The key to experiencing deep peace is allowing reality to be as it is. This includes allowing the inner reality, the authentic feeling that spontaneously occurs in response to a moment of life. Simply saying yes to what’s happening inside and out, without taking refuge in mental activity, is a profoundly transformative gesture. It enables life to be itself without creating a burden to carry forward.

The retreat will include periods of teaching and meditation, as well as an outdoor walking meditation (weather permitting). There will be times of exchange and shared exploration, among the group as a whole and in pairs.

The cost is $65. If you would like to come, or if you have questions, please be in touch with Jan at jan.frazier@comcast.net. To register, send a check payable to Jan Frazier to P.O. Box 852, Putney, VT 05346. Include your full name, email, and phone. You will be registered at the time payment is received. A confirmation email with directions and details will follow.

You are the moment.  You are the space in which all is taking place.

Whatever the primary focus of attention, whether the immediate outer condition or an absorbing inner reality, there’s an ongoing sense that I am a physically contained awareness moving through space, moving through time, and subject to experience.  That I am separate, a subject taking in an object.

Now forget all of that.

In a moment of presence, in which the solid sense of self is felt to briefly dissolve, what happens?  For some reason (a thing we are not in charge of), a door has opened.  In floods awareness.  This is not a mental experience.  It is not a “spiritual” experience.  (Forget all of that too.)  This is a human experience.  It’s about feeling.  Presence is the enlivening of intelligent awareness that is felt throughout the body.

Something has caused awareness to sense itself.  People often will say they recall vividly the first time this happened.  Probably it was in youth.

What opens the door?  The gathering of electrified attention.  The quieting of thought.  An encounter with astonishing beauty can do it.  Being stunned by radically unanticipated circumstances.  Extreme physical effort.  Rhythmic, repetitive, “mindless” activity.  Creative endeavor.  Breathtaking emotional or physical pain.  (I experienced it at the height of labor contractions.)  But even just the plain, quiet gathering of attention will open the door.

You are in utter stillness.  Briefly, the familiar sense of person-having-experience has melted into diffuse awareness.  There is sensation.  Deep peace.  Likely, you feel something.  Alive, alive, you are alive.  The mind is still.  The apparent separateness of a self — so familiar — has softened.  You are the moment.  You are the space in which all is taking place.  What’s happening “around” you is on the same plane of reality, in the same space, as whatever’s going on inside your apparent self (thoughts, feelings, sensations).  It’s all one “thing.”  (This is what is meant by “being one with all that is.”)

What holds the door shut?  (For this, the shut door, is the primary ongoing human experience.)  Resistance.  Pushing away the spontaneous feeling that comes in response to a moment of life.  Mentally managing a feeling.  Making up a story about what’s happened, erecting a barrier to protect yourself.  Believing your thoughts, mistaking them for reality itself.  Paying attention to something inside your head instead of paying attention to what’s here and now.

Fear holds the door shut.  It is all about fear — of the unknown, of the uncontrollable, of pain.

When the door opens, you allow yourself to feel what’s happening.  You are an aware intelligent animal — sensory, heartfelt, fearless.  What’s happening “around” you is happening within you.  You are the present.  This is what presence is.

This is what religion and spirituality have invented words and concepts for (”God” being one).  But when you are flooded with presence, you aren’t thinking “God.”  Just like a fish doesn’t think “water.”  There isn’t anything but.

The thinking about it, the name for it, comes only after, during the in-between times.  The useless times.

What is security?  In ordinary life, it’s establishing circumstances expected to provide stability and safety.  A reliable set-up of some kind, a stable sort of container for life to move along in.  The desire for security often comes of having not had it, or being afraid of losing it.  Something to do with physical circumstances, financial well-being, health.  Knowing you will have ready access to what you need.  That you won’t have to reinvent the wheel, or maybe do without, every time a need arises.  When the rain is falling, there will be a roof to get under.  When there are meds to buy, there will be money, or a health plan, so you can get them.  A reliable car in the driveway, or proximity to good public transportation.  Somebody to look out for you when you need help or love.

