Q: I have quite a lot of responsibilities when I’m working in the world and I notice that I can become very heavy with those responsibilities, and my yearning is to dance much more lightly with it, because when I become heavy I feel stress in my body and I lose my presence and I lose my connection with the people that I love.

John: Then don’t hold them tightly. You will hold to what you have your meaning from. What you hold to and have your meaning from is what your self is then of. You’ll make your self of that, even though it isn’t that your self belongs to. Your self won’t shift in what it belongs to without you shifting in what you belong to. That’s a fundamental change in your self that comes from a fundamental change in you.

Whatever is most delicate in you needs to have you. For you, as awareness, that’s a different orientation. As awareness, you’ll be governed by most delicate meaning, within, that you’re knowing, instead of being governed by meaning that you’re holding in your self. As awareness, you need to be mastered by the littlest, within, and not by the bigness of what you experience in your self in your life.

Q: When I feel the stress or the tension entering my body, it feels like it’s an old habit or pattern but I don’t find a way of stopping that.

John: For you to stop that you would need to stop taking to heart everything that you’re in the habit of taking to heart. You take to heart, as a habit in your self, meaning that is superficial instead of taking to heart meaning that is deepest, unseen, and most delicate. Whatever you take to heart is what governs you. Take to heart everything superficial and it’s that level of your life which governs you. It doesn’t matter what you believe in your mind. It’s what you take to heart that you are actually saying is most real. What you abstract in your thinking that is most real isn’t, for you, what is most real.

You’re stressed with what fills your heart. What you hold to in your heart you’ll need to protect and keep together. What you have from holding, you’ll maintain with the same holding. When you take to heart that, within, which needs no holding together, you’ll not need to hold together, you’ll not be stressed about. Your being stressed reveals what your heart is planted in. What you take to heart is what your heart is planted in. You are more upside-down than what you think.

What is most delicate, within, most out of sight, is what needs to have your feeling and your thinking. That has you, from within the deepest, being right side up. For you, as awareness, to become fundamentally reoriented is a change so subtle and yet so great that everything in your self and in your life would change. Everything that you hold and that you have held together won’t hold any more.

Instead of holding, you need belonging. The more you hold, the more stressed you’ll be because you’re having to maintain what you don’t actually belong to … when you are belonging to most delicate meaning, within, meaning not coming from your self, meaning that is the same as what your being comes from. You need to belong to what you first come from, not belonging to what you’re holding anymore.

Your whole floor needs to give way to deep, most subtle ground, within, that you can’t see. Your ground needs to be the same as what you actually come from, instead of your ground being everything that you’re accustomed to holding together.

Q: And where do I come from?

John: What you are holding: meaning. The more you hold meaning, the less you have meaning. When it’s meaning, most delicate meaning, within, that you’re coming from you’ll be what meaning is instead of holding meaning. When you hold meaning, it will be in its dense form. When you come from what meaning is, you’ll have no need to hold it because it is what you are. When you’re coming from most delicate meaning, within, you find it everywhere. If you’re holding it, that means that you’re not coming from it.

You know how to meet as a being, and it isn’t what has you. That makes you meeting as a being a category that’s in your self – something of use to you – instead of it being what you actually live by.