Foster - The way of rest: finding the courage to hold everything in love

Stop trying to heal yourself, fix yourself,

even awaken yourself.

Stop trying to fast-forward the movie of your life.

Let go of letting go.

Healing is not a destination.

Be here.

Your pain, your sorrow, your doubts, your longings,

your fearful thoughts: they are not mistakes,

and they arent asking to be healed.

They are asking to be held. Here, now, lightly,

in the loving, healing arms of present awareness...

Jeff Foster

Contents

Authors Note

A strange yet familiar feeling of utter fragility and rawness greeting you as you wake. A reflection of a reflection of something vaguely remembered in a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk as you hurry to work again. An unexpected diagnosis. A long-lost friend, returning. An old relationship breaking apart to make way for something new. Taking a friends hand in the darkness, helping them to walk when they cannot walk, or do not want to walk. A cup of tea with a loved one. That look in your grandmothers eyes before she passed into infinity. Billions of light years away, comets shooting through the vastness in profound silence...

There is so much beauty and so much sorrow, so much pain and so much joy, so much creativity, so much to be felt and discovered here in this crazy, beautiful world that we so often take for granted. Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it.

Perhaps its not death were afraid of but too much life.

When you were young it was nothing less than an act of pure creative intelligencegenius, in factto begin constructing a protective wall around your raw, sensitive, beautifully fragile and innocent heart. It made perfect sense back then to try to numb yourself to the overwhelming intensity of things, both negative and positive; to block out your pain, your fear, your anger; to distract yourself from your feelings of loneliness; to disconnect from your sorrow and your joy, too; to try to build a fixed and consistent self in order to fit in, feel safe, be accepted. It made sense to try to control yourself, adapt yourself, manipulate yourself, hide parts of yourself, in order to get love and approval from those you looked up to.

You were a tiny, sensitive love warrior, seeking love outside yourself, and you were not wrong. But perhaps now is the time to end this self-abandonment, and rediscover the love that is within you. Perhaps all your brilliant childhood defenses and seeking strategies are no longer necessary. Perhaps your heart isand always wasvast enough to hold all of life, the sorrow as much as the bliss, the agony as much as the ecstasy, the boredom as much as the excitement. Perhaps you are now finally ready to let all experience flood in; not just the good parts, the shiny parts, the spiritual parts; not just the happy, positive feelings, but all feelings; to feel them all at last, no longer afraid that they will harm you, no longer ashamed. To think all your thoughts, positive and negative ones, too, and not apologize for either. To walk your own path, finally; to speak with your own voice, speak out loud in the clear air, without compromise. This is courage! Courage not as the absence of fear, or anger, or doubt, but the willingness to truly live, to include all of yourself, the messy and painful bits, too. Courage not as the eradication of your vulnerable humanness, but as the willingness to make mistakes, to fall down, to get back up again; to keep going, even though youve lost your map, even though you dont know the way, even though you feel scared and broken and doubt your own ability to walk.

To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, if the path in front of you is clear, youre probably on someone elses.

If you are fed up with walking someone elses path; if you are sick of trying to control your thoughts and feelings, trying to live up to some inherited, secondhand image of happiness or beauty; if you are ready to drop the idea of how you should be, and love yourself exactly as you are, flaws, imperfections, doubts, scars, birthmarks, bruises, warts, and all; if you feel like you just want to embrace the whole damn universe in all its madness, joy and sorrow, sadness and ecstasy, clarity and confusion; if you are disillusioned or disappointed with the promises and paths of well-meaning authoritiesparents, spiritual teachers, self-help gurus, world leadersand long to be authentic and real, well, then you are ready for the Way of Rest.

The message of this book is simple. Stop trying to be happy; stop running away from your unhappiness; embrace yourself as you are, and discover a deeper happiness. There is nothing wrong with you, and there never was, no matter what you believe, or were told. You are complete, whole, exactly as you are; perfect even in your imperfections, awesome in your humanness, strong in your fragility. Your flaws are beautiful. Your doubts are sacred.

It is okay to feel broken and wounded sometimes, it really is. Your pain or discomfort, your sadness, your anger, your fear, are not signs of your failure or spiritual weakness; they are important and precious parts of you that just long to be held in love. There is no longer any need to be ashamed of your wounds, to hide them or push them further away, to pretend to be happy, or okay, or perfect or enlightened. There is no need to pretend at all anymore. You are exhausted from the fight and the flight, tired of seeking love outside your own heart, fed up with disconnecting from the present moment, and you long for rest. My dear reader, this book is your permission to rest, permission to feel, permission to live... without needing to wait for permission any longer.

Please dont take anything I write as indisputable fact, as some inarguable, absolute truth. I am only a little bird, singing my song, offering these imperfect yet very heartfelt words to you. I write only from my own experience as one who has suffered and found a way through suffering; as one who once wanted to die and be numb and pure and enlightened, but who has now fallen in love with his imperfect humanity. I see the human and the spiritual as one; the Absolute and the relative as indivisible lovers; and enlightenment not as a future state, but as what we already are, the brilliant light that shines from our very core.

Many of the pieces in this book I dont even remember writing; they flowed out freely and spontaneously from a profoundly still and silent place within; in many ways this book wrote itself as I sat and watched, amazed. I have never thought of myself as some expert, some infallible teacher or spiritual guru. I know the true teacher is the one we carry in our hearts, and the true authority is life itself, the present moment, shining brightly beyond all ideology, prior to human religion or systems of thought, prior to even these words.

Before you are a success or a failure, good or bad, happy or sad, rich or poor, spiritual or unspiritual, strong or weak, Christian or Buddhist or atheist, even male or female, you are. You are alive. You are awake. You are life itself, inseparable from the power that grows the flowers and gives birth to galaxies. You are consciousness, the very consciousness that was there at the big bang; that is how essential you are. And so happiness is not something you earn, or are given by others; it is your birthright.

I hope the words in this book inspire, challenge, and encourage you; but most of all, I hope they remind you that you are alive and worthy of the kind of love that moves the stars.