Category: Teachings

Life happens fast. The irony is noteworthy: while a given moment is utterly still (when you’re really there), the succession of lived nows, when the mind revisits a stretch of time, appears to have occurred with lightning speed. Just ask anybody who’s old — most poignantly, one on their death bed. The impression of speed grows with the accumulation of years: for a single one is but an ever-shrinking proportion of the entirety.

Where did it all go? 

I sit facing my brother. I drink in his lovely old face, the dear voice, everything about him its same familiar self, however the years pile on. Some things don’t change. We have been close all our lives, sharing deeply about music, about what it is to live with integrity, about the nature of the vastness beyond this existence. My brother and I have said things to one another we’ve shared with not another soul. I listen to his halting portrayal of how life feels now. When he reaches for his cup of coffee, I watch his hand tremble. At moments it’s apparent he’s lost his train of thought.

Where did it all go? 

Both of us, now, are old. Over the era of our grown-up encounters, his being six years my senior has been irrelevant, not apparent. But over these recent days together, my brother seems, again, to be my elder. Now I am looking out for he who once looked out for the youthful me: for my beloved brother is diminished, physically and mentally. Even as my mind registers the change, I happily accommodate his needs of the moment, adapting with ease as the moment asks. Just the same, I’m aware, as we sit companionably, that once he has returned home, there will be a good deal for me to take account of.

Now, blessed now, what’s primary is that he is here. We are together, in this cherished now. 

* * *

Life itself occurs much more quickly (now, now, now) than the processing of it. Were I to attempt fully to register the significance of an encounter while it’s under way, I would simply not be there for the next said thing. 

Processing wants the generosity of a stretch of time. I learned to gently postpone that secondary experience until the aftermath of a significant encounter. I did not want to miss a single moment of the sweetness of the time together with a loved one. The cost of attempting to do both at once is dear. It is not kind to myself — or to my beloved brother — to do anything but purely attend.

The sort of processing I refer to here occurs in the foreground of conscious awareness. A moment of reckoning, as with my brother, asks a good deal of space. It is to take an account of a change. It is to feel, to look away from nothing. It’s to tune in to any impulse to protect oneself — to set aside this unwelcome new reality, preferring to rush ahead to whatever-is-next. There may be the seeking of refuge in how it was before — until now. A person may be desperate to avoid the discomfort of a fully-reckoning heart. (Once, that person would have been me.) To allow in this newness is to let it become a part of oneself, enabling a moving ahead, as life carries on. So that the nowadays “image” of a loved one, a relationship, is fully incorporated. To do this is to play, always, with a full deck.

* * *

Surprisingly, it is only a blessing when the lifelong inclination to avert the eyes from a painful truth — a thing unwanted, unanticipated — has disappeared. The strongest impulse, ever after, is to look a thing squarely in the face. All our lives (my own included) we have ached for stability. While we’ve done it to spare ourselves acute discomfort, the persistent habit of looking away from evidence to the contrary has in fact only intensified the underlying strain of living. For on some level, we’ve long silently suspected that we have been lying to ourselves. At long last, the actual truth — even when it’s difficult — is a peaceful place to come to rest. 

It took a while for me to learn not to attempt to process, mid-life-experience, all I was feeling. What I came to understand was that I was actually attempting to multitask: to experience and to process concurrently. Once I realized that, and saw the cost of not being fully present with what was happening in the now, I tenderly gave myself permission to wait until the solitude and the silence of after, to allow all the necessary space asked by the savoring heart. 

Part of what it is to live is to feel how everything changes, moment to fleeting moment. In an encounter that deeply matters, to live is to really be here, while the experience is unfolding. Each now is breathtakingly brief, asking a purity of attunement. 

* * *

During our precious days together, had I been fully integrating my brother’s evident changes, I would not have really been with him. I was aware that a generous space would be needed, in the aftermath, to allow the fullness of it all to register. 

