Changes

When we improve ourselves greatly we can sometimes expect that the world has changed along with us.  It hasn’t.  It is the same mess it was before.  And it is how we face those circumstances that show us who we have become.  

Complaining Fuels Your Unhappiness

Stop for a minute.  You have told me many things about your circumstances that you feel are causing you stress and anxiety.  To end your unhappiness you must start with yourself. 

I know it seems unfair.  You have observed that something horrible happens to you around other people’s pain, even when their frustrations are not directed towards you….something happens, and this is true.  Anger, complaining, hurt, rolls through the masses like waves passed from one spot of ocean to another.  The pain that cuts you is spilling out of you as well, and cutting others.  It can help to imagine how unfair your employer must feel things are.  But do not focus on the legitimacy of his hurt.  That is not important.      

Ask yourself, do you truly wish to feel better?  Are you tired of feeling awful?  Do you want it to end?  If the answer is yes, if it really is, stop yourself from asking for my support in this manner, dear friend.  Take full responsibility for your own suffering and take it now, always now.  This is not about fair or unfair.  It is about your happiness and it is about your suffering which fills my heart with sorrow.     

If we could only remember how little we know about being alive, me might forget our own frustrations.

Death As a Teacher

I wept when I read your email. I am also afraid of death.  When I imagine the moment that my body fails me and I see the world fading, I wonder if those who claim fearlessness can imagine as vividly.  To be truly fearless requires a great deal of wisdom and often, at first, suffering through a great deal of terror. 

It is the moment of ending that terrifies me.  I day dream about the faces of the dyeing clenched in resistance, the sobs of “not wanting” or solemn expressions of hopelessness.  I imagine unique manifestations of the same dread, spoken by the bodies of strangers and loved ones in their dyeing moments, who are longing to be cradled like small children retreating to their mother’s breast.  And I wonder what I could do for them, because I could not tell them everything was going to be okay.    

I wish that I could save myself and everyone I love from such a terrible fate.

This is a difficult topic to breach and very helpful to both of us, not only to weaken our resistance to the inescapable but because death is so powerful that the very thought of it is enough to clear our minds, and let everything of no importance fall away.        

My experience with it has shifted my path irrevocably and I would suggest to you in great earnestness that when the opportunity to meet death as a teacher presents itself hang on, go deeper into your aloneness; even in your most desperate moments when comfort beckons you so forcefully that you would take it in any form, withstand the temptation and allow death to transform you.  Death is a gift, a window into life, and it is easily forgotten. 

There is not much I can say to you about acceptance of death; only that I know that true acceptance would mean that there was no suffering in it.  It is true that the only thing to fear is fear itself and that the power of death can release that insight from its cliché veneer.  And in saying all of this I wonder if I really know what I am saying.  In the presence of death I know nothing.  I know absolutely nothing.  And in this state I feel at home.   

Good morning, I wanted to write you.

Outside my window

There is a shimmering sea bed of green.

The sparrow and the inchworm swim through the rye,

And I can smell the salt in the wind.

...And I feel my own weightlessness

A Relfection on Your Future Career Choice

Rachel,
Do not believe in your despair.  Action unfolds out of a great stillness that lies deeply behind everything.  My pen touching this paper is entirely random and in a sense predetermined as there is nothing happening now that could be more natural.  Unnatural is a word used to describe an inner disturbance.  When one has fallen gracelessly out of line with themselves...that is when the details of so many others' lives (and perhaps their own) will appear unnatural to them.  And they will be tormented by some great resistance that blinds them to the enveloping silence and stillness.  That stillness is where each sound is born, each sight, scent and feeling.  And these creations vibrate into some great orchestra of being, that we should not forget to observe patiently and brush oh so delicately with our lightness of breath, as not to loose sight of their source.  In your hurry to determine your next course of action take care to observe yourself from a distance as if you were a great warmth at the back of your skull with an unnameable sense that is sight without vision.  And in the same way I have just named the unnameable, action will rise out of you inevitably.  And whatever it may be it will cost you nothing but instead subject you to the greatest joy if you observe its birth from stillness. 
I am not worried about you afterall,
Love Jess