Q: Within my professional life I always take the professional decisions of being in very meaningful places and doing things that I find meaningful, as if I have to justify my existence somehow, as if I lack self compassion to myself, just to see and be. I always have to find a bigger meaning, deeper meaning to justify it. So how do I check with myself if it’s coming from a clean, honest and right place within?

John: Whatever it is you do, and it really doesn’t make a difference – it makes so little difference what you do – but in whatever it is you do, do it for what is a little bit deeper than what you’re used to. So it is the doing that feeds what is a little bit deeper in you. What you’re used to is using what you do to feed your experience, instead of what is just beneath it. When you do to feed your own experience, your doing makes much of your self. Make much of what is just beneath your experience, just beneath the surface. In that, you come into your real life.

Q: Why is it that I need to do something meaningful in order to justify myself? It’s supposed to be enough just being, but I feel if I don’t do that..

John: It’s because you’re addicted to experiencing your self. You’re addicted to your self. You do what you do to give a sense of importance to your self. As soon as the pattern of that is in place, that pattern is like a mechanism and it moves you, so what may have been, at one time, conscious, becomes unconscious. If you draw a conclusion without knowing the truth of that conclusion, that installs a belief in your self. It’s consciously concluded and consciously installed. It’s the emotion behind it that installs it. Once installed, it will run that aspect of your self for the rest of your life.

What ends that is that while that subconscious mechanism moves your self, which causes a closing, then in the midst of that closing you unconditionally open, and you open at personal cost to your self. It will cost you what you’re holding onto, but as you open into that, a belief that has been controlling your self starts to loosen and come undone.

Open to letting your most quiet deeper life, that is all within, matter more to you than your personal life and your professional life. Live the deeper life at any personal cost and at any professional cost.

Q: These things are so embedded in each other, I feel it’s a lot of work to realize, to separate.

John: It’s the opening that does it. Opening is natural to you and easy for you as long as you don’t mind the personal cost. That then establishes consciously in you, and in your self, that the deeper life within matters more to you than your personal life and your professional life. The deeper life, as you’re given to it, will do with your personal life and your professional life what you’ve never been able to do. It will turn both into a depth of goodness.

Q: It sounds very easy: just open up. But now start doing it. Now it’s time to work, for me.

John: It’s work if you use your self, your mind, your emotions and your will for you to open. Whatever you use to open, you make stronger. If you use your self to open, you make your self stronger. If you use what you quietly know in your heart to open, you make the deep inner knowledge stronger.

Open without using what you’re used to and this is all easy. Stay with it and it will flow in you like a river.