Falling in Love with Where You Are: A Year of Prose and Poetry on Radically Opening Up to the Pain and Joy of Life

by Jeff Foster

Stop making your inner joy dependent on external things – objects, people, circumstances, experiences, events – that are out of your 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 doesn’t depend on life’s ever-changing ‘content’.

But you were always perfect, you see, from the very beginning. Perfect in your absolute imperfection.

“Forget your perfect offering,” sings Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

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.

The paper doesn’t even know that the story is ‘over’. The paper holds time but is not bound by time.

This scene is not a mistake. The movie of your life is not broken. You’re rediscovering how vast you are, how much you can hold.

any fixed and unchangeable image of yourself. You don’t need to be the enlightened guru or the spiritual warrior. You don’t 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 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.

You’ll never reach a point in your life where everything is solved, all neatly tied up in a bow. That’s the point. There’s 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.

This moment is the access point, the portal, the gateway of grace to all that you have ever longed for. Don’t skip over it in pursuit of tomorrow’s imagined glories.