Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Jeff Foster.

Jeff teaches and shares from his own awakened experience a way out of seeking

fulfillment in the future and into the acceptance of “all this, here and now.” Jeff’s

teaching style is direct and uncompromising, and yet full of humanity, humor, and

compassion. He belongs to no tradition or lineage and makes his teaching accessible to

all. In 2012, Jeff was voted by The Watkins Review to be one of world’s 100 most

spiritually influential living people. With Sounds True, Jeff has written a new book called

The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life and an accompanying

audio program where he invites listeners to discover to discover “the ocean of who we

are,” an awareness that has already allowed every wave of emotion and experience to

arrive.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Jeff and I spoke about how acceptance is

actually what we are. We also talked about how to work with very practical concerns like

our fears of financial insufficiency. And we talked about the power of meeting someone

and being with someone who is suffering or who is in pain, and how to do this with an

absolutely open embrace. Finally, Jeff and I spoke about the path of awakening that

he’s travelled through experiences of deep depression and some of the most important

discoveries he’s made. Here’s my very real, honest, and helpful conversation with Jeff

Foster.

In the introduction to your new book, The Deepest Acceptance, you begin, Jeff, with a

really strong statement—[a] really strong, definitive statement, and I want to be begin

our conversation there. Here’s what you write: “I teach one thing, and one thing only: a

deep and fearless acceptance of whatever comes your way.” So to begin with, it’s a

strong statement, to write the words “I teach one thing and one thing only.”

Jeff Foster: Yeah, well you know, this is a radical message really that I teach. I’d say it

wasn’t for the faint-hearted, exactly. I’d say it’s a basic problem of humanity, if we could

speak about that. It’s that we’ve, on some level, we are afraid of life or we have become

afraid of life, afraid of living. You know we spend so much of our time, it seems, turning

away from life, turning away from ourselves; turning away from pain, turning away from

fear, turning away from sadness, turning away from doubt. And I’d say that if I had to

summarize everything that I have to teach it’s, stop. Stop turning away. And stay with

life and turn towards life if you can. Face what is actually here. In the end, come to know

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it as yourself. It so often feels that life is somehow against us, you know? Or that life is

doing something to us, or that life is going wrong, or that life is not going our way.

My invitation is: stop and look at what is actually here. Come out of your story of your

life—life is this, life is that, or this is going wrong, or that’s going wrong, this will happen,

that will happen. Just gently return to what is actually here. I talk about the constant

invitation of life. I see life as a constant invitation to simply return home, in a sense, to

return to what’s actually in front of you—because that’s really all you’re ever dealing

with, although it can often seem like it’s so much more. Just face what’s here.

TS: Now this idea of facing what’s here, a deep and fearless acceptance of whatever

comes your way— but you know, obviously, there are some really difficult things that

come people’s way. And so as you’re talking, I’m imagining some of those really difficult

things and somebody who says, “You know, how do I really accept and fearlessly turn

towards the grief that I have from something like losing a child—or something that just

seems unbearable?”

JF: That’s so true. You know sometimes life can get really, really challenging, and you

know, we are faced with these waves. I talk in the book a lot about the waves in the

ocean of you. If you see yourself as this vast ocean, all these waves are always

appearing—thoughts, sensations, feelings—these are all the waves appearing in you.

As you said, absolutely, oftentimes the waves can get really intense. These are big

waves: waves of fear, waves of grief, waves of sadness, waves of fear, waves of doubt,

and waves of joy, waves of bliss. I mean it’s all allowed in you. You know, it’s all

essentially, what you are is the space for all of that. But as you said, sometimes these

waves can get so intense and the truth is, we often don’t know what to do with them.

Despite everything that we’ve learned and our spiritual evolution, all the experiences

that we’ve had and all the insights that we’ve had, all the awakenings that we’ve had,

still, sometimes these waves appear in very intense waves of grief, as you said.

TS: Or like a tsunami, let’s say.

JF: Like a tsunami, yes.

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TS: Someone’s experiencing something like that. Not some wave but something that

seems like “Oh my God, this will crush me.”

JF: Yes, yes. And it happens to the best of us. It happens to the most supposedly

awakened and enlightened people. No one is immune from these tsunamis. That’s part

of the invitation, though—you know, a great place to start is actually just to be totally

honest about this. This tsunami is appearing, this tsunami of grief, of fear, and in this

moment, I don’t know what to do with it. It can be a very beautiful place to start. Rather

than going into the whole story of “I don’t know what to do with it,” and “What’s wrong

with me, why can’t I deal with it?” And “It’s going to overwhelm me—” and you know, all

the stories that we tell. To actually come back to the truth of the moment—which could

be, in the moment, it could be, “I do not know how to face this.”

Often I say that we’re told a lot about resistance; a lot of these spiritual teachings talk

about resistance and how we’re always resisting the moment and we should stop

resisting the moment, that we resist our pain, we resist our fear, and that we should

stop. I think what I would say is that I think it’s probably more true to say that no one’s

actively resisting their fear. No one is actively resisting their grief. It’s probably more true

to say that we just don’t know how to be with our grief. And we don’t know how to be

with our fear. It’s not that we’re resisting it. It’s more like we don’t know how to sit with it,

how to be with it.

Possibly because, no one has ever shown us how to sit with grief, how to be with grief.

We’re taught, from when we’re very young, not to feel so much of this stuff. We’re

taught that sadness is bad, or fear is bad, or anger is bad. So we spend so much of our

time running away from these feelings, because really, who has ever shown us, whose

ever held our hand in the midst of our grief, in the midst of our pain, in the midst of our

doubt? Who has ever just sat with us and held our hand and for a moment, not try to fix

us or change us or to get us to not feel that or to get us to try to feel something

different?

It seems to me that we’ve really forgotten, or maybe we never knew, how to be with

these giant waves. And as I said that can be a beautiful place to start: just to admit your

innocence, in a sense, to admit that with total humility—“Actually, I don’t know how to be

with this,” —and to begin there.

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TS: Now, what would you say to the person who says, “You know, I don’t know how to

be with this overwhelming something, whatever it might be—whether it’s fear or

whatever—because of this intensity. It just seems there’s too much intensity there.”

Sometimes I hear from people, “If I really let myself feel this thing, I’ll start crying,” and

they say, “I’ll never stop crying if I start crying.” So what would you say to that person

who has a fear of the intensity?

JF: That’s so true. You know I often say, I don’t think we’re so much afraid of death, I

don’t think anyone is really afraid of death, I think we’re actually afraid of life. We’re

afraid of the intensity of life, because as you say, it can get so intense. And certainly

over the past five, six years as I’ve been traveling around the world speaking to people

and really going into this with them, I hear that so often. They say, “Jeff, I’m afraid if I

really just allow this grief for just one moment, if I truly allow this, if this grief is let loose,

if it was unrestrained, if I just stop for a moment running away from it, I fear that it would

stick. It would never go away. It would destroy me.

