FALLING IN LOVE

WITH WHERE YOU ARE

A Year of Prose and Poetry
On Radically Opening Up
To the Pain and Joy of Life

Jeff Foster

Non-Duality Press

falling in love with where you are

First English edition published December 2013 by Non-Duality Press

Jeff Foster 2013
Non-Duality Press 2013
Cover design from an idea by Nic Higham. Layout by John Gustard.
Author portrait (back cover) by Liya Matiosova: www.matiosova.book.fr
Jeff Foster has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission
in writing from the Publisher.

ISBN:978-1-908664-39-6

Non-Duality Press | PO Box 2228 | Salisbury | SP2 2GZ

United Kingdom

For Sherie,
forever in my heart.

I will not forget you.

I have held you in the palm of my hand.
Isaiah 49: 15-16

The bad news is youre falling through the air,

nothing to hang on to, no parachute.
The good news is theres no ground.
Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche

FOREWORD
In your hands you hold the potential for a total re-ordering of
your life as you know it.
In my work in the publishing industry over the last 20+ years,
Ive had the rare opportunity to get to know and work with
hundreds of the worlds most respected and realised spiritual
teachers, psychologists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists and
artists. From time to time, a new voice comes onto the scene
unfortunately for all of us not often enoughwith something
that is utterly alive, emerging out of the unknown, opening a
portal into the ever deepening mysteries of love. Jeff Foster is
one of these voices.
Over the last few years, I have continued to be inspired by
Jeff, both as a writer and someone who cares deeply about the
lives of those around him. I have witnessed Jeff sitting with
those in deep despair, profound fear and raging anxietyeven
on the brink of suicidestruggling with what it really means to
be a human being. I have also seen Jeff meet the most devoted
spiritual seekers, creating a home for them to come to rest, finally,
from the weariness that seeking spiritual enlightenment so often
brings. In each of these meetingsthrough his words, through
his silence, and through his loving attunementJeff shares the
gift of presence, wisdom, clarity and kindness, never giving up on
the preciousness and potential of each and every unique person,
and of the very human journey itself.
As so many have observed over the last few decades, while the
worlds great nondual spiritual teachings offer a vision of crystal
clarity into the true nature of the eternal Self beyond that which
comes and goes, these very same traditions can become stale,
worn out, second-hand, and just, well, inhuman. We sometimes
forget that the essence of spirituality is a cosmic embrace of the
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relative, the dual, the very messy, sticky, gooey nature of human
life. The light we seek is not elsewhere, but already shining
through the appearance of a separate self, pouring out of our intimate relationships and illuminating our most disturbing feelings
and emotions. As Jeff reveals so clearly and provocatively, light is
alive even in the darkness.
One of the most important contributions Jeff makes to the
spiritual conversation is his uncompromising demand that we
honour our humanity and that we take the risk of seeing how
sacred ordinary life really is. I whole-heartedly recommend this
lovely new book of poetry and prose, and sincerely hope that
through Jeffs wordsand through the space between themyou
come to see the magnificence that you are, and begin to consider
the real possibility that youve never actually left Home.
Matt Licata, Ph.D. (alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com)
Boulder, Colorado
October 2013

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AUTHORS NOTE

Who knows who wrote that song of summer

the blackbirds sing at dusk? This is a song of colour,
where sands sing in crimson, red and rust,
then climb into bed and turn to dust....
Kate Bush, Sunset

Why do I write books about the wordless essence of life? Why do

I try to say the unsayable?
Perhaps why is the wrong question. It seems that the deeper
the inner silence, the more naturally and effortlessly the words
flow, finally liberated from their shackles, set free from the prison
of conformity and correctness and the need to be liked or even
heard. Out of purest stillness, this delicious music erupts, these
creative and playful notes of myself, vibrant expressions of that
pre-verbal silence at the core of everything, inviting you to intimacy with your present moment, here and now. My words are
your words are the words of life itself, ever offering themselves in
remembrance of that which is never gone and is endlessly shining.
I do not write nor speak by myself, for myself, nor am I
myself written or spoken, I can only remain radically open to
the unexpected eruption of words. I am a house, ready for the
children who call me Home to come running back from school,
their cheeks rosy and stuffed full of chocolate and expectation,
and ready to let them go, as they finally leave for destinations and
adventures unknown.
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Its like asking the blackbirds why they sing in summer.

