8samkeit - die Praxis für therapeutisches Coaching Karlsruhe

04/02/2023

When you look into the eyes of a loved one,
you know they will die one day,
and "one day" could be today,
and so it breaks your heart a little bit
each time you look into their eyes.

This is not an error
but the way it’s meant to be.
True love brings an awareness
of the loss of the beloved.

And so you stay with your grief today, you breathe into it and make a home for it in your heart, it hurts your chest and your throat and your tummy but it feels so alive, this grief, this loneliness, this yearning for home, and you feel so alive and awake in the hurt, and you want the hurt to stay with you because you want to keep your heart open to your loved one today. You don’t want to shut off to the "mysterium tremendum" of existence, and you don’t want to cling to that which will surely pass. You love your loved one through the grief, through the tears and the broken heart and the awareness of mortality, you live close to contingency and impermanence and change, and each moment with your loved one is rendered infinitely precious. You celebrate their presence today yet stay rooted in their passing. You embrace this living day, knowing it could be the final one, your final chance to meet.

Good. Let it all be final, then, and hauntingly alive in its finality.

Death is in life, not at its end. Grief is your constant companion, your guru and guide and lover, not a negative or depressing thing but a misunderstood doorway to cosmic compassion, to extraordinary hope and a deep and enduring love of life. All things will pass, all things are dying and changing in one way or another, everything we love and all that we don’t flows through our awareness unstoppably, ceaselessly, like sand through an hourglass, like hot blood through veins. We cannot stem the flow of holy grief but we can learn to endure it and even love it, let it break us open to more life and more laughter and more willingness to stand where we stand, feel what we feel, know what we know, even if it hurts and we long for escape, even if we want to die ourselves sometimes from so much life.

I am eternally grateful to grief and her shattering and her unplanned losses for they have brought me kicking and screaming into a clear awareness of the one thing that cannot be lost.

Let us die into life, my love.

Let us die into life.

- Jeff Foster

26/09/2022

We'd like to introduce ourselves
We are a new generation of spiritual inquirers

We no longer require second-hand answers
Our spirituality goes beyond cosmic guilt and punishment
And 'us and them' thinking

We no longer cling to holy books
For all books are holy

We don't kill over truth
For truth is all around

We are willing to fearlessly face present experience
Without conclusions and without prejudice
Naked as the day we were born
Open to what comes

We are no longer waiting for life
Or some divine revelation in the future
For we see life in everything
Including the waiting for life
And God in all that we once rejected

We no longer dream of escape
Or some perfect "Heaven"
For we have relaxed into uncertainty
And doubt is an old friend
And not-knowing is dearly beloved
And imperfection is deeply holy to us

The body is included
"Mind" is not the enemy
Feelings are sacred
Sexuality is celebrated
We love the mess!

And we finally understand
That wisdom and compassion
Absolute and relative
Duality and nonduality
Transcendence and immanence
Personal and impersonal
Human and divine
Were never divided at all.

We are a new generation of spiritual inquirers
And if you have read this far
On some level
I think
you already
understand.

- Jeff Foster

26/09/2022

ON ABUSE AND "SPIRITUALITY"

"You attracted it because you desired it".
"If you think there's a problem with another's words or actions,
YOU are the one who's confused".
"Everything is just your projection. Everything is in your mind".
"Clear up your vibration and you'll stop attracting bad things to yourself".
"You are too attached to the body. Go beyond the body. It's not who you are."
"If you have doubts, fears, resistance, pain, anger, then you must be in your ego and totally unenlightened".
"The past is an illusion. Let it go right now!".

Ugh. I'm so tired of all this New Age spiritual bu****it.
I'm tired of ANY spirituality that doesn't fully honour
our messy, unresolvable, first-hand, real-time, embodied human experience.
That doesn't bow deeply to the struggle of our raw and tender hearts.
That guilt-trips us for our imperfections and shames our limitations.

No, it's not always your projection.
Yes, sometimes other people really ARE abusive and need to be stopped.

No, everything isn't always "in your mind".
Yes, your body matters. Your feelings too.

No, your doubts and fears are not 'wrong' or 'bad' or 'unevolved'.
No, you do not 'attract' abuse through a faulty 'vibrational frequency'.
No, you do not deserve to be violated in any way, in the name of Truth, in the name of God, in the name of Love, or IN ANY OTHER NAME.

Yes, your boundaries deserve to be respected, your 'yes' AND your 'no' too.

No, it's not okay for spiritual teachers to abuse people "for their own good"
- to shock them into awakening, to enlighten them, to help them drop their "ego".
Teachers that use abuse as a tool are simply abusers, not teachers.

I reject any spirituality that dismisses our tender, vulnerable, fragile humanity.
I reject any spirituality that shames us for our precious human thoughts and feelings.
I reject any spirituality that begins any sentence with "If you were enlightened..."
I reject any spirituality that divides self from no self, divine from human, sacred from profane, absolute from relative, heaven from earth, duality from nonduality, material from spiritual.

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman.
He said, "Your heartbreak is illusory and only the activity of the separate self.
One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering".

