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
Is It Already Here?
October 18 2011
Stop for a moment.
Whatever you’re seeking — joy, love, peace, compassion, acceptance, freedom — whatever it is, stop for a moment and ask: Is it already here?
The mind will try to respond logically, presenting thoughts such as, “Of course not — if it were, why would I be seeking?”
Don’t settle for the mind’s logic. Let yourself enter deeply into your actual experience.
Is what you’re seeking already here?
Even if you feel as if you can’t quite touch what you’re seeking — is it already here, perhaps just on the edges of your perception?
Live the question. There’s no intellectual answer. Let yourself be with the question, over and over again, as you go through your day.
Here are some of the things you might be seeking — and some ways my clients have opened to what’s already here for them.
Compassionate self-acceptance
Escaping from self-judgment into self-acceptance and self-worth — this is something everyone seeks at some point.
A client told me, “Sometimes I feel so beaten down by the voices of criticism. And then I stop and ask: is there already freedom from the judgment? Is a feeling of inherent value already here? And even in the most difficult times, when I stop to ask and really listen for the answer, that sense of compassion and acceptance is already there. Sometimes I can rest in it — and sometimes it’s just a glimmer — but it’s always there, and it’s always a relief to find it.”
Peace and rest
Many of my clients are highly productive, to say the least. They feel caught up in doing. Though they often wish they could stop and find some peace in which to relax and rest, they also tell me about measuring their self-worth by how much they accomplish.
They seek rest. They’re looking for a way to slow down, to stop the relentless cycle of activity.
One client said, “When the ‘doing’ seems overwhelming, I ask myself what’s really true — what’s really present for me. Then I can feel the part of me that already knows it’s okay to slow down, stop, just sit for a while. And then somehow the drive to ‘do’ eases, and there’s a sense of peace and stillness.”
Connection and love
“I’ve always felt like something had to be wrong — there had to be a problem of some sort — for me to get the attention and love I wanted,” a client told me.
“It feels manipulative to get attention that way,” she said. “But even worse, it creates this constant cycle of suffering for me. If I want love, and I believe I have to be in pain to get it — where does that leave me but endlessly finding ways to be in pain?”
The creation of drama in order to gain attention and love starts at a very early age — just look at any over-tired toddler! But as my client noticed, it’s inauthentic for her, and it’s exhausting and painful.
I asked her, “What’s already here for you? Instead of looking outside yourself, is there compassion and love available in your experience right now?”
“That was not the question I expected,” she told me later. “It’s a whole new way of looking at things. I’d always struggled to stop creating the drama, but that didn’t change how I felt underneath — it didn’t relieve the craving for connection and love. But in opening to experience love that’s already there ... that changes everything.”
An alternative to seeking
It’s a classic trick of the mind: always believing that what you want isn’t here, so you have to keep struggling to find it.
Stop believing what your mind tells you. Instead, ask yourself, is what I want already here? Go deeply into your actual experience.
“I’ve recognized that even when I get what I think I want, it doesn’t actually make me happy,” a client said. “With that realization, I’m asking myself more and more: is what I really want already available to me? Is it already here?” She paused. “I don’t always have an answer, but this feels more right to me than the constant struggle for something that’s ‘out there’ somewhere.”
How about you? Is what you’re seeking already here?
Even if it feels as if you’re not in touch with it in this moment — whatever “it” is for you — you can often catch a glimmer of it in the periphery of your awareness.
And just by looking into your actual experience, you may find that what you seek is already here for you.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist, critic, and essayist.
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