Teachings

This little construction of lichen I’m just now gazing upon, exotically designed, whimsically colored, its spongy tendrils of greenish gray dotted at their tips with crimson, like something out of a Star Wars movie — something a child might produce with big bright crayons — it is the way it is because it works well, just the way it is, to keep itself alive. None of it is made for our pleasure. No entertaining God assembled anything with our delight in mind.

Yet it bemuses the human being, who pronounces the lichen “whimsy,” whose eyes see what it names exotic. Meanwhile, the plant simply is what it is, as the human is. It’s the same with this hillside I call beautiful — all the varieties of green, the birds in their busy communication it pleases us humans to call “song,” as if its function were aesthetic, or arose from joy.

* * *

Are the birds happy? Does it occur to them to enjoy life, or to feel morose when things don’t go well? Do they lament when it rains? That woodpecker who came, soaked, to my suet feeder: was it relieved when the sun finally came and did its drying work? The sympathizing human with her face at the window, making compassionate note of every saturated feather, the way bunches were clumped together like after a shampoo and towel-dry — did it ever occur to her that the woodpecker wouldn’t think to mind the rain?

Just do what you are doing. Don’t mind it. Don’t label it.

Birds aren’t “smart” enough to be crazy. Only humans have the brains to mind, to see the rain as off-putting, to perceive the hillside on a sunny morning as beautiful, whereas if rain is falling to pronounce the weather bad. Does the bird, huddling in the branches, wish the water would relent? It wouldn’t occur to an animal to wish, to be frustrated. To see the day as beautiful, or too full of things to do. Yet in some ways the woodpecker works harder than we do, and minds not a drop of it. The bird does what it’s doing and nothing else. It’s not planning ahead to what’s next. Nor is it visualizing what it would rather be doing. A nonhuman animal has no name for the sheer surge of aliveness, the purity of utterly focused attention, that fuels every moment of its life.

Only we need names. Words become stand-ins for reality. You may protest that we are not winged creatures. And isn’t our kind of language handy? Oh, it is handy. Fun even. Everything in its place though. We insert words between ourselves and the real. We look through language, through concepts. Words are interpretive lenses, and we become so accustomed to that kind of looking that we no longer can see, unimpeded. We invent tomorrow and yesterday, and today is lost. Let alone this now!

We find so many things to mind, to wish otherwise, that we never feel the plain aliveness fueling our animal selves. It’s the same vitality felt by the wet-headed woodpecker, working at the suet it pleased me to call “mine.” My suet, my woodpecker. My idea of how unfortunate it was the bird had gotten soaked, and how glad it would surely be when the sun toweled it dry. Talk about projecting.

* * *

This is what we do. We don’t know what it feels like to yield, to just be-with. To be awake, present. To feel our plain, unelaborated aliveness. We too work all day, as other animals do. Nor is this writing an injunction to go out into nature. It might appear that way, but no. Plenty of us are far from woods or the ocean. It’s an invitation to do what we do (work, talk, vacuum, drive, pay bills, help a kid with homework, wait in line at the store) — to do each thing as though it is okay to be doing that, and ONLY that, just then. As though there is no need to go ahead in the mind to the next item, or to the one prior.

If you could open a book of recipes alphabetically arranged, and open it to the letter P, and come to the makings for the delectable thing called peace, this is what you would find for ingredients. Just do what you are doing. Don’t mind it. Don’t label it. Do it with your pure attention. If your mind needs to be there too, let it do its good work.

If you’re balancing your checkbook, or explaining the order of things to your colleague, or marshaling a set of arguments for your child (who cannot see why doing homework matters), then press that wonderful noggin into service. Let it rip. When it’s done its job, allow it to grow quiet. If your mind isn’t needed for what is here and now — if you can wait in line without thinking about how to stand still and breathe (just do it!), without needing to pay attention to the shirt on the person in front of you — then your mind can be empty and airy and comfortable. This is the makings of a peaceful life, or at least a peaceful moment . . . which is all there is, anyhow. Ever.

Does the woodpecker think Boy, this suet sure is tasty? Does it remember the suet that was there last week and do a comparison of which was better? The bird is not grateful. Nor is this writing about gratitude. It’s about what-is. The suet the creature is putting its beak to just now is the suet that is. The other suet, from a week ago, has long since dropped from the woodpecker’s vent feathers to a branch below. That ancient meal has meanwhile fueled the muscle of the glorious wings, the swallowing of a subsequent berry. Each thing has had its effect, its outcome.

