Q: Hi. I would like to ask you how to get over bad habits and, in particular, addictions, in a healthy way.
John: By first not changing your addictions. By first you changing your way of being in the midst of your addictions. That makes your addictions not your focus, not your problem; that you are coming into the light while you are in your addictions. When you are in the light, in the midst of your addictions, there you are free of your addictions, enabling you to walk away from them without them being something. You’re not walking away from a bad thing. You’re walking in the light. You’re walking in your new freedom that no longer needs those addictions.
Q: How do I reach this light?
John: By opening and softening. What is one of your addictions that you’re okay with saying?
Q: Smoking, for example.
John: Then don’t quit smoking, but while you smoke, with every puff, that you are consciously opening and softening; that with every puff of a cigarette you are relaxing into your heart, that you’re letting your heart take control of your personality. So when you smoke with others, you consciously let your opened heart come up into your face and show in your eyes to others; that while you smoke, everyone gets to see you.
Q: How would I recognize I’m getting free of it? Is it an event, or step-by-step?
John: You don’t need to become free of smoking; you don’t need to quit smoking. Don’t quit smoking.
Q: Thank you!
John: While you smoke, open in your heart like you did when you were really little. Every time you smoke, there you are again, and others can see it. People will say: “As soon as you smoke, you look like the innocence of a small child.”
Q: How would it help? I’ll be smoking and looking cute and adorable, childish, but still I’ll be smoking, right?
John: It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter if you smoke or if you don’t. What really matters is that you live from within your heart. If you quit smoking and never smoke again, but you don’t live in your heart, quitting smoking doesn’t help you. It only helps your body.
Q: Can you please give another example how to get to this heart place?
John: When you lie down to go to sleep, as soon as your head reaches the pillow, you are returning to your heart. It registers in your body.
Q: That inner coziness?
John: Yes.
Q: And what about smoking weed? Up to the point when it’s self-sabotaging and you are not fully aware in order to get to this heart place, to solve this problem.
John: First, don’t stop smoking weed.
Q: Thank you once again!
John: First, while you smoke, you belong to your heart and you let your deeper heart have your ‘high’.
Q: From that place will I smoke weed up to its healthy benefits without self-sabotaging?
John: As you live what I’m telling you, your heart will gain mastery of your personality and your self. As that occurs you won’t be self sabotaging anymore, and you’ll love it.
Q: Thank you very much.
John: So, when someone says to you: “You stopped smoking cigarettes and weed …” your response is: “No, I started to really love.”
Q: My answer would be, I began to love, started to love?
John: Yes.
Q: My self?
John: No.
Q: Everything?
John: Not even everything. You just began to love. You moved in the stream of love. It isn’t about what you moved to. It’s what you move as.
Q: Thank you.