To welcome your question is to answer it 

The benefit of Liber is not that it answers all your questions immediately, but teaches you to relate to them without answer. Not just in the sense of: 'yes, I am aware of them and observe them,' but as in: 'I welcome, eat, taste, taste and digest them. Unconditional.

And just as Liber teaches you to deal with your questions 'blankly and non-knowingly,' it also trains you to frame your relationship with your (other) thoughts and feelings. By training you to let them enter unconditionally into the space of your 'not-knowing'. And not resisting them, no matter how they affect you.

The power of Liber

Something and nothing, that's all Liber has to offer
The power of Liber: the simplicity of its conception. You have your "something" - the presence of thoughts, feelings, questions, opinions, desires, expectations and views - and its absence, the infinite space of your "nothing.

Just two tastes, that's it. And all you have to practice is to treat anything that tastes like 'content,' like wanting, knowing, expecting, finding, feeling, striving, hoping and so on, say anything that makes a sound, moves, has a 'form,' as taste 'something.' And then to welcome it as taste 'nothing'.

The result: the content of your "something" undergoes a transformation. Because it gets the space to express itself, to feel 'seen and heard'.

And so this also applies to your questions about the Liber method itself. Such as: "does Liber work?", or "what makes Liber different from Mindfulness?" or "is Liber compatible with my daily meditation practice?" or "how long will it take before I notice anything from the Liber practice?", or "how often and for how long do you recommend I practice?".

Liber does not benefit you so much by answering your questions at a moment's notice, instantly relieving you of unpleasant feelings, or giving all your thoughts a golden edge, but by teaching you to welcome them into the space of your silent presence for it. After which then, from that encounter, a fresh, "upcycled," "something" can emerge.

For example, a question like "Does Liber work?" can transform into the insight "What a control freak I am. 'By asking "what makes Liber different from Mindfulness?" you may get better in touch with your tendency to prefer the familiar path. Under the question "how long does it take me to notice something about Liber practice?" you may discover your own impatience. And the question, "How often and for how long do you recommend I practice?" may especially speak volumes about your handling of insecurities. And each of these insights provides a wonderful trigger for yet another dialogue with your 'nothingness'.

Questions about Liber?
No better place to soak them up than in the space of your own "nothingness.

Here's how you do it:

Write down your question and also describe the feeling the question brings, or what led you to ask this very question. See if you can manage to write down up to 200 words related to this question.

Then take 5 minutes to relax. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and be all attention to, "follow," your breathing.

Now read aloud and empathetically to yourself what you have written down and again and again. Just until you feel the energy of the question change. After which you can start the exercise again at the beginning by writing down the insights that this reading aloud and listening brought you, in turn, reading aloud, listening, and so on and so forth.

The benefits of Liber
With Liber, you kill three birds with one stone.

More powerless, more human
By allowing your "not-knowing" a place in your existence, you shape how you are to begin with more completely, more honestly. You become more human. Because after all, there is a lot more a person does not know than he does know. At the core, powerlessness typifies us more than power. And where we consciously embody that, there is, by definition, more of us present.

Less hiding, more yourself
In addition, by inviting your "knowing" to manifest to its fullest extent, you also become "more yourself. Because much of what previously led a shadow existence now comes into the light.

More meek, more capable of living
The third blow: by fully accepting and welcoming into the space of your "not-knowing" your "knowing" - "come on in, come on in"-, that which you know or think you know transforms. Prejudice becomes insight, and you thus become more capable of living.

Start Now
Why put off until tomorrow what you can start right now? Your first exercise is waiting for you. Much exercise pleasure.

Why do you want what you want, desire what you desire? Why do you find what you find? Why do you interpret what you feel the way you do, and also: how do you know it's right?

Already as you read these questions, answers are welling up inside you. Comments. Liber learns: give them space. Let what you find, express itself, what you feel, make itself felt. And be "merely" present for that. Experience it, question it if necessary, but find nothing of it, want nothing of it. Just as a sieve reacts no differently to sand than it does to salt.

What does that get you? Liberation from a self-concept that is itself legislator, executor and controller at the same time. And thus by definition is at odds with itself. I want, I find, I feel, I desire? The Liber learner comes to see: every sentence that begins with the word "I" narrows my life space, unless ... I learn with an uncovered eye to see who is saying it.

To this end, Liber teaches you to shift your energy. To make not realization, but as objective an evaluation as possible of what you want, feel and desire your main occupation. The exercise: to ground your existential center of gravity not in your thinking and feeling, but in your single awareness of them. Learning to become a single receptive ear to what is within you.