I mean we’re really getting into some primal fears here. The fear of being destroyed by

this wave, that this wave will annihilate me, this wave will destroy me, you know. This

wave, it will just overtake me. I will become something [else]. There’s so many fears

around it. So this is really where we get to the core message of my book, which is “the

deepest acceptance,” because that’s always the question: “Well, how can I accept?”

When things are going your way, when the waves are nice and gentle, when it’s a lovely

sunny day in the ocean and the waves are nice and gentle, it seems easy to accept the

present moment. [But] when the waves become intense and the tsunamis arise, the

question is “Well yeah, but how to accept this?”

So we try to accept these tsunamis. This is what I say in the book. There’s so many

people out there that I meet who are trying to accept this moment. They’re trying to say

yes to the moment. There’s a lot of trying that happens; we try to accept the tsunami,

but because of the fear and the intensity in that moment, we just feel unable to accept.

We feel unable to allow. So then we’re faced with the tsunami and, in the moment, our

own inability to accept it—our own inability, our failure to accept it. So then that

becomes the truth of the moment is that there’s this giant tsunami and there’s, in this

moment, a sense of inability to face it.

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What I say in the book [is] actually, that’s not a failing of yours. That’s not actually a sign

of your failure, that fact that you feel unable to accept this moment. There’s a much

deeper truth contained there. This is why I speak about the deepest acceptance. I talk

about acceptance not as something we do—what I say in the book is actually

acceptance is who we are. It’s another name for you. Acceptance is another name for

who you are. Peace and rest and freedom and all the good stuff that we’re looking for—

it’s not actually a case of doing something to get there, it’s more a case of remembering

how you’re actually built. You’re built as acceptance. That’s your true nature.

TS: Now can you explain that a little bit more? I’m not sure I’m following you, exactly,

that acceptance is who we all are, because you see a lot of people who don’t seem to

be particularly accepting.

JF: That’s so true. Acceptance is who we are. It’s how we’re built and that’s what we

forget. I would say that’s probably the problem of humanity—and all conflict, and all

suffering and all violence, and all destructive behavior actually emerges from that

forgetting of who we are.

So if you’ve ever meditated—maybe this is a way of talking about it in the most simple

way. If you’ve ever meditated, you’re sitting there watching thoughts come and go,

maybe watching sensations come and go, and it starts to dawn on you that maybe you

aren’t who you thought you were because if thoughts can come and go, then they can’t

truly define who you really are because who you truly are in your essence can’t come

and go. It can’t come and go. It can’t appear and disappear. Who you truly are, is

always, always here. It’s always present. I think everyone in the world has that basic

sense of being here, existing right now in this moment. We can doubt everything,

everything we’re told, everything we’re taught except the fact that we exist right now.

There’s a sense of being here. It doesn’t really matter where we are. It’s not being here,

or being there, it’s being where we are—wherever we are in the world, it’s being where

we are. Everyone has that sense, and that’s what I call the ocean, the ocean of

consciousness, the ocean of awareness.

So you’re sitting in meditation, you’re noticing thoughts coming and going, and feelings

coming and going, and sensations coming and going, and you start to realize that

actually, who I am can’t be thoughts, who I am can’t be feelings, who I am, in my 5

essence, can’t be sensations, because they all come and go. So you start to notice that

there’s something here that doesn’t come and go that’s always present, this ocean of

who you are—this is what I call it: the ocean of who you are. So you start to notice that

within that ocean of who you are, within this ever-present wide open space of you, all

the waves of life are always appearing and disappearing. Thoughts come and go.

Sensations come and go. Feelings come and go. All the waves arise and dissolve in the

ocean of you. Who you are always remains.

So when I talk about acceptance, I’m talking about it is a different way, perhaps, [than]

we’ve used the word before. So acceptance is not a case of me [doing the] accepting: I

have to accept this moment, or I have to accept this fear. I have to accept this pain. You

could say that on a deeper level, who you are as the ocean is already accepting or

allowing its waves. Every wave that arises in the ocean of you is in a sense already

accepted. It’s already allowed because it’s appearing, because it’s here. So if a thought

is appearing, it means on the deepest level, the ocean of you, is already allowing that

thought.

If a sensation is appearing right now in your present experience, it means that who you

are in the ocean of you is allowing that sensation. It’s allowing this feeling. It’s allowing

this sadness. It’s allowing this pain. It’s allowing this joy. If a wave is arising in you, it

means on the deepest level that who you are in a sense has already said yes to it. And

in a sense, who you are has already said yes to this moment exactly as it is. So these

thoughts, these sensations, these feelings, even this doubt or this confusion or this pain

that’s appearing right now—on a deeper level, who you are is allowing it, who you are is

accepting it, who you are has said yes to it. So even if it seems, on a surface level, it

seems unacceptable to you, to the mind, to the thought—your thought might say, “This

sadness shouldn’t be here.” Or a thought might say, “This is too much sadness.” Or a

thought might even say, “This isn’t enough sadness, because thought is always

comparing—but on a deeper level, who you are as the ocean is already allowing this

sadness.

This sadness has already been welcomed into you—that’s why it’s here. I mean in a

way, this goes completely against our common sense of what we’re taught and it can

seem, even when you first hear it, it can seem even crazy or confusing. But really, it’s

not something that you believe; it’s something that you begin to notice in your own

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experience. It’s like life becomes this constant meditation, noticing thoughts, noticing

sensations, noticing feelings, and then noticing on a deeper level, that whatever is

arising in this moment, even if it’s very intense, even on the most basic level, it’s not

your enemy.

I think that’s the core realization, that if sadness is arising in you, even if it’s very

intense, it’s not your enemy. No wave is against the ocean. It’s already being allowed in

you. So what I would say is life is just this never-ending invitation to remember this

already accepted nature of present experience. So acceptance isn’t something that you

do. It’s not “I accept this moment” or “I don’t accept this moment.” It’s noticing on a

deeper level that this moment has already been accepted. So that’s what I mean when I

talk about the deepest acceptance. It’s an acceptance that goes beyond “I accept” and

“I don’t accept.

In a sense, it’s total surrender actually to life. It’s total surrender. It’s like recognizing

your total humility in the face of life. But it’s not a place of powerlessness and passivity.

I’d say it’s the absolute opposite, because it’s discovering this inner built-in “yes” to life.

It’s a “yes” to every moment, [but] not as something that you have to strive to do. It’s not

like I have to strive to say “yes,” because that becomes so exhausting, I think, trying to

accept this moment even when this moment becomes so difficult. We try and try and try

and we try and we try and we try and we try to accept it. It can become so exhausting,

trying to accept this moment.

Bur even that exhaustion is part of the invitation—to notice, to give up trying to accept,

and notice that on this deeper level this moment has already been allowed in. These

thoughts, these sensations, these feelings, these waves of experience have already

arrived, so it’s too late, in a sense, to fight them. It’s too late to accept them and it’s too

late to fight them because they’re already here.