What if this time together were to turn out to be our last? One day it will be. Though seldom is such an encounter seen for what it is, while it’s under way. For it tends to be realized only in wistful (often regretful) retrospect. If only, we lament.

We owe it to ourselves to hold still for a thing that deeply matters, whether it shimmers with pain or joy, or with some of each. This is what it is to have a human life, to be endowed with a heart. Sometimes the tender heart simply needs to break. Tears long to be allowed to breach their tight doors.

I am done with lamenting. Let us all be done! There is nothing to do but fully be in the now. Let after take care of itself.

And mortal life is its fleeting self. In the realm of embodied existence, time is indeed “real” — and short.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

Once upon a time I prided myself on the ability to multitask. Other people, observing the “skill,” admired me for it. As if it was good to be able to do two things simultaneously.

I once heard a brain scientist vividly describe the chemistry of what occurs inside the head during an attempt to multitask. How in fact what’s happening, with lightning speed, is a going back-and-forth, back-and-forth, between focus on the two things. He explained how doing so is in fact taxing to the brain — tiring to the very person who imagines that it “has” to be this way, with “so much to get done.” His portrayal brought to vivid life the way in which trying to do two things at once means neither is done as well as it might have been, had we granted ourselves permission to do one at a time. Hence — ironically — time might actually be saved: for to do a thing once, with full attention, likely means it won’t have to be redone later.

Consider the expression “pay attention.” Attention is a precious commodity.

In my own inner observations, I came to realize that even attempting to think while engaging in a physical task constitutes multitasking. In that case, we are attempting to bring attention, simultaneously, to what’s inside the head and to what the body is doing. The poor scrambling brain, all the while, is furiously attempting to focus in two directions at once. The result — surely you have observed this — is that after you go out to do errands, it dawns on you that you’re not certain you turned off the stove as you’d intended to. Why does this happen? It’s because you — because we, for I noticed myself in this same wasteful process — simply cannot attend two things at once. One of them, or more likely both, ends up being less well done for lack of sufficient attention.

* * *

By the time of this writing, it’s been years since all of this became clear in my awareness. I long since learned that if I try to think while turning off the stove, I will have to go back later to be certain it’s turned off. Or I will need to revisit whatever thought I’d been having while my hand was turning the knob. Nowadays, on the unusual occasions when I try to do two things at once, I stop myself and say: Which matters more in this moment? Shall I think first and then do the task, or is it better to hold still and contemplate, and then do the physical thing?

When thinking occurs consciously — that is, when it happens deliberately, not (as it long was) unconsciously, often saturated in emotion — then it’s entirely possible to choose to set it aside for the duration of an action requiring full attention. If a thing is worth doing, whether it’s mental or physical, it merits the fullness of conscious awareness.

* * *

Spending so much time in the woods has provided me unending opportunities for learning. This includes discovering how attempting to think while moving is unwise, sometimes even dangerous. How many times have I tripped over a fallen twig, because of focusing on the exciting new thing that just now dawned on me, to the detriment of tuning into my ever-aging feet. Walking briskly through trees full of enthralling creatures, most of whom are heard more than seen, is a real set-up for losing my footing. It is crucial for my well-being that my ears and eyes be attuned to the possible proximity (for instance) of a protective mother bear during the time of young cubs. Much of what my senses drink in is not of the nature of safety, but of pure delight: the glorious song of the veery in the treetops to my left; the magnificent sight of the soaring pileated woodpecker with its gaudy red head. But to fully take in these moments among the beloved trees, I must hold still. Not just so I don’t stumble, but so as not to divide attention in a way that sacrifices one scrap of the moment’s savoring.

It’s like the thing my musician brother once said to me: if you “listen” to music as a kind of background to daily activities, you aren’t really — fully — listening. How right he was. Nowadays if I’ve got music playing, it’s front and center in awareness. The moment I notice myself pulled to do something else, I turn it off. Music I love is worth every drop of attention.

