Home > Work > The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life
1 " 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 , The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life
2 " The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. MARCEL PROUST "
3 " Admit is a beautiful word—it means both “tell the truth” and “allow in.” To admit present experience—to tell the truth about what is actually present—is to recognize that what’s present has already been admitted into life. The waves appearing at present have already been admitted into the ocean, and admitting that they exist is at the absolute core of this teaching. Waking up is all about admitting who you really are! "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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 "
6 " 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. "
7 " To be honest means “to tell the truth without expectation,” without aiming for a particular result, without trying to hurt or manipulate the other person in any way. Honesty means telling the truth and being willing to experience everything that follows. It means telling the truth not with the aim of changing or fixing the other person, but simply because the truth is what I long for the most. What I long for the most is to let go of the burden of trying to hold up a false image of myself in your presence. In the end, we don’t need a reason to tell to the truth, to admit what is. Truth is its own reward. "
8 " Tomorrow's integration is not my job. The story of yesterday's awakening is irrelevant. Here and now is where life is. And there is only here and now. "
9 " And how easy this mechanism is to see in others! Can we see it in ourselves? That is the question. Who are your scapegoats? What do you reject in others that you secretly reject in yourself? Weakness? Failure? Fear? Homosexuality? Violence? What thoughts and feelings do you not admit in yourself, in order to hold up to the world an image of who you are? "