Specifically, you do this as follows: in "word clouds" you write down what is going on inside you. As if you were the note taker of your own feelings and thoughts. Then you read this back out loud without thinking anything of it. You do this until the eloquence of your word cloud begins to lose energy and you notice that the roles are reversed. That the highest word is no longer for what you think and feel, but for your potential to be perfectly empty and receptive to it.

A power you didn't know you had becomes new ground under your feet: your ability to be powerless, as "nothing," for all the "something" stirring within you.

What happens then is as puzzling as it is fruitful. Invited to share without reservation with your unconditional interest - your "nothingness," what you find, feel, want and desire - your "something" - begins to cleanse and organize itself. Fear of being overwhelmed by the unknown gives way to a desire to become acquainted with it. What is outdated allows itself to be replaced by what is. Your thinking dares to evolve and begins to harmonize with place and time.

Released from a floating self-construction, you come to stand with both feet on the ground.

Don't understand something about Liber? Suffering from a practice dip? Did you discover a feeling or insight you weren't waiting for? Or maybe you're disappointed in yourself because you don't think you're making anything of it?

Read these tips again and again.

Cornelie: healing after a split existence

Her life was called successful. Married, children, contact strong. She was a nurse, held leadership positions and was a humanistic counselor. 'All exterior' she says, 'copied from others. To survive. Inside I have always been anxious and insecure. On the suicidal side.

Cornelie is from 1944. Child of traumatized war parents. Hunger. Hiding. Bombing. Shelters. Houses shot to pieces. Born into a composite family. Her father a widower. Left behind with two daughters with TB.

'Like growing up in a basket of stray cats' she says. 'Begging for some crumbs of love. You get bitten and pushed away. Saving yourself. Guilt because you are healthy and your mother is still alive. But who is mostly concerned with the suffering of your half-siblings. Pain? No one was in pain. Tears? Unwanted. Everything was denied.

'Successful on the outside, rotten on the inside. Like I was a failed soufflé. That's how I've always felt. Split. It drove me crazy. What if it were discovered?

'Psychiatrists, medications, psychologists, group therapy, the alternative circuit: I tried everything to get rid of it. Nothing helped.'

'And then I came across "Liber. Just like that. On the Internet. I knew immediately: this is going to get me out of my worries and fears. And pretty soon a sense of healing presented itself. Only by doing the exercises. Every day again.

I discovered an inside of myself, separate from my environment. The need to always be alert, feelers out, alert to danger, diminished. That gave me peace. I began to relax and became less defensive. My environment also noticed the difference immediately.

'I understood how I had been looking for the wrong solution all these years. For a better-looking Cornelie. Instead, Liber brings me more Cornelie. I appear to be so much greater than that insecure, fighting girl.

'I think humanist. That's another reason Liber appealed to me. There is no religious word involved. But ask me what a year and a half of practice brought me and I have to use spiritual language: the consciousness of being 'secured in God'. To be allowed to live 'in his hand'. In which no one has failed.'

'Liber summarized? Rest and peace at last. No longer pining for a course. Because I have found the answers within myself.'

Hello Thomas,

You don't know me, but I have been doing the Liber exercises from your site for a few months now. Since I am having positive results with them, I wanted to give you a heads up about this.

My name is Elke and I live in Groningen. I have been practicing Zen meditations for several years and attend a weekly yoga group. From a good friend I heard about Liber. I was not very interested. I responded with: "I already do enough, I don't need anything else. And actually it is quite crazy and contrary to make so much effort to become calmer.

But...my interest was piqued and so I started looking on the Liber Coaching site. At first with resistance and occasionally, trying wise so to speak, I started. I sit relaxed on the couch. No difficult mandatory sitting postures. No searching for rest (often far to be found), but just 10 minutes of writing down everything, words, sentences, feelings, thoughts, sounds, in short whatever arises in me during my writing. This focuses my tense attention. Gives focus so to speak.

In the beginning I listened to your text on the site. Now I use the alarm clock that I also use in Zen. What strikes me so much since I started doing this is that I actually disconnect myself from the grinding thoughts. Okay, Zen and yoga do that too, but these exercises give me an extra dimension. Namely, the Nothingness. Not knowing, just realizing every time, that I don't know. And that gives me a lot of peace.

That I don't coincide with my thoughts. It has been said to me so many times in all kinds of trainings but thanks to Liber I now understand it. Because now I also feel it . I am learning that I can choose. That I am more than those grinding thoughts. Daily "sitting" is much easier for me because of this.

I said to Jan, "Thank you for pointing me to Liber. I don't need anything but to be very close to myself. Writing relaxed on my bench and reading that to myself. No need, no compulsion'. And then I thought 'well, I can thank Jan, but then I'll thank Thomas too, it seems logical to me'.

So hereby: thank you very much!

EVERY