Q: When I was a child my father abused me sexually. When I see him in a family meeting or near my children, I’m still feel that it’s in my body. I still feel that it’s not clean inside of me.
John: It’s because it’s held by you. You took it in and you didn’t let it through, so it stays there in your body, held by you.
There are different levels to the circumstance of your father abusing you, and that’s because, within that circumstance, there are multiple levels of you. If, in the circumstance, you restrict your presence to a surface level of you, without your presence being free to be in, also, all of the other levels of you, then you turn the circumstance into something that is more than what it is. The form of that is that you’ll have a story about that circumstance. When you’re present within a number of levels of you, then the surface level of you is put into the dark, because it’s on the surface level of you that you’re not understanding. On the surface level of you, you don’t have the kind of perspective that can carry and hold your father and you in a circumstance that he’s putting on you. So your experience in that, within the surface level of you, is it’s like you’re being put into a box, and it’s a dark box. Your experience of that is traumatic. But there are other levels of you, deeper levels – levels of you, deep within that cannot relate to being put in the box – deeper levels of you that don’t flow in a way that is less when you’re being abused on the surface, deeper levels of you that when you have presence in them, flow even more when a surface level of you is being abused. That’s what brings perspective into the surface level, or brings love into the surface level, or that fills the box that you’re put into with love, enabling you to see the deeper levels of your father, even though he lives in a box.
When you see those deeper levels in him and you’re present within those same levels in you, then when you see him living in a box, that makes your deeper levels move. Your deeper levels are directly connected to the same levels, right there, in him, even though he’s not living in them. What that generates on the surface level of you is compassion. It’s wrong what he did to you, but that’s only one level. It isn’t wrong what happened to you. If you’re not in both levels at the same time, you will live in a story. You’ll live by his wrongness to you. You’ll lock in the surface trauma, you’ll lock it in to your body and that’s what then defines your self when you’re around him.
When you don’t hold to the trauma, and the trauma is restricted to the surface, it doesn’t go any deeper than the surface. When you’re not holding to the trauma of what happens to you on the surface, the surface, in the trauma, calls upon the deep. So a trauma to the surface draws up the deep, right into the surface. In that way while you’re being traumatized on the surface, you are awakening to the deep. It’s the deep that answers the trauma. If that’s what moves in you, then as soon as you see your father, it’s the deep in you that moves in all of your body – not the trauma, not the holding, not the story, not its mind. When you see your father, it’s love that moves.
Q: I understand. I feel in my body everything that you said. How can I begin, when I see in his eyes the box that you said? What can help me to see my deepness and to go deeper in me?
John: When you see him and you see in his eyes the box, when you see how imprisoned he is, that’s because you’re looking from within your box. The box sees the box. When you have box-vision, shift your level of seeing by shifting your level of being. The deeper the level of being that you’re coming from, the higher the level of seeing, the higher the level of love that gives you perspective. The fact that he is imprisoned doesn’t cancel the real and the deeper levels in him. It just means that while he is imprisoned, he has no presence in his deeper levels. They’re all there – just not lived in. Live in yours and you’ll see his. Then, when you see him, what he sees in your eyes is that you are not imprisoned, enabling him to see that he also doesn’t need to be imprisoned. Your freedom invites his.
For you to move in this, you’re not making right what he did to you. You are making real to him your being and his. You’ll be breaking through into his heart, instead of you being held by his mind. You return to fully being in your heart while you’re with him, and he will see, in your eyes and in your face, the innocence of the girl that he contributed to shutting down. That will take him right back to what he saw in you before he did what he did to you.
Q: I’m afraid of this moment, of the heart to heart.
John: It’s on the level of your personality that you’re afraid, but if you go deeper within and you relax into your heart, there, concerning all of this, you are not afraid. Concerning all of this, you love. You are moved with love. Both levels can be there at the same time. Then it is your heart, and the love that fills it, that frees your personality.
There’s no process to this. You need no therapy; you need no healing. All you need is to be opened into these deeper levels of you. As soon as you’re opened into them, you are those levels, with those levels moving like a fountain, like a fountain in your personality, just like when you were really little. Your father saw it in you. You are free for him to see that again.
You’re nurtured by this, but you’re afraid. You are nurtured by this and you are a little less afraid. You are nurtured by this, and you love.