Category: Teachings

People longing to awaken sometimes hold mistaken impressions about what radical freedom would be like. Some suppose that the quieting of the mischief-causing mind, long in the thrall of ego-maintenance, leaves a person in a kind of clueless la-la land. This is far off the mark. What actually happens, for most, is that the mind simply no longer inflicts suffering. Instead, it is blessedly freed up to be of actual use. It can learn; it can remember. No longer does it squander its considerable resources on inventing (and attempting to solve) problems related to the self. The liberated mind becomes a practical device, a handy tool to be implemented when a life situation warrants its engagement.

One thing needing to be sorted out, after awakening, is the matter of finding a comfortable balance between the purity of present-moment awareness (the default mode of being) and mental engagement, when life calls for that. Surely being altogether in the now is life’s most delicious experience. Yet there are times when inviting awareness to reach beyond immediacy is in order. Indeed, there are occasions when being too much in the heartfelt now is actually ill-advised.

We’re used to orienting to the mind as a bad guy. It’s truly a blessing to make friends with the mind.

Given the profound inner change over the years since my cat’s death, where the spacious heart longs to be primary, discovering how to incorporate this wisdom about the mind’s usefulness has not been the most automatic of adaptations. It has asked a good deal of me. The learning is ongoing.

The woods have been my great teachers in this regard. Given how much I love spending time (life!) among the trees and my fellow creatures, the necessary expenditure has been gladly made.

Looking ahead is something that applies to both the temporal future and the visual/spatial one. Whether anticipating something not yet here in time or a physical location not yet reached, looking beyond this now, this here, asks that we engage the mind and revisit its storehouse of acquired knowledge.

* * *

While I need to take care, in non-snow seasons, not to wander too far from the familiar path, lest I become disoriented and lost, in a snowy winter it’s another matter altogether. Snowshoes are wondrous devices, making it possible to traverse terrain unwelcoming in snowless seasons. I can explore to my heart’s content, knowing that the trail laid by the biting impressions of my meandering snowshoes will be retraceable, followable all the way home, when I decide to turn and head back. It means I need pay no attention at all to where I’ve made random turns, dictated by the moment’s whim.

But on one occasion — most memorably — I became profoundly disoriented in the snow-blanketed woods. This time, atypically, I had ventured out in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, the fast-falling snow having erased the path marked by my toothy snowshoes. Although while the ongoing erasure was under way, so focused was I on the immediate delight of where I was and what I was seeing and feeling, I was unaware of what was steadily taking place right behind me. Meanwhile, having no sense of the gathering risk, I was continuing obliviously into territory altogether unfamiliar to me, with no idea how far from home I was, nor what direction my house might be in. 

Once there’s plenty of snow on the ground, even on a sunny day, it’s challenging to recognize even the most familiar defined walking trails. Snow makes disappear trails that are otherwise readily apparent. Never mind how “familiar” the terrain. Because the trees are mostly bare of their greenery, the spaces between them are more substantial in winter than in the growing seasons, when a more readily visible broad “line” is drawn among the trees by the spacious winding trail, where nothing much grows. But in snow-covered woods, when the leaves are down, the familiar pathways through the woods are not so obviously detectable. It is surprisingly easy to become disoriented. Lost.

This oh-so-memorable occasion happened late enough in that winter afternoon, with dark fast approaching, that I could well have been stranded overnight in the forbidding conditions. Nor was the lowering sun of any help in the matter of determining direction, concealed as it was by the curtain of heavy snow. And there is no cell service out there.

Mercifully I managed to find my way to the welcome sight of my landlord’s cleared field coming into view. By chance I’d come upon a familiar tree, one I knew well from the foot trail. It resembles no other tree in those woods, thanks to a defining feature of its bark-stripped trunk: the encircling impression made by the teeth of a long-ago chain saw. When the tree came into view, I held very still. My humorous backward-looking self pictures enfolding angelic light transforming the signpost into a “vision” (like a cheesy moment in a movie). I can laugh now, but that is precisely how that sighting landed in me. I used the tree as a way to orient myself. In short order I was able to get my bearings. Courtesy of that tree (which I wanted to wrap my arms around and kiss), I was able to detect the shape of the snow-blanketed trail I have traveled ten thousand times, to see which way I must now turn and proceed, to find my way out of the woods before dark.

