see, when you are trying to save me, you are actually abandoning yourself? You are running from your own discomfort, your own unlived potential, and focussing on mine? I become your ultimate distraction. I don’t want to be that for you…

6. IF YOU ARE FEELING SAD… If you are feeling sad, you are not in a ‘low vibration’. You are not sick or broken or unenlightened or far from healing. You are not ‘trapped in your ego’ or stuck in the ‘separate self’. You are not being negative, and you don’t need to be fixed, and sadness is not a mistake, because it’s life moving in you, and life can’t be a mistake, ever. You are just feeling sad, that’s all. It’s a feeling state playing out on the vibrantly alive movie screen of presence, that’s all. It’s not a problem that requires a solution or a Band-Aid. It’s a sacred and precious part of you longing…

7. RELAX, YOU ARE NOT THE DOER What is stress? Stress is the tension between this moment and your mental image of how this moment should be. Stress is your narrow focus on a mental list of ‘future things to do’, the imaginary pressure of ‘all the things that haven’t been done yet’, ‘all the other things I should be doing now’, ‘all the wonderful things I’m missing out on’. Stress always involves past-and-future-thinking, a forgetting of your true Ground and your only place of power: This moment, here, now, today. When your focus shifts from what is not present, to what is present, from ‘lack’ to what is abundantly here; when, instead of trying to complete a list of ten thousand things, you simply do the next thing, the one thing that presents…

8. THE RUPTURE AND THE REPAIR When our plans and dreams fall apart, what doesn’t fall apart? First there is the rupture. The status quo is shattered. The old safety is gone. Old wounds are triggered, the pain body resurfaces, buried trauma erupts from the depths of the unconscious. You feel disoriented, groundless, homeless,…

You encounter the strange space of Now, pure presence, raw, unprotected by old dreams, nothing to cling to. Even your outdated concepts of God crumble here. And then you remember to breathe. And you return to the safety of the present moment, and you feel your feet on the ground again, and you feel the weight of the body again, and you observe the madness of the mind rather than losing yourself in it. You watch your thoughts spinning out of control, but you, as awareness, are not spinning out of control with them. The world may feel out…

You commit to feeling it fully today, to not running away. A feeling is just a feeling, a flowing energy and not a solid fact, and presence can hold it as it flows. You wail, you weep, you scream, but you are repairing. You have broken to heal, ruptured to mend. Old energies have emerged only to be blessed with love, acceptance, tenderness, today; and there is only today. You only ever have to deal with life a moment at a time. Please do not forget this. You can’t go back to the way things were. You can’t un-see what you have seen. But you can be present, right now. And you can take each step consciously now, not automatically, habitually, but mindfully, with care. Finding gratitude for each extra moment you are alive. Thanking the air, the rain, the vastness of the sky. Thanking the feet and the legs and the spine as they keep you standing.…

9. YOUR OTHER HALF “I can’t live without you”. “You complete me”. “Without you, I’m nothing”. “Never leave me”. They sold you a beautiful lie about love. Nobody is coming to save you, you see. No prince on horseback. No Juliet. No “One Special Person”. No surrogate mother. No messiah, no saviour, no God who will take away all your doubts, your pain, your feelings of emptiness, that sense of separation and abandonment that’s been lodged in your guts since you were young. Nobody will be able to feel and integrate and metabolise your feelings for you. Nobody can do living and dying for you. Nobody has the power to permanently distract you from your inner journey. Nobody can own you or be owned by you. Nobody can complete you. Nobody is coming to save you. This is terrible, wonderful news. Your other half, your completion, your salvation, your ultimate purpose in this life, is not outside of you, you see, but deep within you. It lives as your very own warm presence, burns like the Sun within.

We just never learned how to be alone. If you can find or lose it, if you can be ‘in’ it or ‘out’ of it, if it can be given to you or taken away, if you have to fight for it, beg for it, manipulate yourself or others to get it,

if you feel you have to become worthy of it, deserve it, win it, hold onto it, even understand it, then it’s the mind’s version of love. It is the lie, not the reality. If you love, you are present. That’s it. Love is simple and kind and effortless. If you love someone, you are present with them. As present with them as you are with yourself. As present as the Sun in the sky, despite the clouds, the storms, the ever-changing weather. Do not confuse love with desire, then. Desire comes and goes. It burns brightly, or the flame extinguishes. But desire is not consistent, like love Do not confuse love with attraction. Attraction is beautiful, but it ebbs and flows, rises and falls like the ocean waves. It changes with the seasons, days, hours, moments. It is not ever-present, like love. Do not confuse love with warm, pleasant feelings, chemical feelings, limerent feelings of being “in love”. Pleasurable feelings turn to painful ones so quickly. Love is not pleasure nor pain, it is not ecstasy nor hurt; it is the field that endures, even as the bliss fades into despair. It is the space for all feelings. Do not confuse love with the urgency to possess someone or be possessed. Love is not infatuation. Love is not obsessive nor compulsive. Love does not cling. Love does not own anything; it is weightless, transparent, formless and clear. Love does not say “I need you for my happiness, my contentment, my life”. No, love is synonymous with freedom, with a wide open heart, with the willingness to feel every feeling, think every thought.

