Category: Teachings

If not, it’s time for a change. Let me say that again: If you don’t cherish your every day, your moment-to-moment, gift your dear self with the space to sit with the truth of that. Don’t avert your eyes. Listen to your beloved self speaking that profound honesty-to-self.

You don’t have forever. You could die later today. (If you don’t believe it, ask yourself if anyone dear to you has ever shocked you by coming to an early demise, long before ever you could have imagined their disappearance from your life.)

Perhaps this is the moment you hold the mirror to your own face.

We aren’t here to work, to survive another day. To put up with one thing and another that drains us, that does not nourish, delight, make us giggle, tear up with joy. We are here to enjoy, to have fun. To (above every other thing) love.

* * *

Last summer I had six hummingbirds that flitted around the feeder I’d hung on the porch. They buzzed and dive-bombed one another and flew in and out with breakneck speed. (Did you know that in their tiny chests their wee hearts beat a thousand times each minute?) Utterly fearless, these creatures. I’ve had them zoom straight to my face, hover inches before me, as if to say into my gobsmacked eyes What on earth are YOU? (Such a privilege, that proximity!)

This summer there are two hummers. Next year . . . sigh. So what else is there but for me to linger out on my porch for as long as I can manage. To watch when they come. Because this one right here may be the last I’ll ever have the privilege of seeing. So I slow the hell down, pay attention. Grieve? No, not yet: the time for that will surely come. No, I celebrate the breathtaking beauty before me, the ferocity. What else can we do?

* * *

Looking all of this in the face can feel like a death. Oh, but it also can feel like a freshening spring morning, a waking up, a realization that life actually could be different. Better! Altogether worth living. Never mind (for now), the how of it. Just seeing the truth of how things are now — maybe have been, for so long you cannot recall a before — even slowing down enough to let all of that register in your beloved heart . . . Well, someday in the not-too-distant future, you may well look back on what you’ll see as a moment of truth and bow your dear head in gratitude.

You just might cry. With relief? Maybe. Regret? Don’t bother. (It’s a waste of life.) Maybe the tears will be gratitude leaking from your living eyes. Your not-done-yet eyes.

Tell me this: have you ever gazed upon someone else (perhaps someone important to you) and lamented how they were “wasting their life”? Perhaps this is the moment you hold the mirror to your own face.

* * *

Ask yourself (when you can summon the courage) this question: Do I habitually do things as a means to an end? So I can . . . get to the other side. Rest. Have fun. Be by myself for a bit. Or maybe so I can generate financial “security.” (As if.) Or impress others. Get my partner/parents/best friend off my back. Get a raise, a promotion. Do nothing at all.

Maybe it’s time to get off your own back!

If we’re not willing to look, it’s entirely possible nothing will ever change. Then the last breath comes, and the wondering How come I never saw this before?

Never mind the “how” of it. It will come to you all on its own. It will whisper to you when you’re washing your face, or dropping off to sleep. Or pushing yourself so hard to get things done, do them better, have somebody else APPRECIATE YOU, for once! Perhaps a tender little whisper that means you only well (does it have the ring of your own voice?) will say, You deserve to live a life of delight.

Please, oh please, listen to me. Listen to your heart.

* * *

Do you know any animals? What we call “pets”? Or do you observe someone else’s beloved creatures? Perhaps you have the privilege to observe animals in the wild, even in a city: birds soaring above, mice skittering, deer munching on yummy grass, spiders with egg sacs on their industrious backs, bees sipping from flowers somebody has allowed to keep growing. They are the finest teachers in immediacy. Be their students.

Do other animals (for we too are their kin) “know” their lives to be brief? Maybe not (but what do I know? nothing so far). But we do know that about ourselves. Our minds are both a torment — perhaps you’ve noticed — and a blessing. Those organs in our noggins have the ability to remember, to anticipate. To learn. To note trends, to see that it’s been a long time since there was a deep resting. A savoring, a giggly delight.

They can say: Okay, it’s time for a change. Oh yes (perhaps you’ve noticed) they can also say . . . I don’t want to look this in the face. Maybe I’ll try tomorrow. On and on it goes.

Then the life stops. Chances have run out.

It ain’t over yet, my love. Know how I can tell? You’re reading these words right now. Taking them into your beloved heart. Your oh-so-brief heart. Have fun! I will if you will. It’s a deal.

