Q: A few months ago I became extremely sensitive in my body, in my mind, and everything stressed me. I can feel my body so much. I can feel my blood pulsating, every heartbeat. It feels like my body is both expanding and imploding at the same time. In the beginning it made me more present, more knowing. I felt much worse, everything was fine, but I’ve lost that sense of fineness. When I came back this year, it’s much more difficult for me to connect and I want to get back to that fineness that I know is there. When I try to listen to the silence, I can just hear too much noise and when I try to feel the stillness in my body, it’s just vibration or sensation. I can’t connect to it the way I could before.

John: That’s because you’re relating to what you know from within your self. You’re using your self, something like your ground of being. You’re starting from within your self and using your self to relate to what you’ve awakened to instead of relating directly, without the use of your self, to what you’ve awakened to. You’re relating to your self instead of you relating directly to what you know, within, without keeping an eye on your self, without you monitoring your self.

As long as you keep reflecting on your self while you’re relating to what you know, you’re not being what you know. You’re being your self while keeping an eye on what you know. That’s going to be hard on your self, because your self isn’t able to provide for you in the way that you’re depending on it. What you know, within, provides for you, and your self is like a child of yours. You are its parent.

For you to live your awakening and to move your being up into your heart and into your self, you need to be more than your self. You need to raise your self in a similar way that you would raise a child. If you’re reflecting on your self while you’re relating to what you know, that’s like a parent always being tuned-in to how a child thinks and feels. What that tells the child is that its thinking and its feeling is the real perspective. That gives a child too much responsibility on the level of thought and feeling, will and emotion.

Instead of empowering your self by reflecting so much on your self, live reflecting on what you know, regardless of what you’re experiencing in your self, and that what you know the truth of, within, is your stream. That’s what you swim in instead of swimming in your experience. Swimming in your experience makes too much of your self. Swimming in what you know empowers what you know. When you swim in what you know, that establishes your relating in your self. It’s what creates your walk in your self. If your walk in your self comes from your self you’ll be stressing your self, relying on your self for something that it isn’t able to produce.

Let how you are in your self not come from what you’re experiencing. Let it come from what you know in your heart. Then in the midst of whatever you’re experiencing you are soothingly rested in what you know in your heart.

You don’t need to experience life on the grounds of how others experience life. You don’t need to fit into anything. Swim in your stream. That’s your real life, and let your self change to that, instead of you changing to your self by reflecting on it. Instead of your life being about your self that relates to what you know, your life is about this inside stream: how you are this stream, how you move in this stream, how you know the truth within all of the levels of this stream, and how you stream into your self. Your delicateness – the delicateness in your self, in your nervous system, and in your body – all of that sensitivity becomes something like the face of your stream. It’s not stressful. It’s what your sensitivity belongs to.

You awakened and then you drifted back into your self. Return to your awakening and, like a tree, be planted in it so that all of your roots are in what you really are. The rest of the tree grows up into your self. The supply of life to your self is the tree and what it’s rooted in. The tree is you being what you really are; it’s roots into all of your being and its branches out into all of your self.

Then, as you feel your heartbeat, that for you is like a reality pulse. All of your sensitivity is used to register what you’re planted in and how that comes up into your self, and how that changes whatever it changes.

Q: Is there a gentle way to turn back into that knowing, when my self is telling me that really things are not good? Lately, when I’m focusing on this knowing, it’s been a way of escaping from the bad things that I feel.

John: Instead of using your will to tell your self the truth, raising your voice to your self to try to put your self in place, you, awareness, despite what you experience in your self, merge with what you know in your heart. You’re not doing that to alleviate the pressure in your self. If you do this for a result, you do this for your self.

Merge with what you know the truth of in your heart, making what you know your life. Your heart, then freed, comes up into your face, and it’s your heart in your face that tells your self the truth. The presence of what you really are freed up into your face addresses your nervous system. That’s how your self is told the truth.

When you use your will to tell your self the truth, that just strengthen your sense of self. Your will is a part of your self. Whatever you use to tell the truth to your self becomes stronger. If you use your thinking, your feeling, your emotions, your will to tell the truth to your self, you make your self stronger, together with its conditioning.

When you, as awareness, merge with what you know the truth of in your heart, you turn into what you know and what you really are. That, filling your heart because that’s what you’re being in your heart, is what then moves your heart, and as your heart moves, it moves up into your face, into your eyes, and there your self changes.

Your emotions, the emotion in your self, is identified in your face. When your heart comes up into your face, it comes up into this sensitive field of emotion, and instead of emotion moving, it’s your heart that’s moving within the pathways of emotion without emotion moving. For your self, that’s deeply transformative. Your self responds and changes because this completes your self.

You need to go through a weaning. You need to be weaned of your self.

Like others, you have treated your self, in the way that a baby is to its mother’s breast, as though your self is the source of goodness. The powers that you’re accustomed to in your self, the powers of experience, are not your source of goodness. Feeling what you know isn’t the source of goodness. You don’t need to feel goodness for you to be what goodness is. Goodness doesn’t have to do with emotion. It doesn’t have to do with behavior, experience or feeling.

You are goodness. Your relationship to that from within the environment of your self isn’t through experience. It’s through what you know and you being what you know. You being what you know doesn’t need to register in your self as feelings of goodness. You being what you really are doesn’t need to register in your self at all for you to be it.

What you have awakened to is a different way and a different walk than your self is like and what this world is like. Know your way and everything else follows.