When you wake up, you stop having big sighs of despair and big sighs of relief.

Sometimes when some of this hasn’t come together very well, a person will turn to the spiritual life as an alternative source of security and well-being.  A set of beliefs enabling faith, a way to believe that all will be well, that the universe is benign, that a divine goodness is overseeing all.  There’s a wish for life to be understandable.  Life is seen as a series of lessons, or the playing out of karma or destiny, something with a larger meaning.  A frame of reference to make the hard times tolerable or at least comprehensible.

Something.  Anything.

When a person awakens, no assurance of security comes with the revelation of the truth.  What happens is that you’ve stopped needing any sort of promise that all will be well.  It stops mattering.  You stop looking for meaning.  It stops being important to be able to count on something, somebody.  Yourself even.

When you wake up, you stop caring very much about what happens to you.  Not because you don’t cherish your life.  No, it’s that you no longer feel quite real to yourself, at least not in the way you used to.  Why would you need to keep yourself in a certain kind of condition when you have nothing to lose?  You have let go completely of needing to keep your sense of self intact.  You cannot be threatened.  You’re okay with whatever happens.

How can you feel afraid of something unknown, something in the future, if only this moment feels real to you?

What you come to see is that there never was any security.  Ever.  Only the impression of it.  That is the truth, and one of the things about awakeness is that it is entirely comfortable with changeable reality.  It’s no longer uncomfortable in the presence of even an ugly or painful truth.  The truth is, even when you thought you had attained some kind of security, in your life before, you hadn’t really.  Secretly, you knew this.  (We do know this.)  It’s just that — well, back then, when security was something you valued, you sort of held your breath, day to day, year after year, hoping the flimsy edifice would remain roughly stable.  During the intervals when it did hold (by luck mostly), you told yourself (because you wanted to believe it) that now you had things pretty much together, and maybe this time it would be for keeps.

The problem is, you always deeply knew that someday something would go wrong.  For instance, you always knew death would come.  (The trend is observable.)  The fact that we can manage to forget death is coming, most of the moments we live, is the ultimate indicator of the thinness of the appearance of safety.

So when somebody wants to find their way to a reliable, solid piece of ground to stand on, and they think waking up will provide that, I want to look them in the eye and gently say — well, no, it doesn’t work like that.

You don’t wake up so you can finally feel safe.  You wake up because you want to stop needing safety and predictability.  You wake up because you want to know what it’s like to live in the present instead of in the future.

For what can security possibly mean, if there is never any such thing as tomorrow? as continuance? as predictability?  If this moment, this exact one right here, really is the only one that’s ever real (this is one of the pieces of truth that smacks you right in the face, when you wake up), then how can the question of providing for the future even be taken very seriously?  And if you don’t have any built-in resistance mechanism, whatever any moment holds is just what it is — neither okay nor not-okay.  Just real.

Oh, of course you will keep paying the rent and registering your car and putting gas in it and trying to save a little money.  The practical stuff will keep happening, as it should.  But you will stop being in the least invested in any of it holding up as it might have previously.  You won’t assume anything will continue, let alone improve.

When you are awake, none of the little successes gives you a warm fuzzy feeling anymore.  Nor does some upheaval in your life turn your stomach to water or interfere with your sleep.  You pretty much stop having big sighs of despair and big sighs of relief.  You no longer identify with how things are going in your life.  None of it affects your sense of self worth, well-being, security.  The ever-changing circumstances are a practical matter, that’s all.  You respond as you need to, and you move on.

So if you appear to have the circumstances that amount to somebody’s idea of security, you don’t feel any different inside from how you’d feel the day after some or all of it fell completely apart.

Because it isn’t about you.  It just isn’t.  And you know what?  It never was. You just thought it was.

The cost for both events, if you register before April 13, is $65.  After April 13, the cost is $80.  For the Friday evening talk only, the cost is $15.  No one will be turned away for inability to pay the full amount, but please pay in full if you are able.  These teachings are meant to be available to all.

