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Into the Belly of Meditation

Jeff Foster — December 21, 2020

Into the Belly of Meditation

By Jeff Foster

You are weary, friend.

Sit.

You are thirsty.

Here. Drink.

You are hungry. Here. Take this.

A piece of bread.

A small bowl of soup.

See how God has taken form!

It is all I have but it will keep you alive.

I will light a fire that will never go out.

A sacred flame. Unconditional in its burning.

To illuminate us in the darkness.

Oh. I see you are wounded.

Bruised. Bleeding.

Exhausted from the world.

You have suffered much, I know.

Come.

Take off these dirty rags.

Don’t worry. It’s safe.

There is strength in your nakedness.

Here. Wash.

Rub this medicine onto your wounds.

Put on these robes, they are clean and dry.

Lie down. Close your eyes.

I will watch over us tonight.

Listen. You have not failed.

I see new life breaking through.

I see birth. An insurrection.

The sharp edge of hope.

I have no teaching for you.

No wise words.

I only want you to trust what you are going through.

To bring this fire inside of you.

Until the end.

I have known this pain. Yes.

This courage to keep moving. Yes.

This courage to rest, too.

The sacrifice of the known world.

Friend.

Drop into the belly of meditation now.

The place you were always seeking.

The vast silence at the Earth’s core which is your own core.

Breathing into the gut now.

The throat. The chest.

Irradiating the nervous system with unspeakable

tenderness.

Flooding the body with soft, warm light.

Drenching the human form with divine love.

And sleep.

I may not be here when you wake.

We may not meet again in form.

Yet I leave you with all you need.

Food. Water. A bed.

A chance to rest.

A touch of kindness.

And your unbreakable Self.

flowers

This poem is excerpted from You Were Never Broken: Poems to Save Your Life by Jeff Foster.

Jeff Foster shares from his own awakened experience a way out of seeking fulfillment in the future and into the acceptance of “all this, here and now.” He studied astrophysics at Cambridge University. Following a period of depression and physical illness, he embarked on an intensive spiritual search that came to an end with the discovery that life itself was what he had always been seeking.

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Are You Suffering from Empathic Distress? How to Recla...

Mara Bishop — March 7, 2024

Are you exhausted, anxious, or overwhelmed? Maybe your life is challenging. Or perhaps the state of the world and others’ suffering feels unbearable. If your life is going well, but you still feel miserable, maybe you have some guilt or shame. You are not alone. You may be suffering from empathic distress.

Most of us have been taught that empathy is wholly positive and should be fostered in children and revered in adults. This idea is partly correct. The absence of empathy is clearly problematic. When the ability to sense or care about others’ feelings or pain is missing, we edge into sociopathy. However, empathy is experiencing another person’s pain as our own. In small doses and for short periods, it allows us a deeper understanding of our fellow beings. But it can also make it harder to help, because the pain is spread around, not diminished. If your friend breaks their leg and you experience genuine empathy, it might feel like your leg is broken too. This makes it harder for you to function and definitely harder for you to help them.

Empathy can make us sick, overwhelmed, and burned out.

Many people feel helpless in the face of the magnitude of suffering in the world today. It can result in what appears to be apathy at first but is actually empathic distress, which means “hurting for others while feeling unable to help.” An op-ed in the New York Times titled “That Numbness You’re Feeling? There’s a Word for It” described this phenomenon and cited some of the research I used to create the Sounds True audio course Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World.

The Research

Neuroscientists Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer identified empathy as a contributing factor to burnout, primarily but not exclusively, among healthcare workers and therapists. The older term compassion fatigue is a “misnomer.” Compassion and empathy have distinctly different impacts on our bodies and psyches. Compassion is witnessing and being willing to help when possible and appropriate. Empathy is taking on others’ pain as our own. Empathy often creates “more distress.” It is a huge distinction.

Empathy is overrated and fatiguing. Compassion is what we need. Unfortunately, we often confuse the two. This dynamic is one reason why developing healthy energetic boundaries is essential.

Decreasing Empathic Distress

Being unable to adjust between compassion and empathy is a big reason many people feel drained and overwhelmed. Research about the critical difference between compassion and empathy aligns with many spiritual concepts of energetic boundaries. It also challenges some. One of the ways we inadvertently make things difficult for ourselves is when we believe that to be good, kind, “spiritual” people, we must always be wide open. We must be at one with the universe, be open to everyone, and say yes to everything. There is a paradox here. We are all one on some level, but we need to embrace the ability to differentiate ourselves from others at times to steward our own health.

We have reached a tipping point with empathic distress; it is a crisis within the crises.

