Category: Teachings

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 . . .

Ten years ago I posted the Degrees of Consciousness. Many reported that they found it enormously useful. I offer it again today, in the hope that you will find it of benefit at this time. (Even if it helped you years ago, be assured that you are not who you were then.) – Jan

Click to view the PDF

This moment is enough. Life is enough. The way things are this moment (whatever the particulars) is plenty. The Latin root of “satisfied” is satis (in English, “enough”); the root of “grateful” is gratus (which means “for free”).

But these words of mine are not a lesson in language. Stick me with, love, while I get to the point.

* * *

When a person is truly in the now — even when it’s something experienced as bad (so long as full acceptance attends awareness of what’s happening) — then there is a sinking into the real. Bizarrely, this radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome. Because to yield puts us in the moment, and anything that brings us fully here feels good. Oh, maybe not so much the specifics of the now. It’s allowing the truth of reality that is restful.

This radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome.

All-that-“shouldn’t”-be has no meaning. None of this can be fathomed with the ordinary mind. Visualize an animal picking over the fresh bones of another creature, sniffing for remnant flesh, hungry for sustenance. What I struggle to describe is like that: fundamental, elemental as that.

This is not an injunction to go out and try to become this way. It is saying: when liberation comes, this is how you will have turned out to be. A person cannot try to experience every moment as enough and expect to thereby become that way. But when the blessing comes, when the morning is awakened to that all torment has been lifted from you like a delicate cloth as you slept, what you are sure enough left with is the constant feeling of enough.

You have been relieved of wanting, of dissatisfaction. Of judgment. Actuality overwhelms the possible, the desirable, the how-it-once-was.

* * *

Also — something Franklin Merrell-Wolff has written about in his books about awakening — the real is at something from a distance from you now (whoever “you” may be, a hazy thing for sure). Merrell-Wolff calls it the high indifference. You see the oh-so-real clear through, but you are no longer defined by whatever human life is delivering into your hands just now. You are not of it. You’re unflinching in the face of it, curiously unmoved in the way you’ve been accustomed to.

You see the world go on. Outer things work as they work, the way they always have. Meanwhile, delight surges through your bones in each delicate movement of your body. If you are sick, it’s okay. If money is in short supply, it’s all right. It’s just the way it is.

You are constantly in the middle of a miracle. You cannot go anywhere or do anything or have anything done to you that leads you to feel you’re anyplace but in a miracle. When someone lifts a metaphoric “gun” at you, the bullet goes through you and comes out the other side. (Yes, when Mahatma Gandhi had an actual gun aimed in his direction, it killed his beloved body. But those who witnessed the violence reported that he seemed to be, in the final moments, at his accustomed ease.)

* * *

There are subatomic particles that regularly streak through apparently solid masses — people, walls, planets — and are never felt, never seem to disturb what they pass through. Life feels like those subatomic particles. It goes right through you, but you don’t register it. Not in the old way anyhow.

None of it changes you. You are just the same as you were.

It is about satis: enough. If enough is the rule of the day, of the moment, then all is well, constantly and profoundly well. Even when your heart is breaking because someone you dearly love has just died.

You cannot make yourself be this way, I don’t think. God knows people try; it doesn’t seem to work. But if you wake up one morning and feel lighter, if you have the feeling of something having changed when you slept, you will notice it is this way. When dissatisfaction picked itself up and left you, when it peeled itself off every inch of your sleeping body and slipped out the window, it left you light, buoyant, at peace.

When you get up, feel how light you are. How willing to dance. How at ease you have become! What a blessing life has turned out to be. Satis, satis, satis.

* * *

It was thanks to Franklin Merrell-Wolff that I came to understand, now many years ago, what had happened to me when I stopped suffering. If you have not read anything by him, pick up one of his books. His language is somewhat formal and “stilted,” for he was writing in the long-ago era when that was the mode. But oh, my love, is it worth the effort! His insight into the marvels of clear-eyed consciousness is stunning.

I wish you well, each moment you live.

If it matters to you, act like it matters. Express it. Do something! Maybe this has to do with someone beloved in your life. Perhaps it’s got to do with a situation in the larger world.

It is a very big world. We have our up-close concerns (family, friends, life decisions, our own health and well-being). But we all exist in a context. We cannot have our eyes on only our immediate situation.

* * *

Yes, there is the here-and-now, this very moment. Registering the smell of something in the room, on the breeze. Focusing on what needs getting done this day. Sometimes the present moment is felt as a radical immediacy, a timeless stillness, where the larger world has ceased to be. This can be true even if you live in a war zone. There are oft-told accounts of that very thing, a bizarre and impossible-seeming moment of peaceful ease in the midst of an unmitigated nightmare. In the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance. In kindred times and situations where it would be unbearable to “occupy” that surrounding circumstance, because it was (is, right this moment) truly perilous. In Sudan, say.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a part of the world that isn’t in an ongoing war or famine or flood — if you are lucky (as I am) to live in a country that is allegedly “free,” including free to vote — then express your gratitude for that blessing by taking the action of voting.

It really is, after all, one world.

* * *

Citizens of the United States are paying a good deal of attention to the upcoming election. We in the U.S. are (more or less) free to express divergent views, to protest. Some of us have protested the violence that continues unabated in the Middle East — even, as I write this, verging on all-out regional war. The world as a whole is in peril. As if the climate disaster weren’t already sufficiently imperiling.

It really is, after all, one world. That said, some parts of the planet are less subject to violence and poverty and war than others are. Some people have more freedom than others to take action, to express ourselves. I, for instance, have enough food and water. I’d like to say I’m not in constant danger of having a gun aimed at me, but alas, in the United States no one is free of that danger, not even the beloved children in school.

With all the mess of the country I dwell in, I count myself fortunate indeed to be in what calls itself a democracy. I have the ability to vote. And so I do. It matters to me. If I have this freedom — as so many do not — and do not exercise it, I am a fool.

I am not getting political here (though I realize it may look like it). Nor would I ever judge anyone for declining to express their values at the ballot box. The man I dearly loved for many years never voted in his life, so far as I know. It was up to him. That is one of the things freedom means, eh? I myself didn’t vote for years after I was old enough to. In that era — Viet Nam, Nixon — it seemed it was pointless to vote.

* * *

Never assume it’s somebody else’s job to take care of something that matters to you. It’s your job. It’s mine! However “lucky” or unlucky you are, wherever on the dear earth you dwell, do what you can to relieve suffering. To make it a better place for us all to carry on — as one planet. Take the steps you can to show you love your immediate world, but also the earth as a whole. Educate yourself, as I am trying like hell to do. Feed yourself, if you’re fortunate enough to have food. Provide for your little ones, for your elders, your neighbors, if you are able.

And if you live in a democracy, for God’s sake vote. Whatever your politics. If you don’t open your mouth and say what matters to you, then you don’t get to complain if things don’t turn out the way you wish they had.

Then, when the results come, accept what’s happened. You did what you could. There’s nothing for us all to do but to move on, from there. To be in that new now, whether or not it’s the one you would have chosen.

Be kind, regardless of other people’s beliefs. We are shaped by the world we grew up in, by our particular experience. In some sense we cannot help being who and what we are.

Nothing matters more than love. Period.