A good deal of learning surely did occur on that occasion. 

If I hadn’t had a working mind that day I got lost in the stormy woods, things may not have turned out so well. But here’s the real miracle: not once did I feel fear, even as I was looking square in the face of the reality that I may indeed not find my way home before dark. I had no mental space to spare — to squander! — on being afraid. What was in order was to think: to see if I could sort out, in a logical way, where I was, what direction to go. 

* * *

Fear ran my life for 50 years. Once upon a time, after such an experience, the story of that snowy afternoon would have become a “thing” in my head, an endlessly repeating nightmare shimmering with anxiety. I’d have carried it like a burden I could not put down, along with the countless other difficult experiences I never got over. Instead, the lessons I learned that day — what to do, what not to do — rest quietly tucked away in the back of my head, retrievable at a moment’s notice, should they ever be needed. Thus is the gift of a liberated mind, one no longer capable of inflicting suffering on self.

We’re used to orienting to the mind as a bad guy: it is, after all, the source of a great deal of unnecessary pain. But to generalize from this recognition to supposing that the mind is all bad is to fail to acknowledge one of the great illuminers of the inner world. Make it your business to learn about your own mind. Become aware of the assumptions you may carry about thought — such as the belief that all mental activity is suspect, a problem, and worthy only of dismissal. Many a seeker participates (with every best intention) in this error.

It’s truly a blessing to make friends with the mind. To explore, with open eyes and heart, the terrain of what it is to think consciously — usefully! Learn to tell the difference, inside your own daily awareness, between mischief-making thoughts and those that actually help usefully navigate life’s practical terrain. One of them generates discomfort; the other does not. One is animated by a ceaseless circular momentum, while the other is quiet, even restful. These are the distinguishing features of the two. Learn to notice which is under way, any time you notice yourself engaging the mind.

What you are more deeply able to discover, by this self-exploration, is the profound difference between ego-maintenance and beneficial intelligence.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

The fully awakened heart knows what it is to love unconditionally. What could be more life-altering than to come to dwell in — to dwell as — radically fearless love, liberated from the familiar human ache to control, to defend against pain? Rinsed of it all, wide-open consciousness is felt as being boundless. 

Acceptance of what-is becomes a profound door-opener. There is no separation between you and whatever you’re presently aware of. Consciousness itself is not apart from what it detects: if a thing is real, then perceiving human awareness is, for the duration of the moment, that reality. The awakened heart unflinchingly takes in what’s real. The processing mind — so well equipped to deny reality, to recoil from its challenges — is brought to utter quietude. 

Ask someone on their death bed: was it wise to put constraints on the heart? If they had it to do over, is that how they would live?

Nor can the egoic human mind remotely fathom such an experience, focused as it is on orienting to ever-changing reality, necessarily maintaining the sense of an independent self. What typically occupies us as people is this: where am I in relation to this that’s happening? But that presupposes there is an I, and that it is apart from what’s happening “to” it, or around it. Hence the ceaseless need to sort out how to orient to each thing as it comes along. The whole thing is exhausting.

Awakening mercifully delivers a person from all of it. Talk about deliverance.

* * *

Sometimes in a human life, love is confronted with hideous suffering. 

I once read an account by an awake person of sitting in a theater watching a film about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Containing footage of the devastation, the movie was unflinching in its close-up portrayal of the nightmare visited upon the victims of the bombings. As the viewer took in (without recoiling) the images and sounds on the screen, he became aware of something bizarre within himself. The footage seemed to have brought him to a state of something like ecstasy.

Naturally curious, he mused upon what had happened, and eventually was able to account for the seeming contradiction between the pain he was confronting and the condition of his own interior. What he saw was this: when faced with that enormity of suffering (inflicted by one people upon another!), consciousness is asked to widen to such an unaccustomed extent — to open and open beyond its familiar spaciousness — that what becomes primary is not the agony and cruelty being witnessed but the purely accepting love that is “holding” it all.

