Q: I’d like to hear you say more about being gentled and quieted in the midst of anything that arises. That’s what I love more than anything, and yet living as that moment to moment often seems to not be a choice when there’s, for example, a feeling of being attacked by other, a feeling of extreme triggering or fear in the body.

John: Then it’s because you’re invested in not liking being attacked by others. You’re invested in your self through the form of likes and dislikes. When you’re caught in them, that just sweetly exposes your investment.

Q: So there’s the exposure, there’s the feel of whatever that brings, shame or fear or whatever, and what I hear you saying, is making your allegiance home, always.

John: The shame and the fear is a distraction. It’s another investment. It’s a way of referring to your self. It gives your self a negative sense of importance, which is safer than nothing. It feels safer than nothing.

When you have investment in your self you would rather feel negativity and pain, you would rather feel depression than nothing. When you are unconditionally gentled and quieted in your heart, what makes you so at rest within, in the midst of anything, is that it’s real to you that you, first, have need of nothing. You don’t need to feel happy for you to be okay. You don’t need a quiet nervous system for you to be okay. You don’t need nurturing thoughts and feelings for you to be okay. You have need of nothing for you to be okay, because that okayness isn’t a thought, it’s not a feeling, it’s not an emotion, it’s not a physical state. It really has nothing to do with anything that’s yours or any use of anything that’s yours. That okayness really has only to do with you, what you are being, and there isn’t anything that can separate you from that, and you’re able, over any tiny little thing, to leave that.

Q: So I guess a turning toward what is inevitable as far as shame or fear or anger or whatever arises in this. Is there a relating to that as love? Feels like love opens to and allows whatever arises.

John: The difficulty with that is when you connect that to result. Love has no connection to results. When you’re being that unconditionally in your self, that is a catalyst to real results. It’s transformative, but not if you need it.

Q: Yeah, so the question comes, how to stay as that? It just seems like there isn’t a choice when there’s movement away from this that I am.

John: When there seems to be no choice and you’re taken in a pattern, that reveals the choice you’ve made and that you continue your investment in it, so your experience is that you have no choice in it.

Whatever it is that fills your heart is what’s going to matter to you, and it’s only a profound honesty that shifts that. When you try to shift that, you complicate it. When you become honest to what matters more than what you’re experiencing, you naturally shift into being what you really are and there isn’t anything that prevents that.

Q: It sounds like a radical honesty in every moment of admitting what I love the most, with experience being the mirror of that.

John: Yes. What that’s like in practice is that you live being more honest to your self than to your personality, and that you’re more honest to your heart than to your self, and that you are even more honest to what you quietly know in your heart than you are to your own heart. That takes you much deeper within than personal honesty. It’s a level of honesty that takes you right into being what you really are.