Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Jeff Foster. Jeff teaches a way out of seeking fulfillment into the future, into the acceptance of “all this, here and now.” His teaching style is direct and uncompromising, and yet full of humanity, humor, and compassion. He belongs to no tradition or lineage and makes his teaching accessible to all. In 2012, Jeff Foster was voted by the Watkins Review to be one of the world’s 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.
With Sounds True, Jeff Foster has created two new audio learning programs: The Courage to Love: Meditations for Embracing Everything, and Sacred as You Are: Depression as a Call to Spiritual Awakening. Jeff has also released a new book called The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Jeff and I spoke about the obstacles people face in achieving deep rest, and how to treat discomfort as a welcome guest and learn how to actually rest in discomfort. We also talked about a desire to want to die and what is at the core of this desire, and how this can be a gateway into a deep meditation on the nature of self. Finally, we talked about daring and the type of courage that is required to truly rest. Jeff read a passage from his new book called “Turn Back, Right Now!” Here’s my conversation with someone who is as funny as he is deep, someone I’m proud to be able to call a friend, Jeff Foster:
Jeff, with Sounds True, you’ve written a new book called The Way of Rest. Towards the beginning of the book, you actually write that “every great adventure is fueled by rest.” I want to begin—I hope you’re sitting back, leaning back in a restful position, by talking—
Jeff Foster: As always.
TS: Yes—by talking about rest. It seems like it’s something so needed in our culture as a whole, but even within people who are on a spiritual path.
JF: Yes. I think it’s what everyone’s looking for, really deep down, is rest. I think underneath every question I’ve ever been asked at every meeting and every retreat I’ve done really is this question: “How can I rest?” I look around the world right now, just going outside and walking through the streets and going into the shopping malls where people hang out, into the cafes and everyone is so fast these days. Maybe it’s just that I’m really, really slow, but everyone seems to be running around, you know? Trying to get places and achieve things, and basically making the future way more important than the present moment; making the goal far more important than where they are.
I think in so many different ways that’s really what I teach and what I invite people back to, is just a place of rest. I invite people to really slow down and reconnect with the present moment, with where they are—feel their feet on the ground and pay attention to their breathing and notice their bodily sensations and take time to just feel their feelings, even if they’re uncomfortable, and notice the thoughts swirling through their mind instead of getting so caught up in them. Yes, I really believe that that’s what, deep down, everyone is looking for.
I know that’s what I was desperately looking for ten, fifteen years ago. I reached this point in my life where I was just so depressed and so exhausted. I even reached the point—ten, fifteen years ago, I can’t remember now, It’s all kind of lost in the fog of time—but I reached the point of wanting to die because I was just so disconnected from myself and so attached to becoming something.
Looking back, what I realize now is I didn’t really want to die. I wanted to rest. I didn’t really want to die. I wanted to rest. I just didn’t know how to rest. This is really the core of what I teach is rest, how to rest. I’ve been asking the question—is it even a how? Is that even the right question, “How can I rest?” Really, what I’m inviting people to is actually the place deep within themselves which is already at rest.
The rest is actually already what we are, on a much deeper level. It’s not even the question of, “How can I reach this future place called ‘rest’?” The mind even makes rest into a goal. Paradoxically or ironically, we start struggling to rest. We even turn rest into a place to get to. What I’m suggesting is really that rest is our true nature. There’s something deep within us that is at rest. It’s always been at rest. Call it consciousness. Call it awareness. Call it our true nature. Call it life itself, but it’s what we are and it’s always at rest. It’s always been resting. It’s not a goal; it’s our true nature.
So if we’re talking about rest, we’re talking about who we really are—something that’s constant, present, unchanging, unmoving, always with us. So this is what I teach, although I don’t really consider myself to be a teacher, more like a—I think Eckhart Tolle talks about this, more like an un-teacher, like I unravel—
TS: What does it mean to be an un-teacher?
JF: You’ll have to ask Eckhart Tolle about that!
TS: OK.
JF: [Laughs.] It’s my sense of humor. As you know, Tami, I haven’t lost my sense of humor, even with my awakening. The sense of humor seems to have remained. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. You can tell me.
TS: I’m into it. I think what you mean by “un-teacher,” or in quoting Eckhart, is that you’re helping people unlearn something that’s obscuring the state of rest, something like that?
JF: Yes. That’s exactly it. You always say things much better than I can. I think you should do this job, really! Yes, I think we know too much, you know? Most people are so stuffed full of knowledge, information. “We know too much and we feel too little,” to quote Charlie Chaplin. We’ve taken on so many false concepts and beliefs and ideas. We’ve taken all these secondhand ideas of how we should be. That’s basically a simple way of talking about our conditioning: how we should be, how we should feel.
What I’m trying to do with people in my books and in my meetings, retreats, is just start to really question and even begin to dismantle, deconstruct those ideas, those images we have of how we should be. Because really, that’s what we’re always doing is comparing ourselves, basically, with an image of how we should be; comparing this present moment with an image of how the present moment should be. We start to see, actually, all these “shoulds,” these images, are actually lies that we shouldn’t—even in the spiritual world, we seem to get this idea we shouldn’t—I don’t know, we shouldn’t feel sad or that we shouldn’t have doubts because we think that we’re supposed to be in this state, this enlightened state where there’s no fear. There’s no doubts. There’s no sadness anymore. That’s just an idea. That’s just an image.