Both events will take place at All Souls Interfaith Gathering, 291 Bostwick Farm Road, Shelburne, VT.  We will be gathering in a beautiful circular sanctuary with panoramic views of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains, set on conserved land with abundant natural beauty.

To register, send a check payable to Zachary Ispa-Landa to 2 Grove Street, #2, Burlington, VT 05401.  For more information, contact Zac at ispalanda@gmail.com or call (828) 712-3124.

The recipe for peace, always, is to have attention on present-moment reality.

What does that mean, just here?  It means alive, aware, in this place, this moment.  Not in some other time or place, which the mind has probably been insisting was possible (even necessary).  There’s often a discrepancy between where you are and where your attention is.  You’re here, but your thoughts and emotions are focused on something happening later today, or happening now but elsewhere, or something that occurred earlier in the week, or twenty years ago.  The result of the split between body and mind is often an ill-at-ease feeling, or worse, real emotional turmoil — and about something that’s only “real,” just now, inside your head.  

The recipe for peace, always, is to have attention on present-moment reality, without resistance.           

Just here, remind yourself.  This is the only place you are, or can be.  When you whisper that to your mind, its contents may lose color and momentum, restoring you to a little calm and presence, where you can simply feel yourself be.  In present-moment awareness, your heart slows down.  The tension unwinds.  You can feel your breathing.  Your here-ness.  Ah . . .  Things are more okay than you realized. 

Almost always, here — this moment — is pretty much okay, especially if you aren’t tightened against whatever’s happening in the present.  When you’re able to see that the source of the pain isn’t what’s around you this moment, but is a string of thoughts that your mind has convinced you are real, the tension will have a chance to relax.  Deeply taking in just here is like being gently led into a warm, still pool in the middle of the ruckus. 

Just here, just here. 

It means something else too, something deeper.  Just here means simply being.  Not doing something or being somebody.  For the moment, simply here.  Aware.  Still.  Existentially here.  Your awareness is the space in which the present moment is happening.  You can sense this.  It’s the experience of pure I am (the thing Nisargadatta talks about).  Not (just for these few restful moments) I am a parent, or I am bewildered, or I am trying to improve things in my life.  The end of any possible sentence has dropped off, leaving you with the unencumbered experience of I am.  Feel the essence that remains.  Feel how peaceful it is. 

Just here.  Here for the moment.  That’s enough.  You don’t need to have an opinion just now, to do something.  You’re just here. 

Something in each of us — something fundamental, the stuff we’re made of — is plain, unresisting awareness.  Something in us is capable of being just here.  Perfectly still and empty.  Nothing more to it.  At your center is a profound and quiet neutrality.  An alert, radically allowing presence.  When you grow quiet enough to sense this, in a moment of busy or challenging life, there is no place for torment to take hold. 

Something in you is just here.  Really here.  And not anyplace else.

Don’t let it get complicated.  Seize any impulse to judge and set it aside, far over there, with lots of space around it.  Take any thought to change yourself and set it over there beside the temptation to judge.  These two things must be far away, so far you forget they were ever an option.

This isn’t about improving your thoughts, about wresting control of your life by creating a spruced-up mental framework. 

Now come back here and look.  Cleanly, with wide, inquisitive eyes, observe to what extent your experience of your life is determined by something going on in your head.  Anything at all going on in your head.

You are thinking, But it’s unavoidable.  Something will always be going on inside my head.

Remember, the thought to change anything needs to be set aside.

Discover to what extent the way your life feels to you is shaped by mental activity, by the mind-made lens you look through.

You are thinking, But it’s important for the mind to process, to evaluate, to look out for danger, to hope for a better time.

Relax the tendency to object.  This isn’t about second-guessing.  It’s about the willingness to notice.  You’re simply observing a phenomenon, as it’s presently operating.

This isn’t (above all) about improving your thoughts.  It isn’t about wresting control of your life by creating a spruced-up mental framework.  It’s about relaxing the wish to control.

It’s about discovering, for yourself, the difference between a moment of real life and your mental handling of it.

We live inside our mental impressions of life.

You say, But there’s no choice about that.  Oh yes there is.  You say, But we are intelligent beings, and besides, the mind runs on automatic.