Unbounded consciousness is felt as love. Not the familiar oh-so-human emotion, tainted by need and hunger, associated with comfort and mutuality. This love is of a different order of reality, even as it surely does register in the heart. What could be more ecstatic than love taking over so thoroughly that there simply is no other reality? Even as (yes) the human self is in the presence of visceral agony.

The excellent mind of a human being, even a fully awake person, is simply incapable of accounting for this seeming contradiction. The palpable experience under way is altogether outside the bounds of anything recognizable. Nothing has equipped us to understand.

Long after reading that account, I was to experience a curious commingling of pain and rapture in the setting of extreme sorrow. I recognized it as kindred to what occurred for that other person in the presence of the nightmare film. 

* * *

People who have lived in concentration camps or experienced life-threatening warfare, or who’ve known some other extremity at the edge of life and death, will sometimes notice something curious about those experiences. It may likewise occur in the context of a terrible car accident or some other health emergency. An inner quiet descends. Time is felt to stop. In the profound stillness at the heart of extremity, a person may report having never felt so throttlingly alive. Even as (yes!) death is staring them in the face. For what could more radically shake a person awake than such a crisis?

Just at the moment when familiar human perception is registering what’s happening as an unmitigated nightmare, a person may be experiencing what will later be cherished (if they survive) as one of their life’s high points. For into that arrested and arresting moment descended a quiet miracle, enabling them to know, perhaps for the first and final time, the blessedness of simple aliveness. What could be more precious than such a moment? And yet to the ordinary mind what could be more bewildering?

Here is the compelling question: Why does it take something awful to bring us to this recognition?

* * *

It is rare to love without condition put on it. There is the wish for the feeling to be reciprocated. We want a relationship to fulfill us somehow; we long to be able to count on its stability. Many a relationship is at least as much “about me” as it is about delighting in the other person. The eyes are likely averted from any sign of imperfection or trouble. Nor do we welcome the unknowability of what lies ahead for one dear to us. It’s a tall order indeed to look in the face the truth that we cannot assure the well-being of anyone.

The tit-for-tat of love is a deadening force: I will love you if you love me back, if you promise never to leave me. There is no more reliable way to imprison the heart — nor (ironically, most poignantly) to drive a distance between two people. By marked contrast with the airless cell “love” often becomes corrupted into (“Promise you will love me always”), in an atmosphere of allowing, love can be a deliciously wide-open space with a sweet breeze blowing through it. 

* * *

Unconditional love has nothing whatever to do with need. Putting condition on it places confines around the heart, making it smaller than it would otherwise be. Constraining love makes us smaller. To limit it is to live less fully than we might. Oh, but the perceived risk of the wide-open heart is great indeed. For it means the eyes are wide open to uncertainty, to the absence of control.

Love without condition is not about me. It is not about anything. Unconstrained love is what it is to be deliciously alive.

The scaled-down expression of cherishing is the norm, in human life, because of the way love is inevitably confused with need and fear. We’re afraid of losing the beloved, one way or another; that our love will not be reciprocated in kind. The relationship may not deliver all we wish it would. It’s all about perceived risk.

Meanwhile, the biggest risk of all is the one most of us gladly (if unconsciously) take, start to finish: that we will never know the felt experience of radical love. For to fully love in unresisting acceptance of reality asks a great deal of the human heart. 

Yet the cost of this tradeoff is dear indeed. Just ask someone on their death bed: was it wise, after all, to put constraints on the heart? If they had it to do over, is that how they would live?

God save you from that regret, dear heart. Risk be damned.

* * *

Significant relationships typically involve denial and inauthenticity. Projection is rampant. The eyes tend to be averted from evidence to the contrary of what one wishes were the case. This dynamic is shot through with delusion, avoidance, and conflict. Is it any wonder so many relationships generate more pain than joy?

Yet such phenomena, when honestly observed, can become valuable teachers. They shine light on what we’re attached to, what we fear. Sometimes, if a person can summon the courage to be honest about such things — revealing their inmost fragile selves — the relationship can become more authentic, the connection deepen. Sometimes when unaccustomed honesty comes into the picture, it becomes vivid that change is in order. It’s all about the willingness to accept risk, in the name of authenticity.

