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The Difference Between Us and Other Creatures
August 17, 2024
This little construction of lichen I’m just now gazing upon, exotically designed, whimsically colored, its spongy tendrils of greenish gray …
June 21, 2024
Jiddu Krishnamurti would sit very still before vast crowds in India and all over the world. People traveled great distances …
Addiction: Shining Light on It
May 23, 2024
Most of us are (or have been) addicted to something. I used to be addicted to food. I have long …
April 7, 2024
Among the things we don’t have forever to do is express our gratitude to someone significant in our lives. This …
Want vs. Need: Noticing the Difference
February 26, 2024
Maybe like me, you sometimes tell yourself “I need to do this.” Every now and again, it can be useful …
January 30, 2024
When somebody says those words to us, it’s typically intended as a kind of rebuke. But when we pose the …
December 20, 2023
How I love to see the snow falling. I moved to New England many years ago so I would finally …
November 7, 2023
I am one of the greediest people I know. I am having just the best time. So much fun, such …
October 19, 2023
It is fall in New England, where I presently spend my days. I recently had an experience I am moved …
The Benefit of Looking Backwards
August 25, 2023
Life often turns out radically different from how we supposed it might. Have you noticed? You look back over some …
Uncertainty: A Surprising Blessing
July 18, 2023
Much of our planet is presently at the mercy of weather extremity. In the United States, as in so many …
June 14, 2023
We generally ask a question because we hope to get an answer. Sometimes, though, the deepest benefit of asking comes …
May 6, 2023
The storied container of a person’s recollected history is a kind of static object that exists in the head. Mental …
March 29, 2023
A human being blessedly is endowed with a dual capacity: to experience our oh-so-mortal physicality and simultaneously to attune, in …
February 13, 2023
We keep getting older. From the moment we’re born, each day we’re older than we were the day before. This …
January 2, 2023
A new year has begun. “Happy New Year,” we wish one another. But what if we greeted each new morning …
December 6, 2022
Life happens fast. The irony is noteworthy: while a given moment is utterly still (when you’re really there), the succession …
November 1, 2022
Once upon a time I prided myself on the ability to multitask. Other people, observing the “skill,” admired me for …
October 1, 2022
In the nearly 20 years since awakening, I have observed several lengthy “chapters” in the more fully waking-up of the …
August 9, 2022
A seeker’s aching desire to awaken is not apart from, not different from, what comes to many a regretful human …
July 2, 2022
There is more than one way that knowing takes place in a human being. This is the case whether or …
May 27, 2022
People longing to awaken sometimes hold mistaken impressions about what radical freedom would be like. Some suppose that the quieting …
The Vastness of the Wide-Open Heart
April 19, 2022
The fully awakened heart knows what it is to love unconditionally. What could be more life-altering than to come to …
March 27, 2022
A person who longs to awaken, contemplating what the sweetness of freedom might be like, may suppose that it would …
The Delight of Preference Without Attachment
February 21, 2022
Awakening removed the fear of dying, taking with it the neurotic lifelong obsession with doing what “matters” (or “needs” doing), …
January 14, 2022
While it is often supposed to be so, awakening is not typically a single shining moment altering everything on one’s …
Wisdom from Surprising Sources
December 10, 2021
He is the truest friend of my life, and likely of the before of this life. How hesitant I was, …
Awakening Misconceptions (My Own Included)
November 7, 2021
There is a bounty of common assumptions about what it is to awaken, and about what it’s like to live …
October 1, 2021
Once in a great while we are given two births in a single life. There’s the one the body has, …
Climate Change and the Climate Within
August 30, 2021
Recent conditions on my road have made it clear that my Vermont town and my particular life experience is (like …
July 13, 2021
Spiritual teachers can be legendary for their ability to open a person’s eyes to the truth (and some, for their …
God and Karma (and Other Ideas)
June 5, 2021
When reflecting on some life development, do you ever turn toward karma or divine will, or perhaps the configuration of …
April 30, 2021
Desire is wrongly maligned in spiritual circles. Many a well-meaning seeker supposes it to be the enemy of peaceful well-being, …
March 19, 2021
For most of my life I’ve carried an impression, an assumption, having to do with a given thought and how …
February 4, 2021
One of the more compelling features of human existence is the way a person is both timeless and mortal. This …
January 3, 2021
The life-altering time we’re all in carries its potential blessings. The extremity and uncertainty of the pandemic may attune us …