Friend, if you are experiencing stress, sorrow, physical or emotional pain in your life right now, it doesnt mean that your life is
going wrong, that you are broken and sinful, that you have failed
as a human or spiritual being, or that you are far from awakening. You may just be healing in your own original and unexpected
way. Sometimes we need to feel worse for a while. Sometimes
the old structures, things that we once defined and identified as
me, need to crumble. Sometimes we need to be brought to our
knees before we can stand again. Sometimes illusions need to die.
Sometimes our sacred plans and hopes, our schemes and dreams
of how things were going to turn out, need to burn to ashes on
the ruthless yet ultimately compassionate bonfire of the present
moment.
As we open up to life and love and healing, as we awaken
from our dream of separateness, we meet not just the bliss of
existence, but also its pain; not only the ecstasy of life, but its
agony too. Awakening doesnt always feel good or comforting or
blissful or spiritual, for we are inevitably forced to confront our
deepest fears and darkest shadowsthose parts of ourselves that
we have cut-off, denied, repressed, numbed ourselves to all these
years, and the meeting can get messy to say the least.
But eventually we come to trust the process of no process
at all. We learn to see even our deepest sorrow as an intelligent
movement of life, not a threat to life. We remember that we are
vast enough to hold all of itthe good and the bad, the pain and
the pleasure, the light and the dark, the agony and the ecstasy.
We are not nearly as limited as we once imagined. We are life
itself.
Falling In Love With Where You Are offers a simple but radical invitation: Stop waiting for the world to make you happy. Stop
making your inner joy dependent on external thingsobjects,
people, circumstances, experiences, eventsthat are out of your
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direct control right now. Stop playing the happiness lottery. Give
yourself a break from seeking and discover the natural happiness
that you are and have always been, the in-built contentment that
doesnt depend on lifes ever-changing content.
The prose and poetry in this book, harvested from two
years worth of journal entries and Facebook posts, is designed
to guide, challenge, encourage and perhaps inspire you on your
lonely, painful, ecstatic, crazy, exhausting, blissful and confusing
pathless journey to the Home that you never, ever abandoned:
the present moment.
Read the following pages slowly, mindfully. Spend twelve
months soaking everything in, meditating on the words as the
seasons change within and around you. Or, whenever the mood
takes you, allow the book to fall open at a random page. Let the
words in this book live with you, month after month, year after
year. Feel the silence, the presence, the warmth underneath the
words, in-between the words, surrounding the words, holding
the words.
Let go of the destination. Savour the ever-changing seasons
of your journey. Be present to each step. Remember to breathe.
Know that you do not walk alone.
With love,
Jeff Foster
Brighton, England
September 2013

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 it is so precious, just to be able to sit in this open space

together, where nothing needs to be resolved or solved;
where we dont need to fix ourselves or be fixed; where our
burning questions dont need to be answered; where, finally,
our questions are allowed to just be questions; where our
uncertainty doesnt need to be transformed into certainty;
where our doubts are finally given permission to just be doubts.
Here, in this warm embrace that we are, in this place of true
meditation without a meditator, without a destination, without
a controller, we dont need to find the answers, we dont need
to come to any mental conclusions about life, we dont need to
work everything out, we dont need to know, because finally,
all our wondering and our wandering, our trying-to work-it-allout and our trying-to-make-it-all-work, our exhausting seeking
and searching and our desperation to find answers, is all just
allowed to be here, exactly as it is
Jeff Foster, from a retreat in Glastonbury, England, 2012

JANUARY
Ever since happiness heard your name,
it has been running through the streets
trying to find you...
Hafiz

THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU

Friend, from the very beginning, you were not broken. You were
not born into sin. You were not destined for the garbage heap.
There was never anything fundamentally missing from your life.
You just thought that there was. Others tried to convince you
that you were not good enough, because they too felt not good
enough. In your innocence, and with no evidence to the contrary,
you believed them. So you spent all those years trying to fix,
purify and perfect yourself. You sought power, wealth, fame and
even spiritual enlightenment to prove your worth as a me. You
played the Build-A-Better-Me game, comparing yourself to other
versions of me, and always feeling inferior or superior, and it all
became so exhausting, trying to reach those unreachable goals,
trying to live up to some image that you didnt even fully believe
in anyway, and you longed for the deep rest of yourself
But you were always perfect, you see, from the very beginning. Perfect in your absolute imperfection.
Your imperfections, your quirks, your seeming flaws, your
weirdnesses, your unique and irreplaceable flavours, were what
made you so loveable, so human, so real, so relatable. Even in
your glorious imperfection, you were always a perfect expression
of life, a beloved child of the universe, a complete work of art,
unique in all the world and deserving of all the riches of life.
It was never about being a perfect me. It was always about
being perfectly Here, perfectly yourself, in all your divine
strangeness.
Forget your perfect offering, sings Leonard Cohen. There
is a crack in everything. Thats how the light gets in.

A LOVING PROMISE
I will always listen deeply to you, but I will never try to fix
you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you
second-hand, memorised answers. I will never pretend to be the
one who knows, the enlightened one or some missionary for
a conceptual truth so far removed from real-time, immediate,
first-hand present experience. I will not get into drama with you,
I will not indulge and feed your stories and mental conclusions
and fears, I will not mistake who you are for my story about you,
my dream of who you are.
But friend, I will meet you in the fires of hell, I will hold your
hand there, I will walk with you as far as you need to walk, and
not turn away, for you are myself, and in the deepest recesses
of our experience we are intimately each other, and we cannot
pretend otherwise.
And so, if you feel confused, feel confused now. If you feel
frightened, feel frightened now. If you are bored, lets get profoundly bored together. If you are burning with rage, lets burn
together awhile and see what happens.
When we break the mould, interrupt the outdated pattern, and
make the unexpected commitment to dignify our present experience
by radically connecting with whats really here, without judging it or
pushing it away, perhaps great healing is possible.

