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
Rest in Love
June 14 2011
As my clients experience the unwinding of their conditioned patterns of thought, belief, feeling, and behavior, they often find themselves a bit disoriented.
It’s understandable enough. When you’re no longer reacting to the experiences of your life from the perspective of those conditioned behavior patterns, it can feel as if you’re not sure who you are any more. From that place of uncertainty, it might seem as if you no longer know how to respond to the people and situations in your life.
But you do know.
As the conditioned reactions begin to dissolve, and even in the midst of disorientation and confusion, you’re more in touch with the deepest expression of your heart than you’ve ever been.
It’s your mind that no longer knows — and it’s your mind that feels confused and uncertain.
Your heart knows all that you need to know.
And when you can rest in the heart, rest in the love that’s there, your actions and responses will arise naturally and authentically from what’s most true for you. You’ll discover what my clients discover: that when they rest in this deep sense of stillness and love, they experience life, and the people and situations in their lives, in a very different way.
Here are a few suggestions to help you discover what it means to rest in your heart.
Notice stillness
Stillness is present in the midst of turmoil. Even when it seems as if you have no access to it, it’s always there at the core.
Yet it’s also true that experiences can feel overwhelming, and can appear to drown out any sense that stillness is available to you.
More than any other time, this is a sign for you to slow down, stop, and step back from whatever it is that feels like it’s sucking you in. Stepping back into the stillness of your heart — even when you think it’s not there — will offer new perspectives on whatever is happening.
This doesn’t mean suppressing the feeling. Feel the feeling and open to the stillness at the same time.
What if you were to trust that stillness is there to receive you as you step back — even if you can’t feel it?
Be present to experience
Allow yourself to be fully present, and notice that fully present is very different from numbing yourself or detaching from your experience. It’s also very different from being overwhelmed by your experience.
“When I open to my experience as it is, without letting myself be seduced by it, I can stay present for what’s happening instead of trying to manipulate or avoid it,” a client told me. “I become a full participant in my life, instead of being run over by it. And the foundation I rest in — the foundation that makes it possible — is the stillness and love that’s present in my heart.”
What she’s describing is a felt sense of stillness in her body and core — in her heart — and her faith that both stillness and love are always there for her, even in those times when she may not feel their presence.
What would that faith feel like for you?
Allow emotions to be
Your feelings don’t need to be about anything. For instance, you don’t have to feel sad or happy about something; you can simply feel sadness and happiness.
When you allow your feelings to be what they are without attaching them to an event, a person, or an object, your heart can stay open.
On the other hand, when you attach a feeling to something that’s happening or to a person’s actions, then the feeling becomes knotted up around the event or person — and your whole experience begins to contract.
“Allowing what I feel to be as it is without making it a result of anything frees me to fully experience whatever is happening,” a client observed. “It may be true that we’re responsible for our own feelings, but that really isn’t helpful. What’s helpful is this recognition that feeling can be present without needing to have a cause — without needing to connect it to something.”
What she’s seen is that when you attach your emotional experience to a reason — to whatever appears to have caused it — then you’ve created something to struggle with.
If you consider the emotions you’re experiencing to be unpleasant, you’ll struggle against the reason — struggle to change it. On the other hand, if you consider them pleasurable, you’ll struggle to hang onto them — struggle to hold the reason in place.
But situations change, people’s actions move and unfold, and feelings are never static.
What happens when you allow your emotions to be, without trying to find a reason for them, and without attaching them to a situation or a person?
Obviously, life doesn’t always go the way we want it to. Obviously, we have preferences and desires that may or may not work out the way we plan.
Yet as my clients discover, there’s a richness of experience that’s available when we open ourselves to what is — even in the midst of sadness, frustration, or fear — and when we rest in the stillness and love that’s present at the core of our being.
“Give all to love; obey thy heart.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, American lecturer, essayist, and poet; leader of the mid-19th-century Transcendentalist movement.
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” (French: “Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.”) Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Catholic philosopher.
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