December 9, 2020
What is it to be in the now? It’s to gently allow awareness to take in whatever is immediate, inside …
November 14, 2020
The spiritual orientation to life is often set in motion by the desire to address painful inner forces like anxiety, …
October 11, 2020
What is it to live authentically, to be at no distance from the life you’re in? It’s to know what …
September 3, 2020
What does grief ask of a human being? When the heart is aching to break, what’s to be done? A …
August 18, 2020
If a person is fortunate, the question will come. What am I, at my essence? Is there something deeper than the daily …
July 17, 2020
Awakening is a beginning, not a triumphant conclusion. There might be the impression that once awakening has occurred, nothing remains …
April 20, 2020
A moment of life occurs. You’re doing something, or observing or listening, your senses engaged. A split second later, at …
Practical and Spiritual Wisdom, in a Single Gesture
March 21, 2020
How can you take care of yourself in a difficult moment (including this one), and at the same time come …
March 15, 2020
Here it is, the teacher of them all. Every blessed one of us at “school” nowadays, morning-noon-and-night. How might it …
March 3, 2020
When a person wakes up, what is it they awaken to? And what do they awaken from? Awakening is about …
January 27, 2020
You may sometimes find yourself thinking Things have never been this bad before. This thought could be about your own …
Unconditional Love and the Surrender to Fear
December 23, 2019
We ache all our lives to be loved unconditionally. To be seen through and through as we truly are, without …
November 19, 2019
When you allow yourself to sink into the reality of something challenging, to grant a painful feeling its necessary space, …
October 15, 2019
Why might a person choose to eat in a healthy way, to get regular exercise? What’s behind the wish to …
September 12, 2019
Disasters befalling one acquaintance and another. No shortage of reminders of how uncertain everything is, always. How constantly subject to …
August 13, 2019
“Briefly, briefly, we see it, and forget,” writes the poet Jane Hirshfield. What is that it? How can it be described? How …
July 21, 2019
We are all our lives estranged from our very selves — that stillness at the heart of each moment, the …
June 26, 2019
In some ways of looking at a human life, having a healthy sense of self appears to be a good …
May 14, 2019
A human being is endowed with two essential capacities. One is attention, which is about direct encounter, attuned to the …
April 13, 2019
What’s it like living a human life after the mind has ceased running the show – once radical freedom has …
The Value and Limitation of Religion
March 29, 2019
So much trouble has been set in motion by religion. Even so, religious or spiritual practice surely has been a …
February 11, 2019
What does it mean when it’s said that you are not separate? That you are not (compelling appearances to the …
January 8, 2019
Attention is gold, a commodity of priceless value. For it is via attention that we come to know reality, to …
November 27, 2018
[This writing is more personal than most posts on this site. I was encouraged to make it available, even so, …
October 6, 2018
Do you ever notice yourself in the act of being judgmental or unkind, either to another or to yourself? When …
August 27, 2018
Hope is thought to be a good thing, a positive force. Its absence is associated with depression, pessimism, negativity. What …
July 10, 2018
Undo all the ideas in the head, or at least see them for what they are: mind-made, and so maybe …
May 20, 2018
Each moment – when rightly received, fully occupied – is an incredibly potent thing. When you’re fully attuned to what-is, …
The Breakthrough Shift: Lost and Found
March 24, 2018
So much seeking is misguided. Many get hopelessly lost in the impression that somebody else “has it” while they do …
February 6, 2018
The impression is that “I” exist, that I am here – that each of us is a person, recognizable, ongoing …
December 31, 2017
The holy of holies, missed. All one’s life, it’s missed. Never entered, embodied. Never even (maybe) sensed the presence of …
The Disappearing Act of the Self
November 21, 2017
How up for grabs it all turns out to be: that enduring impression of a self, having substance and boundary, …
The Secret Room Where Peace Lives
October 17, 2017
How naturally a person tends to equate accepting something with liking it. It’s easier to see this in the negation: …
September 4, 2017
It was like I’d been robbed. As if someone crept into my dark house in the night and made off …
Interview on Spiritual Teachers Podcast
August 27, 2017
This is a 90-minute interview Jan recently had with Shawn Nevins on Spiritual Teachers.org. It may be listened to via …
July 3, 2017
I used to picture time – the collective moments of a lived life – as a horizontal line. The present …
Audio of The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is
June 6, 2017
Jan Frazier has just recorded the final section of her second book, The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What …