P.S. – Had you been thinking that the purpose of life is to “wake up”? What on earth is it to be awake but to be with what’s happening now? (So funny, eh?) And one last thing: soon you will be receiving an announcement for an in-person event I’m offering in Vermont this September.

When I first felt myself drawn to Siddha Yoga, my long-time spiritual practice, one of the things that most appealed about it was the recommended practice of noticing what was going on in my head as I moved through my day. Not like an aggressive gardener bent on rooting out weeds, but gently, curiously. Just observing. Seeing how I reacted, on the inside, to things that happened on the outside.

My children squabbling: how that generated heat in my body, which generated yelling, and sometimes grabbing. My husband phoning to say he’d be home a little late: how that made the remaining minutes of being a single parent seem to elongate, or multiply. Receiving a real letter from a literary journal (not the standard small slip of paper, rejecting my poem): how that swelled my heart, gave me a sense of being a “real” writer.

There was a causal relationship between what happened and how I felt about it.

* * *

Until I encountered this idea of noticing my interior as its own world, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that there was a separation between that inside reality and the one out there — the things that happened, the situations presently surrounding me. To me it was all one big integrated blob, the inner and the outer woven together in a way that made them a whole thing. One reality. As far as I understood it, there was a causal, inevitable relationship between what happened and how I felt about it. What I told myself about it, how I responded to it.

As my mother often used to say of her own behavior and attitudes, “I couldn’t help it.” I hated that she would say that, especially when it had to do with things about herself that I saw as signs of bigotry. The “colored” laborer working in the lot by our house, who asked little-girl me for a drink of water, and my “white” mother gave me an emptied-out peanut butter jar of water to hand him, instead of a drinking glass. I asked her why, and she said she couldn’t help it. When I took the empty jar back inside to my mother, after the man had quenched his thirst, she threw it in the trash.

Later, older, I chided her for that. But in some sense, I would ultimately understand, she really couldn’t help it, given who she was and the era she’d grown up in. To her, a glass that had had Black lips put to it would ever after be not altogether cleanable. She told herself she “couldn’t help it,” and so — believing it — in some sense it was true.

* * *

I might have prided myself on being free of my mother’s egregious version of bigotry. But the truth was, all my life, until I stumbled into Siddha Yoga, I believed as truly as she did that I couldn’t help feeling and believing what my interior insisted was true. You might say I couldn’t help being racially tolerant. Because of my conditioning, because of growing up in the mind-opening sixties, and going to a racially integrated school, I couldn’t help recognizing that people were people. My mother had her conditioning. If I had grown up in the 1930s, in a world where the races were sharply divided by a set of white people’s unquestioned assumptions, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hand that thirsty man a glass of water.

Of course, the real point of the business of observing the inner world is to see it as a conditioned place, the particular conditioning being not so relevant. I had conditioned myself to believe my little children should never squabble. Oh, I never had this thought consciously. (The most potent of conditioners are unconsciously held.) But the fact that I reacted to their uproars with such frustration, such heat, had behind it an unwillingness to accept what was surely inevitable with siblings. I didn’t want them to squabble. It was easier for me if they didn’t. I wanted them always to get along. It would make my day less hectic. Even just looking at that — at what I wanted, for them never to fight, never cry, never need my intervention — would bring into the moment a breath of calming air.

* * *

Until this practice of just plainly looking at what went on in my interior, without any judgment of what I saw, it simply never occurred to me that the source of my frustration, of my pretty regular suffering as a stay-home mother, was not my children’s behavior: it was my mind.

The inner world and the outer were starting to look as though they were separate, as they carried on quite independently of one another — not, as I had believed my entire life prior, that they were a single world, over which I had very little control.

My spiritual practice shone blessed light on one of the things that would become my great teacher: that reality out there is one thing and what I make of it is an altogether different reality. My kids were not causing me to suffer: I was doing that to myself.

I wish the same dawning awareness for you, my friend.

* * *

Here’s my sincere gratitude to those who responded to my acknowledgment, a couple of months back, that (like so many) I’m in challenging times financially. Your help has been a great blessing to me.

There are images for it. The box of treasure you sit on, extending your hand in begging. Though the box belongs to you, it never occurs to you there could be something inside it. Or this one: the jewel you know to be in a teacher’s pocket, and you’re so busy following the teacher, trying to get your hand in there, that you’ve never thought to reach Inside your own pocket, the one that goes everywhere you go. The geode, what it seems to be on its uninteresting surface, the amazement of what turns out to be concealed beneath the grime and dust.