We get this idea that somehow doubts or sadness or fear or loneliness—all these very beautiful energies in us, these feelings that just want to be felt, they’re just movements of life. We get this idea that these energies are wrong or bad or unspiritual or even negative. I just try and smash some of those ideas and just help people really embrace themselves exactly as they are.
TS: So if rest is really what you find people are looking for underneath all of the questions—they come to your retreats and ask this, that, and the other thing—what’s the obstacle? What are the obstacles, plural, for people finding the kind of deep soul rest that you’re pointing to in The Way of Rest?
JF: Let me just give an example. I was speaking to a woman just a few months ago. She was experiencing a lot of pain in her body, and she’d been trying everything to get rid of the pain—every method, every technique, every practice, been to every therapist, all with this idea that she wants to get rid of it. Of course, she wants to get rid of the pain, but she was exhausted. It was like it had become this battle with herself, this battle with her pain, like the pain had become her enemy. She was wondering why the pain was still there after everything she’d done, why she couldn’t get rid of it, because this is always what the mind wants to do, is get rid of. This is always the mind’s question is, “How can I get rid of this discomfort? How can I get rid of this pain? How can I get rid of this fear? How can I get rid of this anxiety?” We can exhaust ourselves trying to get rid of these parts of ourselves.
What I just suggested this woman try is just to actually stay with the pain—to actually become curious about the pain in her body, to actually bring awareness to it, bring attention to it. Without this idea that it should go away, without trying to get rid of it, without trying to make the discomfort go away. She sat there for a few moments just really feeling into the pain, breathing into it, just trying to welcome it. Instead of trying to get rid of it, actually trying to be with it, to stay with it, to welcome it.
Then what happened is as she stayed with the pain, she started to feel very sad, so I just invited her to just allow the sadness, as well—not fight the sadness, just begin to trust, really, whatever was coming up in the present moment, in the present moment, without trying to get into a different moment—without making the present moment wrong, which is what we often do. So it was like trust, trust.
Then she started to feel a lot of fear, and so I was like, “OK. Great. Then feel that, as well. Allow that in your body, as well.” Then she was saying how lot of anger was coming up and so I was, “Trust. Trust that. Allow that. Allow that.” Then what she started to feel bubbling up from deep within her was just this very powerful sense of—actually, it was hatred. It was hatred. She said, “Jeff, I just have to be honest with you right now. I just feel like I hate, I hate myself.” It was coming from deep within her. This hatred just wanted to express itself. She’s like, “I hate myself so much. I just feel like I want to die right now.” I just stayed present with her and just said, “OK. Just allow that, as well. Allow all of this to come up.”
What happened then, she just started crying, and then she calmed down. What she said to me then was, “Jeff, it’s incredible. I’ve never—in my whole life, I’ve never allowed myself to feel that hatred. I’ve always—in the past when I’ve felt that hatred bubbling up within me, I’ve always just tried to put a stop to it and distract myself, and I’ve gone to eat something or read something or do something. This was the first time ever I’ve actually allowed that hatred to move in me and to actually feel it and express it.” She said, “It’s very strange. Right now, I feel more rested and more alive than I’ve ever felt in my life.”
I thought that was just incredible that we—then she was telling me how as a kid, she never allowed herself to feel anger or to feel hatred because, of course, the people around her, her parents, didn’t allow her to feel that and certainly didn’t allow her to express that. So she stuffed it down. That’s what she was doing for her whole life, pushing down all these very precious parts of herself.
I think what she came to discover was that actually, there was enough space in her. This is really what I teach, as well, that there’s so much space in you. You have so much capacity for the so-called positive feelings, as well as the so-called negative feelings; for the so-called pleasurable sensations, but also for really uncomfortable sensations. That all thoughts and all feelings really have a place in you. They can all just be allowed to arise in you, in presence, in what you are. It’s like what you are is the sky and every thought, every sensation, every feeling that arises is just like weather that comes, And it can be intense, it can be painful, it can be uncomfortable, but it’s life.
This is really what my book is about. It’s just like, bow to everything, really. Bow to everything—the joy, but also the sadness. It’s life: feelings of bliss and excitement, but also feelings of boredom, even anger, even hatred. They’re all expressions of life. They’re not impurities. They’re not signs there’s something horribly wrong with you. Because I think that’s where we go so quickly is that, “Why is this thought here? Why is this feeling here? Why is this sensation here? There must be something wrong with me. I must be doing something wrong.” There’s never anything wrong with you, but I think that that sense that there’s something wrong with you, it goes so deep that we’ve been shamed. We’ve all been shamed to some extent. We’ve all been taught or we’ve learned that certain thoughts, certain feelings, just shouldn’t be in us. It’s that we’ve forgotten our true nature. We’ve forgotten how much we can actually hold. We’ve forgotten how much capacity there actually is in our being, in our presence.
So that’s where the rest comes from, is knowing, really, that whatever thought, whatever sensation, whatever feeling is arising in you right now, is appearing in your experience—it’s not a mistake. It’s not wrong. It’s not bad. It’s not sinful. It’s not unspiritual. It’s not a sign that you are far from where you should be. It’s not a sign that you’re far from healing. It’s not a sign that you’re far from awakening. That’s the mind. That’s what the mind is always telling you, that I’m far from where I should be—which is always a lie, which is always a lie.
