Understanding the Urge to Die

I spent the first 23 years of my life wanting to die. And here is what I discovered:

The urge to die is the urge to live in disguise.

The urge to die is the urge to disappear as a separate self, to vanish into the vastness of Being, to rest deeply, as we have never rested before. It is the wave longing to return to the ocean... forgetting that it was never divided from the ocean in the first place. An innocent mistake, easily corrected with a little investigation.

The urge to die is not negative, sick, dark or sinful, but it is deeply, deeply misunderstood, that's for sure! We ignore the urge, push it away, hide it, medicate it, keep it a secret, try to numb ourselves to it or even philosophize it away. But when acknowledged, honoured, listened to, even the suicidal urge, the urge to shed our false skin, contains infinite intelligence. All feelings do!

For secretly, the urge to die is the urge to awaken, to come alive, to stop identifying as a separate body-mind, to remember our original nature, vast and free! It is the urge to shed the false 'me' (ego, self, person) to stop pretending to be something we are not, to let go of all that is second-hand and inauthentic, and to live, to really live, fearless and free, as consciousness itself, full of life and potential and cosmic creativity!

The urge to die is not our enemy - it is not to be annihilated and not to be feared. It contains a profound message of awakening and change. It says, shouts, screams, "You are not limited to what you think you are! You are a child of the Universe, remember, deserving of all its riches! Only the false can die, and you cannot be false!" Can we hear its call? Can we listen, really listen?

The wave cannot return to the ocean, cannot get Home. It was never divided from its Home in the first place! You are already Oceanic, friend, and the true suicide is not the stopping of the body-mind but the remembrance of your original and unblemished nature, here and now, beyond the ravages of time!

LIVE! LIVE! LIVE! NOTHING TO LOSE!

~ Jeff Foster ~

Breathe Into The Pain

Friend, you've tried absolutely everything except the obvious:

Doing absolutely nothing at all.

Stay with the thing you call "suffering". Stay with the grief, the sorrow, the fear, the longing, the boredom. Take away the second-hand words and directly feel the raw, first-hand energy in the body, in the belly, the chest, the throat, as it vibrates, tingles, moves, expresses fully. Let the energy do its sacred, intelligent work. Don't get in the way. Breathe deeply. Allow the breath to reach these unloved parts, to fill the 'broken ones' with oxygen, to dignify these lost and lonely visitors. The fact is, these energies are here only because they have already been allowed into the vastness of You. Dignify pain with the breath of life.

This moment is already shining, it's already life, it's already a welcome guest, dancing in your ever-present space. The mind wants to cling or resist, rewind or fast-forward this present scene - to push away the pain or cling to the pleasure. But take the radical step of taking no step at all. Do absolutely nothing right now except turning towards the very energy you have been trying to escape. Meet what is here as an ancient friend, not an enemy; a guide, not a block. See it as intelligent, not a 'mistake'.

Be what you are, the deep allowing of all of life's energies - both 'positive' and 'negative' - the vast unchanging Room for the ever-shifting content of thought and feeling...

~ Jeff Foster ~

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 didn’t 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. That’s how the light gets in.”

~ Jeff Foster ~

Falling In Love Where You Are