When something cracks the homely rock that an ordinary, imperfect life seems to be, and the person whose life it’s been is dazzled by the preciousness that’s revealed, the feeling is always this: I knew all along. I didn’t realize I knew, but now I see somewhere in me I did.

The revealed thing is deeply familiar, like a part of your body.

The revealed thing is deeply familiar, like a part of your body. You have come home. You’ve been carrying home with you all your life, through all the troubles. All the time you thought you needed to recover, to patch together a life, to process, build self-esteem, make amends — all that time, there was something in you that had never been hurt. That had never harmed anyone else. All that time: heaven in your pocket, in that threadbare thing that is your life.

Your story.

* * *

This is what people report, when they wake up: they say, Oh my God! It could have been this way all along! They also want to know how on earth they missed it. What blinded them to something so obvious, so right-in-their-face. How can they have failed to see, all those years, what’s as ever-present and abundant as air, as light, wind?

How come everybody else doesn’t feel it, sense it, taste it? How can anyone not realize what they’re positively slathered in?

But the person who’s just mysteriously slipped out of the deep sleep knows how that can be. How every one of us misses this thing that’s just now become so obvious it’s like the light of a thousand suns: the only truth there is. Anybody who has (you might say) come to can remember what it was like before. Before: when the ebb and flow of life was cause for distress, or reason for satisfaction, relief. When all of that seemed to be what constituted a life, or what broke it. When hope and memory and longing were the fuel that kept the movement going.

A person who has “come to” looks around at others, recognizes herself, himself. Suddenly we are all the same — are all truly alike, whatever the particulars. We are kindred in our entanglement with event and circumstance. We wish things were different. But what is now known (more significant by far) is that we are also the same on the deep interior, the essence so sweet, so free, so utterly unburdened. So unworried about time, about loss and having.

* * *

When the essence comes to the surface — is known, felt, worn like the most luscious garment — when that happens, and there is the recognition that others have this same deliciousness within and yet do not feel it, there can be a little sadness, and bewilderment. (This happened for me.)

Or somebody may try to get their hand into this one’s pocket, now spilling with riches, as if this thing weren’t everywhere, always — as it if were possible to escape heaven.

This has been the way for millennia, this misunderstanding about who “had” it, about its being a kind of property, an achievement, a prize. Something to earn. The teacher (or the acquaintance, whoever it may be) says no, the kingdom of heaven is within. But who is willing to believe it? Who’s ready to set aside everything else, for this?

It is plain, it is bare, undecorated. It has no features. It is the beginning, what we start with. It’s like saying there could be a human body, a life, without carbon atoms in it, without electrons and a nucleus. This is not an achievement. It is about existence.

One teacher called it the ground of being. It is not about virtue, about wisdom or compassion or creativity, though surely these can be among its outward expressions. They ripen inevitably from it. But the ground of being does not have to work at kindness, at love. It needs to cultivate nothing. And being kind as a way to get to the elemental — as a route to what you fundamentally are — is roundabout.

And all the talking, all the writing, the head-scratching — it may be of little use. Open your eyes, just open them, the ground of being would say, if it had a mouth. If it had a mouth it would sing.

It would weep — with gratitude. And with aching that everyone, before long, would know the thing for what it is.

I gave birth twice, first to my son, later to my daughter. He was born Cesarean, to save his life. When it came time to birth his little sister, I was able to deliver her into her father’s loving arms by what was known as natural childbirth.

No pain medication. Only deep breathing, hours and hours (and hours!) of it. She came when she was ready to show her face. It was all smooshed-up and sticky. Well, labor and delivery had been rough on her too, not just on me. Some of my sticky insides, where she had dwelled her first nine months, was visible on her brand-new wrinkled body. Her father tenderly conveyed her to my cradling arms.

Hard to say which of us was more exhausted, mother or child. We looked and looked and looked at one another. It’s you! My God, what a moment.

It was the sweetness of absolute surrender.

To this moment of my elderly life (she’s been out of my body for nearly 35 years), labor was the most exquisite body pain I have ever experienced. It was also — are you ready? — among the most rapturous experiences of my life.

But this isn’t just about having a baby.

* * *

During the hours of labor (the better part of a day and night), the only reality was the one taking place inside my body and in the immediate scene. All the rest of the world had ceased to exist. A nurse within earshot said something about the kids getting out of school right then, and a voice in me whispered What? Are you telling me that ordinary life has . . . just gone on? While I’m lying here in agony?