It does, yes.  And we have fine brains that are useful when they are useful.

This isn’t about stopping thought.  It’s about seeing that thought is one thing and the direct, yielding encounter with reality is another.

The mind insists that it has to mediate.  That to relax the habit of mediation would subject a person to danger.

Has your mind ever grown still?  Have you been stunned to stillness?  Have you had that experience where time has seemed to stop?

What did it feel like?

In the confrontation with a single riveting fact, has all the rest of the world — and all thought — fallen away?  In the physical presence of a beloved, the shock of devastating news, a sudden threat to your existence?  A singer on a stage, her voice breaking your heart open and open and open?  A labor contraction getting worse by the millisecond?  A grenade you can see sailing toward you?  Your body in purely focused effort (running at top speed, climbing a mountain)? 

Where was the mind then?  Where were you?  Lost in the moment.  Given utterly to the present thing.  What strange calm suffuses a person at such a moment (even when it’s a terrible moment).

But most moments aren’t mind-stilling ones like these.  Life is nearly all lived inside the head.  So, we suffer.

This isn’t about trying to change anything.  The desire for things to be different, like the tendency to lament (or celebrate) what is seen, needs to be allowed to recede.  These tendencies are structures that block the light.  Just watch what happens inside the head.  Observe the running background commentary, and see how it affects your feeling state.

Oh yes, it can all change.  Not by your trying to make it change.  But by the simple, clean gesture of watching what’s actually going on, as you presently are.  Trying to change yourself guarantees you never will.  Try the other way, and see what happens.

You can’t stop the mind.  But you can step outside and watch it create content. 

You are standing in a place that is just the size of your shoes.  You will never move.  You only seem to move.  Your feet cannot be anywhere but this now.

The mind is able to move.  The feet are here while the mind is 20 years ago, or next week, or maybe-someday, or an hour ago.  The feet and heart are here.  The past has all dropped behind you, gone as gone can be, but the mind can’t quite believe the utter goneness.  It cannot see the utter impossibility of reconsidering, of remaking what has happened.  The uselessness of trying to make it okay that it happened the way it did. 

Consolation is as useless as regret.  The thing about the past is that it is gone.  And that it is a fact.  These are the only useful things to see about the past.

The future doesn’t exist.  Only one thing is real:  now.

Only when the past is allowed to be a mere fact, only when the future isn’t counted upon, does it become possible to take a deep breath and actually occupy the present.

This is why the mind is so significant.  Why seeing that the mind isn’t you, isn’t life, is key to being here now.  Whatever the mind creates for content is at a remove from immediate life.  Suffering is created in the mind.  You can’t stop the mind.  But you can step outside and watch it create content.  The reason you can do this is that there is more to you than your mind.  When you step outside and see what it’s doing, you are in reality.  You are here, now.  You are experiencing the moreness of yourself, the hereness of yourself.  You are able to see, from here, that the mind cannot do you harm so long as you don’t live inside it, believing its rendering of reality.

What people tend to do, when they want to end the mind’s torment, is to try to use the mind’s own arguments to vanquish itself, to reason with itself.  This will never work.  Just let the mind go on muttering to itself.  Walk outside the room where it’s going on. 

It’s peaceful out there.

After a while of doing this, when you get to where you can readily step outside, you’ll find that the mental content fades from color to black-and-white.  After a while, when you stop living within it, you’ll feel your feet where they are.  You’ll feel your heart.  You’ll smell the air.  You’ll face the present reality, whatever it is, with all your resources (including, by the way, your useful mental resources).  Your attention will be on what you’re doing.  You’ll forget there is even a past back there, that there’s a pile of rubble far below, just back of your heels.  It’s all just what happened, exactly how it happened.  Nothing more.  You’ll find acceptance easy, natural.  You won’t be afraid of the future, or try to make it a certain way.  You’ll forget it’s even coming, because all of your attention will be right here. 

You’re alive.  Welcome to your life.

The self that is capable of believing it needs to change is your egoic self (however much it may entertain itself with thoughts of wanting to awaken). 