If you can just turn towards your present embodied experience, even if it’s uncomfortable—feel the sadness or the joy. Feel the fluttery sensations in your belly or the tight sensations in your throat or feel the pressure in your head, and just don’t make it wrong. Turn towards it with this attitude of a curiosity and welcoming. So it’s this shift in paradigm from the paradigm of the mind, which is, “How can I get rid of this discomfort? How can I get rid of this fear? How can I get rid of this sadness?” Shifting from that paradigm to the paradigm of the heart, you could say.
Or as I’m saying in a retreat I recently did in Belgium, it’s like one way is the way of doing. The mind always wants to do; “What can I do to get rid of this?” That’s the way of doing. And shifting back into the—falling back into the way of rest, which is—it’s not, “What can I do to get rid of this?” it’s, “How can I make space for this, this sadness or this fear or this doubt or even this feeling of emptiness in me? How can I make room for it? How can I allow it? How can I come to recognize that it’s actually life?” It’s not a mistake. There’s beauty in it. There’s beauty in it.
TS: Now, I can imagine, Jeff, somebody feeling that, “I get it that I shouldn’t turn away from discomfort and discontent, but actually resting in it. How can I rest in it? It feels terrible.”
JF: Yes. So, don’t make rest into a goal. Don’t make it into a doing. If I’m talking with someone and they say that to me, they say, “Hey, I’m feeling really uncomfortable,” I wouldn’t tell them, “OK. You have to rest.” That becomes another way of shaming them, in a way, because they just go into, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I rest?” You have to be very careful about—this is thing, that the mind turns everything into a goal. It will even turn rest [into a goal]. “Oh, god, now Jeff says I have to rest. Well, I have to try and do that. It’s something else I have to do now is rest,” which is the opposite of rest, really.
Really, the answer is meditation. When I’m talking about meditation, I’m not talking about trying to get somewhere. For me, true meditation is really—it’s very, very, very, very simple. Meditation is just this inviting your attention into the moment, becoming curious, becoming fascinated, as if you were looking at your present experience through the eyes of a child or through the eyes of God. Do this with fresh eyes, so just—instead of trying to get rid of the discomfort, instead of trying to make it go away, just become really curious about the discomfort, like where do I feel it in my body? Is it in my belly? Is it in my chest? Is it in my head? Bring this curious, open awareness into the discomfort. Feel those sensations in the body.
You’re not trying to rest. I think that’s really important. You’re not trying to rest. Begin to just allow these sensations to be here. It’s like the sense of trust. It’s like, even though these sensations may feel uncomfortable right now, I trust that they’re not a mistake and that they are life. You can breathe into the sensations; you can feel or imagine your breath moving into those sensations. It’s just this sense of welcoming whatever is here, treating the discomfort as a welcome guest.
Also, you could notice there’s a part of you, of course, that wants to run away from it. You notice yourself becoming distracted from the discomfort—going off into your mind, thinking about the past, thinking about the future. I think it’s important not to call that wrong either. That’s just, it’s an old habit. It’s running away from discomfort. It’s an old, old, old habit. It’s running away from ourselves, running away from the thing that hurts in us. It’s like the self-abandonment, it’s such a habit. It’s such a habit. So we can just notice. We can notice if we’ve become distracted, if we’re running away. We can just acknowledge that and gently bring ourselves back to our bodies, back to the discomfort, the sadness, the fear, breathe into it without trying to make it go away.
I think it’s really important not to make rest into a goal. Trying to rest actually makes you feel worse, sometimes. The mind turns everything into a goal—all these wonderful spiritual ideas of being present, being in the now. The mind even turns presence into a goal. I’ve seen many people do that. It’s very tricky, the mind, because it’s like the mind gets this idea “OK, I have to be present with the discomfort. OK. I’m going to be present with this discomfort.”
It’s like then you’re only being present with the discomfort because you secretly want the discomfort to go away. There’s that secret agenda. “OK, I’m going to be present. I’m going to be in the now. Oh, I’m feeling sad. I’m feeling anxious. I’m feeling angry. OK. I’m going to be in the now. I’m going to be in the moment. I’m going to be conscious of this. I’m going to be aware.” Easily, the only reason we’re doing that is because we secretly want the discomfort to go away, want the fear to go away, want the sadness to go away.
Then actually, you’re not really being present. That’s resistance. That’s resistance disguised as you being present. Really, it’s being present without an agenda. Sometimes I tell people it’s like, go the opposite way. It’s like, “I’m going to be present with this sadness. Not to make it go away, but actually to allow it to stay.” Go the other way: to actually turn to the discomfort, to turn to the fear, to turn to the doubt, to turn to the empty feeling or that longing instead of trying to make it go away.
Of course, when you’re doing that, you start to feel really powerless. You start to feel really powerless when you’re trying to make something go away and it stays. You feel really powerless. By just saying to that ache, that contracted place, that tight place, that tenderness, just saying to it, “Hey, you can be here,” actually allowing it to stay. Instead of trying to make it go away, allow it—”Hey, you can stay,” even though you’re uncomfortable, then you actually start to feel much more empowered because you’re not at war with your experience at that point. You’re not split. You’re not split from your experience. You’re working with what’s presented to you. You’re working with the sadness instead of going to war with it. I think it’s really that going to war with yourself that becomes so painful.
I really believe that the greatest pain of life actually is that self-abandonment, is running away from yourself. It’s like there’s discomfort here, but you don’t want there to be discomfort. It’s like you’re splitting yourself between the discomfort here and the image of the person without discomfort. You’re the one with discomfort and you want to be the one without discomfort. You’re the one with sadness. You want to be the one without sadness. You’re the one with doubts. You want to be the one who feels certainty. Literally, you’re splitting yourself. You’re comparing yourself with an image and then you’re trying to move towards the image, which is just a dream. That’s what I invite people to do is let go of the dream—smash the dream and turn towards the reality, turn towards your embodied experience, even if it’s uncomfortable. You begin to bow to it, to honor it, to find the sacredness in it.
