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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.

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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

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Don’t Wait for a Crisis

November 29 2011

A client asked, “How can I bring the spaciousness I feel in meditation into the difficult moments of my life? How do I meet the challenges that come up for me without getting knocked out of that place of peace and stillness?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked before — and it’s the wrong question.

Look at it from another context.

Imagine you’re learning to speak French. You probably wouldn’t ask, “How can I negotiate a complex business agreement with a French company?” Instead, you’d recognize that you need to take your classroom understanding into a casual, low-pressure setting for more practice — perhaps over a glass of wine with a French-speaking friend — before diving into the complexities of contract negotiation.

Bringing your experience of stillness and calm off your meditation cushion into your daily life is just the same: it’s something you develop through ongoing practice.

Then when those times of crisis and challenge arise, you’ll discover that spaciousness is already there for you. You won’t have to reach for it, and you won’t have to struggle. Your experience of spaciousness and your capacity to allow everything to be as it is will simply be the ground you stand on — because you’ve developed it through ongoing practice.

Like many people, you may use “practice” to refer to time spent away from the day-to-day, perhaps in meditation, yoga class, or some other activity that has personal meaning for you. Viewed from that perspective, “practice” can sound like something you do outside of your normal engagement with life.

But that creates an unnecessary separation between your day-to-day life and your developing capacity for internal awareness and spaciousness. And that leads to questions such as my client asked.

Instead, allow every moment to be your opportunity to practice stepping back to see the larger context. Because whether what’s happening for you is enjoyable or not, there is always a larger context — and it’s in remembering that context of spaciousness that you develop your capacity to rest there in the more difficult moments.

Here are some suggestions for exploring this opportunity.

Redefine “practice”

When you look at your meditation practice (or yoga, prayer, or whatever it may be for you) as an activity that’s separate from the rest of your life, the word “practice” becomes distorted from its real meaning.

To practice means to rehearse, to prepare, to train.

When you’re serious about learning French, you don’t leave your French at the classroom door. You bring it into your daily life. You find reasons to speak French. You play with it and you have fun with it.

You practice it.

What happens to your understanding of your personal practice when you look at it from this perspective?

“At first, it felt hard to remember to keep stepping back,” my client told me. “But then I noticed that I was actually already doing it. I was already noticing what was happening for me from moment to moment — I just hadn’t been paying attention to what I was noticing!”

Practice in the good times

You might be surprised that I suggest being aware of the larger context even when you feel that things are going well.

What better time to practice?

Spaciousness is the ground of everything that happens — it’s the context within which all experience moves, whether you call that experience “good” or “bad.”

“At first,” said my client, “I thought that being aware of good experiences in this way would make them less enjoyable. It felt as if attending to how my experience was unfolding would somehow tarnish my pleasure. But that’s not the case at all! If anything, there’s more depth and richness when I’m aware of the wholeness of experience — what’s happening and the context within which it moves.”

Ever more subtle

“The more attention I pay to my own awareness,” my client told me, “the deeper and more ... I don’t know ... refined it gets. I grow more and more aware of the details of what’s happening.”

Awareness creates more awareness. The more you practice, the more subtle it becomes.

My client described an example. “I was reading a book — nothing spectacular, just a reasonably good detective novel. At the same time, I was aware that I was feeling ‘off,’ yet I couldn’t see why, because there seemed to be no cause — no trigger. In allowing myself to be aware of the subtlety of what I was feeling, I realized that a scene in the book had hooked an old belief pattern and brought up old emotions.”

She went on, “In seeing that, two things happened. First, that old belief pattern unravelled itself a little bit more. Second, that was something that in the past would probably have affected my whole day, without my ever understanding what was making me feel bad. It’s so subtle, and yet so powerful — and so miraculous!”

There was even more to her realization. “The more I extend my practice in this way, the more I realize that I am that spaciousness,” she said. “I am the larger context through which my experience moves. It isn’t separate from me.”

Don’t wait for a crisis!

As my client discovered, when you take your personal practice out of its designated space in your day and bring it into every moment, your increasing awareness stabilizes all of your experience.

She tells me there hasn’t been a crisis for her since she began extending her practice of attention and awareness in this way. My guess is that there may have been situations that she would have experienced as crises — but that from this deeper place of practice simply aren’t a problem for her any more.

So don’t wait for a crisis to bring your practice into your life. Practice moment by moment, day by day — and see what happens.

“As I have practiced yoga in the quest for inner peace I have found that my spiritual practice doesn’t end when I leave the yoga mat. That is the beginning. While having a time of quiet each day is essential for our spiritual health, it is what we do in the world that propels us forward as individuals and as a society.” Darren John Main (1971-), American yoga teacher and auther; from Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic.

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