The most dangerous myth is the one that tells us that another person has the power to ‘make us happy’. No, no. Happiness, true happiness, the kind of happiness that cannot be bought or sold or neatly packaged, is identical with your own presence, which nobody can give to you, and nobody can take away. It is ageless and timeless and formless, yet as solid and real as the experience of reading these words now. If you look to another for happiness, you will always depend on them, always be afraid of losing them, and anxiety and resentment will rumble underneath your ‘love’. You will adapt yourself to please them, numb your most uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, close your eyes to the truth and live in…

That is not love, it is an addiction, addiction to a person and an idea. It is fear masquerading as ‘romance’. It is the lie. But underneath every addiction is the longing for home, for Mother in the deepest sense of the word. Find the deepest sense of home within yourself, then. Make your body your home and your mother, your breath your father, your belly your dearest friend as it rises and falls in the present moment, your hands, your shoulders, the way your face…

When you are not trying to win love, when you are not running from your own uncomfortable feelings, you can afford to truly love and be loved. Invite others into your love field; let them stay, let them leave, bow to their path and walk your own with courage. But do not for a moment buy into the lie that salvation lies anywhere except at the very heart of your exquisite presence, the place where there’s nobody to be saved and nobody to do the saving. The place of true meditation. The place where you touch life, and are touched in return, moment by moment… For you are The One, your own greatest lover, partner, friend, guru and Mother. And so you can say to yourself, every morning when you wake, and every night…

10. The Silence…

Many of us in the modern world would find even a few moments of such silence in a conversation awk-ward, uncomfortable, even embarrassing. Sometimes we speak not because we have anything important or authentic or heartfelt to say, not because we even want to talk really, but because we feel we have to. We feel uncomfortable, nervous, anxious about not talking. We speak in order to avoid the void, silence the silence, distract from the extraordinary absence at the heart of life. We speak in order to run from ourselves and each other. Slow down, friend. Get out of your head and into your body. Take a few moments to just feel your feelings in a conversation. Let yourself feel awkward and uncomfortable, vulnerable and a little shaky in the silence if you must. It’s just a feeling, it won’t hurt you, you can bear it, and the silence will hold it anyway. Take the risk of the other person sensing your feelings of awkwardness, or thinking that you’re boring or strange or have nothing to say. Hey, at least you are real! At least you aren’t hiding behind a wall of words. At least you are trying to connect in a deeper way. At least you have the courage to feel awkward and not distract yourself from that, not abandon yourself when you need yourself the most. Bring some space into your conversations today. Listen. Wait. Listen some more. Lean into the awkwardness. Respond from the heart, not the mind and its fears. Let your conversations breathe a little. Know that the other person is probably feeling…

11. THE BEST SELF-HELP ADVICE There is no self to help. The best self-help advice of all. When you try to ‘help’ the ‘self’ you reinforce an illusion: That there is a broken self today, an incomplete self that is ‘less than’ a future self. And you strengthen identification with a mind-made entity called ‘me’. An image. A mirage. You forget your nature as Presence itself. When you give up trying to help a self, you sink into an unconditional embrace: The embrace that is Life Itself. Where all your imperfections, your doubts, sorrows, joys and fears, your longings and your ecstasies, even your imagination of ‘self’, and your frustrated attempts to ‘fix’ it, or ‘help’ it reach a future perfection, are 100% embraced. Already. No self to save. No self to fix. No self to enlighten. No self to lose. No self to transcend. Just an exquisite moment. An unlimited divine perfection, shimmering through this human imperfection. Shining…

12. ON BEAUTY Beauty isn’t there in what you see. It’s there in how you see. There is a vast field of loving possibility where your presence meets the presence of the ‘other’. Yet there are not two…

13. EVEN WHEN WE CANNOT HOLD OURSELVES I was speaking with a young man about letting go of his ideas about the future, his images of how his life ‘should’ be, and embracing himself as he actually was, feeling his pain instead of…

Discovering presence can be a shock to the system, can begin to reorganise the entire psyche, release deeply buried feelings, urges, longings, fears. I understand that. I’ve been through it. “Yes, it is scary to lose all your hope.” “I’m terrified.” “Where is that fear? Can you describe it to me? Can you feel it in your body now?” “Yes. It’s burning… Fiery… Here… in my chest.” “Would you be willing to stay right there for a moment, feel that power in your chest?” Silence. “It’s hot… and I feel like… I feel like I want to kill someone. You know, I feel so pissed at you now. You’ve taken away everything from me, all my hope…” I stayed present. “I understand. Yes. So where do you…

“Yes. Yes. It’s huge. You’re feeling your own power. You don’t have to deny it any more, or act on it, just feel it now, for a moment here; let’s let it burn, honour it together”. “Wow. It’s a lot.” “It’s yours. Just allow it. Allow those sensations in your belly, heart, throat. Breathe into them, through them…” “I want to scream.” “Do it!” “I… I… I hate life!” “Louder!” “I HATE LIFE! I HATE EVERYONE! I HATE MY PARENTS!” “Yes! What else do you hate?” “I HATE YOU, JEFF!” Our eyes meet. A recognition. Love. Presence. Total acceptance. He bursts into tears, slumps in his chair, his body relaxes, he breathes deeply again. His grief and rage had been…