Heading back to the transformational and alchemical vortex of Ubud (BALI) in a few days where “the sad wasteland of spiritual detachment, disembodiment, arrogant world-denial and superiority” is so widespread and melting with the powerful unapologetic and truthful energy of Mama Bali, that nurture, unveil, witness, slap, shake and laugh!
So liberating when u finally set urself free and SEE what IS, instead of what is preached, going deeper and beyond the shallow surface of pretentiousness and fake masks.
Let’s get REAL people and WAKE UP! For real!
A DEEP BOW TO WOMEN
(On International Women’s Day)
The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says:
“Relationships are here
to make you conscious,
instead of happy.”
I get that.
I wandered in the wilderness for many years, the sad wasteland of spiritual detachment, disembodiment, arrogant world-denial and superiority (“I’m more evolved, more enlightened, more awakened, more conscious, more ego-free, more clear than you… you mere mortal!”).
Getting back into real, grounded, earthy, messy, intimate human relationships – that’s where the real adventure began.
Relationships started to bring to the surface all the material within myself that I had been trying to avoid, numb, repress, or hide over the years, stuff that didn’t fit into my perfect ‘spiritual’ picture, my mind’s image of the ‘enlightened one’.
It was painful and deeply humiliating to be shown time and time again that I wasn’t ‘done’, that there was actually no ‘finish line’ at all, that unenlightened energies still raged in me, energies that I’d not yet accepted in myself, energies that longed for the light, fragments that simply ached to be embraced and be given a relational home in the vastness that I am.
Painful and humiliating though it was, the process came to be astonishingly liberating, and ultimately relieving. The ‘stink of enlightenment’ (as Mariana Caplan calls it) doesn’t stand a chance in the furnace of intimate human relationship.
Clichés like “there is no self”, “there is only awareness”, “I have transcended human feelings”, “everything is perfect”, and “that’s all just your projection”, just don’t cut it when your close friend or lover or partner is standing in front of you, asking for honest, vulnerable, no-bullshit heart connection.
She will see through your games, she will call you out when you lie to her (and yourself), she will make you face everything that needs to be faced. She wants to meet YOU, not your clever spiritual concepts or your second-hand ideas. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all you strong, honest, intelligent, beautiful women who taught me how to love and how to listen, how to receive and how to give, and showed me my blind spots and where I was hiding, and may this journey of discovery never, ever end…
– Jeff Foster
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