Q: I’d like to ask you about my relationship with my daughter. I’d like to ask you what it is that I need to do.

John: How old is she?

Q: She’s seven. I’d like to ask you about what it is she needs from me in the connection we have together, in particular when she’s having big feelings and I’m having a reaction to her feelings.

John: Clean, clear, pure you … without any filters or boundaries.

She reads you. She doesn’t understand how she reads you. She doesn’t even necessarily understand that she reads you. She reads you, reads you, and reads you. She needs you because she is dependent on everything that you have. Because she’s dependent on what you have, she easily focuses on what you have and she uses what you have to focus on what she has, but there’s really nothing more disturbing to her than losing the most delicate connection with you.

When you become distracted by what you have and what she has, like a dog she will be scratching at your door. If she loses that really delicate connection to you, she becomes insecure in herself. As long as she is directly knowing you and directly being with you, she’s realizing, through the nurture of that, what she is. She doesn’t really want what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. She wants you.

Q: Can you talk more about the purpose of this connection?

John: She intuits and knows what she really is and she doesn’t understand what she knows. When she is directly knowing you, she’s coming into that understanding. The more that she’s knowing you, through your forms and despite her forms, the more she’s realizing what she really is.

You can tell her what she really is but your words don’t mean nearly as much to her as you mean to her. When you speak to her, she isn’t really listening to what you’re saying. When you’re speaking to her, you have her attention; she’s reading you. It matters much more what you’re coming from, within, than what you’re saying to her. If you’re really clear in what you’re coming from within: that what you’re coming from is any tiny little bit within that is deeper than what your self is and, from within that, you know her and you see her, she then experiences that her reading of you is right. When you are then as clear in your self in what you say as you are clearly coming from what’s deeper, knowing her and seeing her, then, to her, your words are like you. Then she begins to really listen to your words because she reads how deeply you really are in your words. That enables her intellect to develop – not on its own, but from within the context of her knowing you, seeing you, reading you, and that you are clearly in your words.

In that way you are exercising meaning directly: directly to her and into her intellect. Her intellect as it develops becomes attuned to her own capacity of knowing and reading you. Everything that she develops into: feeling, emotion, will, thinking, her intellect, her capacity to relate in her self and as a person all have a deeper and a greater context. That deeper and greater context, at first, is you: not your self, not your person, not your ability, not anything that you do for her, but you.

As she develops in her self and in her person and the connection with you is direct, she will continue to come from her own being in reading yours, and she’ll continue to come from her own heart in reading yours, and she’ll continue to come from the power that she realizes and experiences in her self and as a self because she’s reading yours. She’s reading you and what you do with your powers, how you move in your self. She’s reading you in what you do with power because she’s trying to sort out the power that she’s coming into in her self.

When she becomes frustrated or angry, upset, overtired and overworked, when she becomes stressed, she’s experiencing the un-integrated aspects of the powers in her self and she makes her self dependent on you. When she’s having a difficult time she’s really needing you to be what you really are. She’ll direct her power against herself and she’ll direct her power against you. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing. She doesn’t understand that she’s trying to sort out what all of this power is.

When she becomes frustrated with it, what she knows is you so she’ll throw her power at you. She’s wanting you to do something with that power so that she can realize what this power is all about. She’s needing you to come back to her, with you using your power in your self, without you being mixed up in it. She needs you to remain clearly and purely you, engaging your self at whatever level of development your self is in, in dealing with hers. When she throws her power at you, she’s needing you and she’s also needing a power answer. When she tries to sort out her self and her power, it’s an uncomfortable experience for her because she doesn’t understand yet what all of the power in her self is all about.

If you’re not being really clear in what you are coming from without any use of your self, she reads that you are then, in some way, doing what she’s doing and that also frustrates her. When you are being just clear, clear in what you really are, then she knows in being with you what she really is, and in some way she experiences that, giving her real ground within what she experiences of her self and the power in her self that she hasn’t yet come to know how to deal with, and what it all means.

She wants to learn. She loves learning and learning is easily frustrating. Learning puts her into power that she hasn’t integrated yet. In coming into her self, in coming into the powers that she has in her self, she’s always in a stretch. When she’s clearly connected with you, then she experiences what matters more than what she’s learning in her self and what matters more than the stretch. In this way, she grows up realizing a context in you, and therefore a context in her, that matters more than all of the learning.

It is this context, this living, nurturing, direct context that then becomes her ground, instead of her self and the power that she’s coming into being her ground. She grows up with a stability and a clarity that she understands in her body, that isn’t based on what is seen, what is seen in her self. It’s all based on what she knows in you and what she knows in what she is. Her comforts and her discomforts then don’t distract her. She’s grounded in what’s deeper.

For you to really parent her is for you to be more of a self to her than a person, and more of a heart to her than a self, and more of a being to her than a heart, enabling her to realize all of the beautiful differences of these levels in her, how they work, and how each level is completely dependent on the reality that is just deeper.

When you’re being with her, it’s sort of like you’re playing the piano to her. It’s how she learns to do the same. In playing the piano to her, in you moving through all of your forms to her, use every key available. Play every key on the piano and play in a way that reaches her. If the way that you play the piano to her doesn’t reach her, then you are losing direct connection with her. What you play to her needs to reach her and it needs to make sense to her. Love making sense to her.