* * *

A person might think the mind is its own world, having its own terrible momentum, that there is nothing to be done about the life inside the cranium. It seems to carry on independent of any desire for peace that might show up around the edges, wistful, like a courting lover with no expectation of ever really coming there to hang its hat, put its feet up, and stay awhile. Some might suppose (as I once did) there can be no change in the tyranny that reigns inside the wordy head, so brimful of its own history, its dreams and grudges, its idea of what a life is supposed to look like, how the world ought to be.

You might believe this is just the way it is, that the mind has a life of its own, nothing to be done about it. That quiet well-being has to do with us and everybody around us being happy enough, fed and housed enough, safe enough — that peace is about the wars all being over, and somebody sane and good running the government, or at the very least our workplace. The idea that inner well-being is to be had when things on the exterior are roughly in order.

But life isn’t like that, or haven’t you noticed? Things on the outside will keep on being what they are, right up until the day the brain shuts down, and even after that, though we won’t be noticing.

Can you imagine that peace could be had, somehow, even while the mind carries on muttering to itself, running the way it has, morning-noon-and-night?

* * *

The only peace that’s to be had — the deep contentment of the woodpecker with the wet head, not glad when the sun comes out — the only one that’s a keeper, that cannot be rattled by what-all goes on, has to do with something in us, something we’ve already got, and it does not live in the mind. The mind is a noisy thing. It’s been taught to be that way, and it can be untaught.

We have more to say in the matter of mental racket than we half dream. Not by going at it via a full frontal assault. But by a little sneak around to the back side where the plug is, where the energy supply is that keeps it all going. Slip it out of the socket. Just by paying attention to what’s happening right now inside you. Don’t mind it. Don’t proclaim it bad. The plug slips out all by itself, simply by your observing the havoc of the mind.

Awareness is clean and clear: it simply sees. It has no agenda, no goal — to fix, complain, celebrate. Awareness is like light itself. It illumines what is before it. And most of the time what is within its field of seeing — if only we will tune into this — is the havoc being wreaked by the assessing mind.

Oh my friend, do tune into this capacity that is your innate equipment. You can see yourself thinking. Discover this, if you have not yet. Realize that if you were to wake up, spiritually speaking, it is there you would dwell ever after, in utter peace — however hard outer life might be, however much of a disaster the present moment may be.

I wish you well. This month’s podcast episode will address this same topic.

Jiddu Krishnamurti would sit very still before vast crowds in India and all over the world. People traveled great distances to be with the man, to take in what he had to offer. He referred to himself in the third person: the speaker, he would say. All of them sat together in the scorching heat of what his listeners tried so hard to understand.

What he embodied. What he lived.

Even when he was quite old and in decline, he would sit with them. Riches poured from his frail lips, from that ferocious, tender heart. Those before him drank in his words, longing to draw them into their own dear selves, so that they might be like the speaker.

He lamented all his life that he never seemed to get through. They kept supposing it all to be too complicated.

* * *

I never sat with him.

I understood what he was aching to get across to people. Though it was after the fact. It was some time after the thing had already happened to me that I came upon him. I sat with K’s words. When I watched talks of him (long dead by then) or read words in his books, it helped me to get what had happened inside myself. Oh, I said again and again. He was like this too.

What a blessing he was to me. Long after his death, I wrote a poem to thank him. It’s included in Love Incarnate. The lines are spoken to Krishnamurti, but really, the poem is “addressed” to those who have eyes to see, hearts to drink in the radical truth of their dear selves.

* * *

If only the thousands who came to sit with him, over the decades, could have seen how simple it was. How in the intimacy of one’s own heart it could all be known, shiny and silvery in the light of their innate pure awareness. What they (what I, the first five decades of my life) could not see. How it all was obscured by the dust and mess of what human beings kick up, the mold and residue of our ordinary confused lives. What miracle might have unfolded, if only a person could soften to herself, to himself.

What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment.

If only we could let go of trying to wake up. Let go of angst, of time and its frenetic little dance. Unbutton the hot, heavy, suffocating clothing of all prior experience. And so come to encounter directly the truth animating all existence, our own blessed selves.