THE BOOK OF YOU

On every page of a book, behind the wordsno matter what
the words are describing, no matter what is going on in the
storythere is the whiteness of the paper. Rarely noticed, even
more rarely appreciated, but absolutely essential, so that the
words can be seen.
The paper itself is not affected by the story that is being
toldit is only there to hold the words, without condition. A love
story, a war epic, a gentle comedythe paper itself doesnt mind.
The paper does not fear the ending of the story, nor does it
long for an earlier time in the story. The middle pages do not need
to know how the story ends, and the final page does not mourn
when the main character dies. The paper doesnt even know that
the story is over. The paper holds time but is not bound by time.
You dont know how many pages are left in the book of your
life. You dont know how this autobiography will end. From
the perspective of the mind, your life is not yet complete, and
thought is constantly trying to work out how to end your story
in the best way. How to solve things, neatly? How to resolve the
unresolved problems? How to tie up all the loose ends? How to
fix everything?
But from the perspective of the paperthat is, from the perspective of your true identity as consciousness itselflife is forever
complete as it is, and there is nothing to resolve, and the unknowability of things is their resolution. The story does not need to be
completed in the future for consciousness to be fully present now.
The paper simply meets the words exactly as they are.
From the perspective of the paper, even if the story is an epic
one, from the first page to the last page, nothing has actually happened at all. The entire story has unfolded in perfect, unchanging
stillness. The most incredible story never told.
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LOSING YOUR RELIGION

Okay. So you feel peaceful, blissed out, in the flow. Youre
manifesting perfectly and life is going to plan. Youre okay with
everything that happens. You cant imagine ever suffering again.
Cut to the next scene in the movie of your life. Theres been
some kind of loss, shock, bolt of lightning from the blue. Youre
lying in bed, sick with pain, or grief, or despair. This was unexpected, unplanned. Youve tried everything. Nothings working.
Where did your awakening go? Werent you supposed to be
the one who was okay with everything, who met every experience with equanimity and an effortless yes? Where did all your
spiritual progress go?
The spiritual me feels humiliated and beaten up. Were you
a fake, a fraud, a liar? Were you always kidding yourself? How do
you get back to where you were?
Dont go back. Stay with it. Youre awakening from another
dream. The dream that present experience could or should conform to any image or expectation. Youre discovering your own
inner authority.
This scene is not a mistake. The movie of your life is not
broken. Youre rediscovering how vast you are, how much you
can hold.
You dont have to feel okay all the time. You dont have
to be free from all resistance all the time. You are bigger than
that, unlimited in fact. There is no all the time for you. You are
the space for the okay and the not-okay, the acceptance and the
resistance. You dont need any fixed and unchangeable image of
yourself. You dont need to be the enlightened guru or the spiritual
warrior. You dont need to be the peaceful one, the awakened one,
the strong one, the highly evolved one, the one immune to suffering.
All are false limitations on your limitless nature. Simply be what
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you are, not this one nor that one, but The One, the space for
all of it.
Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again, until
you lose all interest in being on pedestals.

BE GLORIOUSLY UNRESOLVED
Youll never reach a point in your life where everything is solved,
all neatly tied up in a bow. Thats the point. Theres no final
scene, only the on-going adventure movie, forever unresolved.
You learn to love the mess of your life, its constantly changing
nature, its unpredictability. And you stand as the immutable
silence in the midst of the storm, the wide open space in which
joy and pain, ecstasy and agony, boredom and bliss, can arise and
subside like waves in the ocean. There are no problems when you
know yourself as the space for it all.

TRUE ACCEPTANCE
Saying yes to this moment, exactly as it is, saying yes to yourself,
exactly as you are, doesnt mean giving up on the possibility of
change. It doesnt mean that answers wont arrive, that sadness
wont disappear, that pain wont ease, that intelligent action
wont happen in the next scene. It means a total alignment with
the present scene, which contains the intelligence of an entire
universe. It means deep trust in this instant of lifethe only
instant there isand letting go of promises, and ideas of how life
should be.
Instead of trying to skip to tomorrows certainty, trust the
uncertainty of today. Instead of rushing towards an answer in
the next scene, trust this creative scene of no answers yet.
Instead of trying to run towards joy or bliss in the future, trust
this present moment of sorrow or doubt, or whatever shape the
cosmic intelligence is taking. Certainty may or may not come in
time, answers may arrive, joy may burst forth or not, thrilling
moments may present themselves sooner or later, but dont skip
over the treasures of this moment.
If answers come, they will emerge from the fertiliser of not
knowing, the rich soil of doubt. If joy shows her face, she will
emerge from pain that has been touched deeply. If a new life
grows, it will grow in the only birthplace there is: Now.
This moment is the access point, the portal, the gateway of
grace to all that you have ever longed for. Dont skip over it in
pursuit of tomorrows imagined glories.