Q: My heart, in a way, is still frozen and when that part gets touched I don’t feel anything. It really hinders me to feel the depth of my own being. It has to do with letting affection come in. I’ve made very early a decision that it is not safe to love.

John: It isn’t in your heart. It is in your self. In your self it’s a structure created by judgments that have been made. A judgment is a conclusion drawn in your thinking and empowered with your emotions, a conclusion that you didn’t know the truth of and a conclusion that suited what you felt in your self.

When something affects your self, it’s easy to then think because you feel. In that way, it’s easy to use your mind to form a mental construct that makes sense of what you’re feeling, and then to use another mental construct added on top of the first to alleviate your self of what you’re feeling and of the vulnerability that’s in the feeling. And then emotion is added to that construct. The emotion is the intense feeling that the construct will save you the next time; that you need a construct in place. You need the construct to protect your self.

Once this is formed in your self, which happens quickly, the more intense the emotion around the mental construct, the stronger the mechanism that’s put in place in your self. It is the emotion which locks it in, not the thought itself.

Q: Is it correct to say that over the years it’s adding up?

John: Yes. Each time you use the mechanism that’s in place and the way that that mechanism is structured in your self, you keep adding to it so it becomes increasingly more sophisticated. It becomes polished in its application. In that way, on an emotional level, each time you use the mechanism you perfect it more and it works better and better and better and better.

Q: If it really would work better, why would I still want to use it? Because it’s exhausting.

John: It’s exhausting and it does protect your self. It isn’t a real protection. Reactivity protects your self and reactivity is exhausting. Anything constructed that isn’t real, that isn’t just like your own being, is exhausting to maintain. It maintains a self that isn’t like your own being and, when you begin to surrender from it, you’ll be passing through the levels of that mechanism. Each level that you surrender through, there’s another level beneath it which will exercise a questioning in you: “Are you sure you want to take apart the next level?”

When the surrender is real, you pass through the next level of that mechanism and then you encounter the next level again, until you arrive at where you first constructed the mechanism. When that is surrendered through, then it’s gone.

You don’t need to keep track of all of this. The deconstruction of a mechanism takes place when something of life triggers the mechanism. Then it comes up to the surface of your self. When you are in openness and softness of heart without having to be mindful of what kind of mechanism you’re deconstructing, without having to notice what you’re moving through, the openness and the softness naturally moves through it. It doesn’t require a work.

The mechanism will keep coming up as though you haven’t dealt with it. It doesn’t matter. Openness and softness moves through the mechanism. Openness and softness of heart keeps dissolving everything it encounters of mechanisms in your self. You don’t need to keep track of them. There isn’t anything to work on. Anything that you deal with in your self when you encounter something of your self in the same way that your being is, your self opens. It doesn’t matter how deeply rooted the construct is. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve involved your self in it. When beingness meets it, then in some way that construct responds. It responds to the beingness that you’re in, and that beingness enters the construct. The construct cannot survive that beingness. It can’t hold.

If you love openness and softness of heart enough to live it, you don’t need to remember any of this. Your life is made of your orientation. You don’t need to work hard at any of this. The accomplishment of change in its authenticity is from within the simplest fundamental shift of orientation. Instead of you relating to your self, the shift is in you relating to the simplest beingness that you know in your heart.

Your self with all of its structures, constructs and mechanisms, including everything in your subconscious self, cannot sustain your fundamental shift of orientation as awareness. Your self, in all of its aspects, unlocks, unfolds and becomes like what you are being in your heart. Your self changes and transforms. Instead of having a self of patterned holding, you have a self of open and soft change.

With that transformation, your self is increasingly made no longer for survival but for love. Love survives. Love survives everything.

Q: It’s like seeing the universe through your eyes.

John: Your seeing is different. What matters is what you know in your seeing. There is more to see and there is more to know in it.

Q: Could you take me with you?

John: I’m not taking you along. You’re coming along.