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
Being With Experience
January 26, 2010
What does it mean to “be with” your experience?
It’s hard to explain in words — just as it’s hard to explain what it means to see a sunset, taste an orange, or ride a bicycle.
Every experience has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s only when we struggle with it, resisting what we call “bad” or grasping what we call “good,” that experience appears to become either painfully endless, or painfully fleeting.
When you can be with your experience, instead of struggling to change it, you allow all of experience to move — naturally and simply. And you allow yourself to respond to what’s actually happening — naturally and simply.
So what does it mean to “be with” your experience? Here are some pointers to help you discover for yourself.
Relax
When you have a physical cramp in your body, you don’t tighten the muscle in resistance. You know that only intensifies the pain. Instead, you stretch and relax.
Yet most people believe that denying how they feel, pushing it away, will make them feel better.
That’s the equivalent of tightening a cramped muscle. It makes you feel worse.
Instead, envision your experience as a stream. It may be tumbling and turbulent in this moment, but nonetheless, imagine yourself relaxing into the flow, going with it instead of fighting against it.
Notice judgment
We’re taught from childhood, in a thousand different ways, that the so-called “negative” emotions are bad and shouldn’t be expressed. Ultimately, most adults feel that they shouldn’t express these feelings, and that they themselves are bad for feeling them.
So when experiences of anger, sadness, frustration, jealousy, inadequacy — whatever it may be — arise, it’s easy to start judging yourself.
But that only adds shame and guilt to the mix.
Life brings a wide range of experience — and your emotions naturally respond with just as wide a range of feeling. There’s nothing inherently bad or good about experience or your feelings.
Allow yourself to feel what you feel, and just notice the voice of judgment when it arises.
Allow, allow, allow...
Whatever arises, and whatever your response may be to that experience, even if it’s resistance or judgment — just allow it to be and to move.
When resistance and judgment are present, they’re part of the experience. Just as you can’t solve anything by pushing the experience away, so you can’t change the resistance or judgment by pushing them away.
Allow yourself to feel what you feel — all of what you feel.
Where is the experience?
Who’s having the experience? Who’s judging it? What space is it arising within?
These aren’t questions to be answered intellectually, although your mind may try to grapple with them. When I pose them to one of my clients, I can almost literally hear her grind her teeth!
And yet she’s found that gradually these questions have opened her to a place of curiosity and spaciousness, instead of resistance and judgment.
You are not your experience
As you experiment with relaxing, noticing judgment and struggle, and asking yourself where and for whom the experience is arising, you’ll see that you are not the experience.
This goes beyond the ability of words to explain, just as sunsets, oranges, and bicycle-riding are beyond words.
Hold the commitment to be with your experience, instead of being your experience, and you’ll find that experience arises within a far larger context.
And you’ll find, as my tooth-grinding client put it, that this larger context “doesn’t have to dive into the experience. Instead, it can hold it lightly, with compassion and curiosity, without resisting or grasping.”
This larger context is fully present to the experience. It allows, without judgment, any emotion to arise and find its natural expression ... and to move on.
It can simply and fully be with experience, in a space of stillness and peace.
“Everything actually just is. From the perspective of consciousness, even resistance just is. And if you resist resistance, that’s just what is. You can’t get away from it.” Adyashanti, American spiritual teacher, from the essay “The Novel of Life,” 2005
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