If this isn’t about having a baby, what’s it about?

A couple of years after that day, I found myself weirdly missing the state I’d been in during labor. What the hell? I went to a hypnotist, who helped me “relive” the experience. Little by little I began to get it, to account for what it was had happened that day that I was lonely for.

It had to do with the radical surrender that was necessary for me to get through a single contraction. Even just one of them. What I ached to relive was the thing that happened when I gave in completely to the pain wrought by a contraction.

It was the sweetness of absolute surrender. But it also had everything to do with this: each contraction was the now. It was just THIS one I had to give myself to. Now, now, now. When the next one seized me, it was the same again. Be with that one. I could not bear even anticipating that more would come. One contraction after another, I was crushed in the arms of radical allowing.

To this day I can tell you that only a handful of moments in my long life has come close to this one I struggle so to describe. Understand: it was not exactly about “having a baby.” It was about turning myself inside-out with yielding. And what that felt like to the heart of me.

* * *

And what might this have to do with you, dear friend? Ordinary life asks of us one surrender after another. Most of the occasions are minor, not worthy of later recall, unlikely to deliver us into the hands of rapture. But once in a while — you may have noticed — life asks of us a mighty big allowing. Oh yes, it may hurt like holy hell, rather the way delivering a baby does.

But to bow to a thing, even an enormous one — the loss of your lifetime maybe, causer of unending grief — to say yes, this is what is, is to feel the entirety of a heartbreak, even one that holds the heart in its fist, crushing it.

Nobody wishes for such a sorrow. But anybody who lives long enough is likely to be handed such a thing. Look the truth of it in the face. As you can, feel the terrible pain. Not so you can “get on with it”; not so you can protect yourself. But because it’s real. You can avert your eyes from what’s happened, from the feeling in your body, your heart. But it will come back, flooding you with the truth of it all.

As you can manage, bow. Just bow. Consider it life’s version of meditation.

Who knows? You may be surprised (befuddled, even) by the curious taste of rapture around the edges of the agony. Rather the way I was about labor.

* * *

Now I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I offer it wishing to be a helpful companion on your inner travels. It’s not about selling anything, not about money. It is for that reason — that I didn’t want you to misunderstand my intent — that I’ve never done this previously. But life is short, and I want to help you however I can.

All I have wished for, in having this website, in offering private consultations and writing books and doing periodic teaching events, is to be of use to those who ache to know who they really are. What I have wanted is to help ease their suffering (whether or not waking up ever happens).

I post a new Teaching roughly every 4-6 weeks. These essays are offered without cost. If you would like to receive an email notification when a new one is posted, it’s best to subscribe. Every teaching I have ever posted continues to be available on this website.

I have written five books. (See the Purchase page for details. FYI, there was briefly an issue with ordering books through my website, but it’s been resolved.) The books are When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening; The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is; Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings on Awakening; The Great Sweetening: Life After Thought; and Love Incarnate: Twenty Years After Awakening. All are available in both paperback and digital format, excepting Opening the Door, which is an ebook only. Briefly, here is what each is about. When Fear Falls Away details the moment of awakening and the subsequent months of development and understanding. The Freedom of Being is more “teacherly” (and many have told me it’s been of great value to them as they grow increasingly self-aware). Opening the Door is a collection of long-ago teachings I had on this website. The Great Sweetening is a collection of relatively more recent ones. (It is now available through me and is less expensive than it is on Amazon.) I wrote Love Incarnate several years ago following the most significant awakening that’s occurred since the initial one. It tells what it’s like for me nowadays. The purchase page also includes several audio options.

Often when I’m speaking with someone in a consultation, they will allude to “your book,” and invariably it’s the first they mean. Of course it’s useful, a view into what waking up can be like. But if you were to ask me which of my books is of most benefit to seekers, I would unhesitatingly say The Freedom of Being and Love Incarnate.

I am happily available to talk with people who want that. See the Consultations page for details. I reserve Zoom for international sessions; all others are via phone.

For a time I produced a Podcast. I no longer record new episodes, but those I made continue to be available. Many have told me these have been very helpful. I have heard the same of the Watch/Listen pages.

Please let me know if you come upon links that are not working! Finally, I am beyond grateful for the kind Donations I receive, small or large, monthly or one-time. Money is tight for me nowadays, as it is for so many. (But there’s more than one way to be “rich.” There is no greater wealth than to know what it is to love.)

