The woman pictured below has changed my life and my practice, and today’s audio dharmette and guided meditation was inspired by my time with her. This September, for the first time in many years, Jan Frazier will be teaching and sharing about her experience in person. For more information on that retreat, you can scroll down past the little article or click here.
I read Jan Frazier’s book, “When Fear Falls Away” last fall, which is essentially Jan’s diary after she had a sudden, unexpected, and irreversible awakening experience. Jan didn’t have any particular spiritual practice, nor did she really understand the concept of enlightenment, or so it seems from her book. And it wasn’t until nine months after her awakening that she connected the dots that what had happened to her was called “Enlightenment.”
To put it lightly, Jan’s book was mind-blowing for me. While reading it I was flooded with memories of the time in my early 20’s when I first started practicing, a time when I felt extremely alive, connected, and joyful for no reason— a little like tripping on mushrooms for several straight days. People and things were literally glowing all around me, and I felt in love with the world. Reading Jan’s book made me realize how serious and long-winded my practice had gotten since that time. I’d been operating under the belief that enlightenment was way too far out of reach for me, and I was practicing that way too. I wasn’t looking for freedom now, I was playing a long game. But I didn’t need to be.
After I read her book, I found out that Jan was living just a few miles away from where I was living at the time in southern Vermont, and so I reached out to her and she generously invited me to her home.
Jan Frazier is very understated. She is a tiny woman living in a little cabin in the woods with her cat. Her porch is sprinkled with birdseed; quotes, photos, and other keepsakes brighten the dim interior, which is modestly furnished and comfortably untidy. She offered me some tea and we sat together.
I told her that I wasn’t sure what to say. That I just felt like collapsing into her arms and crying. It was a full-body experience to be with someone so realized. I could feel her freedom wafting all around her and spreading into my cells. This was even while she talked about having a body, at 70 years old, ridden with chronic pain, and even (or especially) while she told stories about sitting next to her husband on his deathbed, or her son’s horrible car accident.
To give you an illustration of what it’s like to be Jan, here’s an excerpt from her book, When Fear Falls Away:
“Imagine this: whatever has weighed on you suddenly no longer weighs. It may still be there, a fact in your life, but it has no mass, no gravity. All that has ever troubled you is now just a feature of the landscape, like a tree, a passing cloud. Every bit of emotional and mental turmoil has ceased: the entire burden, some form of which has been with you as long as you can remember. A thing familiar as your closest friend — as much a part of you as the language you speak, the color of your skin — is utterly, inexplicably gone. Into the startling emptiness flows a quiet joy that buoys you morning, noon, and night, that goes everywhere you go, into any kind of circumstance, even into sleep. Everything you undertake happens effortlessly. You are happy, but for no reason. Nothing bothers you. You feel no stress. When a problem arises, you know what to do, you do it, and then you let it go. . . . Because your equanimity is disconnected from anything in your outer life, you know that no matter what challenge you are handed — for the rest of your life — the peace will sustain.”
In other words, imagine being unfuckwithable. This is what’s possible. She tried to impress this upon me - that it’s not only possible, but in fact inevitable. She talked about time, and how my thinking on eventually getting to enlightenment was starting from a faulty premise; there is no such thing as “later,” only now. Now is when my freedom is, and it is also all that there is. Freedom. Now.
I spent a fair portion of my time with Jan in tears, gazing into her eyes, feeling embraced by her quiet presence, and hoping to let her freedom in so deeply that it became my own. I felt uncharacteristically unselfconscious around her, because there was no judgment but only love emanating from her being. She was the embodiment of the complete and utter freedom that I so long for. And here she was, reassuring me that enlightenment can happen for anyone—even if you don’t even know what enlightenment is.
Jan Frazier was just a regular person, with a regular life. She was a mom who didn’t even meditate and was having chronic panic attacks, and now she’s completely awake. She would probably be content to simply stare at a wall for the rest of her life. In fact, she told me that if she wanted to, she could just settle into bliss for as long as she wanted to. I asked her why she didn’t do that all the time, and she said this: “because I love life, and I love people, and if I did that I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere and see the people I love or do things I love without hurting or killing someone.”
It turns out, being free doesn’t make you float away from life, it makes you embrace life even more; even if you are in terrible pain, even as the ones who are most dear to you die.
Since my time sitting with Jan that day, my practice has become infused with ease and trust. It reminds me of a more innocent time in my practice, when everything was new and fresh, and I hadn’t adopted the idea that freedom meant a lot of work. I was much more interested in this moment, and all the beauty and perfection to be found in it, no matter how mundane. In those early days of my practice, I could look at almost anything, soften my body and my eyes, and wonder at it’s suchness. My nervous system has relaxed and there’s something in me that knows that everything is okay. More than okay.
There’s nothing quite like sitting with someone with that depth of freedom: I’d never experienced anything like it from any other teacher. So to share this with the world, Some friends and I have been organizing a daylong for Jan to teach. This is the first time she’s offered something like this in eight years, and she’s delighted to spend the day with us at Potash Hill in Marlboro, Vermont on September 6th, 2025. Please join us.
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