And in that moment, I saw a deep, deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the feminine.

And I vowed to bow to that fu***ng broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

- Jeff Foster

26/09/2022

FORGET ABOUT ‘HEALING’

Some days,
you just have to forget
about ‘healing’.

You have to stop trying to feel better, trying to overcome your emotional wounds, or trying to be anywhere other than where you are.

You have to embrace the day as it is.

And you have to give yourself the most sacred permission of all:

To shatter.
To break.
To be an ugly mess.
To lean into a place of utter humility and powerlessness in yourself.
To cry out to the heavens, “I can’t do this!”

To admit utter defeat
in the loss of the life
you had imagined.

To crumble to the ground, lonely and hopeless and profoundly ruined.

To want to die, even.

And there, in the darkest places, in the blackness of the underworld, you may begin to rediscover... life.

And learn to love the beginnings. A sacred reboot:

A single breath.
The way the sun warms your face.
The sound of a tiny bird singing in the tree over there.
The raw simplicity of a single moment of human existence.

Hell has been transmuted, through love and patience.
You have discovered the wholeness in your brokenness.

You have given up your idea of ‘healing’,
and you have uncovered something
infinitely more healing:

Your authentic self.

Beautiful
and true
and utterly fu***ng unfixable.

- Jeff Foster

26/09/2022

F**K UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

F**k unconditional love.
You can't do it.

It's an impossible goal
that makes you violent inside.

But you can
embrace
your imperfect attempts to love,
your conditional search for love,
your failure to reach the ideal,
your sorrow, your fear,
your exquisite shame,
your ecstasy and your agony,
your inherited ideas of love,
your messy, deeply conditioned human love,
in unconditional
present
awareness.

Friend, even your failure to love
unconditionally
is welcome here,
unconditionally.

And that is the true meaning
of unconditional love.

- Jeff Foster

25/08/2022

25/08/2022

We are all, to some extent, depressed ('de-pressed'), pressed or weighed down by the false self, exhausted on a soul level by our frustrated attempts to hold up an image, play a character who isn't really who we are.

We long to stop acting, and be authentic again.

When we repress our true feelings, desires, urges, longings, banishing them into the unconscious, living as a facade in this world, eventually, we become depressed, even suicidal.

Depression is not a mistake, it is supremely intelligent at its core: It is an ancient call to rest. To slow down. To come out of the mind and its fears and into the body and its senses. To let go of the image. To 'kill' the character we’ve been playing and be exactly what we are. To stop running. To touch into our wounds and traumas with great gentleness. To mindfully drench our present experience with loving attention. To awaken to our brilliant rage, our awesome grief and our astonishing hidden terrors. To speak our truth out loud. To walk our path, to forge ahead with courage. To come out of hiding and to allow ourselves to be seen. To stop de-pressing the wildness inside!

My depression in my early twenties ended up saving my life a thousand times over, pushing me onto this healing path. Yes, depression was my unique call to discover the deepest kind of cosmic rest within myself.

I am eternally grateful to the gods of the Underworld.

- Jeff Foster

08/07/2022

"Liebst du mich?", fragte Alice.

"Nein, ich liebe dich nicht", antwortete das weiße Kaninchen.

Alice runzelte die Stirn und legte ihre Hände zusammen, wie sie es immer tat, wenn sie verletzt war.

"Siehst du", erwiderte das weiße Kaninchen.

Jetzt wirst du dich fragen, was dich so unvollkommen macht und was du falsch gemacht hast, damit ich dich nicht wenigstens ein wenig lieben kann.

Weißt du, deshalb kann ich dich nicht lieben. Du wirst nicht immer geliebt werden Alice, es wird Tage geben, an denen andere müde und gelangweilt vom Leben sind, ihre Köpfe in den Wolken haben und dich verletzen werden.

Weil Menschen so sind, verletzen sie sich immer gegenseitig, sei es durch Nachlässigkeit, Missverständnisse oder Konflikte mit sich selbst.

Wenn sie sich selbst nicht lieben, zumindest ein wenig, wenn sie keinen Brustpanzer der Selbstliebe und des Glücks um Ihr Herz schaffen, wird das schwache Unbehagen, das von anderen verursacht wird, tödlich und zerstört sie.

Als ich dich das erste Mal sah, schloss ich einen Pakt mit mir selbst: "Ich werde es vermeiden, dich zu lieben, bis du lernst, dich selbst zu lieben."

Lewis Carrol, "Alice im Wunderland"

Mein Buch:
"Worte der Gefühle", gibts hier:
---> https://amzn.to/3qh1SGx

29/06/2022

Breathe into your fear.
Inhale into the very centre of your sorrow.
Oxygenate your doubts, uncertainties.
Give your anger room.

Bow to your present experience.

Stand courageously in your moment,
every moment of your precious life.

For you are worthy, and complete,
and you have the right to exist
exactly as you are.

No more turning away, friend.

Those days
are over.

- Jeff Foster

11/06/2022

Jeff Foster questions on why we think our feelings and thoughts are bad; he opens to question why we started to think that sadness or anger is bad. Talking h...