Once a person (awake or otherwise) realizes — in a bodied way, not in the head — that there is latitude over where attention is put in a given moment of consciousness, much becomes possible. We can be deliberate about where attention is placed. Once or perhaps twice a day, I consciously “attend” matters to do with the larger world. This includes the sorts of concerns showing up on the news: the current situation with the Covid pandemic, ongoing wars (like the one in Ukraine), the state of American democracy, of the climate crisis. There is much to do with the random slaughter of children, of people of color.

These things matter to me, as they do to most of us. But I do not “live” there all day, even as I am well aware the phenomena are ongoing. I know how much tuning-in to these realities is enough and how much is unnecessary, in order for me to stay sufficiently aware of what goes on around me, all around the world. Much about our planet is a mess. It is heartbreaking. Yet it is not difficult to be deliberate in the matter of how much attention to bring to a given concern. As a result, although my heart will surely break in the presence of the many nightmare conditions in our world, I do not linger there unnecessarily.

* * *

During the time my son was actively using heroin, aware as I was that he could die at any moment, I nevertheless did not dwell, hour after hour, in awareness of the tentative state of his aliveness. I simply loved him with my wide-open heart. In no way did I wall off my love, in the name of “protection.” I was well aware how his dying, should it occur, would crush me. No contradiction between the two.

Nor does the awareness of the severity of such things interfere with the deep peace that carries me along. This does not constitute denial. Such things would have been hard for me to understand, prior to awakening, when any painful or challenging reality tended to take fierce hold of me and keep me in its grip. Something said, “If it’s real in an ongoing way, then I must be tuned into it in an ongoing way.” That is, obsessed.

No wonder I suffered. No wonder we human beings suffer.

Please consider this possibility for yourself. It is not necessary to awaken in order for you to learn about the latitude regarding your attention, in any moment you become self-aware. Do note: attention is not the same as thinking-about. It’s got to do, simply, with where you put your inner eyes. Where your momentary focus is. 

Consider the expression pay attention: it’s right there, in the way we say that. Attention is a commodity, and it is a most precious one. More precious by far than the money sort of commodity.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

In the nearly 20 years since awakening, I have observed several lengthy “chapters” in the more fully waking-up of the several human expressions: heart, mind, and body.

Prior to 2003 I would have said my primary experience of life occurred via the heart (with the oh-so-busy mind never ceasing its tormenting commentary). I had always been very much in my body (if also identified with its features). Although it appeared as though that ever-suffering heart had catalyzed the moment of the initial awakening, in the long stretch of life to unfold afterward, the primary focus — to my frank surprise — appeared to be on what occurred courtesy of the mind.

From the view of this long retrospect, that is not so surprising. For although I had long had a “good” mind, as the world would view it — I’d always been a good student and a skilled writer and so on — the greater part of my mental life had long been devoted, as it is for most of us, to the upkeep of the illusory self. The forging of identity, the obsession with past and future, fretting and grasping for control — these were the occupations of my intelligence. Which is to say, it was almost entirely squandered on fruitless and pain-generating undertakings.

* * *

Imagine the breath of fresh air, then, when so much space was abruptly freed up in my noggin. The departure of fear, of the lifelong fixation on identity and attachment, endowed me with the gigantic miracle of all the space I could ever desire: for contemplation, curiosity, awe, the ever-human attempt to fathom. None of it generating angst. To my heart’s content I explored terrain newly of great interest to me: things such as the question Why doesn’t everybody experience life this way? Why, indeed, didn’t I, until now? And (increasingly) this: Given that it’s now so obvious that this radical peace is actually everyone’s innate condition, might there be something I could do to . . . help them see? To get that mind-generated suffering is not, in fact, inevitable?

Waking up doesn’t undo our genetic “endowment” or prior conditioning. It frees us from attachment to our gifts.

