What people say
I can honestly say that, for the first time in 50 years, I’m learning how to just be. How to relish the present moment, which, magically and mysteriously, unlocks the door to the treasure house that is the rest of my life.
- Jennifer Green, Salem, Oregon
From the moment Jon and I connected, I had this deep experience of loving presence and complete trust. Something bypassed my mind and my ability to figure things out, and communicated directly to my heart and soul that I was safe and in the right place. There was a creation of power in our relationship that he honored and witnessed as being mine. It was my power. I had the experience of being wonderfully, beautifully powerful, in the most loving, energized way.
- Laura Lind-Blum, The Idea Midwife, Waterbury Center, Vermont
Jon can help you recognize where you are, and become more clear. My work with him has not been about plotting out my future, it has been about helping me come into deeper relationship with myself so that next steps unfold easily and effortlessly.
He creates a safe, spacious container for you to go as deep or wide or high as you’re capable of in any given moment. It’s a matter of him being able to see the facets and help me make them real in me.
- Sandra Leader, Carmel, CA
My feelings changed from, “Quick, fix me, I can’t stand how I feel, make it better, hurry,” to, it’s not about hurry, and it’s not about fixing, it’s about staying where you are and getting more and more and deeper and deeper sensations that this is okay. You’re fine, this is okay.
It helps me reframe experience. I don’t see anything that’s happening quite the same as I’ve ever seen it before, because my viewpoint has been enlarged. There’s more, there’s peace, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s health, there’s everything.
- Layne Young, artist, Salem, Oregon
Free Article
The Gentle Art of Inquiry
In my last article, I wrote about how spontaneous awareness of joy, peace, and spaciousness is your natural condition. The contrast between this natural peacefulness and the contracted experience of struggle is your pointer to understanding when you are out of alignment, when your perception of the world is distorted. In allowing everything to be exactly as it is, struggle drops away, without effort.
That article, “A Doorway to Freedom,” lays the groundwork for what I’m writing about today. If you haven’t read it yet, or if you’d like to remind yourself of what it said, you can find it here.
As I suggested in “A Doorway to Freedom,” simply sit with your feelings without avoiding or clinging, noticing the thoughts and beliefs underneath. As you allow what is, being with and observing your experience, that experience will naturally shift, and your feelings will often dissipate by themselves.
However, we all have deep, persistent beliefs, core conditioned beliefs, about how the world works and how we’re supposed to act and be within the world. Those core beliefs have had a long time — decades, a lifetime — to become firmly embodied within you.
When a belief or thought pattern appears persistent and recurring, dragging along feelings of struggle, pain, and frustration, then sitting with the feeling and observing it may not be enough. Exploring such beliefs and habits of thinking requires more attention, a conscious inquiry into what’s true for you.
This is not a logical, intellectual process. There is no way to “figure things out.” You cannot rationalize emotion or belief, and you cannot argue logically with your feelings and behavior patterns.
It’s hard to let go of the desire to do so. We’re taught that logic, rational argument, and problem-solving are the answers to our difficulties. But as my clients discover over and over again, this is a process of feeling, experiencing, and discerning.
One client wrote recently, “It used to make me want to scream when you’d tell me to allow everything to be as it is, to question the beliefs, to stop arguing with myself. I didn’t know how. But there isn’t a how — and yes, I know that’s what you said — but it takes experiencing it to really get it.”
With that in mind, I recommend that you try the process I describe here only when you’re caught in contraction, caught in a struggle with the beliefs and the feelings you want to shift. Trying it as an intellectual exercise won’t yield results, and may instead only increase your frustration.
Be easy and gentle with yourself. There are no wrong answers. Hold the process lightly. And know that in any moment, no matter what, you’re ok — and you’re doing the best you can.
Sit with it
Meet your feelings in the midst of their expression — whether it’s pain, confusion, anger, or whatever else is arising for you. Sit with the feeling for a while. Pay attention to the thoughts that come with the feelings, and how the feelings intensify as the thoughts and beliefs unfold.
Don’t try to change, transcend, or avoid anything. Just sit with it, be with it, meeting whatever arises.
Find the core
You may find that the belief appears to have multiple pieces, some of which feel more important or weighty at different times.
At the center, however, is a core belief, the essence of the thought-and-feeling mixture of your experience. Look deep and find that core.
What is the cost?
Right now, in this moment of suffering and struggle, what is the cost to you of this core belief? What has the cost been over time?
Don’t think about it. Just feel it.
Is it really true?
In relation to your experience of natural wellbeing, of peacefulness and spaciousness, is this thought really true?
Don’t analyze or argue. Feel your way into it. Is it really true?
Notice that you’re experiencing your mind, experiencing your thoughts, as a waking dream or virtual reality.
Who would you be without the thought?
If you could open to life without this belief, without this thought, who would you be? Feel it, get a sense of it in your body and being. Even if you believe that the thought is true, become curious about what your experience might be if it had never entered your mind.
Be gentle, be patient
Don’t rush the process. Allow each question the time it needs to be fully experienced. Live with the questions, let them become part of you.
The other day, a client said to me, “It seems as if every belief or thought I look at, I find another one right underneath!” She was expressing a mixture of amusement and frustration that most of my clients — and I, too — recognize all too well.
Inquiry is a lot like peeling an onion, up to and including the potential for tears. Allow whatever arises within you to have its natural expression — no more and no less. And give yourself the gift of time and space as you enter into this process. It took years, decades, a lifetime to weave these beliefs and thoughts into the fabric of your life. They won’t unravel and release themselves in hours or even days or weeks — but they will unravel and release, given time and the gentle influence of inquiry.
“I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” Sir Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian.
“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” Thomas Paine, 1737-1809, British pamphleteer, revolutionary, inventor, and intellectual.
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