Q: Hi, John. Could you tell me how I can be a most nurturing mother for the baby that is growing in my belly? What are the stages that the baby goes through?

John: Have no personal issues. Have no issues that end up being grounded in negative emotion. Have no more use for a lower level kind of self. Have no use for a little self.

Really like growing up. That orientates the baby in its development to feeling that has to do with finer beingness instead of emotion that has to do with coarser beingness. Its first teaching that it grows up in is your beingness, whether your beingness is coarse or fine. Your example is its first outer teacher. Everything that you haven’t dealt with in your self and in your heart, your baby will be dealing with. It’s all being passed on to your baby as it develops.

This isn’t to put you into any kind of guilt, or any kind of being at a loss. This has you facing, within, your own relationship with knowing and that that relationship affects everything. It affects your self, your person, your life. It affects others, and now you’re going to see it in your own baby.

Q: What you started with about getting grounded in negative emotions, is that the biggest thing? What’s between me and knowing?

John: When you have negative emotion about something, that means that you are drawing conclusions that serve only an emotion and that you’re not drawing conclusions that are serving what you are knowing in your heart. That doesn’t mean that some of your conclusions are not in line with what you are knowing in your heart, but that’s not why you draw the conclusions. You draw the conclusions because of the negative emotion, and then using what you know in your heart to support it.

Q: I think I really see that, as well. How can I change that? How should I relate to it differently?

John: In your heart, treasure growing up, so that growing up in your self is of greater value to you than your self. Then instead of having perspective in your self that is based on the emotion you have in a situation, you’ll have a living perspective in your self that is always more than the sum of all of your emotions.

When your emotions are always secondary to the perspective you have in your self, then your emotions are always free to dissipate. They dissipate because as they come up you draw no conclusions by them. The emotion that comes up without your drawing a conclusion by that emotion has no root, so it is then merely an influence from within that comes and goes, with your actually being the better for it because you didn’t take the emotion at face value. You took what you knew in your heart, while that emotion was there, at face value. So then, for you, the presence of emotion within issues and circumstances has you softening to what you know in your heart and not hardening or closing because of the presence of that emotion. As soon as you harden when there’s negative emotion, you have drawn a conclusion about something of reality just because of your emotion being there.

You may be believing that the conclusion is because of what you’re thinking. If there’s negative emotion there, it isn’t because of the thoughts. It’s because of the emotion, and you’re using your thinking and what you know the truth of in your heart to support the negative emotion. What that does is it has you feeling right about something instead of being clear about something. When you are clear, within, because of what you’re knowing in your heart and because of your thinking, you won’t need to be right. You’re already clear. When you’re being right in your self, you won’t be clear. You’ll claim being clear. The more you hold to being clear while being right, the less clear you’ll be.

When you let go of making issues something personal, then you’ll be free to be openness and softness within an issue, freeing what you know in your heart to come into the issue and freeing your own good thinking to come into the issue. What you’ll be forming in your self is kind judgment instead of coarse and hard judgment.

As soon as you feel reactive about something – anything – it doesn’t matter how wrong the situation is or how wrong the other person is, as soon as you are reactive you’re wrong, so then it doesn’t matter how right you are, you’re wrong. And if you draw conclusions by how right you are, conclusions that come from your emotions, conclusions that serve your little self, you’ll be making your little self stronger. You’ll be strengthening a self orientation, instead of the self orientation opening and softening.

For you to be in what is real, within, every issue and circumstance that comes up for you that touches your self, you need to be a little bit more open and a little bit softer than before. So then, to your experience, the more that you are in life, the lovelier you become.

It’s that loveliness that will be the real parenting to your baby. Your intentions are not the parenting. If you’re not drawing from that loveliness, within, within issues and circumstances, then your loveliness toward the baby will be conditional. You’ll give as much loveliness to the baby as the baby is lovely for you. When that changes, you’ll change.

Right now, as the baby is developing inside of your body, its own beingness is connecting directly with you because its body is in your body. Through that, you come into clarity as to what is worth relating to. Through that connection of being, you have a direct experience of how to be in your issues and your circumstances. You have direct experience in knowing what to come from.

You have it from your baby because your baby hasn’t come into its self yet, so it doesn’t relate to your self. It relates to what you are as a being. The more it develops, the more it will be coming into itself and it will be less of a teacher to you, less of a functional being toward you, and more and more coming into itself, realizing from what you are in your self. The influence is going to shift from the baby to you in the pure, to an influence of what you are toward the baby that is able to be pure.

You have the example from within, and then you have whatever you’ll do with that, whether you match that and really respond to that, turning into that, or whether you hold to the old.

For now you’re being held by the beingness of your baby in your body. The more that the baby develops, the less that will be so, and the more that you are really holding the baby in whatever kind of being you are in your heart and in your self, within your issues and within your circumstances.

For now, you have in your body a gift, a gift to help you in what kind of gift you’ll be. Within all of your issues, within all of your circumstances, within every difficulty, love learning, love growing up. Love the pure without losing it because of being in difficulties, without losing it because of making difficulties something personal. Draw from what is deeper, within, to deal with every difficulty and to deal with every issue that feels to you personal.

Your deeper beingness and your baby’s deeper beingness, your child’s deeper beingness, must, in your living, matter more than its self and your self; must matter more than anyone’s self. Then you’ll be mothering, parenting, right-side up instead of upside down.

Love, in your own living, within every issue and circumstance that comes up for you, love that you’re not teaching your baby, your child, to live upside down.