During the years the awake mind seemed to undergo the most apparent blossoming, my lifelong heart tenderness was surely still in evidence. I continued, as previously, to enjoy being embodied, although the familiar identification with my physicality (and the associated fear) had melted away.

Bit by bit, as life carried on, I began to notice a growing amount of attention to my body. Surely this was in part because of having learned the wisdom of looking ahead, both visually (as in the woods) and temporally, registering that I did not have forever to live. With that increased focus on physicality, I felt my body come more and more entirely alive. I took better care of it, eating a healthier diet and getting regular exercise. Not to “avoid death” (ha!) but to enjoy being here as long as possible.

Then my beloved cat died, and all that unfolded from there. Landing me back, this time absent crippling fear, in the territory I’d begun in all the years prior: the heart. And so (perhaps ironically, given it was where I’d long lived) that was to be the final terrain in which I came to know the full blessing of awakening. Of the incarnation of which we all partake. 

In the years since my cat’s death, having learned how to re-engage with the physical and mental realities of a human life, the mind has come once again to do a good deal of learning — some of it to do with reveling in the physical life.

* * *

All my life I have loved words, their meanings, how to spell them. All of which is a “feature” of my embodied self, shaped (as is the case for each of us) by genetic endowment and by the environment my birth landed me in.

The compelling occupation, early on, was the felt experience of curling my small fingers around a fat pencil and bringing letters into being. I studied earnestly to prepare for spelling bees. Anyone observing would have foretold two inevitabilities: I would be a writer, and I would major in English. Early on, being a wordsmith, I became a devotee of Scrabble and other word games.

Scrabble-playing, as it is for me since awakening, nicely illumines the difference between before and after. Historically, beginning in early childhood, I was not only skillful with all things relating to words — spelling, grammar, writing — but also ferociously identified with that strength. Hence the enduring memories I hold of all the youthful spelling bees I didn’t quite win, and in each case who beat me (and with which word). I never forgot it was the red-headed girl who knew how to spell hygiene.

Somewhat later, as an adult earnestly writing poems, I was just as devotedly sending them to a slew of poetry journals in the hope of their being accepted. I wanted to get into really good journals. On the infrequent and joyous occasion when an acceptance letter landed in the rusty mailbox out by the road, I shrieked to the sky. My children still remember me doing that, when they were little; they could hear it from inside the house. It was the sound of Mom-being-happy. To me, getting into a good journal meant I was A Good Poet, and that mattered almost as much as the keen pleasure of writing a poem.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I later ceased being attached to praise or “success.” It was the highest of ironies that I never managed to have a book published until after it no longer mattered, in the way it once would have. When something you’re good at is admired or complimented by another (above all, an “authority”), and that positive reinforcement has no impact whatever on how you feel — well, after a lifelong association of praise with a stroked ego, it is strange to be sure. Sometimes a reader of one of my books will say positive things about its impact or my writing ability. While I’m glad to know the writing is of benefit, nothing in me feels the long-familiar surge of self-worth.

* * *

Waking up doesn’t undo skills that are part of our “endowment,” whether genetic or based on prior conditioning. What it frees us of is attachment to our gifts. They no longer define us. We don’t identify any longer with something we’re good at. It may still be fun (as Scrabble is, in my case). I still enjoy writing, or I wouldn’t be writing this book. It’s just that I no longer take pride in the outcome. A book is not an “extension” of me, puffing up my identify.

As it happens, this very morning I came upon the word zephyrs. The Scrabble devotee in me registered that it would be a killer word to play: using all seven letters (yielding an extra 50 points), including the 10-point Z and two additional high-scoring letters. These kinds of words still get my attention, as they have since girlhood — not because I’m any longer hellbent on getting the highest score. I don’t care who wins now; I often don’t even notice who’s ahead, as a game is under way. Just the same, the lifelong delight in making a good word is intact. And (yes) I’m still good at it. It’s fun!