TS: Is it fair to say, Jeff, using this metaphor of the waves and the ocean—from a kind

of practical, on-the-spot [perspective] that if somebody find themselves deeply identified

with some kind of very intense wave of experience that seems difficult or overwhelming,

that if they shift their attention to the oceanic nature of our experience, that that makes

room from this acknowledgement of acceptance? What do you think about that? Shifting

to being the ocean versus identifying with the wave.

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JF: Well, that’s it really. It’s all about remembering your true identity as this vast,

spacious ocean, rather than identifying as this small limited person. Every moment is

this invitation to remember that actually you are much vaster than you ever imagined.

You know, I think that’s what goes to the core of so much suffering, especially the

people I’ve met over the past few years. There’s this sense that when we’re suffering,

that somehow we’re somehow too small, we’re too limited to take this. This pain is too

much for me, or this fear is too much for me, or this grief is too much for me. That’s how

it can feel, but of course in reality, this moment is never really too much.

Whatever is going on in this moment, even if this moment is very intense and full of pain

and full of fear, you could say that there’s something here that is already holding this

moment, it’s already embracing this moment. It’s already allowing this moment to be,

even if you feel personally unable to bear this moment, that you fell unable to take this

moment. You feel unable to accept this moment. What you are as this vast oceanic

space is already holding the fear.

So suffering is really all to do with identification. For example, when there’s a wave of

fear—and it could be anything, it could fear, it could anger, it could sadness—that’s an

invitation to remember who you are. Who you are in this moment is holding the fear,

who you are is the space for that fear. What I am in this moment is the space for this

fear. In a way I’m giving this fear space. You know, I’m giving this fear breathing room.

I’m making it safe for this fear to express itself. I’m making it safe for this pain to express

itself. I’m making it safe for this sadness, for this doubt, to express itself.

In a way, it’s completely the opposite of everything we’re taught about ourselves. It turns

life upside down but we remember ourselves as this vast ocean that is allowing these

waves to be. In a sense, these waves, a wave of fear is not the enemy. That’s what

we’re taught, maybe. A wave of pain, a wave of sadness is not the enemy; as the

ocean, you could say it’s one of your children, you know? As the ocean, you give birth

to a wave of fear, you give birth to a wave of sadness. These are not enemies to be

destroyed, these are children to be held, to be loved in this moment. Life doesn’t ask

any more of you than that. You’re only facing this moment of fear.

When we go into the identification, when we forget our true identity, as you said, the

ocean, this vast ocean, this vast space in which fear is appearing right now. When we

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forget how vast we are, we forget how spacious we are. We forget how loving we are, in

a sense, how deeply embracing we are. We start to identify with that wave. So, instead

of remembering ourselves as the vast ocean in which fear is coming and going right

now, we identify as someone who is afraid. I think that’s the fundamental difference

between remembering who you really are and forgetting who you really are. It’s that

identification. So we remember ourselves as in this moment, and it’s only in the

moment, because that’s all there is, ultimately. [If] we remember ourselves right now as

this vast ocean in which this wave of fear is allowed, and we don’t identity as “I am the

one who is afraid,” or “I am the one who is sad,” or “I am the one who is in pain, I am the

victim—” because there’s always some kind of victim story behind that.

[Doing] this is not a denial or a rejection of the wave. It’s not pushing the wave away. It’s

not saying “Oh that fear can’t touch me. I’m beyond fear.” You know, all the spiritual

bypassing stuff that we do sometimes. It’s not about that. It’s about acknowledging that

the fear is here—acknowledging it, noticing it—and at the same time as remembering

yourself as the wide open space that’s holding that fear. So the fear is allowed to move

in me, but ultimately, it doesn’t define me. So it’s both. It’s like allowing the fear to fully

express itself without pushing it away. But at the same time remembering yourself as

this vast space.

TS: Now Jeff, for whatever reason, I’m thinking about somebody who might have a fear

—let’s say of financial insufficiency of some kind. Like, I’m just not going to have

enough money. And this is all great, this spiritual talk that Jeff’s giving about

remembering the oceanic nature of consciousness, but I really need to attend to this

fear about not having enough money and kind of get it together here and mobilize and if

I rest in this oceanic place and [don’t] really concern myself exactly with this fear, I’m not

going to manifest practically the way I need to. How would you respond to that?

JF: That’s such a common question that I get. I get that question so often that it’s “Jeff,

this all sounds wonderful, you know, remembering myself as the ocean, and coming

back to the moment and deeply allowing, but how does that help me make money and

how does that pay my bills? And what about this, what about that?”

TS: I’ve asked a question that you get asked a lot, but that’s ok. That’s ok. I’m alright

with that.

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JF: [Laughs] It’s not an original question, Tami.

TS: It’s ok. I can roll.

JF: You can roll. [Laughs] That’s good. It’s interesting, I was talking to a woman last

week and we were having this [same] conversation and there was this possibility that

she might lose her house in a few weeks, might not have anywhere to live. And so when

she came to me, she was obviously full of anxiety and stress. She was talking, talking,

talking very, very fast. “What about this? This might happen. That could happen. I might

not have anywhere to live. I might not have any money. I might be homeless.” You

know? So there’s a relative reality to all of that.

That could happen. In a few weeks, she might have a house or not have a house or

have money or not have money, but the point was that in this moment, she was trying to

work it all out. She was trying to get all the answers right now. She was exhausting

herself, trying to fix her life in this moment. So what I did is, I just invited her, to just for a

moment, instead of trying to fix her life and come up with a solution right now—I wasn’t

saying that the solution wouldn’t ever come. I wasn’t saying that she was never gonna

have money. The point is, in this moment, she didn’t know. In this moment, she hadn’t

found the answers yet, she hadn’t found the solutions yet. They might come.

That’s the funny thing, the strange thing that I find—and lots of people that I speak to

find the same thing, actually—when they do just come out of that complicated, stressful

story, trying to solve the future—that’s what we do. We sit here, in this moment, trying to

fix the rest of our lives. It becomes so exhausting sometimes. Sometimes it can be very

beautiful, just in this moment, to admit that we don’t know yet, that we haven’t got the

answers yet. Just for a moment to relax and sink into this place of not knowing, sink into

this place where we don’t have the answers yet, sink into this place of mystery. And

then like you said, what happens at the point is people go, “Yeah, but if I sink into the

mystery, the bills won’t get paid. If I sink into life, I’ll lose my home. If I sink into life, I’ll

end up doing nothing. I’ll end up becoming passive. My life will fall apart.”

