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
Firefly Moments
May 3 2011
It seems normal to focus on what’s wrong or uncomfortable in life.
You might even think that it’s necessary to do so. After all, if you don’t focus on what’s wrong, how can you make things better? If you don’t understand the problem, how can you solve it?
But when your attention is tied up in problems, your attempts to change your situation can quickly become just another struggle, resulting in even more resistance and pain. Furthermore, the focus on struggling against what you don’t want is likely to create drama, helplessness, and victimhood.
Even when you’re able to simply be with what’s arising, allowing compassion to meet your sorrow or anger or other painful feelings, you may find yourself so focused on meeting the pain that you forget to see what else is happening.
I was exploring this with a client the other day, and for some reason I thought of fireflies.
Fireflies are amazing little insects that enrapture children and adults alike with their winking lights at dusk. Even those who otherwise have strong “ewww” reactions to bugs are usually enchanted by fireflies and their gentle, cool, winking-and-blinking lights in the night.
Firefly moments are the amazing, miraculous moments of your life. They can be flashes of simple yet powerful insight; sudden glimpses of joy; a moment of laughter or love; a spark of gratitude or beauty — or any of the myriad ways you might open, however briefly, into a deeper experience of the miracle that is your life.
When I write about the importance of fully experiencing your feelings and seeing the thoughts behind them, it’s often from the perspective of becoming conscious of dissonance and struggle so you can begin to allow them to unravel.
Yet it’s just as important to notice the miracles in life — the joyful moments, the firefly-flashes of beauty, love, compassion, and gratitude. Then you begin to fully inhabit your experience, without focusing disproportionately on any single aspect.
Here are a few ways to begin seeing your own firefly moments more clearly.
Recognition
One of the things I see over and over again in working with my clients is this simple question of recognition. It’s as I said in the opening paragraphs: the focus is so often on problems, pain, and struggle that the moments of happiness, joy, and peace are overlooked.
Cultivate recognition of your firefly moments. Initially, that might mean setting an intention — and following through on that intention! — to stop and look back to see what you’ve missed.
You may choose to take a few moments in the evening to reflect on your day — perhaps with your journal at hand to write about your experience. Or you could pause periodically throughout the day, or take time during meditation.
With practice, you’ll find that the firefly moments become more noticeable for you as they’re happening.
Appreciation
Especially when you’re overwhelmed or caught in struggle, it’s easy to feel as if the firefly moments are fleeting and insignificant.
Yet as you begin to feel appreciation and gratitude for even the smallest hints of expansiveness and opening, you’ll almost certainly find that firefly moments naturally, and without effort on your part, become more frequent and more rewarding.
“I’m reminded of when I was a kid and collected fireflies in a jar,” one client said. “Individually, they’re these little tiny lights. But when I had a dozen or so in the jar, they lit up my whole room at night!”
Experience the miracle
Each of those moments, whatever they may be for you, is just as much a tiny, glowing miracle as a firefly’s glow on a summer evening.
And each of those moments is an expression of a far bigger miracle.
Allow yourself to experience the miracle — the small, individual moments, and the larger context of your whole life — as fully as you can.
And ask yourself: what is that miracle that lives in you, through you, as you?
It’s not just abstract. It’s concrete — like a firefly.
“What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Crowfoot (1830-1890), Native American warrior and chief of the Siksika First Nation
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