Q: Hi, John.

John: Hello.

Q: I’m here today because I would like you to teach me how to stay motionless and quiet, even when I’m feeling angry or some emotions.

John: By nurturingly not taking yourself to heart, not taking yourself seriously, nurturingly not making anything of your self, which leaves you gentled and quieted in your heart. Your heart life, your deeper heart life will come through your thinking, your feeling and your emotions but it won’t manifest as any kind of negativity or reactivity. It comes through emotionally as joy, happiness.

Q: It’s difficult to not believe what say the emotions in the heart.

John: It’s difficult only if you’re not in your quieted innocence. It’s difficult if you take your self seriously. When you take your self to heart that will manifest emotionally, but as negative emotionality, reactivity. Take your self seriously and you’ll become over-sensitive to everything that negatively affects how you feel in your self, and you’ll project that onto your self, onto others, and onto circumstance.

The purpose of your self is for your deeper heart to have presence in life: to manifest, to be seen, to flow. When you are in your deeper heart you are rested within in the midst of anything that affects your self, so your real life is not your self life, your worldly life, your relationships life. Your real life is your heart life, and you let that fill your interior, your thinking, your feeling, your emotions and your outer life.

Your heart life is your real life, not your outer life. You can lose all of your relationships, you can lose your belongings, you can lose your career, you can lose your worldly presence, your worldly life, you can lose your health, but if you still just remain gentled and quieted in your heart you are clear, and you have a wellspring from within that nurtures your presence everywhere in your self in the midst of difficulty, in the midst of loss. Then you are no longer about gain and loss. You are all about the quiet nurture within. It’s your flow. It’s you.

If in your self and in life you relate to your personal rights, all you have then is your sense of self and you don’t have your own heart. Personal rights have nothing to do with your deeper heart; personal rights have only to do with your self. There’s a place for it, for personal rights, but only if you hold them very lightly, and the more that something pokes at your personal rights, the more you relax within because you are about something deeper. If you move to protect your personal rights, you will do so at the expense of your heart. Your heart matters more than your rights. Don’t leave your heart for anything. If you are in a difficult circumstance that’s very trying for your self, at all cost don’t leave your heart. If someone’s mean to you, don’t leave your heart. Your heart is real life of you. In all of your outer life, don’t leave your inner life for your outer life. Be your inner life in your outer life.

Live from deepest within, all the way out into everything. There is not first gain and loss, pleasure and pain: first there is you. Your self isn’t you; you have a self. Your self matters, but only as long as you are being what you really are in your self. Without this deeper you, your self loses its meaning. The more meaning that you project onto your self, the more you separate from this deeper you.

Live receiving offence to your self. Live receiving injury to your self instead of living taking offence and taking injury. As soon as you take offence or take injury from anything or anyone, you escalate in your sense of self-importance. The higher you exist in a sense of self-importance, the higher the level of your pain and your suffering. It isn’t real. It’s only actual, and it comes to rest when you come to rest in the midst of it.

What you deeply, really are is not your experience. What you deeply, really are is love. This love doesn’t come from your self; it comes from the deeper levels of you. Live the quietude of this love that you really are and your self will become as lovely as you are. Live taking your self seriously, and you’ll develop a difficult self, a troublesome self, a fearful self, an irritated self. Miserable. Moody. Your self is actual but it’s not real. The love that you really are, much deeper within – that’s the real. Be the real in the midst of whatever actualities are there.

This is your inner love life. It grows like a garden. Don’t forsake the garden for your sense of self. This is your return to what you were like when you were still in your innocence, happy without a reason.