I think that’s a very primal fear, actually. If I sit here and just for a moment, do nothing,

my life will fall apart. I think that’s really fascinating that we have that fear: if I sit here

and do nothing, just for one moment—because that’s all we’re asking— my whole life

will fall apart. So it’s interesting with this woman I was speaking to, I just gently invited 10

her to come back to breathing and begin to just feel the sensations in her body and just

feel the fear, actually. Where was the fear in her body?

She pointed to her stomach and her neck and her throat. And I just asked her to bring

some attention back to the life, the life that she was, the life that was actually moving in

her, the tingly alive sensation that was moving in her now, to come out—in a way—to

come out of this story of MY life. My life and my problems, and my solutions, and in

three weeks time I’ll be homeless, to come out of that just for a moment [from] the story

of my life and in a sense return to life, to remember the life that you are, to remember

that life that she was. And then what was really interesting, as she just allowed herself

to actually feel the sensations in her body, and actually feel the fear rather than running

away from the fear, trying to solve the fear—because in a way that’s all she was doing.

She was trying to fix, present fear. She was trying to get rid of present fear by solving

the story of her life, by fixing the story of her life, like she was coming out of “life” in a

way and going into the story of “MY life.” But the point is, it wasn’t working. It was just

causing exhaustion and stress and no answers were coming. The answers hadn’t come

yet.

What was really interesting was that she just relaxed into her body and started to honor

the fear, rather than running away from it, started to acknowledge it and to honor it and

even to share it with me, to meet fear, actually—not to try to fix fear or push it away, but

to actually meet it. That’s when she started to relax and suddenly, her life didn’t seem

like such a disaster and suddenly it wasn’t such a catastrophe. And the funny thing is,

from that place, that’s the creative place, the mystery of this moment, that’s the source

of all creativity. If answers are going to come, this is where they come from—the

mystery of the moment. They don’t come in the story of three weeks time. The answers

that we long for, they emerge in their own sweet time out of this mystery and it’s like the

mind is—it’s very sweet—the mind is trying to solve our lives for us. The mind is a

beautiful tool and we don’t want to get rid of it and we don’t want to make it into the

enemy, but sometimes life just invites us to come out of that story of “my life” and

“solving my life” and “fixing my life” and just remember the mystery that you are.

TS: Now Jeff in this story that you directed this person, helped this person sit with the

feeling of fear that was in her body, and it seems like that is a really important step and

one that can be hard for people, especially if they haven’t trained—at least in my

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experience—in some form of embodied focus and attention. How do you help people

stay with that, stay with the physiology of what’s happening inside of them?

JF: I guess what I do, if I could summarize what I do with people, is I don’t do very

much, actually. I don’t experience myself as doing very much with people. For me, it’s

about meeting them, you know? I think so often, when we sit with someone, we meet

someone, we’re in a conversation with someone, and they’re expressing fear, or they’re

expressing pain, or they’re feeling doubt or confusion, so quickly we rush to help them

or fix them or solve their problems for them. If someone is experiencing a lot of fear,

maybe out of compassion, out of love, we try to stop them feeling what they’re feeling,

or we quickly offer solutions or maybe we even pretend to have some kind of answer.

What I tend to do with people—I don’t do that so much. I find that what truly heals—I

mean, this is my own experience with people—what truly heals is this meeting, this

being with. I’ll sit with someone who’s experiencing a lot of fear, and they’re going into

this fearful story of “This will happen, that will happen, I won’t be able to eat, I’ll be

homeless, I’ll d ie, I’ll end up in a ditch somewhere.” I don’t give them answers. I don’t

try and fix them. I don’t pretend to have the solutions. I’m just very honest about that. I

don’t pretend to know anymore than they do. What I think I do— and I wouldn’t even

say it’s a doing, actually—I just provide the space for them to meet their own fear. If I’m

able to sit there and meet them as they are, and not turn away from them, and not try to

fix them, and not give them easy answers or try to prove what a wonderful teacher I am

because I know so much—it doesn’t interest me. You know? It doesn’t interest me.

What interests me is really meeting [them].

As I was saying before, I think that’s what we’ve forgotten as a species. We’ve forgotten

basically how to be with ourselves. That’s actually where all of our suffering begins is

this forgetting of who we are, which is the forgetting basically of how to sit with

ourselves, how to sit with our fear. No one has ever shown us how to sit with fear.

People have taught us throughout our lives how to get rid of fear, how to escape fear,

how to turn fear into something else, but who’s ever shown us how to be with fear in the

moment of fear—facing the fact of fear, sitting there facing the fact of fear in the present

moment. Who has ever shown us how to just stay there? We’re given so many

techniques and solutions and methods of how to get rid of stuff.

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So hopefully what I do with people, perhaps because of my own experiences over the

years, I’m far more able these days to sit with my own experience. I’m far more able to

sit with fear, to sit with sadness, to sit with confusion, to sit with doubt in myself because

I’ve learnt over the years not to run away from it. I’ve learnt that actually running away

from this moment does not provide what we truly long for. However paradoxical that

sounds, you know, it’s actually this turning towards, this staying, stay, stay, stay, stay. I

think that’s the constant invitation of life is to stay, stay, stay. Even if in this moment, you

feel that you can’t stay, stay with that. Stay with that.

So I think for whatever reason, [since] I’m more able these days to stay with my own

experience, I’m far more able to stay as well with someone else’s experience and not

run away from it and not try to fix it.

TS: I think you’re actually pointing to something really important, which is the power of

being with another person when we can unconditionally accept whatever it is they’re

going through. I think you’re actually pointing here to something really important about

how we can be there for others.

JF: I think that’s the very essence of healing and the true meaning of the word. What I

would say is that for me, healing has nothing to do with the running away. It’s got

nothing to do with fixing. Healing has nothing to do with fixing yourself. It’s got nothing to

do with fixing people. It’s all about this staying with our experience, even if in the

moment we feel like running away, even if it feels so uncomfortable to stay there, even if

we’re sitting with someone who’s experiencing a lot of sadness or doubt or confusion or

anger.

When we’re sitting there with someone who’s in that moment, expressing anger towards

us and it’s aimed at us and they’re calling us names and they’re saying that we did

these things. They’re judging us. Often what happens at that point is we start to feel

uncomfortable. We start to feel hurt. We might even start to feel the urge to run away,

either literally run away or psychologically run away from them by just withdrawing and

numbing ourselves to them, pushing them away psychologically, or we might even feel

the urge to attack them because we feel attacked. We feel hurt.

We don’t know how to be with our own hurt. We feel hurt and we don’t know how to stay

with that. We don’t know how to be with that. So we lash back at them—there’s that 13

urge to lash back them. So this is the invitation of life, and this is the invitation that I

offer and this is the invitation I speak about in my book. Can we just stay there in that

place, even if in the moment there’s a lot of discomfort moving in us, there’s a lot of hurt

moving in us? Can we stay with our own experience? In the end, that’s all we can know.

Can we stay with our own experience, even if there’s hurt, even if we feel hurt?