So we’re not even making being present or resting into a goal. I think a lot of people go into meditation with this idea that if they meditate, they’ll feel more relaxed, so they even make relaxation into a goal. So quickly—and inevitably this is what will happen, the mind starts comparing you with the image. You look into your present experience and you notice a restless feeling. The mind goes, “I don’t want to feel restless. I want to feel relaxed,” so you start to shame yourself with the image of relaxation.
What I suggest is just get rid of the image, get rid of the goal, get rid of the dream, even if the dream is something beautiful like relaxation. Lovely. But so quickly, you start resisting your present experience because you want to get to the destination. You resist where you are because you want to get there. You want to get to the there. Turn towards the restless feeling. Turn towards the sadness or the fear. I think it was Rilke who said everything that’s troubling you is just something that is coming—I’m paraphrasing here, but it’s something that’s coming for your love. Even this restless feeling, this sad feeling, this doubt, this pain. It’s not working against you. It’s actually coming for your love, coming for your attention, coming for your allowing.
This is what I often say to people. Actually, it’s not even about you moving to a place of rest. Rest is not the destination. This is why the title of my book, it’s a bit of a play on words. It’s The Way of Rest. Rest is not a destination. Rest is the way, but the mind so quickly makes rest into a destination. It’s not the way to rest. I could’ve easily called the book The Way to Rest. It would’ve been a very different book.
This is the way of rest. Rest is the way. You can actually rest in restlessness. That’s just means being present with restlessness—allowing it, giving it a place within you, seeing it not as an enemy, but as a welcome friend. The rest actually is in the allowing. The rest is in the permission. I talk a lot in the book about permission, giving permission for every thought, every sensation, every feeling. The rest is in the love, actually. That’s why the subtitle of the book is Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love. That sense of instead of trying to fix your experience, actually just holding your experience the way a mother would hold her newborn child. She wouldn’t try and fix it or make it into a different child or say to the child like, “I don’t want you. You’re restless. I want the relaxed child.” This is what we do to ourselves when we create these goals. I don’t want the sad child. I want the joyful child. Then joy becomes a goal. Bliss becomes a goal.
There’s plenty of spiritual teachers out there who want to sell you bliss and joy and you have to be “up.” That’s what spirituality, I think, has become for many people is there’s this goal of being blissed out and happy and joyful all the time. That just doesn’t seem truthful to me. Yes, sometimes feelings of joy and bliss and excitement can come and that’s wonderful. We can allow them, but our being is so much bigger than that. We’re capable of holding so much. We can hold the joy, of course, but we can also hold the sadness, like both of our children. Yes, we can hold the excitement and the bliss, but we can also hold the boredom and the doubt and the fear.
If we start to see all of these movements as our children, then we can begin to see that the old paradigm of—basically, it was how can I get rid of my children? It’s violent, in a way. How can I get rid of the sadness and move towards bliss, because bliss is more spiritual, apparently? Well, no. What if sadness is also equally as spiritual? What if doubt is as spiritual as certainty? What if discomfort, numbness, actually—is deeply spiritual, sacred even? It’s really about just coming to see the sacredness in this beautifully messy, gooey, yucky, yummy, human experience.
I never know whether I’m answering your questions or not. I just start talking and then stop at some point and hope that somewhere in there, there was some grain of an answer.
TS: I believe so and—
JF: Shamefully! I’m glad you believe. I’m glad you believe.
TS: Yes. [Jeff laughs.] As I was saying, the book, The Way of Rest, is divided into these 175 short segments—short, little, sort of prose poems. There was a section towards the end of the book that really got my attention that I want us to talk about. It was called, “Why You Want to Die Sometimes.” I think I wanted to talk about this because it’s something I’ve felt. You mentioned that ten to fifteen years ago, this was a big theme in your own life and it’s something people don’t talk about very often. It’s a taboo. We’re not allowed to talk about why we want to die sometimes without people calling the suicide hotline. It’s not even that necessarily we’re “suicidal,” but there’s just this sense of, “God, I just want to die.”
You mentioned earlier in this conversation that it was the part of you at that time in your life that was really looking for rest. I want to read a little bit of what you write. Here’s what you write: “The urge to die is the natural urge to shed the illusion of the separate self, to let go of the exhausting burden of me and my life. Use the thought ‘I want to die’ to begin a deep meditation on the nature of self.”
JF: Ooh, did I write that?
TS: You wrote that. Very good. Yes, very un-teacherlike-ly brilliant.
JF: [Laughs.] I can’t take credit for anything I wrote. I don’t know where it comes from, really. It’s my ghost writer.
TS: OK. Could you have your ghost speaker—
JF: [Laughs] “Ghost speaker!”
TS: —now address, “Use the thought ‘I want to die’ to begin a deep meditation on the nature of self.”
JF: Wow, yes. I think it’s really important to talk about this because I think it’s too much of a taboo. I actually went on a radio show once with a, let’s just say quite a well-known spiritual teacher. We were talking about allowing and moving into this place of acceptance and allowing our thoughts and allowing our feelings, even the difficult ones, even the painful ones. I said, “Yes, and even these deep longings, even the longing to die, even that just comes to us for love, even that just comes to us to be loved, to be allowed.” The teacher, the interviewer, he was, “Oh, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. No, no. We don’t talk about that,” basically. I was like, “Really? Because surely that’s the part of us that needs the most love, the most love.”
