Jeff Foster was born in 1980 in London, England.[1] He studied Astrophysics at Cambridge University.[1] At the time he was overwhelmed by feelings of despair and loneliness,[2] which eventually led to physical illness and a personal breakdown soon after graduation. He was convinced he was going to die.[1] Foster returned to live with his parents, reading and studying for a year on spirituality, searching for relief from his depression.[1] This ended in 2006 with the dissolution of the sense of separation, which he understood to be a spiritual awakening:
As the story goes, I was walking through the rain on a cold Autumn evening in Oxford. The sky was getting dark; I was wrapped up warm in my new coat. And suddenly and without warning, the search for something more apparently fell away, and with it all separation and loneliness.
And with the death of separation, I was everything that arose: I was the darkening sky, I was the middle aged man walking his golden retriever, I was the little old lady hobbling along in her waterproofs […] I was the raindrops falling on my head (although it was not my head, I did not own it, but it was undeniably there, and so to call it “my head” is as good as anything).[3]
Works
- Life Without a Centre: Awakening from the Dream of Separation (2006)
- Beyond Awakening: The End of the Spiritual Search (2007)
- The Revelation of Oneness: Dialogues on Nonduality and Spiritual Awakening (2008)
- An Extraordinary Absence: Liberation in the Midst of a Very Ordinary Life (2009)
- The Wonder of Being: Awakening to an Intimacy Beyond Words (2010)
- The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life (2012)
- Falling In Love With Where You Are: A Year of Prose And Poetry on Radically Opening Up To the Pain and Joy of Life (2013)
- The Way of Rest: Finding The Courage to Hold Everything in Love (2016)
- The Joy of True Meditation: Words of Encouragement for Tired Minds and Wild Hearts (2019)
- You Were Never Broken: Poems to Save Your Life (2020)
“Tomorrow’s integration is not my job. The story of yesterday’s awakening is irrelevant now. Here and now is where life is. And there is only here and now.” – Jeff Foster
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“True meditation is not a ‘doing’, not a task to accomplish or a process leading towards some future goal or state for the hungry seeker – it is pure, child-like fascination with the moment. Fascination with thoughts, with sensations, with feelings, with sounds, with fascination itself – with what is, right now. It is radically being here, and noticing in fascination the desire to get ‘there’ arising and dissolving.” – Jeff Foster
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“Don’t mistake the weather of your mind, for the sky of your BEING.” – Jeff Foster
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If you’re exhausted, rest. If you don’t feel like starting a new project, don’t. If you don’t feel the urge to make something new, just rest in the beauty of the old, the familiar, the known. If you don’t feel like talking, stay silent. If you’re fed up with the news, turn it off. If you want to do nothing, let yourself do nothing today. If you want to postpone something until tomorrow, do it. Feel the fullness of the emptiness, the vastness of the silence, the sheer life in your unproductive moments. Time does not always need to be filled. You are enough, simply in your being. – Jeff Foster
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“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.” – Jeff Foster
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“Stop trying to heal yourself, fix yourself, even awaken yourself. Stop trying to Fast Forward the movie of your life. Let go of ‘letting go’. Healing is not a destination. Your pain, your sorrow, your doubts, your longings, your fearful thoughts: they are not mistakes, and they are not asking to be ‘healed’. They are asking to be held. Here, now, lightly, in the loving, healing arms of present awareness.” – Jeff Foster
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“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.” – Jeff Foster
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“A CELEBRATION OF WEIRD. Don’t become a spiritual zombie, devoid of passion and deep human feeling. Let spirituality become a celebration of your uniqueness rather than a repression of it. Never lose your quirkiness, your strangeness, your weirdness – your unique and irreplaceable flavour. Don’t try or pretend to be ‘no-one’ or ‘nothing’ or some transcendent and impersonal non-entity with ‘no self’ or ‘no ego’, ‘beyond the human’ – that’s just another conceptual fixation and nobody’s buying it any more. Be a celebration of what your unique expression is and stop apologising. Fall in love with this perfectly divine, very human mess that you are. There is no authority here, and no way to get life wrong. So get it all wrong. Fail, gloriously.” – Jeff Foster
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“Love is all that matters. The rain falls, stars explode in silence somewhere out in the vastness of space, and here on this tiny planet someone called Earth, sometimes we meet and hold each other.” – Jeff Foster
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“Why does it often take extreme life situations to bring back an awareness of the magic and mystery of life? Why do we often wait until we’re about to die before discovering a deep gratitude for life as it is? Why do we exhaust ourselves seeking love, acceptance, fame, success, or spiritual enlightenment in the future? Why do we work or meditate ourselves into the grave? Why do we postpone life? Why do we hold back from it? What are we looking for exactly? What are we waiting for? What are we afraid of? Will the life we long for really come in the future? Or is it always closer than that?” – Jeff Foster
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“This moment is not life waiting to happen, goals waiting to be achieved, words waiting to be spoken, connections waiting to be made, regrets waiting to evaporate, aliveness waiting to be felt, enlightenment waiting to be gained. No. Nothing is waiting. This is it. This moment is life.” – Jeff Foster
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“Life is just a constant invitation to find out how vast you are.” – Jeff Foster
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“Meditation is all about coming alive, right now! In meditation, we invite our attention to come out of the drama and complexity of our lives, out of the already-lived past and the uncertain future, and to return to this precious moment, the only moment there is. It’s about being in contact with life as it happens; with breathing, with the heart beating, with all the sounds and smells and sensations of this unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable instant of our lives.” – Jeff Foster
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“Meditation has nothing to do with trying to fix ourselves, change ourselves, attain spiritual states or have special experiences. All kinds of states, experiences, thoughts and feelings may come and go during meditation, of course, but they are not the goal. There is no goal – that’s the beauty of it! Just an invitation to be the space in which all thoughts, all feelings, all urges, even uncomfortable ones, can come and go, arise and fall freely. Meditation has nothing to do with trying to get there, wherever we think there is. It’s all about being here; allowing ourselves to be exactly as we are, curious about the present scene in the movie of our lives.” – Jeff Foster
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