Thank you for listening!

A peaceful life can’t be provided for in a comprehensive way. Taking care of the imagined future, for instance, or reaching out to the larger surroundings to insure security and comfort, a certain way of living. These efforts are doomed.

How to have a peaceful life really comes down to a very small thing: how to have a peaceful moment. This is doable. It is, in fact, the only thing that is.

It’s the idea of trying to control or arrange or predict the circumstances of a life that is doomed to failure, doomed to just generate more uncertainty and anxiety. Not that a person can’t decide to live in one neighborhood versus another, or enter into this relationship but not a different one. It’s that no matter what you’ve laid out for yourself for circumstances, despite the big-picture choices you’ve made, the experience of profound well-being still comes down to what the moment is like.

A peaceful life comes down to a small thing: having a peaceful moment.

Because that is where life is actually experienced — in the present moment — and so it’s only right now that radical rest can occur, in a bodied way that feels authentic. Real. Delicious! Oh so delicious.

Every moment you live, the longed-for condition can come to be, regardless of the immediate circumstances. This is a radical idea. It flies in the face of so many assumptions.

* * *

What most of us do (what I did for decades) is try very hard to establish ourselves in a situation — living, working, loving — where we imagine we will be all right, maybe even happy. The assumption is that how we are inside is determined by what’s going on around us, in our lives.

This approach can seem like the only possible one. It goes largely unquestioned. (You would do well to be aware of anything unquestioned. Often that turns out to be the juiciest of all spiritual practices: to look hard at such an assumption.) There are a couple of problems. One is that everything is uncertain. You may have noticed this. No matter what a person sets up for circumstances, chaos will always be a factor. Change is inevitable.There is no possibility of absolute stability.

We don’t want to admit this to ourselves. So there is this low level of anxiety around the edges of all we put into place to assure happiness. All we have to do is look back over the most recent stretch of time to notice how very few things turned out the way we’d hoped or imagined.

* * *

The other problem is that however stable the set-up seems to be over any stretch of time, life still comes down to How does THIS moment feel? In other words, even the most successful provisions for outer well-being say nothing about how the person is doing on the interior in any given now. Even when the physical health is good, and there are rewarding things to do with time, and the economic and political situation seems safe and satisfying, and there are beloved companions, even then, the present can feel uneasy for more reasons than anybody could ever list, most of them having to do with the havoc-wreaking mind.

There are people who feel altogether content, moment to moment. It’s worth looking at that, and asking how it comes about. It’s also worth asking Could this be me? And this: What’s the difference between their experience and my own?

The distinction doesn’t have to do with a difference in circumstances. It’s not that the person living moment-to-moment infused with joy and well-being is existing in some other world, someplace different from the one you’re in.

Nor are they unaware of the disasters swirling around us all. Denial is not keeping them at a comfortable distance from poverty and violence, a decaying economy, and an environment in peril.

* * *

How all of this bothers the mind, this notion of a person entirely okay, even in the midst of widespread disaster. Aging happens, as ever, and death is known to be certain. How can such a one remain entirely unruffled in it all?

If chaos and change are unavoidable forces, if very little is under a person’s control (and even that tiny bit could change any second now), if an awful lot is wrong with the larger world (and with the personal part of that world), how is it that a human being can be entirely tuned into reality and be at peace?

Reality has something to do with it. Whatever is immediate has a lot to do with it. Attention is key. And allowing: that is the heart of it all.

Peace is generated when a person’s attention is on the immediate and there is no resistance, no mental commentary. Something in the body of a human being recognizes the truth in all this.

* * *

It’s about the plain recognition of what is real. The simple act of acknowledging the fact of a thing brings about a sensation of well-being. Of sanity! Attention acknowledges reality, sans mental commentary.

Note that the experience of peacefulness has nothing to do with whether we like or approve of what the immediate moment holds. The instant any part of attention is siphoned off to the mind (which wants to have an opinion or to resist what’s happening), peace flies off like a frightened bird.

Thinking-about and attending are not the same. Thinking is processing. Attention is being-with.

Be with what is, my friend. So simple. Yes, not so easy. But guess what? In the sweet moments that this occurs, you may register how blessedly at rest you are. Seeing that profound ease just may remind you, next time you’re prone to hurry ahead, to hold still for a wee bit. Ah . . .