I think it’s like I say in the book, the longing to die—first of all, I think we all feel it at some point in our lives in some form. I know I did many times in my life. That feeling, that thought, “I want to die” came to visit so many times. I think a lot of people feel this sometimes. A lot of people don’t admit it to themselves or don’t talk about it. There’s a lot of shame. I think there’s a lot of shame surrounding the urge to die. Often, when we do try and share it with people, we’re met with such fear, even panic. People rush in and try to fix us, try to give us solutions or they say, “Oh, no, no, no, no, don’t. Don’t say that,” or, “Don’t feel that.” Which doesn’t really help, or which just makes us feel even worse, which just adds to the shame that there’s something wrong with me.
What I came to realize was the longing to die really is the longing to live, misunderstood by the mind. That was certainly true for me years ago. I reached this point where I was just so exhausted. Basically, I was so exhausted with myself. Or rather, I was so exhausted with running away from myself, so exhausted with the fight against myself, the fight against my present experience—always running away from my thoughts, running away from my feelings, running away from my anxiety, running away from my fear, running away. I was so exhausted.
It’s like—I think deep down, really, I wanted to rest and I just didn’t know how. I wanted to rest. I wanted to be at peace. I wanted to rest, and I just didn’t know how. And there was no one around me who was showing me. I didn’t have any teachers or anyone around me who had found rest within themselves, so my mind came to this conclusion: “If I kill myself, if I kill the body—if I kill the body, if I end the body, then I can rest.” It was really about finding rest. For some reason, I didn’t. I’m happy, I’m so happy I didn’t take that thought literally, “I have to kill myself.” I didn’t take it literally. I didn’t end the body, but I carried on living.
Over the course of many years, I began to find that rest within myself, but previously, I thought I could only find that through dying or, rather, through killing the body. I began to find rest, actually, in presence, and the rest came through beginning, step by step, to just allow myself to feel whatever I felt, to allow my thoughts. Also, not to try and stop my thoughts because for many years, I’d been trying to silence the mind—because that’s what some of these spiritual teachers were telling me, I had to have a silent mind. I would sit in meditation for hours trying to silence the mind, making that into a goal.
Of course, the more I tried to silence the mind, the more noisy the mind would become. I thought, “God, there really is something wrong with me. My mind is so noisy.” The more I just began to actually even allow the mind to be quiet or noisy, allow thoughts to appear and disappear instead of going to war with them, instead of trying to silence them, instead of trying to get rid of them, just allowing thoughts to come and go like clouds in the sky, like waves in the ocean and also beginning to allow my feelings. I started to become curious once again about my present experience—actually begin to feel my pain, to feel my sadness, to feel my fear instead of running away, instead of numbing myself. Less and less, I started to feel like I wanted to die, actually. More and more, I started to feel like I wanted to live.
Really, the longing to die, what is it? It’s the longing to rest. It’s the longing to be present. It’s the longing to shed the false. It’s the longing to be real. It’s the longing to stop pretending. It’s the longing to stop living someone else’s truth. It’s the longing for truth, as well—to discover your own firsthand truth, to be authentic, to be real, to stop playing a role, to stop pretending to be something that you’re not. That’s what the longing to die really contains, is it’s the longing for authenticity. Actually, I think it’s the absolute paradox. At least in my own experience, I really felt this to be true: my longing to die was my longing to live, completely misunderstood, completely misunderstood.
When people come to me these days—I’ve had so many encounters like this with people. People come to me, and this happened on a retreat recently. This young guy stood up on a retreat and he was like, “I just have to say right now I just really feel like I want to die.” This was on a retreat of like a hundred people. I think he had been feeling that there was something wrong with him because everyone else around him seemed to be feeling peaceful and relaxed and restful, and there he was feeling that he wanted to die.
I was so happy, actually, on the retreat that he expressed that. He didn’t hold that in. He was just so incredibly honest. I just said to him, “Wow. Thank you. Thank you for your courage and thank you for your honesty and for giving voice to that part of you.” I didn’t make him wrong. I didn’t shame him. I didn’t tell him, “Oh, you shouldn’t be feeling that.” I didn’t tell him, “Oh, you’re in your mind.” I didn’t tell him, “Oh, you’re in your ego.” I didn’t make him feel there was something wrong with him. I think that was so important. I didn’t react to him with fear. It was more like, “Thank you, and thank you for giving voice to that part of you.”
It’s just something within you that wants to be felt. I think the paradox is that many of us are afraid to feel, really, really feel into that longing to die, because there’s a superstition, almost, that if we truly allow ourselves to feel into it, that we’ll act on it. That was always my fear; if I really allow myself to feel deeply into this longing, if I really allow myself to feel deeply into this feeling, then I will act on it. Actually, what I discovered over the years, it was the opposite. The more space I made in myself, the more I actually dropped into this place of allowing thoughts and feelings, even allowing this part of me that wanted to die, it actually felt less and less like I had to act on it. It felt more and more that it just had a home in me, actually, and that it was something that all human beings feel at some point. It wasn’t shameful. It wasn’t even dark. It wasn’t dangerous. It wasn’t even unspiritual. It was just a part of me.