Nowadays, my daughter often beats me at Scrabble. She has learned well from her mother, as I did from my own. Nothing could please me more.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

A seeker’s aching desire to awaken is not apart from, not different from, what comes to many a regretful human being on their death bed. Oh that I had truly lived! That I hadn’t squandered each precious moment, as if I had forever. 

This is what it comes down to, dear heart. To have not missed the sweet feel of really being here, moment to moment. To know this now for the jewel it is.

It isn’t the end of pain we really want. It’s to know what it is to feel alive. It’s love we want to know.

It is not only the earnest spiritual seeker who comes to that terrible reckoning on their death bed. This is the human condition. Spirituality is a sham. Life is not about finding a way to end pain. That is what drives nearly every person who wants to wake up.

Whether or not we know it, seeker or otherwise, it’s the most deeply longed-for thing: to know the thrilling sensation of aliveness, in this very moment. If you think being awake is different from this, think again. If you think waking up ends the experience of the breaking heart, you are deluded.

Don’t make waking up into something it isn’t: something grand, beyond the physical, beyond the deliciously human, the embodied.

Stop the infernal seeking after something you hold in your head. Whatever it is, that isn’t it.

When they say You already ARE it, you just don’t realize it, maybe they know what they’re talking about. Stop looking. Stop wishing for a different future, in which you will have found it. The “it” you ache for is the now: it’s to feel yourself being in this exact moment of life, pain or emptiness or whatever else it might hold. Stop running from yourself, for God’s sake. Cease wanting reality to be different from what it is, in this moment: this felt moment. 

It isn’t the end of pain we really want. It’s to know what it is to feel alive. This very moment. It’s love we want to know — the purity of love that is “for” nothing and no one in particular. Love itself, undirected. Needing no object.

Just hold still. Breathe. Feel yourself breathe. Feel your beating heart. If it wants to break, let it break.

That is all.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

There is more than one way that knowing takes place in a human being. This is the case whether or not a person is awake, although for the most part the occurrence of a given episode of knowing, when it is under way, is not observed. Nor do most of us “pair” the two sorts of intelligence, recognize them as being kindred, and alike innate to our humanness.

It is only in recent life that this phenomenon has sorted itself out in my own observing consciousness, although since awakening, I have been aware of both breeds of intelligence operating, and have appreciated the potency embodied by each.

One way of knowing is experienced physically, in the body. It is felt, palpable. Such a moment tends to arrive unbidden, spontaneously. It may be startling. If you allow yourself to pause, you will notice that all momentum, everything mental, has grown quiet. This knowledge is known to be reliable. It is at some cost to ourselves that we avert our eyes from this momentary clarity. If someone you described it to were to attempt to dissuade you from its authenticity, you would struggle to let it go. Who can name the source of such a recognition? In vain would we try. No need: the only “need” is to pay attention.

One way of knowing occurs spontaneously. It is felt, palpable, known to be reliable. It is not mental.

Sometimes in my explorations with seekers, as I am looking for ways to guide them to see that more operates in themselves already than mere torment-generating thought, I will put this to them: Take a few moments now to hold still, to be quiet. I let some seconds go by, then say Can you feel you’re alive? What almost always happens is that there comes another brief stretch of quiet, then their voice saying Yes! I ask How do you know? How can you tell? Almost without exception what they report is I just know. Nothing could be more trustworthy. 

There are a couple of points I mean to drive home here. One is that a person is endowed with two distinct ways of knowing. The other is this: the bodied one (unlike most of what’s dished up by the familiar knower) is to be trusted. To be able to tell the two apart, as life continues its unfolding, is to carry around in oneself the finest of all spiritual teachers.

