Jeff Foster Quotes

Heaven is this moment.
Hell is the burning desire for this moment to be different.
It's that simple.

You are never 'in' and 'out' of now. You are the now.

There are no conditions to love.
And no end to its depths.

Leave everything undefined, including yourself.
Befriend uncertainty.
Fall in love with mystery.
Kneel at the altar of not knowing.
Give your questions time to breathe.
And the answers will find you.

All your problems are just thoughts.
And thoughts are not a problem.

Are you 'the one in pain',
'the hurt one',
the victim of this moment,
trapped in the story of time.

Wholeness is not something that 'happens' one day,
it is that which is already present.
Life itself - what you really are,
beyond your image of yourself - is already whole.

Do not search for the answer.
It will find you in the perfect moment,
when your defences are down.
It knows where you live.

You don't have to feel 'okay' all the time.
You don't have to be free from all resistance all the time.
You are bigger than that, unlimited in fact...
You don't need to be the peaceful one,
the awakened one, the strong one,
the highly evolved one, the one immune to suffering.
All are false limitations on your limitless nature.
Simply be what you are, not 'this' one or 'that' one,
but The One, the space for all of it.
Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again,
until you lose all interest in being on pedestals.

Don't mistake the weather of your mind
for the sky of your being.

Knowing who you are
the unconditional embrace of this moment's content
is true contentment.

We could say that what you are, as the ocean,
accepts every wave, simply because it is every wave.
It has no choice but to accept!
The ocean does not accept some waves and reject others;
this is an unconditional acceptance that is way beyond
our conditioned ideas about acceptance.
The ocean’s acceptance of its waves is beyond
the conceptual opposites of acceptance and nonacceptance.
The acceptance is the inseparability of the ocean and the waves,
and as such, it has no opposite.
Every wave is already accepted by the ocean,
and it is this already-accepted nature of the waves it is all about.
This is the deepest acceptance of life,
which you as an individual cannot achieve.

We talk about finding our “true identity,”
but our true identity does not lie in the story of our lives.
I am not the story of my achievements or my failures.
I am not the story of my social status.
I am not the story of my wealth or poverty.
I am not the story of my successful or failed relationships.
I am not the story of my illness or disability.
I am not the story of my childhood or my past or future lives.
I am not the story of my race, my color, my religion.
I am not the story of my beliefs.
I am not the story of my search for enlightenment or my success or failure to find it.
I am simply what’s happening in this moment.
That is where my identity truly lies—
in the here and now, not in the time-bound story of me.
I am identical with this moment.
That is the true meaning of the word identity: “to be identical with.”
What I am is identical with life as it appears now,
just as the ocean is always identical with its waves

Some people report that they feel attacked or plagued by negative thoughts. Remember, though, that what we are
cannot be attacked—only an image can.
So any time you experience a thought as being negative,
any time you feel personally attacked,
it is a sign that you are defending an image of yourself.
When no image of yourself is being defended,
all thoughts are allowed to arise and fall away.
Then you see that all thoughts are true—in other words,
all thoughts have truth in them.
If you are honest you can find everything in yourself—
and then thought cannot be your enemy.
Every thought you call “negative” is actually a dear friend, trying
to show you the false image of yourself that you are still defending.
It’s almost as if life, in its infinite compassion,
attempts to destroy any false image you have of yourself.

Suffering is always an invitation to discover,
in the moment,
what we are not deeply accepting
and to see that what we are not accepting
is already accepted.

The way out of suffering is the way in.

Discovering yourself to be the wide-open space
in which pain appears and
not the story of someone who is being attacked by pain, that is true healing—
the healing of identity—
and it goes far beyond physical healing.

What I am embraces all, allows all, admits all. And herein lies the peace that passes all understanding
even in the midst of pain and illness.