Sometimes, the longing to die would come to visit. It would come, it would stay for a while, and it would pass. Trusting that I didn’t have to act on it, I didn’t even have to get rid of it. That was the relief. I didn’t have to squash it. I didn’t have to kill it. I could just know that it was just a part of me. It’s was like it was a part of me. It was that young child in me who just felt like they wanted to run away, like they wanted to escape, that they didn’t want to be here. It was that part of me that doesn’t want to be here. We all feel that sometimes, to a lesser or greater extent. There’s that part of you that doesn’t want to be here.
It can come in very mild forms, like “I don’t want to be in this moment. I want to be in a different moment.” That’s the mild form of it. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in this moment. I want to be in a different moment.” In its extreme form, it’s like, “I don’t want to be here on this planet. I don’t want to be here in this body. I don’t want to be here in this life.” It’s that same longing. It’s that part of you that doesn’t want to be here, basically doesn’t trust the present moment.
I think it’s just really important not even to make that part of you wrong. Otherwise, we think that allowing our experience means getting rid of the part that doesn’t allow. We think that trust means in order to trust, I have to get rid of the part that doesn’t trust. What I’m saying, basically, in this book is that there’s this deeper trust in which even the part of you that doesn’t trust can be trusted, can be allowed. There’s this deeper sense of allowing or acceptance in which even the part of you that doesn’t allow or doesn’t want to allow or doesn’t accept—that even the resistance in you, even the nonacceptance in you, is also beautiful. It’s also sacred. It’s also a precious part of you. It’s a welcome guest. So yes, the longing to die, I just think it’s very misunderstood. I really believe it’s the longing to live misunderstood by the mind.
TS: Now, in the quote that I read, you wrote, “Use the thought ‘I want to die’ to begin a deep meditation on the nature of self.” Talk about that aspect, how it can be a gateway to this inquiry about the nature of self.
JF: I’m always reminded of Eckhart Tolle’s story. I’ve always related to his journey; in a way, it’s quite similar to mine. He reached this point where he just couldn’t go on. He didn’t feel like he could go on, at least in the way he had been going on. He reached this point where he felt like yes, he wanted to kill himself. He wanted to die. Then this question was born in him. “Well, wait a second. Are there two of me? So there’s a self and I want to kill the self, but then who’s the one who wants to kill the self? Is there the self and the one who wants to kill it? How can there be two of me? How can there be two of me?”
Really, the thought “I want to die”—at the root of that question, who wants to die? It really can just draw you back into this question, “Who am I?” This is really where we’re going with this, is coming back to the most important question, the first question, the original question, who am I? Who am I? This is really the question at the very heart of meditation—who am I?
In a way, you could say meditation itself is a living answer to this question, who am I? Who am I? Am I my thoughts? You start to look into your present experience. What you notice is your thoughts are always coming and going. Your thoughts are always coming and going, so are you your thoughts? Well, I can be aware of my thoughts coming and going, so there’s an awareness here. There’s something here that at any moment, in this moment, can look at thoughts, can notice thoughts, can say, “Oh, look. thoughts doing this, thoughts doing—oh, look. The mind is noisy right now. Oh, look. The mind is quiet right now.”
The question is, what is that? The question “Who am I?” can draw you back deeply into this space of awareness. Who am I? Our thoughts come and go and I can notice thoughts coming and going, so thoughts can’t be who I truly am. Am I the breath? You could even begin with the breath. Well, the breath rises and falls. I can notice the breath rising. I can notice the breath falling. So am I the breath? No. I can observe the breath. I can notice the breath. I can be present as the breath rises and falls, but that’s not who I am. Am I sounds? I can hear all the sounds around me right now: the sound of this voice, the sound of the air conditioning, the sound of cars moving in the background. So I can be aware of sounds coming and going. I am not those sounds, but I can be aware of sounds.
Sensations in the body—I can be aware of sensations in the body right now, painful sensations, pleasurable sensations. I can be aware of a tight feeling in the belly or a sense of pressure in the head or a tightness in the shoulders. I can be aware of these sensations, but these sensations are part of the world of the ever-changing, always coming, always going. So who I truly am, I’m not trapped in sensations. I’m not trapped in thoughts. I’m not trapped in feelings. I’m not trapped in sounds. In a sense, I’m bigger than thoughts, sensations, feelings. I’m the awareness behind all of this. I’m that which—I contain, I’m the space for thoughts as they come and go, feelings as they come and go, sounds as they come and go.
The question of “Who am I?” can begin to draw you back into this sense of spaciousness, this sense of being the container of your experience, being that which holds the present moment. You hold thoughts and feelings. You can actually embrace thoughts and feelings. So you begin to come out of the past and future and you drop back into the present moment.
What you start to realize, actually, is in the present moment, it’s kind of OK here. You come out of “the story of my life,” the past and future, and you drop back into life itself, which is only ever now—the place where breathing is happening right now, the place where these words are being heard, the place where feelings are being felt, the place where the heart is beating right now. This is life. It’s life. You drop out of the story of my life and you drop back into all there is,—all there ever is, actually, which is this moment, which is life. You start to feel how alive you actually are.