May 26, 2017
How surprising it was, one Christmas not too many years ago, to feel myself moved in a new way by …
April 18, 2017
“What is real?” Or, “What am I?” These are two ways into the heart of the matter, the essential thing …
Spiritual Vigilance: Give It a Rest
March 20, 2017
Conscious awareness is often confused with vigilance, an enforced self-observation having the goal of catching oneself at something “unspiritual,” so …
February 17, 2017
It’s a rich thing to contemplate: what it’s like to no longer identify with body, history, opinions, thoughts – and …
January 20, 2017
I used to be a little crazy. I don’t know how my poor heart managed to hold up as long …
Living in the Constantly-Dying Moment
December 9, 2016
I once lived (or tried to) in ongoing disregard of the fact of radical uncertainty, of brevity. Every single thing …
The Embodied Expression of Consciousness
October 30, 2016
What has changed, when awakening occurs? What’s essentially different from how it was before? …
September 29, 2016
What happens within seems to move outward and to also happen “out there,” with other people, with one’s surroundings. The …
August 18, 2016
“It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense …
Consciousness and Chronic Pain
July 20, 2016
A conscious orientation to ongoing pain, whether physical or emotional, means the “ongoingness” of the condition doesn’t hold your attention …
June 3, 2016
We live our lives in definition, in naming. Above all, in self-definition. All of life, it’s I am a this, …
Northampton Insight Meditation Center, July 24
May 14, 2016
On Sunday, July 24, Jan will give a talk at the Karuna Yoga Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. The evening will …
Northampton Insight Meditation Center, September 25
May 14, 2016
On Sunday, September 25, Jan will give a talk at the Karuna Yoga Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. The evening will …
May 5, 2016
It’s a force of nature, the largeness of whatever it is that opens a person to possibility beyond how things …
The Drunk Carpenter and Life Without a Map
March 25, 2016
We invent disturbances, ways to be at a distance from the harmony that’s ongoing. Mostly we aren’t attuned to it …
February 17, 2016
Nothing has compelled me in the lasting way this has: the idea of how a life can change, comprehensively. How …
December 11, 2015
Sometimes I ask myself this: If this were to be my last opportunity to say something that might be of …
October 26, 2015
A question that gets asked (by others and also inside my own head) is this. Given that the sensation of …
Suffering: That Extra Something
October 10, 2015
Someone observed that suffering is what happens when a person adds something on. Suffering is generated when thoughts are piled …
The Line Dividing Fear from Love
August 21, 2015
There is a line clearly dividing the first 50 years of life from the years since (twelve, at the present …
July 6, 2015
There are two kinds of suffering: the kind that bears fruit, and the kind that’s pointless (and therefore doomed to …
June 19, 2015
Freedom is living unencumbered. You are free to move easily among whatever things come along. You are soft, without the …
May 17, 2015
What appears to be a single multifaceted response to a moment of life is, if you look closely, several steps …
April 6, 2015
I found a door I hadn’t known was there. It was like entering into another dimension, only this wasn’t science …
March 11, 2015
Living awake feels like being in a child’s story, a simple story about a simple thing. The restoration to innocence, …
February 15, 2015
Why does a person meditate? What does that mean, to meditate? When someone sits for meditation, on a given occasion …
January 13, 2015
We are betrayed daily, hourly, by the persisting sense of self. That sense of who I am, and how it …
December 19, 2014
This is the day the Lord has made. Although I have read almost none of the Bible, these words often …
November 25, 2014
The question is, What am I? What is the thing I don’t want to have missed? What is life really …
November 9, 2014
Once upon a time there was a creature endowed with a fine mind, and also with sense receptors that were …
Resting from Mind-Caused Suffering
October 11, 2014
This is the terrible irony of the vast majority of human suffering: the thing that gives rise to it in …
September 17, 2014
It’s said (and has been said for millennia) that it’s possible for a person not to suffer, not to be …
August 6, 2014
There appears to be a you having an objective existence, independent of your mind’s narrative of a self. The further …
July 13, 2014
Talking to God. Who never talks back. Just a receptivity, a ceaseless openness …
What You Can Do to Wake Up: Not This
July 1, 2014
The longing to become free of suffering, to rest in peaceful well-being, gives rise to various approaches, not all of …
June 16, 2014
A door without a lock. A door without a lock that appears to be locked — that gives the impression …
Weekend Retreat Aug. 15-17 in Port Townsend, WA
June 2, 2014
