Sitting in the Unresolved

From “Sitting in the Unresolved” and “Meditation: No Calm Required”:

1. Drop the goal. Begin by abandoning the project of getting calm, peaceful, or “good at meditation.” Foster: true meditation “is not trying to get somewhere.” There is nothing to achieve and nowhere to arrive.
2. Just be here. The whole instruction, in his words: “Just be here. That’s all that’s required of you. Just be here. Be with this. Be present.” Sit quietly, doing nothing in particular.
3. Welcome everything — including resistance. Don’t push any part of experience away. “Don’t try to get rid of any aspect of your experience. Your crazy thoughts — just watch them. Uncomfortable feelings — just breathe with them.” Even “your resistance is sacred” — so you don’t have to fix the part of you that doesn’t want to be here either.
4. Let questions stay questions. When the mind reaches for an answer or a resolution, notice the reaching and let it go. “Our questions are allowed to just be questions; our doubts are finally given permission to just be doubts.” Rest in “wonder, not knowing.” 5. Sit in the unresolved. Stay with the open, unfinished, uncomfortable middle — the unanswered situation, the unmet longing — without rushing to close it. This tolerating the open question is the practice, not a failure of it.
6. Rest as the space / the Ocean. Notice that all of it — thoughts, sensations, the restlessness itself — is already appearing in awareness, already allowed because it’s already here. Rest as that welcoming Presence, the “ocean” in which the “waves” of experience come and go.
7. Breathe with discomfort; feet on the ground. Where a feeling is intense, “just breathe with them,” keep contact with the body and the present moment, and “take one moment at a time.” *(Sourcing note: quoted phrases are Foster’s documented wording from the cited essays/page; steps are faithful paraphrase with short fair-use quotes only. “Oceanic Presence” and “No Calm Required” are his framing.)*

Jeff Foster (b. 1980), English nondual teacher and author of The Deepest Acceptance and The Way of Rest. → (contemporary nondual). His “true meditation” descends from Zen shikantaza (“just sitting,” nothing to attain), Dzogchen / Advaita resting-as-awareness, and Eckhart Tolle’s presence teaching, but reframed for ordinary, anxious, modern life — explicitly removing the demand to feel peaceful.

The “ocean and waves” image is a classic nondual metaphor (awareness = ocean; experiences = waves) he uses throughout.

Shikantaza (Zen) — “just sitting,” no object, no goal, no attainment; the closest structural parallel.

• Dzogchen / Mahamudra resting — resting as open awareness, letting thoughts self-liberate.
• Open-monitoring / Choiceless awareness (Krishnamurti) — attending to whatever arises without selection.
• Tolle’s presence — being the awareness behind thought; welcoming the now.
• Acceptance-based mindfulness (MBSR/MBCT) — allowing experience without trying to change it.
• “Negative capability” (Keats) — capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact — a literary cousin of “sitting in the unresolved.”

Secretly trying to get calm. The single trap Foster names. If you’re monitoring whether you’ve “achieved peace yet,” you’ve reinstalled the goal. Let calm be optional.

• Treating thoughts as the enemy. “Just watch them”; you don’t have to stop thinking. Even restlessness is welcome.
• Forcing resolution. The mind will lunge to answer the open question. Notice the lunge, return to “just be here.”
• Mistaking it for blankness. This isn’t suppressing experience or going numb; it’s fully allowing it.
• Skipping grounding with strong feeling. Pair with breath and body when emotion intensifies, or “sitting in the unresolved” can tip into rumination or flooding.