* * *

What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment. Flawed and imperfect though it may be. No matter where a person has been before, what we think has been learned there, what wisdom accumulated: we dig and dig to get at the truth.

See how useless it is.

Here you are. Open your eyes, your mouth, your arms, your heart. The only real thing is this, here, now, just as it is. You are it. You are the moment, the atmosphere in which the only real is. Oh, not the you you’re used to thinking is reality. That is insubstantial, flimsy as gauze, readily burned as parchment. The light shines through it.

Let the light get hotter and hotter till the edges begin to singe, crisp, dissolve. Feel your blood grow warm with your own dissolution. Forget whatever might have been useful to you in the past. It is not useful here. If it taught you, you are taught. You do not need to remember it: it has done its work. There is no need to keep going over and over it in your mind.

Krishnamurti didn’t waste time. He didn’t know how. Every pore of him was alert, always. How he loved the world! His natural mode was stillness, even when he was in motion. He loved to take long, brisk walks. Each moment fresh and new.

Do not hide from the present. When you do that, you rush toward death. Why hurry? Hook your finger in the finger extended to you. It is your own. It wants to dance. For God’s sake, dance. Soon enough the curtain drops.

Most of us are (or have been) addicted to something. I used to be addicted to food. I have long been addicted to coffee. My son was once a heroin addict. Both of my parents were at the mercy of cigarettes. Smoking was the cause of both of their deaths. They tried to stop, to no avail.

Cigarettes killed my beloved father when he was 52 and I was only eighteen. Even after watching his agony from lung cancer, my mother was unable to let the habit go. Twenty years later, she finally quit — cold turkey — but only after she registered that something in her body had gone terribly wrong. Too late.

It’s an old story, isn’t it? Addiction has a person by the throat. Whether it’s you or somebody you love.

* * *

Nobody decides to become an addict. It doesn’t happen because we are flawed or wicked. It happens mostly because we are hurting. We seek relief from pain or stress or some awful thing in our past. Sometimes it’s grief that drives it. We cannot bear fully to feel whatever has got us in its fist. Resorting to a substance or some unhealthy behavior is a way of averting the eyes, defending the heart.

We do not like to feel pain, so we naturally seek escape.

This too is all familiar. You know it well, if you are addicted to something or are close to someone who is. Whatever has us in its grip really has us, and “deciding” to change the dynamic typically accomplishes very little.

Even relatively benign addictions, like food and money, can define our sense of ourselves. For some years my financial situation was dire, leading ultimately to filing for bankruptcy. Through all of this, money became the equivalent of my worthiness as a person. I felt a huge amount of shame because of being perennially broke.

I share this with you only in case it might be a window into something kindred in yourself.

* * *

What a miracle it was when the day ultimately came that money was . . . just money. A means of exchange: that was all. Neither good nor bad, unto itself. Money had no inherent meaning. It was the same with food. For years food had represented comfort, escape, a way of coping with distress. After awakening, at some point I noticed that food was about hunger and nourishment, about something tasting yummy. It didn’t “mean” anything anymore.

In both cases, it was as though I’d had my finger stuck in an electric outlet, and abruptly my finger was out. No charge any longer. Both commodities — money and food — were now simply (benignly) resources! Dollars could be exchanged for things wanted or needed. Food nourished my body and tasted yummy.

What a relief. But here is the deeper point, which you already know, if you have looked at this yourself: we do not like to feel pain, so we naturally seek escape. It is no wonder addiction is rampant in our tormented nowadays world.

I am not here to offer an “answer” to addiction. What I wish for you is that you are able to let the dynamic turn a light on to what underlies it, whether it’s operating inside yourself or in someone you are close to. Not so you can change anything at all necessarily. If you have ever tried to “help” an addict, you have surely discovered how very little a caring observer can accomplish.

* * *

As my son memorably said to me, when he was still using the drug, “I know you’re right, Mom. But until I’m ready to stop, I cannot stop.” I recounted the particulars of this in Love Incarnate, my most recent book.

Oh the agony of a parent watching her child at the mercy of a drug like heroin! My son and I were close even during his years of using. I knew well that he could die any day. He stole from his father and from me. Lies were his modus operandi. It took me a long time to learn that there was nothing I could give him (a car, cash for food) that he wouldn’t parlay into the next fix. Nothing I could do to help him but just love him.

