Q: I’ve had pain in both legs for a year, and in one of my feet every day. I’d like to know what’s happening with my legs.
John: First, you don’t need to know what’s going on with the pain in your legs for you to be at home in your heart. If that’s not clear and settled for you, you will leave your heart because of the pain that’s in your legs. You’ll leave your heart in an effort to address your situation. You’ll leave your heart for pain relief. You don’t first need any pain relief. You can address the pain and you can address your legs. You can even look to know why it’s occurring, but anything that you address, address from within your heart. Address it because you’re in your heart instead of addressing it because the difficulty is there.
When anything that seems bad with your body is occurring, instead of going into what is bad with your body, start with what is good – not good with your body, but goodness in you. Where you find that is not in your self; it’s in your heart. Start with the goodness and from within that goodness address a difficulty that’s outside of that goodness. Then, difficulty doesn’t separate you from goodness.
If you heal your legs, that healing won’t bring you into your goodness. What puts you into your goodness is when that most deep and nurturing goodness within matters more to you than what’s occurring with your legs. That makes any attention that you give to the difficulty with your legs, goodness attention. That goodness attention is you being what you really are in response to your legs, instead of in reaction to your legs.
Failure in your body is integrated not by first addressing the failure, but by letting the failure in your body point to what you really are, so that any difficulty in your body or a difficulty in your life sends you to your heart. From there you address the difficulty. When nothing can separate you from your own heart, when no failure of your body can take you away from what you really are because being what you really are matters more to you than the condition of your body, that frees you from you being the tension in your body.
At some point, we are all going to suffer catastrophic failure in our body and are going to die. What matters most, until then, is what we’re being, within, in the midst of whatever comes along, so that we are the source of goodness within our lives and in our bodies. Then, instead of running after meaning – the meaning of healing or the meaning of acquiring anything – what we’re being is meaning, regardless of the condition of anything else. Then, instead of your legs being a problem, your legs are dear to you. Because they’re dear to you, you’ll naturally do what you can for them and everything that you do will be from your heart.
You are being goodness to your troubled legs.