On the weekend of August 15-17, in Port Townsend, Washington, Jan will offer a retreat called “Living an Unburdened Life.” …
May 26, 2014
Being conscious occurs in the now. (Even if your attachment to ego has ended, and you’re conscious as the norm, …
April 26, 2014
How is it possible to live in this world, where suffering and deterioration are rampant, and yet be steadily at …
Weekend Retreat Aug. 15-17 in Port Townsend, WA
April 21, 2014
On the weekend of August 15-17, in Port Townsend, Washington, Jan will offer a retreat called “Living an Unburdened Life.” …
April 8, 2014
Anger — whether outwardly expressed or concealed — is a response to something underlying it, something felt before. …
March 17, 2014
When the mind has lost the habit of running on its own, one of the things that’s become vivid is …
January 26, 2014
I had been singing for many years before I realized why I was often short on breath. To produce a …
Preparing the Ground for Resistance
January 6, 2014
The pain caused by resisting is a pointless pain. So unnecessary. …
Discovering the Freedom of Being, February 28 and March 1
October 12, 2013
Jan will be in Austin (TX) this winter. On Friday, February 28, she will give a talk from 7:00 to …
Philadelphia Workshop February 2, 2014
July 23, 2013
A day-long workshop with Jan will take place in Philadelphia on Sunday, February 2, from 10 am to 4 pm. We …
Weekend Workshop, Novato, CA, August 24-25
June 14, 2013
Jan will give a weekend workshop in Novato, CA, on August 24-25. The theme of the workshop is “The Unburdened …
June 14, 2013
Jan will give a talk at East Bay Open Circle on Thursday, August 22, from 7 to 9 p.m. The …
June 14, 2013
Jan will give a talk at Yoga Mendocino on Wednesday, August 21, from 7 to 9 p.m. The talk’s title …
June 14, 2013
Jan will give a talk at Marin Open Circle on Tuesday, August 20, from 7 to 9 p.m. The talk’s title …
June 14, 2013
Jan will give a talk at Sebastopol Open Circle on Monday, August 19, from 7 to 9 p.m. The talk’s …
Lynchburg (VA) and Raleigh (NC), DATES CHANGING
June 4, 2013
In the coming weeks, details about each of these events will appear on this website. If you would like to …
Weekend Retreat October 18-20 in Shutesbury, MA
April 29, 2013
On the weekend of October 18-20, 2013, there will be a retreat with Jan in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. The retreat will be …
April 20, 2013
On Saturday, June 8, Jan will be in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, at the Hunter River Lions Hall, from …
Buddhist Discussion Group in Grafton, VT, April 23
January 26, 2013
On Tuesday, April 23, at 6:30, Jan will be a guest speaker at the Buddhist Discussion Group in Grafton, VT …
Satsang and Evening Talk in Shelburne, VT April 5-6
January 26, 2013
Jan will be in Shelburne, VT (10 miles south of Burlington) on Friday, April 5, and Saturday, April 6. On …
January 2, 2013
On Sunday, April 21, Jan will hold a retreat in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Sponsored by Insight Meditation of Pioneer Valley, the retreat is called “Rethinking …
Cambridge Retreat, February 22-23, 2013
November 19, 2012
Jan will lead a retreat in Cambridge (MA) on February 22 and 23, 2013. We will be at the Friends …
Northampton Insight Meditation Center, April 27
September 2, 2012
On Sunday, April 27, Jan will give a talk at the Karuna Yoga Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. The evening will …
Jan in Philadelphia Saturday, September 22
July 6, 2012
On Saturday, September 22, Jan will give a talk in Philadelphia from 2:00 to 5:00 at the Germantown Friends School, at …
Self Inquiry Discussion Group Retreat, Raleigh, October 5-7
July 6, 2012
Jan will be one of several teachers at this year’s retreat sponsored by the Self-Inquiry Group in Raleigh. The weekend …
Jan in New York City on Friday, September 21
June 29, 2012
On Friday, September 21, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., Jan will have a satsang in New York City at One …
Satsang in Acton (MA) August 4
June 19, 2012
On Saturday, August 4, Jan will have a satsang in Acton, Massachusetts. This will be at a private home, so …
June 2, 2012
On Sunday, September 16, Jan will read from her new book, The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is …
Resting in Present-Moment Awareness
April 29, 2012
On Saturday, May 12, from 10 am to 4 pm, Jan Frazier will offer a retreat called “Resting in Present-Moment …
Retreat and Evening Talk in Shelburne, VT April 27-28
February 24, 2012
Jan will be in Shelburne, VT (10 miles south of Burlington) on Friday, April 27, and Saturday, April 28. On …
Cape Cod April 22: Sunday Morning Service, Afternoon Retreat
January 17, 2012
Jan will be in West Yarmouth (MA) on Sunday, April 22, at One Light: A Center for Spiritual Transformation. She …
December 2, 2011
On Thursday, April 12, 2012, Jan will be at the East West Bookshop of Seattle (WA), from 7:00 to 8:30 …
This Sweet Moment: A Weekend with Jan Frazier
February 26, 2011
On Friday, September 30, and Saturday, October 1, Jan will be in Raleigh, North Carolina. Friday evening, from 7:00 to …