Life Without A Centre

We try to escape from the play of life and the suffering that being "a person in the world" entails. Our efforts to find spiritual enlightenment have the opposite effect and reinforce an underlying feeling of lack, of separation. In Life Without a Centre, Jeff Foster suggests that there is only ever the present appearance of life, with no individual at its core who could ever escape even if they wanted to. The entire spiritual search is nothing more than a game we play with ourselves, the cosmic entertainment. Jeff cuts through the confusion and frustration surrounding the search for escape through spiritual enlightenment, by pointing to the utterly obvious: This moment, and everything that arises in it, is already the liberation that is sought. Life, just as it is, is already what we've been searching for our entire lives. Jeff Foster graduated in astrophysics from Cambridge University. Soon after graduation, life events propelled him onto an intense two-year spiritual search, culminating in the realisation that there was never anything to find in the first place. He currently writes and talks on what some people have called "non-duality," but which he just refers to as "the utterly, utterly obvious."

As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain, too; not only life’s ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn’t always feel good or comfortable or even “spiritual,” for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears, and deepest longings—those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed “negative” and unworthy of our love. How can we find the calm in the midst of the storm? How can we rest, even as the ground falls? Falling in Love with Where You Are invites you to discover a deep YES to your life, no matter what you are going through; to see crisis as an opportunity to heal, pain as an intelligent messenger, and your imperfections as perfectly placed. Through his prose and poetry, Jeff Foster will guide, provoke, encourage, and inspire you on your lonely, joyful, and sometimes exhausting pathless journey to the Home you never, ever left: the present moment. “Even in your glorious imperfection,” Jeff reminds us, “you were always a perfect expression of life, a beloved child of the universe, a complete work of art, unique in all the world...”

A combined and fully revised edition of Jeff Foster's first two books Life Without a Centre and Beyond Awakening. What if life is infinitely simpler than you ever imagined? We spend our lives seeking wealth, success, love, fulfilment, and even "spiritual enlightenment" in the future. Yet right at the heart of life there is an intimacy, a simplicity, a wholeness that is totally beyond words—and which cannot be reached through any kind of effort. In our attempts to change, to improve ourselves, or become "enlightened," we end up ignoring this wordless intimacy which is our birthright and our true home. The Wonder of Being points to the eternal freedom which exists beyond the seeker and the sought, and shows us the hidden assumptions that underlie our seeking activities. With great humour, compassion and clarity, Jeff Foster reminds us of something we have always known—that life, as it is, is a miracle... and beyond our thoughts, we are already free.

Poems for accepting all that you are—including those parts of yourself that you wish you could disown “Give yourself permission to rest, and be silent, and do nothing. Love this aloneness, friend. Fall into it. (Don’t worry. You won’t disappear. I am here to catch you.) Invite warm, curious attention deep inside your weary bones. Until there is no loneliness, only radical self-love.” —Jeff Foster “There was never anything wrong with me, and there is never anything wrong with you.” So writes spiritual teacher Jeff Foster, who has traveled through his share of darkness—but also knows the light that lies on the other side. In You Were Never Broken, he presents a collection of poetry that embraces the full spectrum of human experience, from the seemingly mundane to moments of transcendent realization. Each verse is an invitation to stop and meditate on a different facet of personal transformation. Amid these verses, Foster provides his signature straight talk and accessible teachings on the value of stillness and silence, the pitfalls of the spiritual path, and what it means to surrender completely to the beauty of the present moment. For him, the winding path to self-acceptance started with nonjudgmental observation of his darkest thoughts—and here he shares his world-renowned expertise on how to begin your own journey. For Foster, every moment contains infinite possibilities. With You Were Never Broken, you’ll discover not just raw and inspirational poetry, but also a guide for completely surrendering to the beauty and possibility of the present moment.

An encyclopedia designed especially to meet the needs of elementary, junior high, and senior high school students.

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

With more than 450,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself. Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

The Joy of True Meditation gathers together nearly 50 of Jeff Foster's soothing, touching, provocative and encouraging essays and poetic reflections on life, love, our true nature, and the courageous journey towards wild self-acceptance.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.