Putting conditions on love boxes it in, makes it smaller than it would be: you must love me back, promise never to leave me. If you are my child, I need to be able to keep you safe, assure your happiness. So instead of love being endless space, fresh air moving softly through it, it become a little windowless boxed-in suffocating cell.

* * *

Where is all of this more keenly felt than in the context of a parent’s love for a child? What could a father or mother know more desperately than the longing to protect the young one, to assure their happiness? Hence what pain could be more acute than allowing the limit of our ability to assure anything? In the school of learning about the absence of control, there could be no finer teacher than the experience of crushing love for a child. At some point nearly every parent comes to face the truth that there’s a limit to how much love can assure. The recognition can embitter and distance a person, or it can open a door.

How humbling it is for a parent to realize that a love imagined to be unconditional has in fact been otherwise. We want a child to “turn out well” because we suppose that “success” that will reflect favorably on us as mother, as father. How many miserable and frustrated young people have turned out — superficially — to align with the goals of their controlling, projecting parents? Is anyone fooled into mistaking this for authentic fulfillment?

We are able to learn, as parents. Life with an adolescent can be a harsh teacher regarding the limits on the ability to assure well-being. Yet to embody that lesson surely asks of us something risky: to cease straining for control. For to love uncrippled by such forces — whether it be one’s child or another person dear to us — is to face a terrible truth: I cannot be certain of anything. 

And to have that profound acceptance not be the generator of nightmare anxiety is a miracle not to be fathomed. In a life of identification with the mind’s stories about need and identity, where belief and the desperate wish for certainty hold sway, it simply cannot be.

Love has nothing whatever to do with attachment of any sort. Yet how that does fly in the face of our usual understanding of the most exalted of human emotions. No wonder unconditional love is rare. Our parents can be forgiven for having failed to love us as we’d wished. All we need do is look into our own hearts to ask whether we ourselves have loved anyone, ever, in this way. 

It was inevitable that human beings would come to associate the divine with limitless love: for it is what we ache for all our lives. Yet from start to finish, it does not happen. A god untroubled by our imperfection? What could be more welcome? Of course religions would develop around such a prospect, that life after death would take on the appearance of paradise, eternal rest enfolded in the tender arms of radical acceptance.

* * *

The curious truth is that we deeply (if unconsciously) know the limits on our ability to guarantee anything, whether for ourselves or for another. This unbearable reality is the source of lifelong anxiety that nothing seems able to soothe. Yet what has constituted our most profound terror can oddly become the environment of the most profound peace. It is actually relieving to cease distancing ourselves from what we have secretly known all along to be the case: that the future is unknowable. To allow ourselves to rest in the truth of the absence of control is to come at last to dwell in the land of being with reality as it is. There, in the context of yielding to perennial uncertainty, the heart is undefended. It is able — at long and delicious last — to know what it is to love without condition, without need.

What could be more radically restful, more alive? Such a relief. Such a surprise!

May it not require the nearness of death to fully open your own heart, dear one. The “risk” of wide-open love is much less than the nightmare risk of having not really lived — having not really loved, without condition.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

A person who longs to awaken, contemplating what the sweetness of freedom might be like, may suppose that it would mean living at a remove from ordinary experience. That matters of the body, and perhaps even of the heart, would largely be concerns of the past, when the ego was running the show. This may not be a consciously-held belief about what being awake is like, but it may be there just the same.

Nothing could be further from the truth. At least, in my own experience. The body is deliciously alive, the heart altogether engaged — as is the mind (when it’s needed), blessedly unburdened of ego-maintenance. It’s a grand way to occupy a human life. Just because a person no longer identifies with the body — its appearance, health, age — does not mean physicality can’t be enjoyed! In fact, once identification has ceased, the door opens to delight not available before, back when the body had egoic significance.

What being awake is like: the body deliciously alive, the heart and mind altogether engaged.

This deeply felt “embodiment” occurs, yes, along with attunement to the larger reality. In an ongoing way — whatever momentary embodied experience may be under way — the vast “something bigger” is felt to be shimmering in the background of awareness. Sometimes it’s front and center.

My hope is that by sharing a few vivid particulars from recent life, I might enable the earnest seeker to cultivate a more real sense of “what it’s like” (or can be).

