Perfect Humor

Don’t let your spirituality numb your humanity, your humility, and most importantly, your sense of humor.
~ Jeff Foster

“Friend, if you are experiencing stress, sorrow, physical or emotional pain in your life right now, it doesn’t mean that your life is going wrong, that you are broken and sinful, that you have failed as a human or spiritual being, or that you are far from awakening. You may just be healing in your own original and unexpected way. Sometimes we need to feel worse for a while. Sometimes the old structures, things that we once defined and identified as ‘me’, need to crumble. Sometimes we need to be brought to our knees before we can stand again. Sometimes illusions need to die. Sometimes our sacred plans and hopes, our schemes and dreams of “how things were going to turn out”, need to burn to ashes on the ruthless yet ultimately compassionate bonfire of the present moment.

As we open up to life and love and healing, as we awaken from our dream of separateness, we meet not just the bliss of existence, but also its pain; not only the ecstasy of life, but its agony too. Awakening doesn’t always feel good or comforting or blissful or ‘spiritual’, for we are inevitably forced to confront our deepest fears and darkest shadows – those parts of ourselves that we have cut-off, denied, repressed, numbed ourselves to all these years, and the meeting can get messy to say the least. But eventually we come to trust the process of no process at all. We learn to see even our deepest sorrow as an intelligent movement of life, not a threat to life. We remember that we are vast enough to hold all of it – the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, the light and the dark, the agony and the ecstasy. We are not nearly as limited as we once imagined. We are life itself.

Stop waiting for the world to make you happy. Stop making your inner joy dependent on external things – objects, people, circumstances, experiences, events – that are out of your direct control right now. Stop playing the happiness lottery. Give yourself a break from seeking and discover the natural happiness that you are and have always been, the in-built contentment that doesn’t depend on life’s ever-changing ‘content’…

It is so precious, just to be able to sit in this open space together, where nothing needs to be resolved or solved; where we don’t need to fix ourselves or be fixed; where our burning questions don’t need to be answered; where, finally, our questions are allowed to just be questions; where our uncertainty doesn’t need to be transformed into certainty; where our doubts are finally given permission to just be doubts. Here, in this warm embrace that we are, in this place of true meditation without a meditator, without a destination, without a controller, we don’t need to find the answers, we don’t need to come to any mental conclusions about life, we don’t need to work everything out, we don’t need to ‘know’, because finally, all our wondering and our wandering, our trying-to work-it-all-out and our trying-to-make-it-all-work, our exhausting seeking and searching and our desperation to find answers, is all just allowed to be here, exactly as it is…

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 weirdness, your unique and irreplaceable flavors, 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.”

“I will always listen deeply to you, but I will never try to fix you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you second-hand, memorized answers. I will never pretend to be ‘the one who knows’, ‘the enlightened one’ or some missionary for a conceptual truth so far removed from real-time, immediate, first-hand present experience. I will not get into drama with you, I will not indulge and feed your stories and mental conclusions and fears, I will not mistake who you are for my story about you, my dream of who you are.”

~ Jeff Foster, Falling in Love with Where You Are