Popular spiritual writer and teacher Jan Frazier shows how to move from emotional and mental turmoil to quiet joy and happiness in The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is . Frazier, the author of the bestselling When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening , offers practical and effective suggestions for developing "presentmoment" awareness as the key to awakening. Frazier shows how getting caught up in being on a spiritual journey often sustains the illusion of timespecifically some future time when you hope to awaken. But letting go of the idea of the future and staying focused in the present can give you access to a rich life free of suffering. "When you are hurting, or feeling very unawake, or dissatisfied with yourself, instead of saying 'I've got to change' or 'I've got to get enlightened,' step outside of the whole thing and simply observe your thoughts and feelings neutrally, without judgment. This nonjudgmental looking is transformative." Jan Frazier Whether you feel stuck in your life, or simply want to suffer less and live more consciously, The Freedom of Being offers a blueprint to make the shift into the present.   Jan Frazier is a creativewriting teacher and mother of two adolescents. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Yankee, Cimarron Review, and the Minnesota Review, and her poetry collection was published in 2003 by Pudding House. She resides in rural western Massachusetts. The Freedom of Being at ease with what is By JAN FRAZIER Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC Copyright © 2012 Jan Frazier All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-57863-517-7 Contents Invitation to the ReaderIntroductionOpen the DoorPart One: The Lay of the Land1: The Human Condition2: How We Tick3: Potential and Fulfillment4: A new Orientation to Life5: What Is It to Become Free?6: Getting RealPart Two: Choice Hiding in Plain Sight7: Cultivating Self-Awareness8: Choice9: How Life Affects You10: Acceptance: Unplugging the Suffering Machine11: Living in Feeling: The Encounter with Reality12: Fear13: The Creation and Care of the Familiar SelfPart Three: The Solitary Traveler, with No Place to Go14: What Do You Want?15: Spiritual Practice as Distraction16: A Jewel in Your Pocket17: The End of the Journey18: Preparing the Ground19: Loving Your Ego20: Who Are You?21: The Final ChapterEpilogueAfterword: A Postscript to When Fear Falls AwayAcknowledgmentsReferences CHAPTER 1 The Human Condition Of human nature, two things can be said: (1) We are free. (2) We do not realize it. Free: able to be in the presence of anything, any condition, and to be unchanged by it.Purely content, at ease. Like an open window, the breeze blowing in and back out again.All of it (everything that happens) comes and goes, even the close-up things, and inside,the stillness does not waver. Free means living as pure awareness—awareness that'sonly secondarily a person. What We Don't Know We are free, and we don't know it. It feels the furthest thing from possible, that it could beso. We'd swear we're at the mercy of what goes wrong, what goes right. And yet (here is the truth), freedom is right here. So far away, it seems, but right here.Even as you could spend your whole life chasing it down, you have the scent of it on youall the while. The perfection is right alongside the mess, intimate with the misaligned mini-disaster thatlife appears to be. Close as the breath that's moving in you right now. Sometimes you get a whiff of it on the wind. A scrap of a melody playing in the distance,beyond what you're otherwise paying attention to (some useless thing or other). You could be done with suffering. The thing with no longing, that does not know fear,moves as you move. It asks no act of forgiveness or understanding, nor healing ormastery. It's just here: real as rock, air, dirt. It doesn't await you later. It's not outside you,or in spite of you. You are it. It's so close you cannot see it. You look through its eyes atthe world around you. You could let go of what's hobbled you all your life. Something could shift. Let yourselfknow that it could be otherwise. You think you need to limit yourself with ideas of how-it's been,what-seems-likely. You don't. Your essential nature will wait forever for you to notice— you that insist on averting youreyes; you, so full of misplaced longing, managing to invent difficulty, drowning inperpetually unmet desire for something you think will take away the pain. Some flimsything. When this thing seizes you in its teeth and takes you over, when you become that , and allthe rest of what seemed real is obliterated, then you will look at who-you-were and feel aterrible poignancy. Such pointless aching. See how a mother lion carries her young. How she grasps the skin at the back of its neckwith her glistening teeth that slaughter, how she holds it and will not let go? This is how itis. This is what attends you. Once you see, you're shocked to discover it wa