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sometimes inspiring, sometimes personal meanderings of the Heart's opening in the every-day-ness of life...

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Awakening From Awakening - Jeff Foster


This is a true story from Jeff Foster

Once, at a conference, I watched a spiritual teacher addressing
a grieving woman whose precious young son had just died.  Her
world had just collapsed.  An old reality had shattered.  She said,
"My heart is broken and raw."  He told her, "Your heartbreak is the
activity of the separate self, and therefore illusory, based in ignorance.
When the separate self dissolves, there will be no more suffering.
In Awareness, there is no death.  Awareness has no son."  He told
her she needed to 'wake up.'  She needed to recognize herself as
'Pure Awareness' - that she was pretending to be a victim, that
she didn't know 'who she truly was.'

And in that moment, I saw a deep sickness and inhumanity at
 the heart of much our contemporary spirituality.

The invalidation and shaming of trauma, the false promises,
the power games, and most of all, the suppression
of the divine feminine.  Making our grief, anger, fear and joy a
'mistake' or some 'sign' that we are not awakened enough, not
spiritual enough, not 'divine' enough in our embodied humanity.
The pathologising of our wildness.  The shaming of our fragility,
our sensitivity.

Friends, if this is 'spiritual awakening', I simply have no interest.
Let us [embrace] our fragile, vulnerable humanity!  Not run from it!
Let us bless our precious broken hearts!  Not pathologise them!
Let us infuse our deepest human experience with empathy.
  Send a curious, warm awareness deep into
the wounds.  Not to mend, not to fix, but to feel!  Not to 'awaken',
but to penetrate and be penetrated by Love.
The awakening of the heart
The remembering of the magic we knew when we were very
young.  Let us embrace our painful feelings.  Not see them as a 'sign'
of our spiritual failure, or our inability to manifest, or our ignorance,
or lack of strength.

Let us wake up from the old *concept* of  'awakening'.
Return to the sacredness in our humanity!

and

Meet each other in the fire of living.  Be present with each other,
instead of trying to fix [correct/dismiss] each other.

Jeff Foster
[A Non-dualist with a Heart:)]
[brackets mine]


9 comments:

  1. Yes yes yes. Going through our emotions, not around them, and certainly not denying them and the depths of our human experience. Aren't we wonderful beings that can have these feelings! Maybe an aesthete can benefit in his own way, but I choose to immerse instead of avoid life.

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    1. like what you said..."I choose to immerse instead of avoid life." :)

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  2. It's so appropriate said 'fire in living', indeed. We are all connected in this 'fire', our bodies are antennas, tuning, adjusting more and more to this fire...The 'window' is opening wilder and wilder in accelerate rate...It is indeed a non-linear, spiralling process and nobody knows when and how the wave will 'hit'...

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    1. Thank you Anna... Am not sure Jeff's "fire of living" is the same as what you are talking about...What "fire" are you talking about, and What "wave" are you referring to?

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  3. Ohhhh, sweet Christine, my body is really in fire,in transformation, in shifting and I haven't enough energy to go in long explanations....sorry... But i am sure deep, deep within you Know all answers...Just have read Ivan's latest post "A Song on the View of Voidness"
    by Karma Trinley...Beautiful poem, probably there you will also find answers...it is all about re-cognition...Bytheway, like your blog, it so still and calm...go on, dear one...:)

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  4. Jeff is right, of course. There are hundreds of western self-styled gurus. Please be careful.

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    1. Thank you for the warning... :) I do not "follow" any guru or teacher, religion or path - not even the "non-dual" path. At times I have found Jeff's writings inspiring, but am not enamored of him. :) or anyone for that matter. I try to post various things here from different perspectives/people that are inspiring and thought provoking... Thanks for stopping by and leaving your note. I tried to follow your link but just get a Google page.

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