Can we find the place in that moment, where that wave, that intense wave of hurt

moving in us, is allowed to be there? Can we find our inherent vastness? In that

moment, can we just stop and notice that who we are is vast enough? Who we are is

oceanic. Who we are is big enough to contain that hurt, to hold that hurt, even if it’s

burning, even if it’s very intense, even if there’s a strong urge to run away or the strong

urge to push the other person away or attack them or fix them, manipulate them, or try

to change their experience. Can we stay with all of that? Can we find the place where

actually all of those waves moving in us, just for this moment, are allowed to be here?

Can we remember that who we are is vast enough to hold that hurt and then to meet the

other person in that place of deep acceptance?

I’ve had so much experience with this over the past few years, especially being a

teacher, you know? It’s one thing having all these insights and having an awakening

experience, but it’s a whole other world going out and teaching it, because you’re

exposing yourself to all kinds of situations and all kinds of people. You’re really opening

yourself up for attack, for people to disagree with you and to not like how you teach or to

not like what you’re saying, because it’s really challenging. A lot of the stuff that I talk

about can seem quite challenging to people, and it’s understandable.

I’ve been in situations, many situations the past few years, where I’ve been sitting with

someone and they’ve been very angry with me, or they’ve been disagreeing with me

very strongly and calling me this and that. I mean, it hasn’t happened a lot, but I’ve

certainly experienced this. For me, it’s always an invitation to deeply allow that, in that

moment, whatever waves it brings up in me. Because I’m not immune. There’s no such

thing as anyone who is immune from life. And I think that we have this funny idea that

awakening, or some people have this funny idea that awakening or enlightenment, is a

place of numbness, or a place where you don’t feel all these waves, you don’t feel sad

anymore, or you don’t feel pain anymore, or the waves have somehow become a lot

more gentle.

14

In my own experience, it’s actually the other way around. Because the waves are

allowed to move, actually the waves become a lot more intense. The waves become a

lot more intense because you lose interest in pushing them away. You lose interest in

numbing yourself to life because you want to live.

You know, I spent the first 25 years of my life—I was basically dead. I was numb. I was

absolutely numb to myself and to other people. So I’m not interested in numbing myself

to life anymore. I’m not interested in pretending to be the enlightened one who doesn’t

feel anything. That doesn’t seem possible and it doesn’t seem human. What really

interests me these days is meeting other human beings in this place of deep

acceptance, you know—noticing all these waves moving in myself and finding the place

where they’re all allowed to be there, they’re all held.

That’s how, actually, that’s how we stop turning against the one in front of us. That’s

how we can break the cycle of violence and conflict because we’re allowing ourselves to

feel hurt just in this moment and we’re remembering ourselves as the vast, unlimited,

open space of consciousness that allows this wave of hurt. It doesn’t reject hurt. It says

“yes” to hurt, however strange that sounds. It says “yes” to hurt. In a strange way, that’s

how we don’t become hurt, by discovering this inner “yes” to hurt. That’s how we stop

the identification of, “I am the hurt one. I am the hurt one, you hurt me. I am the hurt

one. I am the victim of you.” I think that’s where all violence, where all conflict begins, is

with the identification as some kind of victim. You know, you hurt me. You hurt me.

So remembering ourselves as this vast ocean in which the hurt is allowed—so it’s not

pretending the hurt isn’t there. It’s not pretending the hurt isn’t there. It’s acknowledging

it. It’s feeling it deeply, but it’s allowing that hurt to move in you so that it doesn’t get

stuck. It flows and it moves. And you remember on the deepest level that it can’t hurt

you, that what you are, as the ocean, isn’t going to be hurt by this. It might hurt, but you

won’t get hurt.

I think that’s the fundamental realization, and that’s how in my own experience how I’m

able to stay with people—even when they’ve become quite violent or agitated or angry,

to stay with them. Underneath all of that, of course, you see their pain. You meet their

pain—and that’s where compassion can begin, is when you remember that all this

destructive behavior is coming from pain, from unmet pain. It’s coming from unmet pain.

15

They simply are not able in this moment to meet themselves. So maybe I can meet

them.

And that’s—for me, what it’s really what it’s all about in the end. Life is all about this

meeting—that meeting ourselves, meeting our own pain, our own fear, our own bliss,

our own joy—meeting all those waves in ourselves and meeting the one in front of us in

the same way actually. Because in the end, it’s the same meeting—we’re really just

meeting ourselves. It’s become a bit of a cliché these days but it’s so true: we really are

only meeting ourselves in disguise. We’re not nearly as different as we like to believe.

TS: Now, Jeff, there’s so many things that I could talk to you about and that I want to

talk to you about, so we’re going to have to have another one of these conversations

soon, but in the meantime, I have a sense that our listeners might be curious about you.

I mean here you are, you have this beautiful, British accent,

JF: [Laughs]

TS: And they may not know but you are young person, you’re in your early 30’s. Is that

right?

JF: That’s true. Yeah, I’m thirty—what am I? I’m 32, I think.

TS: Yeah, there you go. Something like that.

JF: Yeah it’s around 32, I can confirm that later for you. [Laughs]

TS: Thank you. We can check the records, find your birth certificate or whatever. But

you know what’s interesting, I think and what I think people would love to hear more

about is your own process. You talked about how the first 25 years of your life, that you

now in retrospect see that you were “numb.” But I’m curious to know, you’ve written a

little bit about how depressed you were, to the point of a type of suicidal depression but

then your situation changed. You had some breakthroughs, some insights, and here

you are now helping other people. So tell us a little bit about your own story here,

especially the depression and what shifted that.

JF: Sure. I was always a depressed child, depressed teenager in life. If I had to sum it

up, life always felt so heavy for me. I would wake up every morning, and you know, this

16

was 25 years of this, ever since I could remember, I would wake up every morning and

life just felt, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy. I was intensely shy, and intensely self-

conscious. I don’t think I’d, I mean I barely spoke to anyone until I was about 20, which

is why it’s quite ironic, considering these days I go around the world speaking to people

and doing meetings and workshops. It’s funny how life can change like that.

I was intensely self-conscious and it became worse and worse, and I was just filled with

so much self-loathing and I hated the way I looked. I just hated myself. I just felt totally

inadequate. My life totally lacked any kind of intimacy. I was unable to share anything

with anyone. I was terrified of expressing myself to anyone out of this deep fear that if

they really saw what was going on in me, if they really saw who I was, if they saw

beyond the facade, they would reject me. They would laugh at me. Or they would never

want to speak to me again. You know?

I was just someone who kept everything, everything in really. I really never had any

friends. I never had anyone to speak to, really. I was kind of dying on the inside. It got

worse and worse, really; through university it got worse and worse. I was 22, 23, 24—I

can’t really remember—I was living in London, working in the BBC. I thought I was

going to go into television back then. I was working in night shift. I hated my job. I was in

this relationship with this girl and it was very obsessive. I thought she was the one. I

thought she was going to complete me. I’d found my soulmate. And she didn’t agree.