What’s needed is not for you to change your familiar self (the one that longs to awaken, the one that hurts, that is dissatisfied with itself).  What’s needed is for you to see that that person is not what you deeply are.  Trying to improve the person that isn’t what you deeply are — believing this could wake you up — is like planting a bunch of new trees in the forest, further obscuring the blinding light that is your very nature.  It is (to switch metaphors) scoring points for the other side. 

Do you see? 

It is as if there are two of you.  As long as you believe that you are your egoic self, for all practical purposes, there are two of you.  The self that is capable of believing it needs to change is your egoic self (however much it may entertain itself with thoughts of wanting to awaken).  What you need to do, rigorously, is remember that there is always another of you available in each moment — that you can (as it were) step inside that other awareness, the one that is not hurting, not trying to change, not believing it must awaken.  

This is the only truly useful thing to do. 

You may be ready to see this, to actually do it (sometimes anyhow).  You may not be.  When you are ready, you will see it.  You will experience the truth of it, that there is another awareness inside you already that is able to step outside the turmoil, in a given moment, and observe your struggling self, the one that believes it needs to change. 

Meanwhile, if you are not able to step outside and look at yourself in a moment of life, smack in the middle of some kind of angst, at least do this:  stop believing that your egoic mind can somehow bring about a useful change in itself that will move you toward awakening.  The oft-stated idea that you already are that which you seek isn’t just blah-blah-blah.  When you focus all your effort on trying to improve your egoic self, you are turning away from this truth.  (Just because you can’t yet see its reality doesn’t mean it isn’t so.)

Anytime you are in torment, even subtle torment, and you notice it, instead of trying to “fix” the problem, instead of judging yourself for being so unawake, just step gently to the side of the whole thing and look at it.  Look at yourself feeling this thing, thinking these thoughts.  That other looker, that un-caught-up observer, is always (always) there, available, if only you will remember its presence.  You may not always be able readily to step inside it, assuming its perspective.  But at the very least you must remember that it’s possible.

This is the whole thing. 

Stepping outside and looking at yourself in this moment is not the same thing as escape.  Escaping is turning on the TV, chanting, meditating or doing yoga to try to bring on an ecstatic experience, mixing a drink, talking to yourself about how “this isn’t who I really am.”  These things accomplish nothing to demonstrate to you that you are something very different from the one who needs to escape.  Instead, stay where you are.  Stay in the moment — the feeling — you are in.  But also step outside and watch it happening.  Realize that the one who is doing the looking is not experiencing discomfort, is not needing escape.  Is not needing to wake up!  Because it already is awake.  This moment, just now, awakeness is feeling its reality.  It doesn’t mean you’re “awake for good.”  Never mind that.  Stop thinking about that.

Do you see?

Don’t get lazy.  Don’t stop remembering that this is available to you, this location outside the drama.  One time you will find yourself entirely outside, watching your regular self, and you will say Oh my God, THIS is what I am!  “This” being the looker.  You may know this for just a second.  Just a fleeting, delicious, utterly peaceful few moments.  Don’t (really) say, If only this can last.  Just be there.  Later (maybe ten seconds later) you will be back in the muck, having completely forgotten.  It’s okay!  The instant you notice you’ve forgotten, just step back outside and look.  Forget trying to make it last.  When you have that kind of thought, realize it’s just the ego-mind doing the only thing it knows how to do.

You may be thinking Well, but doesn’t my regular-life stuff matter?  Or you may be thinking What’s the relationship between the regular-life stuff and this other perspective?  It’s only the mind that feels the need to sort this out.  When you grow accustomed to stepping outside a moment in which you’re feeling very attached to something, when you give yourself the peace and delight of experiencing your “other” self, then the regular-life stuff sorts itself out.  It isn’t your business to answer the mind’s pesky questions.  Just trust that your really huge, utterly non-attached self is saturated with wisdom that is dying to leak into your regular life, and if you give it half a chance, it will do that.