The real miracle was that once he walked away from the drug — now ten years ago — he never went back. How rare that is! But when he was done, he knew he was done.

And had he been using in the nowadays era, with fentanyl so rampant in the drug supply, he surely would not be alive today, considering how many times a day he used. My daughter’s first boyfriend might still be living now.

Some addictions are more lethal than others. Dead is dead.

* * *

It was when I was a teenager that the Surgeon General came out with the news that cigarettes were a killer. My own growing-up house in Miami (all the windows closed to hold in the air conditioning) regularly contained the smoke of five or six packs per day of Salems and Lucky Strikes. I screamed and yelled at my parents to STOP. I tried throwing their cigarettes in the trash.

They tried with all their might to quit. It did not work. Both died anyhow, very young. My kids never had grandparents.

So many years later, I was to have yet another example of what it’s like when a substance grips you, when you are at its ghastly mercy. Only in the case of my son, the day came when he was able to say goodbye to his murderous habit.

Once upon a time, I was addicted to the approval of others. I set aside so much of my deepest heart’s desire in the name of winning that. Nor was I able truly to rest, to stop pushing myself, to grant myself the space to just sit still. Smell the roses, as we say. All of which led ultimately to what we used to call a “nervous breakdown.” Though it was devastating at the time — I was unable to work for months, could not leave my house, for the most part — it was one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

Sometimes that’s what it takes, eh?

May you (or your loved one) not have to go through what I did. But hey: I’m still here! As are you, my love. You are reading this. I wish you and all you love the very best.

Among the things we don’t have forever to do is express our gratitude to someone significant in our lives. This could be a person who is presently important to us, but it may just as well be somebody from long ago — someone we have never forgotten. Very possibly a person having no idea of their enduring impact.

We do not have forever, dear heart. There are some things that just should not be put off. One of you will die before the other. There is no telling when your last chance will be to express what’s in your heart. It takes two to communicate, a giver and a receiver.

Have you ever been stunned by the abrupt demise of someone?

Is there someone like this in your own life, current or long-ago? Pay attention. These things matter.

* * *

Such brimming joy has come to me, these recent years, because of (at long last) reaching out to a person of long-ago significance. People I’d had no contact with in decades. I wrote snail-mail letters or emails to them saying I’d never forgotten the role they played in my life. A choral conductor, a physician, a high school boyfriend. What a delight it was! I heard back from several of them — one of whom was to die not long after.

It may be a family member, one who has no idea of their favorable impact on you. Yes, relationships with significant people (especially kin) are often complicated. Never mind: it matters to say such things. Perhaps it’s someone you once worked with. A person whose shaping influence came in an era of your youth, and you remember them to this day.

Do it.

* * *

You may have noticed that death does not send an advance notice of its upcoming arrival. Have you ever been stunned by the abrupt demise of someone — courtesy of a car accident, for instance? See what I mean?

If anyone has ever let you know how they appreciate you for something, whether ongoing or in the past, you know how moving that can be. While this is not the “reason” to go ahead and open your mouth about the unexpressed thing — until now, tucked inside yourself — perhaps the recollection of such an encounter, when it was you on the receiving end, will inspire you to go for it.

A few days ago, just after a snowstorm had blanketed my dirt road in inches of the white stuff, I stopped a plow guy clearing the road. He was very busy; there was a lot of snow. But we made eye contact, and so he paused, put his window down. I told him how much I appreciate what he’s doing. He lit up. It meant a lot to him. Saying thank you can be an ordinary, fleeting gesture; it need not be momentous. But it does feel good to be seen, doesn’t it?

Sometimes these expressions are one-way. I have written to very well known people to let them know of my gratitude, aware as I am that they are surely deluged with communication. One time it was to thank a U.S. President; another, I composed a letter to an admired author. Of course I know I will never hear back; I don’t need to. It’s enough to get it down — to click send, to stick a stamp on the envelope and drop it in the mailbox. (And once in a blue moon, I have received an appreciative response. Surprises everywhere.)

* * *

It is courtesy of one such dear being that I am able to offer these teachings to you: she is my website person, Nicky Hardenbergh. Not only is she the brilliance animating the entire Jan Frazier Teachings enterprise; on top of that behind-the-scenes talent, Nicky is a gifted photographer whose lovely images — like the one above (see?) — grace the teachings. Nicky’s generosity knows no bounds.