[Laughs] And that all fell apart. I just hit rock bottom.

I think around the same time I got quite ill as well. I ended up in the hospital. It was a

kind of breakdown. Looking back I can say it was a kind of breakdown, but I think

something had to shift, something had to break down, it couldn’t go on the way it was

going on. I think one event that really started to change things was I had some kind of

near-death experience. I mean, I realized it was that now, maybe at the time I didn’t

realize it. It was some kind of near-death experience.

One day, I was at absolute rock bottom. And I took the day off work because I felt so

bad. I suddenly felt the need to run into the bathroom and I started vomiting, and I was

vomiting blood. I started to panic and started to lose consciousness and I fainted. I woke

up, I don’t know how long it was afterward— maybe 5-10 minutes later—and I had fallen

into my shower and there was blood all over the shower. I remember not being able to

17

breathe and I tried to scream for help and nothing would come out. I really had the

sense, “Well, this is it.” You know, you hear these stories sometimes about people

vomiting blood out of nowhere and then five minutes later they’re dead, and it really

shook me to my core. It absolutely shook me to my core, lying there with blood all

around not being able to scream, not being able to get up. I thought, “This is it then.

This is the end. This is how the story ends.” And I think that was the start of something.

TS: Now, Jeff, just to ask a question, did you have the kind of classic near-death

experience where you leave your body and all of that, or was it more that you just had a

complete freakout experience, that you found yourself in a pool of blood in the shower?

JF: Yeah, I think it was more of a case of absolute existential terror, the likes of which

I’d never experienced before. I mean, I’d experienced fear of death before in my life, but

this was like an encounter with—I mean it’s, I don’t remember much about it but I do

remember being very, very shaken by it and it really set something off in me. It was like,

“My God, death is so close. Like at any moment, we can drop dead. So what the hell am

I doing with my life?”

It started to get these questions churning in me. Questions I’d never, ever asked before.

I was a real kind of—I mean, I’d been educated as a scientist. I had a very rational mind

and I was a total atheist at that point—no interest in spirituality, no interest in anything to

do with spirituality at all. It was all just gobbledygook. It was all just made up. You

know? But this started something, because in my own experience, I felt I’d come close

to death of some kind. Or at least the realization that death is so close and life is so

precious.

I think that’s what it started off in me, was this sense that “My God, this life is so

precious, this moment is so precious, what the hell am I doing with my life? I’m working

in a job that I hate. I feel totally constrained and held back. I’m not nearly beginning to

live any kind of life that I want to.” It was like I was living some kind of robotic,

secondhand life: go to school, go to university. Get a degree. Go and get a job. Get

married. I was on the treadmill.

TS: So you can say that in a sense, you hit bottom at the moment. Would that be fair to

say?

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JF: I think I hit my first bottom.

TS: Ah hah. OK. [Laughs]

JF: And there were more bottoms to come. [Laughs] But that first bottom definitely set

something off in me. So I found myself in the hospital a few hours later and I remember

very clearly I reached out, I found myself reaching out to a copy of the Bible, which was

in one of the drawers by my hospital bed. It’s something I never would have done in my

whole life before that. So something in me was—it was like the seeker was born

somehow. The spiritual seeker had been born, looking for answers, looking for some

kind of meaning to life.

What does all of this mean in the face of death? What is death? What is life? And who

am I? And these questions started moving in me but it wasn’t—I mean, I needed the

answers to these [questions] now. This wasn’t a game anymore. I needed to know who I

was, and I needed to know what death was and who dies. What does life mean? So

that’s really—for the next year, couple of years, I became a totally obsessed spiritual

seeker. I read and I read and I read. I read every book about awakening and

enlightenment that I could get my hands on. But for me, I think it was all about death,

really. It was about death and it was about suffering as well.

I think at some point I read some book about Buddhism and about spiritual

enlightenment. I’d never heard of spiritual enlightenment before. Suddenly, I needed

this. Spiritual enlightenment, this is going to be the end of all my suffering, because I

had suffered so much. I was suffering so much. So it became this obsessive, year-long,

maybe two years, search for spiritual enlightenment. Really, I locked myself away. I

moved back to live with my parents for awhile. I locked myself away quite literally in my

room maybe for a year, two years. I mean, it’s all a bit blurry now. And I read and read

and read and I started meditating. All kinds of self-inquiry practices, but it was all with

the aim of becoming enlightened, you see? It was all with some future goal in mind. One

day I’ll become enlightened and all my suffering will end.

TS: We need to keep going with your story here, because I think at this point, many

listeners may be identifying with you in a certain sense. Like, “Yes, I also not had, but

have this deep passion to know who dies. That’s why I listen to Insights at the Edge

podcasts ad nauseam, again and again and again,” — [like] many listeners. And so 19

keep going, Jeff, because beyond this, you had some types of breakthroughs that really

led you to your work with The Deepest Acceptance.

JF: Well, yes. I mean, it was an incredibly intense few years actually. As I said, I

became totally obsessed with enlightenment. I was really doing everything I could to

become enlightened. I never actually went to any teachers. I never went to any

workshops or retreats or satsangs or seminars, or anything. I guess that was just my

character at the time. I had this fire in me and I kind of wanted to do it all myself. I had

this sense, I remember a long time ago having this very strong sense that if there’s

anything such thing as peace, if there’s anything such thing as freedom, if there’s any

such thing as awakening, I’ll find it on my own. I’ll find it here. I find it here in my room,

here in my backyard. I had that sense from the very beginning.

Maybe it was a kind of stubbornness, maybe it was kind of shyness. I was still so shy, I

didn’t want to reveal myself to other people. I was going to keep myself to myself. I don’t

know what I was thinking, actually, but it was this kind of obsessiveness of, “I’m going to

do this myself.” So I started reading all the books about enlightenment, and the

enlightened teachers and the breakthroughs that they had had, and their enlightenment

experiences, and one day they were walking down the road and suddenly the self fell

away. And you know the story of Eckhart Tolle—you know, he’s lying in bed and

suddenly it all becomes clear.

So I started trying to make this happen for myself. Because back then, this is what I

thought awakening was—I thought it was some kind of event that would happen one

day, some experience that would happen one day. So as the months went on, I became

more and more obsessive really and I mean I had all kinds of insights over the months,

years, actually. I had all kinds of insights, all kinds of experiences, as many spiritual

seekers do along the way. You have moments, hours, days sometimes, of just deep

bliss and peace, and then that passes and you want that experience back, or you have

some kind of experience of total oneness and then that passes. Or you have some

experience of no thought— thought disappears for you know minutes, hours, days. I

mean, you don’t even know anymore. But then that passes and thought comes back.