This was really how I healed from suicidal depression. I realized that my whole life, I had been stuck in the past and future. I hadn’t really been connected with this moment. These days, I’m just so fascinated with this moment, really. I’m so fascinated with this question, what’s it like to be alive? It’s always burning in me. It’s like I lost all my answers and all that was left was I’m fascinated. Looking at this moment as if it was brand new, I became fascinated with my joy, but also with my pain. I became fascinated with my excitement, but also fascinated with my boredom, fascinated with thoughts, fascinated with the breath as it rises and falls, fascinated with sounds all around me. Basically, I stopped being an expert and I became an amateur again. I love this idea of freedom—there’s so much freedom in being an amateur. The expert knows too much; the expert is so stuck in their knowledge and so they stop looking. They lose fascination. They lose their curiosity.
I think meditation, really, it’s all about becoming fascinated again, becoming curious again. That sense of zen mind, beginner’s mind; looking into your present experience with fresh eyes, dropping this agenda of trying to fix yourself, trying to fix this moment or change this moment, even dropping the agenda of trying to get rid of your discomfort, your pain, your fear, and instead, drenching your present experience with this fascinated, curious awareness. It’s like falling in love with yourself as you are, as you are.
Looking back, I’m so grateful that I got to that place of wanting to die. I realize now it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake because then what it ignited in me is this curiosity. This question became so alive in me—like who am I, actually? Who is it that wants to die? Who is it that wants to live, actually? Who is that wants to live, not who is it that wants to die. Who is it that wants to live?
TS: Now Jeff, in preparing for this conversation, I went through the book—I prepared, The Way of Rest, I prepared. I found several small sections that I just loved. One was called “The Hidden Invitation of Loneliness.” Another, “The Call of the Warrior.” Then, the part that I actually want to request that you read for our listeners, towards the end of the book, it’s called “Turn Back Right Now!” “Turn Back Right Now!” I’m wondering if you’d read it for us?
JF: I certainly will. [Reads:] “If you want to feel good all the time, please forget about waking up. If you want to wake up, forget about feeling good. If you long for the raw truth of existence, please prepare for the shattering of your status quos. Prepare for heartbreak, the devastation of dreams. Everything you know about yourself will be smashed into a million pieces. Prepare to allow an unimaginable sorrow, the sorrow of lonely creatures calling out from distant universes to move through you, to penetrate to your very core. And prepare for joys so unbearable you’ll wonder why your heart hasn’t exploded yet. Prepare for love to drain your tear ducts. Prepare to fall on your knees time and time again in awe, in horror, in gratitude, in the deepest calm. Prepare to never be prepared again. If you want to feel good all the time, if you want pleasure without pain, joy without sorrow, light without night, if you want a feel-good spirituality, please, I beg you, turn back. Turn back right now.”
TS: Interestingly, I didn’t ask you to read that at the beginning of our conversation. It’s happened here at the end and it comes at the end of the book, too, so it’s too late.
JF: You don’t want to tell people to turn back at the beginning.
TS: No, you don’t.
JF: Wait until they’re all the way into it and then tell them that they should’ve turned back, but it’s too late.
TS: OK. One final question for you, Jeff. There’s a certain kind of daring that you point to again and again in The Way of Rest, and even the subtitle, Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love. What is this daring part of The Way of Rest?
JF: I think it really takes courage to meditate. Again, by “meditate,” I don’t mean do anything fancy or special. It’s not even a technique. Meditation just means turning towards your present experience, staying with it, even if it’s uncomfortable, drenching your present experience in just this fascinated awareness. Meditation is not a doing. It’s more like a looking, a looking again. I think that really takes courage to stay with yourself, especially in a culture like the one we live in where there’s a million distractions. We’re given a million distractions.
Everyone’s running away from themselves. In a world where everyone’s running away from themselves, it takes courage to stay in a world where people are running away to their mobile phones. People don’t allow themselves these days just a moment of discomfort, a moment of boredom, a moment of anxiety because before they know it, so unconsciously, so habitually, they’re abandoning themselves. They’re abandoning their experience and moving towards the distraction, the addiction—whether it’s a phone, they go out shopping, eating, drugs, whatever it is, alcohol.
Even—I speak to a lot of people who even use spirituality as a distraction, even use spiritual practices as a distraction. Instead of actually staying with their present embodied experience, instead of staying with their pain, staying with their boredom, staying with their sadness, becoming curious about it, drenching it with awareness, beginning to welcome it. Instead of staying with their experience, they turn to a spiritual practice or they go and watch a spiritual YouTube video or something, or they buy a Sounds True book. Joking! It’s a joke, by the way. It’s funny.
TS: Nothing wrong with that.
JF: [Laughs.] In a way, we’re given a million distractions and also a million solutions. There’s plenty of people out there who are selling you solutions. There’s even books. There’s courses. There are retreats with titles like that: how to be free from anxiety, how to be free from fear, how to never doubt ever again, how to get rid of your sadness, how to only feel bliss, how to only feel joy. We’re sold all these solutions, and then you start to wonder, actually, if it’s not these solutions that are creating the problem—that are actually making us hate ourselves, hate ourselves the way we are, shame ourselves for having the doubt, for having the fear, for having the sadness. We’re sold all these images, these solutions.
I think it takes a lot of courage, actually to say to the solutions, the promises, “Hey, thank you, but no.” To say to the distractions, and there’s a million of them, “Thank you, but no. Thank you for trying to lead me away from my experience, but no, I want to turn towards myself. I want to stay with this sadness, stay with this fear, stay with this doubt, stay with this burning in the belly, stay with this shaky feeling in the gut, stay with this contraction in the throat, to actually bring some love to it.” Love is just attention; to bring some attention to it, to breathe into it.I think it takes some courage. Courage is not the absence of doubt or the absence of fear. Courage is actually just—it’s there in this willingness to become curious about your experience, to not run away, to not abandon yourself for some promise of a future.
