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
Take a Backwards Step
August 9 2011
Struggle and contraction can feel all-consuming, and it can seem as if your only choice is to resist.
But as you’ve probably noticed, the struggle to change your experience only winds everything tighter. As a client said to me the other day, “It’s like quicksand. The more I fight against how I feel, the deeper I’m sucked into it, and the more difficult it becomes.”
Struggle and resistance feel small, tight, and painful. At the same time, they can also feel necessary. As she described it, “There’s a deep belief that if I stop struggling, I’m giving up, and I’ll never get free — I’ll always feel like this, and I’ll always be stuck in these situations. Intellectually, I know that’s not the case. But it feels emotionally true!”
We were talking about stepping back from the immediacy of experience — taking a backwards step, changing her perspective so she could see the larger context through which all experiences pass. Although she clearly recognized that the struggle against her feelings wasn’t working, she hadn’t quite opened to the bigger perspective I was describing.
No matter how overwhelming the pain, fear, or other struggle may seem, the backwards step has the potential to change everything.
When you take that backwards step, you discover that the larger context holds your experience, allowing you to rest in spaciousness even in the midst of what’s happening. And you discover the love that arises to meet whatever you’re feeling.
“But I don’t feel love!” my client said in frustration.
It’s not, I told her, the sort of soft, warm-fuzzies feeling that we tend to associate with “love” in today’s culture. It’s something much bigger and much more powerful.
If you’ve experienced the quicksand feeling she describes, or if you too are feeling frustrated about what it means to find a larger context — here are some practices to experiment with.
Experience always moves
By nature, experiences have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Remember that even the most apparently difficult and sticky experience will change. There’s no such thing as an experience that lasts “forever,” no matter how much your emotional response may be telling you that this one really is endless. Instead, when you let go of your grip on experience, it begins to flow naturally.
So remind yourself that change will happen — without your having to struggle to “make” it happen. Some of my clients find that literally opening their hands helps them release their internal grip.
The larger context
Experience always moves — and it moves through a vast spaciousness. Your experience in this moment, your feelings, whatever situation you’re facing — it all moves through a larger unchanging context of expansive space.
As you step back to observe how your experience moves and changes without your having to do anything, you’ll begin to catch glimpses of that larger context.
It can be subtle. Years ago, one of my teachers talked about perceiving it out of the corner of the eye, on the edges of perception.
Relax, and allow the larger perspective to come to you, rather than trying to go find it or figure it out.
What sees the struggle?
My client’s complaint — “But I don’t feel love!” — is one she’s voiced before, and it’s one she shares with many others.
As I mentioned to her, our definition of “love” tends to be distorted by cultural concepts about romance, not to mention our own experiences of love in childhood and even as an adult.
The love that meets your experience in spaciousness is not that type of love!
Your feelings of anger, grief, frustration, self-judgment, or whatever may be arising for you cannot see themselves. Frustration knows only its own reasons for being frustrated. Anger knows only its own feelings of rage against whatever inspired it.
It may sound odd to put it this way, but they cannot experience any context other than their own.
But something perceives your experience. What is it that’s caught a glimmer, no matter how brief, of spaciousness? What sees how the anger, grief, and frustration — and also joy, peace, and happiness — move through spaciousness? What notices how experience changes, seeing how it’s different today than it was yesterday, and even different now than it was five minutes ago?
That space is what meets your experience — it’s what your experience arises within.
That’s the love and compassion that provides you with the capacity to feel what you feel without being overwhelmed by it.
And there’s no description that can begin to touch the experience of it.
A few weeks after our conversation, my client wrote, “I understand now why I couldn’t see what you were talking about. As usual, I was making it much too complicated. It’s so simple. And I suspect that now I’ve seen it, I can’t ever un-see it — even when (not if!) I get caught in struggle again. As long as I remember to step back, seeing the larger perspective, and reminding myself of what sees that perspective ... then there’s this vast sense of ... I don’t know how to describe it. Space, comfort, okay-ness — yes, it is love. As you said, it’s not ‘love’ in the sense we usually think of it, yet it is love — more real than anything I’ve ever known.”
Practice
This internal experience of love doesn’t rely on anyone else’s presence. It doesn’t rely on anyone else understanding you — or even on your understanding yourself. You can’t be unworthy of it, and you can’t earn it, or fail to earn it. It’s always already present, even if you don’t feel as if you’re experiencing it.
However, as my client described, you can overlook it.
It’s through practice that you bring yourself into alignment with it, reaching that place where — as my client said — you stop overlooking it, you see it, and can never un-see it.
The practice is simple: notice how experience moves, notice when you catch glimpses of the larger context, and pay attention to what’s perceiving your experience.
In other words — just keep taking that backwards step.
“To take the backward step means to just turn around, reverse the whole process of looking for satisfaction on the outside, and look at precisely the place where you are standing. See if what you are looking for isn’t already present in your experience.” Adyashanti, 1962-, American spiritual teacher and author, from Falling Into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering
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