I would have all these experiences, I think, as many people do, but something still

wasn’t satisfied. I was still looking for something. It got to the point, actually, that I didn’t

20

even know what I was looking for anymore. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I

just felt I had to keep on looking. It can’t be this. It can’t be my present experience—

whatever it is, whatever it is that the spiritual teachers are promising, the gurus, the

spiritual teachers, whatever they’re promising, it can’t be my [current] personal

experience. That was the basic sense—whatever I was looking for, it was somewhere

else. It was in the future.

So no matter what I did, I couldn’t get there. The experiences would come and go—the

experiences of just total bliss, total orgasmic bliss. Beautiful, but they would pass and

then I was always waiting for the final experience, the final enlightenment, awakening

experience, and it would never come. I was really hooked on that. I was really hooked

on that idea of a future awakening, really hooked. In my experience, that seemed to be

what some of the spiritual teachers were talking about—at least the ones I was reading

—that awakening was something in the future; it was something that would happen one

day. So really, the upshot of all of this I became totally, totally exhausted. I was totally

exhausting myself. I really just lost touch with the outside world. I’d gone into my little

cave.

I didn’t have any relationships at that point. I didn’t have any friends left, I don’t think. I

wasn’t really talking to anyone about my experiences. There were some points, [where]

sometimes, I even thought I was enlightened. I went through that as well. I had certain

experiences and I came to the conclusion right, I’m enlightened. I would go to bed at

night [laughs] believing that I was fully enlightened. And of course, I’d wake up in the

morning, and forget it.

I was really driving myself mad, but I couldn’t find a way out. So it just got to this point of

total exhaustion with the whole spiritual—anything spiritual, really. I was just drowning in

these spiritual concepts. And at that point, I’d gotten into Advaita and nonduality, which

some of your listeners might have heard of. I was grappling with all these concepts like,

there is no me, and there’s no self, and there’s no time, and there’s no space, and

there’s no choice, and all this stuff was swimming around my head. So it reached this

point of total exhaustion.

Well, there was this one experience that I remember, that I talk about sometimes. It

wasn’t really an experience, so much, because that’s what I had been waiting for was

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some big experience: I was looking for my salvation through experiences. Actually what

happened, I can’t really say it was much of an experience; it was more like a

remembering of something that perhaps I’d forgotten. So I remember very distinctly: one

day, I think I was just lying in bed in my bedroom in my parents’ house, totally

exhausted, totally just frazzled from all the spiritual seeking, just tired of the whole thing.

“I’m never going to become enlightened, but I can’t give up looking.” That was the

sense. “I’ve tried everything, nothing’s worked. Everything that I do to try and become

awakened, even everything I do to try to become awakened, seems to take me further

away from it.”

So I was lying there on my bed in my bedroom—this was the bedroom I’d grown up in, it

was the same bedroom—and I just remember, for some reason I just glanced over at a

chair. I was just looking at the chair in my bedroom. This was a chair that I’d seen

thousands of times before. It’d been there since I was a child. It was an old, familiar

chair. And I guess, suddenly something that just clicked or dawned on me. Or I

remembered something, or something became obvious. It’s very hard to actually put

into words because it wasn’t this big thing, really.

It was the sense of “oh, of course! Of course.” It was like something very familiar.

Something I’d always known, something that had always been on the tip of my tongue,

something that had always been with me. It wasn’t like a new experience. It was

something that had always been with me. And there was the sense that, “Oh my God,

this moment is what I’m looking for. This moment is what I’ve always been looking for.” I

mean, this might sound really strange, but there was this sense of “Oh my god, it’s the

chair. It’s the chair.” [Laughs] Because I’d been—for years, maybe for my whole life

actually, I’d always been looking for something, not even knowing what it was.

Especially as a spiritual seeker, I’d been looking for enlightenment, this big experience,

the fireworks. I wanted the fireworks.

Where is oneness? Where is oneness? There was a sense, in that moment—“Well,

oneness is this. It’s already here. Whatever you’re looking for, Jeff, it’s already here.”

And this didn’t come in words; it wasn’t really the mind understanding this. It was much

deeper, much more primal than that. “Whatever you’ve been looking for, Jeff, you were

never going to find it outside of what is actually here.” I remember at that point, I think I

22

burst into tears. I was weeping. I think it went on for about an hour, actually, because

there was just this sense of total humility and gratitude. It was like gratitude for a chair!

It’s very hard to explain really. It was like something as ordinary and simple as a chair.

I’ve been overlooking this [for] my whole life because I’ve been looking for something

else, something more: wanting success, wanting enlightenment or wanting whatever,

and I’ve been overlooking the chair, which has always been here, offering itself freely,

asking nothing. Life itself has always been here offering itself, and I’ve always been

ignoring it. I’ve always been pushing it away or ignoring it or being ashamed of it, or just

not acknowledging it. It was like for the first time, I was acknowledging the chair—

however strange that sounds.

Then I remember looking around and my attention moved from the chair to the carpet. It

was just a very ordinary carpet, and there was just this sense of, “Oh my goodness, it’s

also the carpet.” [Laughs] It sounds funny when you talk about it. Whatever I’ve been

longing for on the deepest level, it’s appearing right now as this chair and this carpet. I

remember walking around the house, looking at everything, as if for the first time. I

mean it really was—it sounds like a bit of a cliché—but it really was like seeing

everything for the first time. Just seeing everything in the house without Jeff, actually.

Seeing what life was like without Jeff, without the seeker, without Jeff looking for

something, without this Jeff character who always felt incomplete and who always was

looking for some kind of future completeness. It was seeing life without Jeff, and the

carpet and the walls and the lights, and then opening the window. And then, “Oh my

goodness, there’s also all of that!” It was like, there’s also trees, and cars, and

roadwork, and dogs, and dogs making a mess, and houses. There’s all of it. And then I

remember looking down at my body, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is also part of it!”

because for so long, I’d been stuck in all these spiritual ideas that the body was

somehow an enemy, or enlightenment was the end of the body, or we should get rid of

the body, or that we should transcend the body.

It was like this realization turned everything on its head. Because now, I knew now—

and this really hasn’t changed, I think this was the fundamental, fundamental realization,

this really hasn’t gone away—is this sense that whatever is arising right now, whether

it’s chairs and it’s carpets, and it’s trees and it’s cars, or it’s thoughts, it’s sensations, it’s

23

feelings, these waves of sadness or a wave of fear—on the deepest level this is all

sacred. This is all sacred and it’s all beloved, in a way the mind will never comprehend.

I’d spent so many years trying to understand this intellectually, or trying to reach some

intellectual understanding, and I guess I realized at that point that this isn’t something to

be understood intellectually. It’s about noticing what is present, what is here, what is

given. So I remember looking down at the body, at the hands and the feet and the legs

and the hair and all the imperfections suddenly just seen without the seeker, without the

story of perfecting myself in the future, without the story of becoming enlightened.

Seen in the light of this embrace, even my imperfections were so perfect in a sense.