In the book, I talk about this courage a lot, this willingness to turn towards your so-called imperfections—your doubts, your fears, your pains, your longings—and actually illuminate them, bless them, instead of seeing them as wrong or bad or evil or dark or negative or sinful or unspiritual. Instead of trying to get rid of them, bless them with attention, with this welcoming. For me, that’s the very definition of courage.
I find the people who come to my retreats— I just completed a seven-day retreat in Belgium. By the end, I was just amazed at their courage just for sitting there for seven days with themselves, without any distractions. For some of them, very, very painful feelings were coming to the surface, because we created a safe space, a safe space where they weren’t going to be judged or shamed or ridiculed or even fixed. They wouldn’t even be given answers. For some people, a lot of very old, painful feelings were coming up from childhood: deep feelings of unworthiness, deep feelings of unlovability. This was wonderful because these feelings, they just wanted to come and be felt and be celebrated, actually: not be destroyed, not be annihilated, not be fixed. I think it takes a lot of courage to sit there while these difficult feelings are coming.
Maybe there’s a voice in your head telling you to run away, telling you that this shouldn’t be happening, telling you that you shouldn’t be feeling this. It takes a lot of courage, I think, to hear those voices in your head, those old voices of shame, the voices that [are] telling you, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m doing it wrong. This feeling shouldn’t be here,” thoughts going off into the future, going off into the past, distraction, distraction. It takes a lot of courage to say to those voices, “Hey, voices, hey, mind, I see you and you’re not going to control me anymore.”
It’s like saying to the mind, “Thank you for offering me solutions. Thank you for offering me distractions. Thank you for trying. Thank you for telling me I should be somewhere other than where I am. Thank you for telling me my experience should be different. I know you’re only trying to help,” because don’t forget even that the mind is not the enemy. It’s just trying to help. It’s trying to change you. It’s making suggestions that you should be different. I think it takes a lot of courage just to say to the mind, “Thank you for your suggestions, mind, and I’m staying right here.”
For me, that’s courage. Courage isn’t necessarily the big, muscly hero going off and slaying the dragon and blood everywhere. That’s not necessarily courage. Courage could look like you as you are sitting with fear and just for a moment, not running away and just turning towards that fear, breathing into it and saying to it, “Hey, fear. You can be here. You can stay.” Saying to the fearful one, the sad one, the lonely one inside of you, the one who feels unworthy, these beautiful parts, you’re saying to them, “You know what? Right now, I’m not going to run away from you. I’m here. I’m here. You’re welcome to sit with me and I realize now you’re not mistakes. You’re not working against me. You’re not impurities. You’re not even imperfections. You are also life.” That’s the voice of courage right there is you are also life, that everything within you is life. It’s all life. It’s all life, like you’re so alive. You’re so alive when there’s joy or sorrow, excitement, boredom, bliss—whatever is moving in you. It’s all life. Therefore, it’s all sacred.
For me, that’s just an image of courage. It’s like turning towards your present experience and even if your mind is screaming, “Get away, get away, get away, get away, run away, run away, run away, run away.” The mind is only trying to protect you and saying to the mind, “Thank you, mind, but I’m remembering this ancient commitment to be with myself, to not abandon myself, to not abandon myself when I most need myself, to not abandon myself in this time of pain, in this time of fear, to stay with myself so I’m not split, so I’m whole. Even though I’m hurting, even though this aches, even though this is uncomfortable, even though this is intense, I know this is life.”
I think this is what we all long for, really, deep down, is to be with ourselves in the most intimate way, to be with ourselves. I really believe it’s not some—we think we’re looking for some far off utopia, for the gold at the end of the rainbow. We think we’re looking for something that’s far away, but really, I really believe deep down what we’re really longing for is just this sense of being with ourselves, being with ourselves. It’s so simple, really. It almost sounds too simple.
To me, that’s the true meaning of wholeness is to be with yourself. It’s not half of you over here and half of you over there, the bad one over here and the good one over there, the unenlightened one over here and the enlightened one over there that one day you’ll reach. It’s to be with yourself as you are, to turn towards your discomfort, your pain, your so-called imperfections, and drench them with love, which is attention, which is attention, to no longer abandon yourself. I really believe that’s the greatest joy.
It’s the greatest joy, sometimes, is to be with your sadness, even though that sounds like a complete paradox to the mind. because what I’ve come to discover is joy is not the opposite of sadness. It’s not, “How do I get away from this [to] joy? How do I get away from this sadness and get to joy?” Joy is actually there in the embrace, in the embrace of the sadness or the embrace of the doubt or the embrace of the fear—whatever is here, to actually be the embrace of it, to say this is also life and this is also welcome and this is also a beautiful part of who I am. I think that’s where the joy really is, the joy inherent in—there’s just this sense of being alive. As every child knows, there’s joy actually inherent in the sense of being alive. Joy is not a destination. It’s actually here, contained within presence.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jeff Foster. He’s the author of the new book, The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love. With Sounds True, he’s also created two new audio programs, Sacred as You Are: Depression as a Call to Spiritual Awakening, and The Courage to Love: Meditations for Embracing Everything. Jeff, I always love talking with you and consider you a friend. Thank you so much. Thank you for your daring, weird, special way.
JF: Oh, Tami, thank you so much. I bow to the daring, weird, special one in you and in everyone who’s listening.
TS: Thank you everyone for being with us. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
