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

Read more of what people say

The Gift of Being Yourself

December 27 2011

The biggest challenge anyone faces in life is to be who they are.

Before you were born, there were already thousands of expectations in place about who you’d be and what you’d do.

Parents, teachers, playmates, friends, enemies: they all had expectations, judgments, needs, and desires that they wanted you to fulfill.

And children are so amazing. They compress themselves, they alter themselves, they do an incredible job of trying to become what they feel the people around them want and expect.

By the time most people reach adulthood, they’ve lost touch with significant aspects of the wholeness of who they are. And they carry within them a host of internal voices that judge what they do and try to dictate how things should be.

Healing means remembering yourself, rediscovering the fullness of your natural potential for love, compassion, and self-acceptance. And that’s a far greater process than can be described in a brief article such as this.

Yet it’s also a simple process. It comes down to just a few steps — steps that you take over and over again, commitments that you renew over and over again, going deeper and deeper with courage and curiosity, including a willingness to be surprised.

So as you read the steps I’ve outlined here, remember that your unfolding into the depth, beauty, and richness of your own wholeness will go in directions you never expected, and reveal aspects of yourself that may surprise you. As one client said, “The things I always judged about myself are turning out to be the things that are the most precious to me. And what an amazing gift that is!”

It starts with commitment

I’ve said this before, and I’ll undoubtedly say it again: the process begins with your commitment to yourself, your commitment to what’s most important.

Who and what are you, really?

Are you willing to commit to taking a deeper look?

“I think the first thing you taught me,” a long-term client told me the other day, “is how the commitment to what’s most important has to be renewed, over and over again. When I stumble and lose sight of my commitment, it’s not a failure. It’s an opportunity to step back, to take another look, to go deeper, and to re-establish my faith in the process and in my own wholeness.”

Question the rules

The rules by which you live your life may be habitual, but that doesn’t mean they’re true.

Yet we all tend to take the “shoulds” and “supposed tos” that play in our minds as rules for our behavior.

“In trying to live up to my family’s standards of perfection,” a client said, “I see how I laid down all these rules about how I’m supposed to do things. But in the end, all those rules just made my life difficult and exhausting. As the rules and associated judgments unravel, everything becomes easier and more fun.”

The unravelling comes from noticing and questioning: is it really true that this is necessary? Is it really true that something has to be done in a particular way — or even that it has to be done at all?

“I’m amazed,” my client said, “at how many of the things I thought I had to do are totally irrelevant!” She laughed. “I’m still doing a lot — but what I’m doing is changing, and it’s much more meaningful.”

Keep your focus

It’s easy to stay busy. It seems more normal to be busy than not. People may even look at you funny if you step back from our culture of always being in a rush, always having too much to do, always being busy.

That busyness is a trap. It sucks your attention away from what’s truly most important.

One client had stopped meditating except for a few moments in the evening. She told me, “I don’t have time in the morning. My business is important — my clients need me — there are things I have to do.”

I asked her to slow down for a moment. And then I asked her, “What’s really most important?”

There was a long silence. I heard her sigh. “You’re right,” was all she said.

A few days later, I received an email from her. “I’ve refocused. And my morning meditations have been so powerful. I’d gotten badly distracted, and I hadn’t even noticed. Thank you for pulling me back on track.”

It’s about re-committing

There wasn’t anything wrong with what had happened. It’s normal to get distracted, and trying to never be distracted is a recipe for failure. This sort of commitment isn’t “once and done.” It’s over and over again, deeper and deeper, at more and more subtle levels.

And that’s actually the beauty of it. Because when you can keep that focus, bringing it back when it wanders, re-affirming what’s most important, re-committing to who and what you really are ... that’s when miracles happen.

“As I remember myself more deeply, nothing is what I expect it to be,” said a client. “Joy isn’t what I thought joy was like, love isn’t what I thought love was like, happiness isn’t what I thought happiness was like. The quicker I can get rid of my expectations of what anything will be like, the more I open to how sublime life really is. And that’s the true miracle of it all.”

In this holiday season — which, whatever faith you may (or may not) follow, is ultimately about unconditional, real love — I invite you to open to the miraculous gift of who you really are.

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself.” Andre Gide (1896-1951), French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.

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