This website is a true collaboration between two people carrying a high level of trust. We are able to laugh together. The miracle of such ease in a “professional” setting is like pure gold to me. We appreciate one another. Nicky is well aware of my gratitude to her. But it’s high time that I acknowledge her publicly. And so, before the eyes of “the world” (my readers), I am saying Thank you, Nicky Hardenbergh.

Neither of us being a spring chicken, I don’t have forever to thank her publicly.

* * *

And by the way, this can all apply in equal measure to saying I’m sorry. Not long ago I expressed my heartfelt apology to someone very much in my ongoing life. Ever since then, our relationship has been vastly improved, as has the degree of trust. All of which has benefited those around us. It’s never too late . . . well, until it is.

Don’t wait, love. Do it. Now — while they’re here to tell. And while you’re here to say it.

Maybe like me, you sometimes tell yourself “I need to do this.” Every now and again, it can be useful to pause in the forward momentum — especially if you feel you’ve been pushing yourself, physically or otherwise — to ask “Do I really have to do it? Right now?”

What’s driving you to keep in motion? Is it that there is actually so much to get done that there can be no space for doing nothing? For simply holding still and feeling yourself breathe? Feeling yourself just be here?

Watching how you’re pushing yourself?

* * *

The way to wake up in an enduring way is to be awake right now. When somebody is the “big” awake, one of the features of that condition is that they are steadily seeing what they’re doing in this moment. They are being real with themselves, however potentially alarming or “risky” it might seem to do that. So what we’re exploring here, in this business of want and need, is about a much larger thing than it appears, on its face, to be.

If you’ve been at this seeking thing for a while, you may be forever casting about for a way to get there.

The means and the end are the same. Remind yourself of this as often as it dawns on you, however much it may bewilder or frustrate you: because if you’ve been at this seeking thing for a while, you may be forever casting about for a way to get there. There is the aching desire to discover a means to an end.

Being in the now is the “way” to wake up, to become free.

Sometimes being in present-moment reality takes the shape of stopping the momentum and registering how you’re driving yourself forward. How much (maybe) it hurts.

* * *

In my own case, while I do have plenty of space in my average day to just sit, be still, reflect, there are nevertheless occasions when I seem to have an awful lot to do. Maybe too much for your average stretch of hours, especially if it involves stressing my aging body.

I have learned the hard way that if I hurry, if I try to cram too much into an average day, I will likely pay a price physically speaking. I could get hurt; I could injure or frighten my cat.

I am a lifelong learner, in every sense of the word. If there ends up being some kind of cost to hurrying, I am generally able to grow quiet, to ask myself, “Why was I pushing? Is there some lesson in this?”

Telling yourself I need to do this can be an invitation to look into how enthralled you may be with other people’s opinions of you (as I once was). Or what a creature of habit you may be (and that is me). Seeing yourself at such a moment can have the potential to open a door to examining usually-buried things about yourself.

So if you can hold still for a few moments, giving yourself the space to get real about potential underlying motivators, valuable clarity can come.

* * *

All my life I’ve had the tendency to push myself; indeed, it was the cause of the emotional breakdown I had many years ago. Just because a person wakes up, spiritually speaking, doesn’t mean they cease being, in some sense, who they’ve always been. The difference is that post-awakening they are much more likely to be conscious of their propensities — to watch themselves doing whatever-it-is.

What a teacher this tuning-in can be!

Then there is the question “What do I really want to do?” It’s the sort of space we don’t typically grant ourselves — to pose such a question, let alone create the space for enacting. As in, if I knew this day were to be my last, how would I want to spend it?

But it needn’t be grand in that way. Anyhow, only one of our days is to be the final one. Every day is precious! Consider the idea of a luscious little window in the day in which it’s possible to “indulge” yourself. Just to be still a moment, go into your heart, your body, and say: What might I really like to do for a few minutes today? An hour? Once in a blessed moon, the entire day?

Just ask the question. If today isn’t realistic, tuck it away for one day soon. You needn’t “deserve” it, in the way we ordinarily think of such things. Only, don’t put it off forever.

It’s just that — well, what is life for? What is it about, in the end? Every now and again, when you notice yourself keeping in motion, “needing” to do one thing and another, hold still and put that oh-so-useful question to yourself. What if I knew today was it?

My just-released podcast episode (“Visiting the Future vs. Living In It”) may be of use to you.