One thing that happens, the more you do this, is that you (bit by bit) stop believing that the regular-life You is what you most deeply are.  So you are able to “hold it” more lightly, because there isn’t so (bloody) much invested in its upkeep.  Yes, you will still tend what needs tending (very tenderly).

The point is, you don’t have to figure everything out.  Something in you (that outside looker) knows this.

When you are hurting, or feeling very unawake, or dissatisfied with yourself, instead of saying “I’ve got to change” or “I’ve got to get enlightened,” instead of those (useless) things, do this:  even as you are immersed in the present-moment feeling of discomfort, dislike of self, etc., step outside of the whole thing and look at yourself.  Neutrally, without judgment.  (If there’s judgment, you’re not outside the whole thing.  Get farther out.)

The entire problem is that you believe you are your egoic self, the regular-life person, the one that suffers (and wants to wake up).  That is the whole thing.  When you step outside and look at it, you are reminding yourself of what you really are.

It’s necessary to realize your assumptions could be in error.

It’s good to see that you do make these assumptions.  Sometimes just seeing that they are running the show can be liberating.  Oh! and yes, it’s necessary to realize your assumptions could be in error.

I’m here to tell you they are in error.

But what to do?  For one thing, notice the assumptions when they are operating.  Pay attention to the feeling in your body and heart, and to the energy of thought, when you are engaged in trying to figure out how to solve some problem.  Something in you is saying, If I can just resolve this, then I’ll feel so much better.  Rather than putting all of your attention on “solving the problem,” shift some of your awareness to the underlying motivator (the wish for relief), and to the realization that life will always be unsettled.

None of which is to say you shouldn’t try to improve things that need improving, in a way that’s realistic and not all tangled up in angst.  But that is a practical matter.  What we’re looking at here is how life’s imperfections affect you inside.

There are some practical things you can do, in a given moment of anxiety or fretful concern or obsessive thinking.  Remember:  all of life is experienced in a given moment.  Your mind will keep trying to get you to believe that the overall situation is “real” right now.  But that’s how the trouble starts.  If you can settle yourself sufficiently to look at what’s actually happening right now, in your present and immediate moment, a lot of what’s causing your discomfort will be able to disperse.

One thing you can do, in a given moment, is check in with yourself to see whether resistance is in high gear.  Ask yourself whether you are busily wishing things were otherwise.  Very likely that is the case.  But things at the moment are not otherwise.  They are what they are, however much you might wish they were different.  If you can allow yourself to sink into that truth, as if you were releasing all of your burden and tension into a cushy chair, probably a good part of the angst will melt away.

The other helpful thing you can do is ask yourself — what of the problem is right here and now, needing attention, available for useful action on my part?  This is a potent wedge to drive into tightly-knotted anxiety.  It applies whether it’s your own life situation or someone else’s.  Just because the situation is ongoing doesn’t make it okay or justified or sane to obsess in an ongoing way.  And just because you are able, this moment, to set it aside (in favor of focusing on the shower you’re taking, or the hammer you’re swinging, or the strawberries you’re picking) — just because you give yourself permission to let the thing go for now — doesn’t mean you somehow believe the issue no longer exists.  When you are called upon to re-engage with it, because it’s immediate, or because you can profitably become engaged in the situation, then you will do that.  Meanwhile, you are living your moments, and by that means you are gently teaching yourself that you are not your (or someone else’s) problems — that (yes indeed) it is possible to have an ongoing difficulty and yet be at peace.

If in this present moment there is some manifestation of the ongoing problem, then do what you can do, or (if there’s nothing to do) just sink into that cushy chair, or listen lovingly to one who needs to be heard.  It’s natural that you will do this.  Still, it doesn’t have to twist you up inside, even when you’re actively engaged with the difficulty. 

See?  You don’t feel better because the problem has been solved, or because you’re in denial about it.  You feel better because you’re in the present, and because you’re not resisting whatever reality holds.  You feel better because something in you (now that you’re present and unresisting) is able to remember itself, its more compelling truth. 

You are not what happens in your life — either what goes wrong or what goes right.  You are the awareness in which it all happens.  Awareness, presence, is empty, alive, allowing.  That is what you are.