Month: June 2019

Finding Safety In This World: Enjoying The Goodness Within

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Q: I feel out of control in my life. Something seems to affect my work and personal life and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s as if I’m influenced by an archetype and keep becoming a scapegoat. I find it difficult to belong to the human race, to be a part of mankind. What happens, for example, is that I start a new job and I’m friendly with everyone, then things start going wrong. I’m ostracized and then fired. Now it’s happening again and I love my job! I’m being ostracized and I’ve been warned not to put a foot wrong or I’ll be fired. It shakes my foundations: I don’t want to lose my job and have no money coming in, but unconsciously I must not want to belong to this group. I don’t want to keep doing this to my self, John. My life feels so fragile. It’s as if there’s no safe place; I have nothing to hold onto.

John: Accept enjoyment. There’s always a safe place within enjoyment, the enjoyment of settling in your body whether you have a job or not. Beingness is enjoyable. It is profoundly nurturing, profoundly safe.

Life may not seem safe to you, but within life there is something that’s higher than life. Instead of you being confined by life in the midst of life, you can be in where life comes from: you enjoying the source of life. You have limited your perspective to your past experiences, so you are controlled by what has been.

When what you most deeply know within controls you, then there’s peace. If anything else controls you, there is no peace. Let what you most deeply know within receive you. Let tenderness within receive you. Regardless of what corner you find yourself pushed into, the innermost of that corner is tenderness. Let tenderness rearrange your perspective. Let tenderness change how you think.

First, get it right with tenderness by letting tenderness receive you. Then get it right with work. Don’t neglect the little, the little that is in everything, everywhere. Remember the little and you’ll remember where you came from. Remember the little in everything, and you won’t be caught by anything big. Let your perspective within come from the little while you are within what you think is big. The big in your life is just unrealized little. You alarm yourself with the capacity to alarm yourself.

Q: Do I need to understand all you say, John, or just let it in?

John: Has any of this warmed you? Then it’s already in, warming you. You cannot get it out of you; you can only neglect it. Enjoy the goodness within. It is in abundance everywhere. Find that goodness in your work. When you find it, work for that. When you are walking, find the goodness in your walk and walk in that.

It is the goodness in life that you belong to. That is the tender little that fills everything. Remember the little.

 

Relationship: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

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Q: I have a burning question about a relationship with a man I’ve been with for some time. I dread being with him, basically. I shut down, and I don’t know if that signifies an ending. When I’m away from him I have space and feel light again. I don’t know if to stay or go, or whether this is some kind of mirror for me.

John: In your self you’re finished with him, and that’s a limiting kind of self. It reveals that you’re in relationship on the terms of your self.

Q: That’s good to hear. I was thinking that leaving is a bit hasty – a cop-out. I’m not even really clear about my purpose in being with men. I told him I’m here for love otherwise I’m going, and he thought that was a bit drastic.

John: Then you’re here for love and your kind of self is going. It will be through relationship that you’ll be moving past your self, not using the experience in your self as a gauge for what is right for you. What is actually right for you isn’t going to be appealing to your self.  

Q: I know I need to stay with what’s deeper than my self. This is what happens in my relationship with men: I go into my head and start thinking instead of staying with what’s more like my being.

John: In relating to your self, with how your self is patterned, you won’t be inclined to give your whole heart to another. It is that that will separate you from what a profound relationship is.

Q: I feel confusion and a barrier inside me, particularly in my chest, as you speak.

John: It’s the confinement of being in something for your self instead of being in something for what you know the truth of. In that, your self will change. Your self will change because you, as awareness, are evolving.

Q: I feel the expansion and I can also feel the self. That confinement is like a rat scratching in a cage.

John: Give that confinement neither voice nor movement. As soon as you give it something, you strengthen its patterning. You’re having a deeper seeing than you have in your self and, in your self, you’re not prepared to let go of your relationship with your self for that deeper seeing: you have a deeper seeing and you’re taken with your self.

As awareness, like not learning the hard way.  In all things, favour delicate knowing within. Learning the easy way will be costing your self. It will keep costing your relationship with your self.

The deeper knowledge that you have, within, isn’t like what your self is like.

 

Making Ready For Ultimate Truth

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Q: I am ready for the ultimate truth.

John: What makes you ready is you being gentled and quieted in your heart, unconditionally, in every relationship you have with everything, everyone, and your self – all of that at any personal expense. It readies you for what is ultimate because it clears you of everything that isn’t ultimate. That level of deep inner quietude, in the midst of anything, cleans you of your beliefs, your core beliefs. It cleans you of your subconsciousness.

Q: For a character like me that sounds very challenging.

John: You’re asking for the ultimate truth.

Q: Yes.

John: What prepares you for that is the most basic truth, the truth within of what is just beneath the surface, and being that within everything on the surface. That clears all of the self-importance on the surface, leaving the presence of purity of heart available in the midst of anything: nurturing simplicity of heart quietly present in the midst of all complexity.

Purity of heart is when your heart – all of your heart – isn’t occupied with what you think, what you feel, what you want and what you need. What fills your heart is just presence of openness and softness: the deep inner quietude of having need of nothing in the midst of all of the doing in your life.

Purity of heart means that in your living, in all of your day, in all of your relationships to everything and everyone, that you are not taking your self to heart; that in your living, your heart is filled with what deeply matters more than your self, and this quiet meaning-filled heart is what fills your self. It is the presence within your feeling, your thinking, your will, your emotions, and all of the ways in which you configure that to do things in your life. The doing isn’t for any personal sense of accomplishment. It isn’t for the improvement or the betterment of any kind of identity. The doing is all an expression of what you are deeply being inside.

It’s like the innocence of a child moving about in its day. Innocence loves doing and in everything it does there’s the expression of that deep, inner innocence, the purity: being clean of one’s self, filled with being, all expressed in one’s self, expressed in every kind of doing.

Q: Thank you.

 

A Deeper Level Of Parenting: Awakening Your Child’s Interior

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Q: I have a question about my eleven-year-old son. He has some difficulties in school. It seems that regular school is not right for him and I’m looking at others. How do you see the importance of the school years? Am I doing more than I should, or not enough?

John: The deeper the level of your parenting, the less it makes any difference what school your child goes to.

Q: But he is only there for half a day and he suffers there!

John: If he suffers in school, he’s suffering from a lack of parenting: not a surface kind of parenting, but a depth of parenting.

If your parenting doesn’t include the realization of the depth of his own interior, then he’ll have a lack within his interior when he goes to school. In his experience, it will be about his environment. The truth of it is that it’s not a lack in his environment, or a lack of match between his environment and himself. It’s a lack of awakening within his own interior.  

Q: It’s true. I’m not sure how to get this through to him. Is it just by being this myself?  

John: Yes: by you deepening in your interior. That means that your interior can no longer be about what you think, feel and experience in your self. Your interior needs to be about what you know in your heart, and about your own being. That opens up the levels of your interior that pertain to your heart and your being, and these deeper levels begin to have mastery of the surface levels of your interior. As this takes place in you, your son sees how you are in your interior and that enables him to directly realize the deeper levels of his interior.

Q: So looking for other schools, trying to fix things or getting him a therapist are just meaningless?

John: They are not meaningless. All of those things help, and all those focuses are not the answer.

Q: The change has to come from me, then, rather than through him? Is that what you’re saying?

John: Yes. When you come from a depth of your own interior, when you are with him you’ll be with him from a greater depth of your interior. That activates a greater depth in his interior.

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