Have you ever felt the tension between being fully human — experiencing love, pain, and everyday challenges — and sensing there’s something far greater at play?
How can we feel fully present to the moment, without being at the mercy of circumstances?
What happens when we stop seeking and start welcoming life as it is...?
How can we be free from attachments, while still desiring and enjoying life?
In this insightful video clip, spiritual teacher Jan Frazier explores living a rich, embodied life while recognizing a deeper truth beyond the mind. Jan shares her thoughts on breaking free from conditioning, embracing the present, and discovering the gift of now...
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I want to invite us to look together at what it is to live a fully human life, an embodied life, mortal life, to love, to hurt... And at the same time to know that, and I don't mean know up here [in our heads]... I mean know in an embodied way, an intuitive way, you might say that I am much more than this embodied human life — that what's called the Divine is real and that we partake of it. Trying to reconcile those 2 things or account for them in some way explodes the mind on the effort.
Yet you probably wouldn't be here today [tuning in to this clip] if you didn't have a sense that there was a bigger reality, that we're not merely human. The truest blessing of a human life is when a person can be fully human but not at the mercy of it, not at the mercy of circumstance... to know even as we live our physical, aching sometimes, lives that there's a larger truth operative, not something we know here [in our heads], to feel it... and so in any moment when you become "awake" — it's a momentary thing, only ever — you can feel it, can't you?
You can feel yourself, you can feel your here-ness, you can feel yourself being alive. That's what we want... we want to feel ourselves being alive. The miracle is to have all the conditioning each of us has, and yet no longer to be subject to belief — most of which is unconscious… no longer to be at the mercy of attachment to getting what we want… even as, yes, we can want… It's delicious to want, something I've discovered in the last few years: to want it, but not have to have it, to be completely receptive to the now as it arrives. And so of course, hearing this, anybody who still suffers in the oh-so-human way will naturally say “okay just tell me how, if you can”…
There is no “how” per se, and the seeker of the mind — any adept seeker who's been at it for a long time understands that… but there's this “nevertheless” thing driving… because anyone who's self-aware, who remembers what it was like being a little child, can remember moments here and there of knowing that there's something bigger going on, that time isn't real, for instance. Little children have to be taught to believe in time, in a possible future. Our well-meaning caregivers, teachers, religious instructors will say to us “You have to do this so that you will be successful, loved, safe"… on and on … so we're taught the means to an “end thing” … We're taught to forego pure immersion in the delicious now for the sake of another now. And that can be a torture to a little kid who knows better, who’s like “What? This makes no sense...” but at some point we all learn this thing that appears to be necessary to live a human life…
Interested in more...?
If you'd like to experience Jan’s wisdom and guidance first-hand, she'll be hosting two upcoming events you won’t want to miss:
"The Mind Before Awakening Versus After" webinar – October 28th
— and —
"Expectation and Surprise Along the Way" (3-part series in November)
See you there!