* * *

The northern goshawk is a ferocious creature — above all, a female during nesting season. Keeping to deep woods, the reclusive hawk is seldom seen. Local birding friends of mine have never clapped eyes on one.

It was a spring morning several years ago. Briskly moving along a familiar woods trail, I heard an unfamiliar piercing call. I stopped, moved my eyes toward its source: there she was, impressive talons curled around a branch high above my head, fifty or sixty feet from where I stood riveted. A hawk, it appeared, although one I did not recognize. Those glowering eyes were boring holes into me. I held altogether still, eyes fixed to her, memorizing her features so I could Google, back in the house, to learn what kind of hawk this was.

Had I understood the situation — what she was, why she was not merely curious about me — I would never have taken the risk of holding still. I’d have made quick feet to extricate myself from her territory, which was defined (I was soon to learn) by the presence of a recently-built nest cradling eggs from her body.

Long after, it would dawn on me that the goshawk and I had something elemental in common: for having given rise to young of my own, I know well the animal ferocity of a mother, when detecting threat to offspring.

* * *

Endowed with its fine mind, a human being is equipped for learning. This is equally true of a person accustomed to not living in the head. Here I am, busily making mental note of the bird’s identifying features, when the much more significant learning is about to occur.

At the alarming sight of the goshawk dropping from its branch, heading with great speed toward intruder-me, my body feels the surge of adrenaline. The intelligent mammal’s animal nature has now taken completely over, the mind silenced. The urgent priority is to put sufficient distance between my vulnerable body and the winged maternal fury bearing down on me.

The mind is abruptly still. But the body! Oh, it is the very opposite of the stillness that was its state only seconds before. For what’s clearly under way is bodily threat (distinct from egoic “threat”). The shrieking headed for my hustling body grows louder by the heartbeat, reducing by the millisecond the distance separating my back side from that open beak.

A thing about embodiment (awake or otherwise) is this: if the fleshly self is mortally compromised, the accompanying human expressions of aliveness (delight, awe, cherishing) likewise cease to be. In a moment like the one I’m in, physical well-being is primary. Heart and mind activity is muted, all bodily resources rushed to the fore, courtesy of adrenaline.

I’m desperate to get the hell out of there, and quick. A remnant of background mental wisdom does fleetingly register: my sneakers mustn’t move so fast as to cause me to stumble. The fleeing human animal is “re-minded,” via one of its handy faculties, that tripping would enable the hellbent creature to seize the flesh-housed body now lying in the dirt, making me ever so sorry I overdid it. 

Something in me has made my scurrying shoes take it down just a notch, however much my body insists that slowing my feet is ill-advised in the extreme. For with each rushing step, the shriek grows louder.

Closer.

* * *

As the internet will later portray in ghastly detail (my mercifully intact body in the computer chair), the goshawk’s piercing claws and razor-sharp beak are fabulously designed to cause the clueless mammal to lament it ever presumed onto the bird’s turf. I’ll discover multiple harrowing accounts of a northern goshawk making a shredded mess of a human back and scalp, when someone has been ignorant enough (or foolhardy) to enter its territory. 

I’ll develop gigantic respect — and awe — for this creature endowed with beak and claws powerful enough to make mincemeat of even a protective helmet. The head gear had been donned by an experienced birder who “knew better” than to intrude into a nesting goshawk’s territory. He was to carry lifelong scars attesting to the mistaken confidence in the hard plastic enfolding his hapless noggin. I doubt he’ll rely on that useless thing again, I mutter into the safety of my living room.

As for me, I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not likely to forget what I learned that day. Another blessing of the excellent mind.

On future woods walks, I’ll muse on the idea of putting a prominent sign at the turn up that trail. What it will say is “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” (Dante posted that at the gate to hell.) Not that other humans typically walk those trails. The sign would be for me.

As if I could ever forget.

* * *

For the next few springs, I went nowhere near that trail. I did miss that portion of my cherished daily odyssey among the trees — taking in the fragrant air, the sounds and colors. The distinctive features of each stretch of those woods are as dearly familiar as my very body. There are few places where I feel more alive than in that world where I’m just one of a rich variety of creatures. For the woods are their realm. I am a privileged guest there (if sometimes an unwelcome one).

