Q: How do I get closer to the deep place within where the stillness, the love and the joy is?

John: By being honest to what you most quietly know the truth of in your heart. By being honest to your heart and to what you know in your heart instead of being honest to what you think and feel in your experience and in your self.

Q: Thought forms and old feelings – is it what takes me away from the real messenger from my heart?

John: Yes. Thinking and feeling doesn’t tell you the truth.

Q: But how do I stop these thoughts?

John: You can’t.

Q: No, I can’t.

John: But you can change what you are being in the midst of your thinking. Then your thinking is an environment that you’re in and your thinking is no longer you. As soon as you don’t like your thinking or you don’t like thinking, you make the environment of your mind you, instead of it simply being your environment.

Q: So it’s more like stepping back and being the witness when it’s going on? No?! (chuckles)

John: You can be the witness but in being the witness you’ll have some measure of freedom from your self because you’re able to look at your self instead of being stuck in your self. If you’re being the witness, then you’re still in a measure of control. When you’re being the witness there’s still a use of separation, whereas if you’re quietly being in your heart there is no separation. And then quietly being in your heart in the midst of any environment, including the environment of your self, the environment of your thinking and your feeling.

When what you are being shifts, your thinking shifts.

Q: When I feel love, it could be in my work – I work with children and my heart is with me – it’s more quiet. Not so many thoughts. Is it more like that?

John: Yes. But then you’re also dependent on you feeling love for you to be in a fundamental okayness.

Q: Yeah.

John: So then instead of being dependent on feeling love, when you’re quieted in your heart what you know is love. When you know love, you also feel, but if you make your self dependent on feeling love then you won’t be okay unless you’re in that experience.

Q: Yes, I see that.

John: When you’re honest, not to a thought or a feeling but you’re honest to what is more fundamental than that, when you’re honest to what you quietly know in your heart, that returns you to an openness and a softness of heart. It returns you to a fundamental beingness. When you are open and soft in your heart, unconditionally, you’re being what you really are. There’s no performance to that. When you’re being what you really are, that becomes reflected in your thinking. When you’re being what you really are, you think differently than when you’re not in your heart. When you’re not in your heart, your thinking comes from your past. It comes from how you experience your self, which is invariably going to have to do with lack.

When you’re quieted within your heart and you’re in an openness and a softness of heart, your self becomes the same because that’s what you’re being in the midst of your self. When you’re in your heart while moving in your self, that makes your self heartful. Whatever you are being while in your self, that’s what your self becomes.

What really matters is not your self in how you experience your self, but what you are being in your self. When you’re not in the beingness of love you’ll be in the beingness of lack. When you experience a lack, then you are moving in some way being closed and hard. The more closed you are, the more you’ll use your self to satisfy what’s missing. That kind of movement makes you more empty, or it makes you feel more empty.

Beingness undistorted, so original beingness or authentic beingness, is open and soft. That’s awareness, you, awareness, being open and being soft. When your beingness distorts that’s because you, awareness, in some way are closing and hardening.

Authentic awareness is awareness being true to a beingness that has no distortion in it: the beingness of love.

Q: Thank you.