Klimecki and Singer focus on how training in compassion meditation can help reduce empathic distress, shifting from an experience of absorbing others’ energy to a state of kindness toward others with clear self-differentiation. The distinction between empathy and compassion is one of the first things we cover in Shining Bright Without Burning Out: Spiritual Tools for Creating Healthy Energetic Boundaries in an Overconnected World. The course also includes a full set of tools for addressing empathic distress from the perspective of energetic boundaries.

Here are a few additional steps you can take today to begin reducing empathic distress:

Be clear about your direct responsibilities and what is not yours.
Pause before entering new situations: conversations, appointments with clients, meetings, etc. Take a moment to reset yourself with a breath and an intention for how you want to engage.
Pay attention to how you feel after interactions with people, places, and media. Note over time when your mood or body feels drained so that you can prepare more thoroughly in the future, consider how to minimize those interactions if they are optional, and take time to reset after engaging.

Mara Bishop

Mara Bishop is a shamanic practitioner, intuitive consultant, teacher, author, and artist. In private practice, she uses her Personal Evolution Counseling™ method to provide an integrated approach to spiritual healing, personal growth, and emotional well-being. Her books Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys and Inner Divinity: Crafting Your Life with Sacred Intelligence are resource guides for spiritual practice. She resides in Durham, North Carolina. For more, visit wholespirit.com.

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Embracing vulnerability… with Brené Brown

Brené Brown — March 7, 2013

Brené Brown

“You cannot access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable.” What a rich and provocative statement from our friend and Sounds True author Brené Brown. There is such a deeply-rooted pull to move toward those emotional-states that we identify as “positive” or “light” or “spiritual” – along with a counter move away from those “darker” or challenging and exposing emotions such as vulnerability, sadness, and grief. But, as Brené reminds us, vulnerability is the ground of all of the so-called positive emotional states, including those of love, joy, and belonging.

When we can allow ourselves to be naked, exposed, to be profoundly touched by whatever appears, we can meet this life – and the sweet, beautiful heart of another – in the most precious way. It is in this turning into the immediacy of our experience, in a truly embodied way, that we come to discover the many fruits of this sacred world. There are times, of course, when doing so is not easy, when it takes everything we have (and more), and feels completely counter-instinctual. But somehow, by some mysterious grace, we learn to stay with what is there, knowing that it has something very precious to show us about ourselves, and about the true nature of love.

Enjoy the following video from Brené on the gifts of embracing vulnerability…

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Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster: Unconditioned Awareness ...

Jeff Foster
Peter Fenner — December 10, 2013

What is it that is here no matter what’s going on around us? Why does the experience of pure awareness seem so hard to hold on to? Tami Simon speaks with Sounds True authors Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster about the nature of awareness and how we can begin to offer the gifts of our realization to those around us. (75 minutes)

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Latham Thomas: Self-Care Is a Radical Act

Latham Thomas — March 20, 2018

Latham Thomas is a lifestyle maven who founded Mama Glow and was named one of Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100. She is the author of Mama Glow and Own Your Glow. With Sounds True, she has created the audio program Beditations: Guided Meditations and Rituals for Rest and Renewal. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Latham and Tami Simon talk about the true meaning of self-care, as well as why there are such strong societal factors that work against it. They discuss those internal aspects of the self for which we have been shamed in the past and how these are actually our deepest reserves of personal power. Tami and Latham also speak on personal boundaries in terms of both protecting ourselves and what kind of emotional support we allow in. Finally, Latham explains why heeding clear internal messages actually takes courage—a courage that is always rewarded in the long run. (70 minutes)

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Joseph Marshall III: Wisdom of a Lakota Elder

Joseph Marshall III — September 23, 2014

Joseph M. Marshall III is a teacher, historian, writer, storyteller, and a Lakota craftsman. Joseph’s expansive body of work includes nine nonfiction books, three novels, and numerous essays, stories, and screenplays. With Sounds True, he has produced the audio programs Quiet Thunder and Keep Going, as well as the book The Lakota Way of Strength and Courage. In this episode, Tami talks with Joseph about the inheritance of wisdom he received from his grandparents, the central teachings of the Lakota people, the sense of guilt and shame that many Euro-Americans feel when reflecting on the tragedies of American history, and a story about the power of awareness and looking back. (48 minutes)

Into the Belly of Meditation

Are You Suffering from Empathic Distress? How to Recla...

Mara Bishop

Embracing vulnerability… with Brené Brown

Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster: Unconditioned Awareness ...

Latham Thomas: Self-Care Is a Radical Act

Joseph Marshall III: Wisdom of a Lakota Elder

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