Eventually, after a few Aprils, I decided to venture ever so tentatively up the first rise of that trail, pausing at the turn toward the stretch where the mother bird once held court. Among the many things I’d learned about the female northern goshawk was that while she may re-use a nest over multiple springs, it isn’t necessarily the case.

That first time back, my feet grew still every few tentative steps, ears and eyes acutely attuned. Detecting nothing, I crept ever more cautiously toward where we met that day, stopping frequently to listen and look. At last I drew near the memorable spot, casting my eyes toward the branch where she was when we first saw one another. Nothing. I glanced in the opposite direction to the tree where I theorized the nest may have been. (I’d learned about the sort of tree a nesting goshawk prefers.) Seeing nothing, I proceeded slowly forward, always ready to retrace my steps.

No sign anywhere. 

* * *

I have not seen her since. Perhaps she opted for a more remote part of the woods, distant from any trail, with its potential for nuisance interlopers. 

As I write this, it is spring again: nesting season. As always, I will take care there to listen, to scan. When I come to that place, I will hold still. Not just from caution, but — well, to grant myself space to go back there, to the moment I met her.

For I miss the goshawk! How could I not? Such magnificence. How could I feel anything but great fortune to have encountered such a creature, harrowing as it surely was?

Such ferocious maternal devotion. She and I are kindred, you see.

* * *

Until that life-altering day, I had not named any of the trails (nor has anyone else, so far as I know). But since that spring day, that place has been the Goshawk Trail.

All my life I’ve loved poetry. Sometimes when I’m moving among the trees, long-beloved lines will remind me of themselves. Not long after the goshawk encounter, a famous line of Robert Frost’s visited me:

Whose woods these are I think I know. 

The speaker in the poem refers, of course, to the landowner. I had long supposed the forest surrounding my cabin to belong to my landlord, who kindly allows me to walk on his property. Now I know whose woods they really are. 

I shared with the good man the news of the splendid creature who’d taken up residence in “his” woods. He was duly respectful, having long known himself to be only incidentally the entitled one.

Nobody owns the wild.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

Awakening removed the fear of dying, taking with it the neurotic lifelong obsession with doing what “matters” (or “needs” doing), in the ever-diminishing time left. The number of days on that precious quantity had been (as it ever will be!) agonizingly unknowable: hence the constant pressure of anxiety, from the awful ongoing sense of brevity, and the haunting pervasive un-know-ability. All that could be known with certainty was that the hourglass steadily held fewer grains than it had the day prior. 

One of the expressions of the fear of death was that I’d run out of time to do better at one thing and another, to “fail” less. I felt an urgency, always, to achieve longstanding goals — like, to become a better mother. The prospect of death was the major enemy in my life: not so much because I feared demise and the actual end of things, but more because of the way dying represented the dwindling of opportunity to achieve all I hoped to get to.

Driven by what “needed” doing, I forever postponed delight, which must be “deserved.” (As if being alive weren’t “deserving” enough. Just ask someone nearing death.)

The greater part of what was on the list — most poignantly (and so typically, for us human beings) — had nothing to do with enjoying my time here. Because I was so driven by what “needed” doing, what seemed to want solving, I was forever postponing delight. Delight, it appeared, needed to be “earned.” Deserved. (As if being alive, in and of itself, weren’t “deserving” enough. Just ask a person fast approaching death: talk about poignant!)

But earning kept not happening. For decades. There was the constant postponement of radical delight, because of all that needed doing first. The sense of priority in the matter of the spending of time was radically out of whack.

* * *

So when the machinery of fear came to a blessed halt, all the ferocious attachment to those imprisoning goals, along with the value I’d assigned those things, simply melted into the sweet now. It felt so delicious to be able to simply rest, enjoy, be here, that my days were one vast sigh of welcome relief. My life’s meaning had to do with simply being alive; or perhaps more truly, I no longer held the sense that it needed to mean anything. Life was not about doing (or failing to do). It was about being, and reveling in plain being.

For many years post-awakening, I was entirely content to allow loved ones’ desires, as well as the wishes of those seeking my guidance, to (gently) “dictate” how I lived. I was primarily responsive, my own potential preferences seldom occupying space in my awareness.

