Q: All my life I am dealing with comparing myself to others and feeling not good enough, not worthy, and it can take me in to a big depression even though I know that I’m doing my best. I’m trying to forgive myself for what I’m not succeeding in, and I’m trying to be soft with myself. It can happen in my work – it can happen anywhere. I compare myself to everyone all the time, and in spite of all the work I was doing with it I’m not moving forward.

John: Live being more honest to your heart than to your self. When you’re comparing your self to others, you’re being honest to what you feel in your self and you’re not being honest to your heart. What you feel in your self is not the same as what you know in your heart. If you consult the feeling, you’ll be the feeling. If you feel like someone is doing better and you’re doing worse, and you appeal to that feeling, you’ll lock into the comparison. But as soon as you have the feeling, that’s your direction to look to your heart, and there you know differently than what you’re feeling.

What you’re accustomed to is that you feel and therefore you think. Your mind is determined by the state of your feeling. If you feel not good, you’ll use your thinking to support what you’re feeling so then you’ll be hard on your self. You need to change the movement of energy. Instead of thinking because you feel, you need to think because you know in your heart.

Q: I think I don’t know how to know in my heart because the feeling is all over. It’s like a black hole.

John: Then you relax, as awareness, in the midst of all of those feelings.

As you relax, you open and soften and you are in your heart, but if you consult what you’re feeling, you’ll think according to what you feel. Instead of consulting what you feel, simply relax despite your feelings. As you relax, you open. The more you open, the more you know. The more you soften, the more you see.

Your inner wellbeing is completely dependent on you opening and softening in your heart. Your inner wellbeing is not dependent on what you’re feeling in your self. Your inner wellbeing isn’t dependent on your thoughts and feelings. It isn’t dependent on what you do in your self: it’s dependent on what you’re being in your heart.

Q: I don’t understand how to relax in that way. Can you teach me what it means?

John: When your body is all tense and tight because you’re emotionally worked up, you know how to relax your body despite your emotions and despite what you’re feeling. You know how to relax your body because you know how, as awareness, to relax. You know how to relax without the use of any form. That’s how you know how to relax your form.

When you say that you don’t know how to relax, within, that’s not true. In you, as awareness, relaxation is fundamentally what you know, but if it’s inconvenient in your experience of your self for you to relax as awareness, it will feel like you don’t know how to relax. If you’re honest to what you know, then you know how to relax, as awareness, even though it’s inconvenient, in your experience, for you to relax.

Q: When you said I know in my body how to relax, it just occurred to me that I know how to go to sleep. It’s the only way I know how to relax my body, but I don’t know how to do it with my heart – to listen to my heart from this point of relaxation. My feelings, my heart, my thoughts are all mixed up. It’s all like a blender.

John: For you it’s blended and it’s mixed because you’re addicted to what you’re experiencing. If you don’t experience relaxation then, to you, you’re not relaxing. You’re not bound to what you’re experiencing.

When you hurt your body badly, what you’ll do with your body is that you’ll tense up because of the pain, because of the injury and because of your emotional response to the injury, but despite everything that you’re experiencing you’re able to completely relax your body regardless of the pain that it’s in, and regardless of the severity of the injury. If you’ve hurt your self badly you are able to lie still, and crunching up your body, rocking back and forth and crying doesn’t help the injury in your body. It adds to the pain. The tensing-up and the scrunching-up and the rocking back and forth and the crying are you trying to create a diversion from the pain, even though it doesn’t work. You make your self busy. You’re able, within the injury, to simply relax your body. It is what is best for your body. How you feel about that doesn’t matter.

When you’re in agreement with what you simply know, you’re able to master your self and your body. You master your self by not giving into its feelings, and giving into your thinking. You respond to what you know in your heart, and what you know in your heart is what governs you concerning what you are in the midst of your self. You being one with what you know is what is master of your self. When you are one with what you think and feel in your self, you make your self master of you.

Q: You say “be with what you know” but I don’t know what I know! I don’t know to recognize this in my self, in my heart. What is what I know?

John: Then instead of trying to find out conceptually what you know in your heart, you go to the closest clarity available to you: what is the closest to you that you do know? And then be that. It doesn’t matter what you don’t know. Go to what you do know. Go to what you do honestly know. Be that and you’ll know more.