They were all just perfectly positioned. There was a sense that everything was in its

right place, and in a way that I could never comprehend. This wasn’t like an intellectual

game I was playing with myself. It wasn’t like believing that everything was perfect; it

was actually seeing this inherent perfection that was not at war with imperfection. I think

that was the fundamental realization. It completely destroyed all of my old concepts

about what perfection was. Before that, I’d always seen perfection as some future state,

or perfection was about getting rid of imperfection. This turned the whole thing on its

head, because now perfection was all about this total embrace of imperfection—this

embrace of thought, sensations, feelings, sounds, and smells.

So I guess I just remember falling to my knees and just weeping. I think I just wept

everything out really. So I think that experience—or that non-experience or whatever

you want to call it—I think that really broke the back of something. That really was the

beginning of the end of my spiritual seeking.

I think it really— it’s like my whole life turned around after that, really, because life was

no longer about me, Jeff, trying to get somewhere, or me, Jeff, looking for something, or

me, Jeff, just trying to become enlightened. It was all about this remembering that every

thought, every sensation, every feeling is on the deepest level sacred and accepted by

life, not by me. It’s accepted and acceptable to life. And I think from that point, you

know, it’s not the, “Oh after that point, all my suffering fell away and everything was

perfect.” I think we love those awakening stories, but I’ve never met anyone who that’s

actually true for—they have an awakening experience and then all their suffering falls

away and it never comes back.

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I think what this experience—or this non-experience, or whatever you want to call it—I

think what it did do for me is it completely changed my relationship with suffering. What I

realized is that basically suffering was, at the most basic level, suffering was and is the

pushing away of life. Suffering is our attempt to escape what’s here, to run away from

what’s here, to deny what’s here. It’s a forgetting of who we really are. It’s a forgetting of

this already accepted nature of experience: that thoughts, sensations, feelings, are on

the deepest level already allowed in us, in this moment.

So the end of suffering—now I realize that the end of suffering wasn’t some big event

that was going to happen one day. The end of suffering was actually contained in my

present experience. It was this remembering to turn towards what’s here. So then what I

saw was that every time I suffered, every time I was struggling in my life, it was actually

an invitation. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a punishment. It was an invitation that in that

moment, I was forgetting something. For years—this was about seven, eight years ago I

think—and I faced all kinds of things for the past seven, eight years. You know,

relationship struggles, and physical pain—my father is quite ill at the moment—there’ve

been all kinds of challenges. And challenges in becoming a teacher—because that was

unexpected—and being asked to go out there and talk to people and being asked all

kinds of challenging questions, and opening myself up to all of that and not becoming

(or resisting the urge to become) some kind of enlightened guru who’s going to save the

world. You know, really always checking myself that I wasn’t becoming too attached of

this idea of myself as a teacher and as some kind of savior who had all the answers.

So I’ve faced all kinds of challenges over the past few years, but in each and every

case, it’s really been a case of staying with what was arising and staying with the

sadness and staying with the pain, staying with the confusion and doubt, and knowing

that really this is all an invitation. It’s all just an invitation to remember. I think that

experience with the chair, that remembering of something so familiar, that really is still

just basically there not matter what I’m going through, no matter what experiences I’m

having. No matter how intense the waves of life become, there’s this deeper knowing

that these waves are allowed to be here.

It’s like an honoring of life. It’s an honoring of the life that is moving in me. I think that it

seems to me, that that’s what we forget as human beings. You look in the world, and

there seems to be so much conflict and fear and stress. It seems to me that all human

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conflict and violence and suffering stems from this basic, basic, basic, forgetting of who

we are. We stop honoring life. When we stop honoring life, we suffer. When we stop

seeing the sacredness in each and every moment, and each and every thought,

sensation, feeling—that’s the birth of suffering. But then, even our suffering is part of the

invitation to remember. We don’t want to make suffering into this new enemy that we

have to destroy. Suffering is an invitation. If we can see it that way, you know?

When you’re suffering, it certainly doesn’t feel like an invitation sometimes. That’s

probably true. You know, years ago when I was so depressed and couldn’t get out of

bed some days because life was so heavy, it certainly didn’t feel like an invitation.

Looking back, I realize now that it was. I guess back then, I just couldn’t see it. I saw the

moment as something to be fought and escaped, rather than seeing the moment as

something to be embraced and met and stayed with. So I think that’s our adventure and

our challenge. And that’s our invitation, is to stay. Stay. Stay. Stay. I mean in every

sense of the word, stay. Meet. Meet ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable it gets, or

how intense the waves get, because there could be gold in those waves—you know, to

mix metaphors.

If we can just stay with our experience, even if the temptation is to run away, the urge is

to run away—but the invitation is stay, stay with the discomfort. Stay with the confusion.

Stay with the doubt, because there may be gold, there may be gold dust in that doubt.

There may be gold in that fear. There may be gold in that sadness, but you’ll never

know if you turn away. You’ll never know. And who wants to—you know, I don’t want to

die having never known. So that’s really what I share and what I talk about in my book,

and in my meetings and retreats, is this staying with life, and how do we meet life? How

do we stay with life? How do we say “yes” to life?

And maybe, as I suggest in my book, maybe it’s not even a question of how, maybe it’s

not even a question of how to stay. Maybe it’s not even a question of how to meet life.

Maybe it’s not even a question of how to allow this moment. Maybe on a deeper level,

this moment is already being allowed. Maybe who we are is already allowing this. So

maybe it’s not even a question of how. Maybe the “how” dissolves. Maybe in that

staying with discomfort, the “how” dissolves, and we finally meet what we were never

able to meet. And maybe finally we can rest, actually, in discomfort. We can rest in our

pain. We can rest in our sadness. However strange and paradoxical and counter-

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intuitive that sounds, but maybe that’s where the true rest lies, is actually in everything

that we thought we needed to run away from. Maybe that’s where the true rest is hiding,

the last place you would ever look for it. You know?

TS: Now I have to say, Jeff, I love listening to you. I love talking with you. And I’m just

so honored and pleased that Sounds True is working with you and that we’ve published

this new book of yours. You know, it’s so wonderful to meet a young, you could say

emerging spiritual teacher in that you’re not well known yet, and I think that your work is

so helpful. It really brings people down to the ground and to the core. So I want to thank

you, and we’ll have another conversation soon. This, I think, is a good place to stop for

now. How does that sound?

JF: Well, thank you so much Tami. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.

TS: Exactly. It does feel like a meeting. I’ve been speaking with Jeff Foster. He’s the

author of a new book, it’s called The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in

Ordinary Life, and Jeff has also created with Sounds True a six-session audio learning

series on The Deepest Acceptance. Jeff, as always, wonderful to be with you. You

make it real.

JF: Thank you Tami.

TS: From SoundsTrue.com. Many voices. One journey. Thanks for listening.

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