* * *

When I woke up, the sense of what matters transformed entirely. In addition, any expression of emotional need disappeared altogether. Life simplified to the point where the only needs were the physical ones, the animal requirements for water, food, and protection from the elements.

And so when it came to pass, after many years, that my brevity began gently to remind me of itself, I sat up and took notice. This was new! That revelation occurred when I was in my late fifties; I am presently 69. I began to reflect on the diminishment that could come with old age, to ask myself this: Given that I will one day die, might there be some things I’d like to do while I’m still able? Not merely alive, but fit enough to be active, to have the energy for (say) a travel adventure with my son. 

I did not have forever.

The awareness of a limited amount of time to be here did not usher in the long-familiar angst and pressure to hurry-up-and-do-things. What the noteworthy change did open up was a cherishing for the blossoming sense of opportunity on the landscape of what might be ahead. And — most surprising, and life-altering — was this: I began to have real preferences as to how I lived. Such a welcome (and sweet!) revelation: that just because I no longer resisted anything didn’t mean I might not have actual preferences.

To experience the newfound freedom to realize I had option, and to have the palpable delight of implementing desired changes in my practical life, was a real surprise, carrying much joy. This development was one of the many gifts enabled by the enduring absence of fear.

There was the question of how I might most like to spend whatever time remained. I also began to notice growing a vivid preference for solitude. For simplicity in all things, which resulted in a growing focus on efficiency and on economizing, of both effort and material resources. And this preference too: the wish to minimize, as much as possible, the need for mental engagement. Much revision of a long-familiar way of living was set in motion.

* * *

What fun opened up to me then! Such a revelation: that there could be actual non-pain-inflicting benefits to looking ahead. To seeing past the end of my nose, as it were, so accustomed was I to simply being in the now. The contemplation of mortality, inevitably including brevity, was turning out to have a blessed — and angst-free! — benefit.

How quickly then was the celebratory trip with my (newly-sober) son set in motion. Not long after, the week away together came into being. Such joy and richness, for us both! Then it was one fun thing after another in my life, having to do with the everyday and also relating to more adventures of the sort my son and I had enjoyed. And — here was the real surprise — this dramatic inner change significantly affected the matter of how my ordinary days were “spent,” altering the long familiar mode of living.

What had come alive in me, after so many years of radical equanimity with whatever-it-was, was the sweet energy of preference. Such a revelation: that I could could prefer to do this rather than that. To live this way, not so much that. There was one revelation after another of the ways preference seemed to want to express itself in how I lived.

* * *

Notably, each expression of preference was blessedly rinsed of the long-familiar attachment to getting the wanted thing. If a desired something didn’t materialize, or if it did come about but then didn’t last (nothing does!), I was entirely fine. No clinging anywhere. A breathtaking discovery, such delicious freedom in it. It simply had never dawned on me that I could want without being desperate to have. In our ordinary human way of being, the two come hand-in-hand: yet it is not inevitable that it be so!

How my life did revolutionize itself, in short order. The things I did, the ways I lived, how my days were spent. There were many surprising developments along the way, things I had not seen coming. One long-familiar pattern after another simply undid itself, leading me in a brand new direction. Along the way, much more unstructured space was brought about in my days.

Dear reader, what is your idea of fun? Do you ever ask yourself that? You don’t have forever! No time like the present.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

While it is often supposed to be so, awakening is not typically a single shining moment altering everything on one’s interior, in one fell swoop, and then continuing unchanged ever after. Although the transformation classically signals the dramatic cessation of familiar torments (mind-caused suffering, attachment, the mistaking of reality for thoughts about it), for many, awakening sets in motion a further unfolding.

The fuller truth of realization — what it’s like after — is paid insufficient attention by spiritual seekers. This is not surprising, given the prime motivator for seeking awakening in the first place: to stop suffering. All eyes tend to be on the “final” goal, as it promises blessed relief.

Meanwhile, waking up turns out to be the opening of a door, beyond which there can be a great deal of development. To assume (or to attempt to impose) anything like stability is to become stuck — to hold at bay the potential blessings of growing clarity.

