Jeff Foster Quotes

All human suffering is a variation on this theme — trying to control the waves, trying to control our present-moment experience so it conforms to our ideas and concepts of how it should be. If you want to suffer, compare this moment with your image of how it should be! I

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on this earth. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Friend, I love your rebellious heart.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. MARCEL PROUST

Love is the answer. The question is unimportant.

The life you are trying to understand is identical with the ‘you’ that is trying to understand it.

Gentleness is the only answer.

Once you see what’s going on in your experience, once you see the seeking that’s happening and are honest with yourself about it, communication becomes effortless. There is no longer any need to work out how to communicate. Communicating becomes a matter of simply saying what you see. It is telling the truth about what’s really going on for you, in your experience — without expectation. What could be simpler than that? Clear and honest communication flows naturally from the realization of deep acceptance of present experience.

Let them laugh and point. You are a yogi of traffic jams and discarded apple cores, aloneness and impossibly blue winter skies, a yogi of broken dreams, mad with truth and devotion and inexplicable joy, and you cannot be saved now.

"Oh, sweet little boy, beloved little girl, you are so overwhelmed by life sometimes, I know, by the enormity of it all, by the vastness of the possibilities, by the myriad of perspectives available to you. You feel so pressed down sometimes, by all the unresolved questions, by all the information you are supposed to process and hold, by the urgency of things. You are overcome by powerful emotions, trying to make it all "work out" somehow, trying to get everything done "on time," trying to resolve things so fast, even trying not to try at all.
You are exhausted, sweet one, exhausted from all the trying and the not trying, and you are struggling to trust life again. It's all too much for the poor organism, isn't it? You are exhausted; you long to rest. And that is not a failing of yours, not a horrible mistake, but something wonderful to embrace!"

TO YOUR KNEES Life will eventually bring you to your knees. Either you’ll be on your knees cursing the universe and begging for a different life, or you’ll be brought to your knees by gratitude and awe, deeply embracing the life that you have, too overwhelmed by the beauty of it all to stand or even speak. Either way, they’re the same knees.

Feelings that have been pushed away do not actually disappear; they live on in the darkness of the Unconscious, pulling the strings in our relationships, our work, self-expression, causing us to become reactive, compulsive, obsessive, depressed, anxious, and deteriorate our physical health until one day, we remember, all feelings have a right to exist in us. So, we stop numbing ourselves, and feed them love, attention, curiosity and Presence. Now, they can finally come to rest.

True healing is not the fixing of the broken but the rediscovery of the unbroken

What you really long for is a deep intimacy with your own experience — the deepest acceptance of every thought, every sensation, every feeling. And that cannot come from outside of yourself.

Stop thinking your way through life, always trying to work it out before living it. Life is to be lived, not analyzed to death.