Q: Hi John. I would like to talk to you about anxiety, about life – especially about my children’s life and the people I really love and care about. Sometimes I feel I love so much I’m afraid to lose, and I wanted ask about it.

John: You are going to lose everything.

Q: I know, and it’s really scaring me.

John: You need to deeply, sweetly relax, knowing that you are going to lose everything. Then you realize that you are fundamentally okay, within, in losing everything. Love remains and all anxiety is gone. If you are not deeply quieted with the thought of losing something, then you are not free to really have something.

Q: How can I be deeply quieted with even thinking of, let’s say, losing my son, for example?

John: You are going to lose your son. You are going to lose everyone. You are going to lose your life.

Q: That’s okay, in my thoughts, because then I won’t feel any pain.

John: Death isn’t for pain relief. Death is an extremely important, very dear part of life. f dying isn’t present in your heart, you are not living. Don’t wait until you are dying for you to really, freely, see those around you.

Q: Is this something I can do to stop being afraid, really, in life, not just for short moments have a bliss on – just really every day? Is this something I can do?

John: Yes. You can carry, in your day, your death, in your heart, sweetly and warmly.

Q: What is death?

John: That absolutely everything that you can hold onto in your self isn’t actually within your control. Death means that holding doesn’t give you what you think.

When you have any kind of anxiety, that means that you are living in an illusion. When you have anxiety, that means that you’re lying to your self. You’re not being real to your self; you are not telling your self the truth. You have no real reason for anxiety. You do have real reason to be deeply, quietly clear in the midst of anything. When you are that clear, that means you’re home and there’s no circumstance, no experience, that can take you out of being home.

Q: Where did these anxieties come from? I wasn’t born like this. I see my children and they are free. What happened on the way?

John: You believed something that you didn’t know the truth of.

Q: It’s like a bag I’ve carried on my back for so many years and it’s full of pain, and it’s coming up again and again.

John: That’s good.

Q: Why is it good?

John: It’s good that you can’t get away with carrying a bag full of beliefs. Every belief you have is a pain-holder. Every belief you have ensures your pain and you use that pain to make your sense of self important. You use your pain to make your self matter more than you.

Q: So how can I let go of this bag really, truly? Seeing my children growing up and being happy, truly happy, not being afraid: just being happy with what I have, and see and live?

John: That they don’t need to be happy for you to see them. When you can see them without them having to be happy, that lets them rest, be at rest because they’re seen, and they don’t need to be happy for them to be seen. Your children don’t need health or happiness for you to see them. That frees them of their health and their happiness, which lets them be in their health and their happiness. If anything then takes away their health or their happiness, they are not less okay within.

Q: So why am I so afraid of death?

John: It isn’t genuine. It isn’t true that you’re afraid of death. You’re afraid of losing what you hold onto.

Q: How can I stop holding onto everything?

John: By being honest to what you quietly know within, instead of being honest to what you feel. If you’re being honest to what you feel, you’ll remain stuck in your conditioned feeling. You won’t feel because you know the truth; you will feel because of your past. That level of feeling isn’t real.

When you fear, when you have anxiety, that’s because your past governs your feeling. Feeling doesn’t belong to your past. It doesn’t belong to your conditioning. Feeling doesn’t belong to your self. Feeling belongs to what you most deeply, quietly know, within. Feeling belongs to what you really are, but if you’re not being what you really are, you won’t feel it; you’ll feel something else in its place.

Whatever it is that you belong to is what you will feel. Shift what you belong to and the source of feeling, for you, will also shift. If you belong to want and need, you will feel the polarization of everything that you haven’t integrated of like and dislike. If you give your self to what you want and what you need, you are giving feeling away to illusion.

The truth of it is that feeling belongs to what is much deeper, within, than want and need. At very least, feeling belongs to your heart. Feeling doesn’t belong to what you hold onto. Feeling belongs to you being in your heart. There, real feeling begins and it increases only in depth.

Q: How would I know when it’s the deep feeling?

John: When you’re not at home in what you really are, then in your life the feeling of what you really are will be reduced to a subtlety – a feeling that is almost not there. When you are unconditionally at home, within, in what you really are – and being what you really are isn’t dependent on any kind of thinking or feeling, it isn’t dependent on anything that you can seem to control – and if that’s how you live, then being able to feel what you really are won’t be subtle anymore. It won’t be a feeling that’s almost not there. It will be rich and strong.

When you’re in that, as soon as your children see you, all they see in you is what they know. Then when your children see you, what they see is the truth. What they see when they see you is the truth, and they can see that it doesn’t matter how you feel. If you don’t feel well mentally, emotionally or physically, the truth that they see in you doesn’t go away: it doesn’t weaken; it doesn’t get thinner; it doesn’t get covered. They see in you that the truth lives and shines in any kind of weather.

They see in you what life is really all about, but if you’re not home, within, they won’t see that in you. What they’ll see in you is what you make matter, and you’ll be living influencing them to make matter what you make matter. You’ll be forcing your holding onto them. When you’re anxious, you’re not telling them the truth. When you have fear, you’re not telling them the truth.

The only way that you can tell them the truth is by you being it. You’re telling them the truth when they see it in you.

Q: I don’t have place for them when I’m not in my best feeling. How can the truth live there also?

John: That you are quietly at home, within, when you strongly don’t feel okay; that when you strongly don’t feel okay, you don’t need to feel better for you to be okay. You don’t need to feel okay for you to be okay.

Q: How can I cross this bridge? I know I can be okay even when I’m not okay, but in daily life I don’t succeed so much doing it. Sometimes yes, but many times no.

John: Real power is when you don’t use any of your power for you to be okay.

When you have anxiety and fear, that means that you live abusing your power. You’re misusing your power. You’re using power for what power doesn’t belong to. The proof of it is in your anxiety and your fear, in your not-okayness. Real power is when you don’t need to use any of your powers to make you feel better.

When you have any kind of anxiety or fear, that means that it’s only a matter of a little bit of time and you’re going to be angry. You’re going to use your power against your self or against someone. When your children see you anxious, what’s real to them, without understanding it, is that in some way they’re next, so what they’ll do is they’ll try to make you feel better.

As soon as you’re not unconditionally at rest, within, you will give away your power to what you feel, and what you feel will go out of control. You will be living out of control. None of it will heal on its own. None of it will heal over time. It all heals when you live being okay as is, within; that your okayness isn’t dependent on anything. That lets your powers rest. As your powers rest, everything heals.

You can do a little exercise. Use your thinking and your feeling to put you into touch with your death tomorrow. Let it feel real to you that tomorrow you’ll die, and that you won’t tell anyone, and that it is deeply okay, in you, that tomorrow you die. What you’ll then come into is that today, you will finally see. You’ll see your children; you’ll see others. You’ll really see life. All of your holdings are gone and you’ve never needed them.

When it is warmly real to you that tomorrow you die, and it is so deeply okay, all of your real seeing opens. Your being will be fully present in your face and in your eyes. Others might ask you: “Why are you all of a sudden so beautifully there, like never before. Why is there so much love there?”

Any time you have some fear or anxiety, any time you are annoyed or angry, that’s when it becomes real to you that tomorrow you die. It’s not a punishment: it’s a deep, deep, deep, warm okayness. You get all of your seeing back and, in that seeing, live.

Q: Thank you very much.

John: Tomorrow you die. Today you love. That’s your life.