* * *

In my own case, the primary transformation announced itself via the abrupt cessation of fear. This occurred in 2003, when I was 50. While I supposed at the time that the radically altered mode would persist essentially unchanged — and while the truth of that has been fundamentally borne out (underlying peace remaining almost entirely unruffled, steady consciousness persisting) — significant developments have occurred over the intervening years, yielding ever-deepening insights and re-forming the orientation to ongoing life. 

To love unconstrained by fear or attachment is also, inevitably, to grieve.

There are multiple awakenings.

In addition to being a likely heart-opener, awakening often gives rise to the deepening wisdom and the experience of physicality. It has surely been each of these for me. Nor does radical freedom turn out to be the fabled condition of uninterrupted bliss. For to have a human heart is to love: and to love unconstrained by fear or attachment is also, inevitably, to grieve. Much remained to unfold in my own heart after the 2003 opening.

Things have never held still on the interior, nor do I expect they will. In the face of ceaseless change and growing insight, humility has become a constant companion. We are only (ever) on the receiving end of wisdom, as it arrives. So long as surrender operates (whether you’re awake or not), there is no end of blessings.

* * *

At the time of this writing, I am 69. In all the years since the initial awakening, the single most radically transformative turning point occurred in October 2019. It was acute grief that ignited the vast opening — grief being one of love’s potent expressions, and so a potent opener . . . when unresisted. I could not have dreamed my heart could open farther than it already had. For when fear dissolves, it’s love that rushes in, taking up the “space” once occupied by fear, leaving the heart undefended.

The enormity of the grief that came sixteen years after the primal change was of a magnitude beyond anything my heart had previously known.

* * *

This is the story of the love for a cat. (Although it is no more truly “about a cat” than Moby-Dick is fundamentally the story of a whale.) It’s about the way grief — fully surrendered to — has the power to explode open the heart, beyond whatever its prior bounds may have been. Unresisted sorrow is a doorway to the sweetness of love without limits, and with it, a gratitude beyond fathoming. This is the story of a love so radically taking over as to render the mind dysfunctional.

It was all set in motion by the diagnosis, in 2016, of an incurable disease. My cat would grow steadily sicker. He was sixteen at the time. We had been together all his life. He was dear to me. The diagnosis brought immediate clarity to the shaping of my outer life. Since there could be no predicting the timing of a precipitous decline in my cat’s condition, I would cease scheduling any distant retreats, not wanting to end up being far from home when he came to a crisis point. It was best to avoid the potential need to cancel, last-minute, a long-planned event. 

In the time remaining, what I most wanted was to spend my days with him. I would be there to drink him in, knowing the space for that was winding down. He was to live longer than the vet predicted, dying in October 2019.

* * *

While the initial reason for simplifying my life was to be home when my cat came to a crisis point, that motivator was ultimately to become a minor point. Allowing love to “run the show” over the course of his remaining years was to carry blessings I could not have imagined possible.

How I reveled in the sweet ease of our leisurely days together, my life much less structured than before. How grateful I was to be free to accommodate his momentary whim, as when he indicated a wish to move outside to be in the glorious sun, or to curl up in my lap beside the toasty wood stove. So joyfully would I set aside something I’d anticipated doing just then (catch up on email, do a little cooking) when he seemed to want to be outdoors. I allowed him to set the pace and direction of our movements. We would linger in the glorious sunshine as long as his heart desired.

Inside the house, I would sit with him beside the wood stove, where he most longed to be on a chilly day. I’d enfold his old body, lifting him onto my lap and cradling him. He might indicate the desire to have a taste of the avocado his human was just then enjoying, a bit of the sweet corn picked that very morning.

Life grew simpler and simpler. It was love that called the shots: blessing beyond all blessings. 

* * *

I never stopped knowing that time was running out. Yet the sorrow of the background awareness of his brevity and looming death in no way diminished the moment-to-moment cherishing.

But time is always running out, isn’t it? Moment to moment, all the years we live. All the while love pulls at us, if only we will pay attention, if only we will yield: love and the urgent reality of now, now, now.

As the months unspooled, devotion and cherishing blossomed to a fullness I had not experienced before. 

And so, when the time inevitably came, did grief.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]