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
Allowing What Is
January 25 2010
Allow everything to be exactly as it is.
It’s something I recommend to my clients. And it’s something I’ve written about more than a few times.
There’s a reason for that: it’s a powerful shift in how you look at and experience the world. In allowing everything to be as it is, you allow a new perspective on your experiences. You release the struggle to make things different from the way they are. And in doing so, you open yourself to allow real change to unfold naturally.
Conceptually, allowing everything to be as it is may not make much sense. It seems odd. The mind struggles to understand why you’d want to allow everything to be as it is. Before my clients experience what it’s like, they often tell me it seems passive, as if nothing would ever get done and there would be no motivation for change, progress, or accomplishment.
Yet the painful personal struggles that we experience as human beings arise directly out of not allowing things to be as they are.
Rather than trying to explain why that is — which in the end is just more conceptual discussion — I’ve provided some examples and pointers to help you experience for yourself what it’s like to allow everything to be as it is
Allowing
If your mind is winding itself up trying to understand “what” or “how” to allow everything to be as it is — just notice. Don’t try to stop it from happening, and don’t get stuck there.
It may help to say it out loud: “Oh, look. My mind is trying to understand what it means to allow everything to be as it is. My mind is trying to figure out how to do it. Well, that’s what minds do. It’s okay. I don’t have to stop thinking those thoughts, and I don’t have to follow them — I don’t have to figure anything out.”
You can apply this to whatever your mind seems to get hooked by — whatever it struggles to change or figure out.
Allow everything
At some point in my clients’ exploration of allowing everything to be as it is, almost all of them get stuck.
They usually tell me something like, “I’m in a situation, or feeling a feeling, that I just can’t seem to let go of. I can’t let this be as it is.”
They’re not allowing their resistance to their experience to be as it is. Instead, they’re judging themselves — telling themselves they’re “doing it wrong” because they can’t seem to stop resisting whatever it is that they’re experiencing.
If you find yourself resisting or trying to change something instead of allowing it, simply allow your resistance to be as it is.
One client described what she calls a “recursive process”: “It unfolds,” she said. “One cycle after another. It starts with a thought like, ‘I don’t want to feel this.’ I remind myself, Allow... and then I feel resistance to allowing ... and I remind myself to just allow the resistance. As many layers as necessary.”
An unwinding
“When I do this,” the same client told me, “It’s like watching a spring unwind. I keep noticing what I’m resisting or struggling with, and I tell myself ... that’s okay. It’s okay for it to be that way. It’s okay to feel that way. And as I allow each layer to be okay, to be as it is, I can feel my struggle and tension unwind.”
She added, “I always thought it was about feeling better. But it’s really not. Because trying to feel better when I actually feel lousy is just another way of not allowing things to be as they are.”
As she’s realized, allowing things to be as they are doesn’t mean that everything magically becomes the way you want it to be.
Yet as she says, “When I allow feeling lousy to be as it is, to be okay, it’s almost miraculous: I start feeling better. But it only works when I’m truly allowing everything to be as it is. If I pretend in order to feel better — I just end up feeling worse instead.”
Exploring beliefs
As you stop struggling to change what is, you begin to see the thought patterns that create your feelings and the belief structures that define your experience.
As you stop denying or hiding from those beliefs and thoughts, you release yourself and allow change to unfold.
One client told me, “I’ve always been a perfectionist. I hate making mistakes. The fear of being wrong has haunted me all my life.”
She went on, “With your guidance, I’ve been allowing that fear and anxiety to be as it is, without trying to change it and without turning away or trying to hide from it. Allowing myself to feel the way I feel has shown me that the fear isn’t really about making mistakes. It’s about not being liked, or about someone being angry with me.”
Realizations like this are crucial. As my client is discovering, it’s only when you allow your experience to be exactly as it is, without trying to change it, that you see what’s really happening — and that’s what allows real change to take place.
“In allowing myself to be with what is,” she went on, “the fear disentangles itself. I always knew intellectually that the fear wasn’t logical, but that never made any difference. Now I can feel it releasing me at the gut level, at the nonverbal, instinctive level. I can stop being so impatient with myself — I’m opening to compassion and love. That’s only happened because I started by allowing my fear and frustration to be as it is. That’s what allowed the thoughts hidden behind the fear to become visible.”
As she’s seeing, the actual experience of allowing everything to be as it is turns out to be anything but passive.
Instead, it’s your first step towards understanding and freedom — and a true, heartfelt response arising out of clarity.
“The world we imagine to exist is always colliding with the world as it actually is. This collision is the cause of immense human suffering and conflict.” Adyashanti, 1962-, American spiritual teacher and author. Quote is from his latest book, Falling Into Grace
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