* * *

One of the great blessings of awakening is that it cleanses the mind of the nightmare habit of inflicting mischief on itself. As if with a surgical blade, waking up cuts out all that has been useless — the story-telling that’s generated a self, devotedly defending it as if it had an objective reality — and leaves a person with a sweetly-rinsed intelligence no longer hellbent on suffering. Now what’s able to happen is reflection that is of true benefit. Insight is able to come, and processing that yields clarity, that is of value. The future is able to be anticipated in a way that generates not fear but rather a useful clarity. The recollection of the lived past now yields learning, appreciation — not useless regret and guilt. Curiosity comes altogether alive: you are a child again, marveling at every simple thing. 

Imagine the mind — long a tormentor — now a beloved playmate, musing and whimsical. Brimming insight.

And so (in addition to the spontaneous bodily way of knowing) there is the knowledge that arrives courtesy of the processing mind. These distinct knowers are alive and well in a person whether or not awakening has occurred. Pre-awakening, though, it’s a trickier business indeed to distinguish between thinking that’s ego-driven and the sort that is “clean” and of actual benefit.

* * *

A clue to telling them apart is this: Does having this thought bring stillness to my body, or is there uncomfortable inner “movement” just now? Typically, the movement is circular, repetitive, one generating an emotion, and likely the resultant avoidance of that emotion. Ask yourself whether this thinking has an egoic means-to-an-end quality. Is its function related to self-maintenance? 

The entire spiritual life, of course, can be devoted to recognizing the difference — not conceptually, but in a real-life way — between egoic thought and the sort that is of actual benefit. One of the most common (and imprisoning) delusions about spiritual inquiry is that “knowing” the difference between these things is of any value whatsoever. The poignant irony is that this confusion is yet another egoic application of thought: here, it is the spiritual ego supposing it has attained something of value.

My main message, dear heart, is this: when reflecting on your mind, for God’s sake do not “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” To reject all-things-mental, as though the mind were entirely useless, is to miss one of the largest points of spiritual exploration. This confusion represents one of the more unfortunate misunderstandings of non-duality. Learn to sort out useless mental activity — intent on sculpting an illusory self — from magnificent (untainted) intelligence. Notwithstanding all the manifest disasters our vast smarts have set in motion, likely concluding in our own demise and the ruination of our beloved planet, there’s abundant evidence that homo sapiens is in fact the most intelligent of mammals.

Too smart, alas, for our own good, both as a species and as individuals.

* * *

In my current mode of living, the two modes of knowing are alive and well, each a blessing for the way it informs day-to-day experience. One of them occurs consciously, deliberately, in the familiar processing sort of way; the other arrives spontaneously, out of the blue.

In the case of the latter, it’s as though a great deal of “processing” has been occurring, perhaps for a long while, entirely in the background, sans conscious awareness. I have not seen it coming. Frequently it is actually startling, for it may be momentous, in its ramifications for my practical life. Nor could I hope to avert my eyes from the truth just now seen. For the sudden arrival of this sort of knowing has the ring of absolute clarity. To deny it — to fail to set in motion whatever it indicates is wise or necessary — would be folly in the extreme.

This knowing is absolutely trustworthy. It has come to conscious awareness at the right moment. Nor, typically, did I previously have any conscious awareness that the processing was under way.

It is a strange phenomenon, to be sure. For historically, a matter carrying such significance would have been either entirely consuming of my present-moment awareness (doubtless generating suffering and a maddening absence of clarity), or it would have been ferociously forced underground, where my familiar human self “needed” to keep it hidden: for the person I was then would not have been able to bear the pain of looking a truth square in the face, when some kind of resolution wasn’t forthcoming.

Clarity arrives on its own schedule. When a major life change calls for processing, in my nowadays experience, it’s likely to occur underground, without familiar mental deliberation or conscious awareness. Not for the long-familiar reason, the avoidance of excruciating emotion.

When one of these moments of startling knowing occurs, it’s as though a committee of wise counselors, intent on my well-being, has been convening to sort out the what and the when of a major life change in order for me. In the rightness of time, out of the proverbial blue, I am tapped on the shoulder and handed, with palpable kindness, my marching orders. 

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]