Q: I’m feeling very vulnerable and without any defenses. As a result of a massage I had, deep and difficult fixations and defenses and hurt and shame, assumptions I’d believed in my childhood, they seemed to be coming uncovered. Since then, internally, there feels like a disintegration of all the stories I’ve been telling about my self. The effect of this has been instability in my relationship with reality. I have no fixed perception of who I am. This morning there was a real sense of internal agony and pain. Since then I’ve been feeling as if something is melting and I really don’t know what to do with it. How do I function through all this?

John: Very sweetly, not quite as well. It makes your self slightly less functional and definitely more adorable. The functionality comes back, but it comes back differently as the crust cracks up. What is deeper within comes into all of the little spaces, all of the cracks. It’s a different substance than the substance of the surface. It’s a substance of being that takes form on the surface, a substance of being that turns into surface form. Surface form is functional whether it’s all held together and not real, or whether it comes from your being, all real. The difference in the functionality is that the one is just function and the other is meaning – pure meaning – functioning: a rich, golden functioning.

Q: Which part of me is dealing with this pain, negativity and hopelessness, and sense of no meaning, darkness. What do I do with all that’s coming up?

John: What deals with that is a gentled and a quieted heart.

Q: I don’t feel I’ve any defenses at all. None left.

John: How lovely. And that’s there because you let that happen. You kept opening until finally the ice-covered river broke open and instead of it all being solid and secure, it’s all in pieces. That also means that all of the water that was beneath the ice is all showing. It’s all available. It’s all available to the surface. The water is your heart and everything deeper. All of your subconsciousness coming up is a result of the ice breaking. It all has to do with your insecurities, all of your thoughts and feelings about the ice not holding together. So each piece of ice separate from the other draws up your fears, your anxieties, your dread.

Q: When they come up what do you do with them?

John: You be the same that allowed all of the ice to break up. What breaks it up takes care of all of the pieces. It isn’t a functionality that takes care. It’s beingness that takes care and it transforms your functionality into a multi-levelled functionality.

Q: Is this a process which happens step by step?

John: As you walk open-hearted, step by step, yes. But there isn’t a process for you to engage in it. The process is a process of change. It isn’t a process in something that you do. You didn’t break the ice in pieces; you softened and softened until the ice couldn’t hold together anymore. The ice went through its own process because of you, within, warming up, you softening. Your internal climate changed, so the ice, all in one, couldn’t hold together anymore and eventually broke up and turned into an ice-floe: all pieces. What takes care of all of that is the same internal climate that you shifted into.

When you experience your subconsciousness coming up, all of the darkness, all of the fixations, everything that you’ve put together since you were little, as that comes up you just very quietly, within, add a tiny little bit of warmth. It’s your warmth. It’s your warm okayness within, your warm openness and softness. The fixations, like the ice, on their own in the midst of a climate change of warmth isn’t going to hold. Your internal climate change is going to permeate all your form.

Q: Climate change transforms the energy of pain or changes it, or moves it into a different place?

John: The experience of pain, when you are being not the pain but you are being the openness and the softness of heart, allows the depth of the experience of pain to access the same depth as your openness. It takes your openness deeper. The pain speaks to you, openness and softness of heart. When the pain is deeper than your own openness, as the pain speaks to you, openness, you are invited from within your own openness to open even more. For openness and softness of heart the pain is an accelerant. It’s not a hindrance. It’s not a block. It’s not a problem. It’s not anything that needs to be addressed.

Pain accelerates what your orientation is. When you, awareness, are oriented to your self, so when your awareness is filled with your self, pain is going to push you even deeper into that orientation. Whatever it is that you’re being, pain pushes you further. If you’re being openness and softness of heart – that’s your orientation – pain pushes you in even further. Pain isn’t a respecter of orientation. Pain simply pushes.

Q: Does anger do the same? Does anger push as well?

John: Anger is pressure that is particularly confined to your feeling of lack of control right where you think and feel you need so much control. When you’re in the movement of doing and you lack control, and you continue to be pressured to control, to move in a way that has no lack, you can’t overcome the lack. You can direct your power to anger, which gives you a sense, an experience, of being in control: all of a sudden you are so powerful. If something isn’t working all you need to do to gain control over what’s not working is get angry and break it. The results are not very good, but in the present there is a satisfaction in your self of regaining control.

Q: And how does one relinquish anger?

John: It’s generated by you, but it takes form in your body and in your nervous system so then when a situation comes up where you have, in practice, initiated new kinds of anger, you’re improving your control program when you feel out of control. All of that becomes subconsciously alive in your nervous system. It’s always ready to perform. What you install in the present in your conscious self, what you put together of a judgment, what you put together of a closed and a hard movement, becomes permanently installed in your subconsciousness. It keeps performing for you. It keeps doing to your conscious self what you have put together. You created it; it keeps working.

As your subconsciousness comes up into your conscious self its power is dependent on you, in some way, closing and hardening. When anger comes up, don’t address the anger. Don’t try to deal with it. Don’t try to suppress it because of the damage it causes. Don’t feel sorry for it. Don’t try and give it love. Don’t use any technique or practice on your anger. All you do in the midst of the anger coming up is you open and soften in your heart. That’s what’s natural to what is really you.

As you open and soften and your subconsciousness comes up, which is full of stored up energy that you invested in your self in the past, that energy, like a battery, is going to use itself up. It doesn’t matter how long that takes. All that matters is that you are not giving it more energy. Any attention you give to the pattern: if you try to give the pattern love and light, you make the pattern something. It has your attention. Your attention doesn’t belong to your patterns. Your attention belongs to you and everything that is real in you.

Q: The first reaction is to give that pattern attention, so to do the opposite, just to…

John: It isn’t about doing the opposite. If you do the opposite of giving the pattern, then what you’re doing is you’re withholding attention from the pattern. That empowers it, so you don’t turn away from the pattern. You don’t remove your attention from the pattern. You don’t turn your back on the pattern. While the pattern is there, in your experience, flaring up and inflaming your self in whatever way it does, your attention goes directly into what is real in you. You’re not removing attention from a pattern: you’re giving attention to what’s real in you. As soon as you face what is real in you, you love.

When you’re in a pattern, when a fixation comes up from your subconsciousness, what you need to do is breathe. Specifically, breathe what you really are. You’re not breathing coping. You’re not breathing help for something. You’re not breathing to get through it. You’re not breathing for any kind of result or change. When you breathe what you really are then you are being what you really are. When you breathe what you know within is real, you are being real. If you try to be real, what you’re breathing is effort. When you breathe trying to be real, or trying anything, you are breathing lack. What you’re breathing is that you’re not being real. While you feel so dreadfully, painfully not real, deeply, quietly, directly, breathe what is real. That’s your life.

Q: You’re settling into something which is formless?

John: Just like you settling into sleep. As you do, all of your forms dissipate.

Q: A lot of things arise in my head, now, but I’m not going to go into those because there’s something so deeply nourishing in what you’re saying to me and I want to hold it in my heart because the mind takes over.

John: It’s completely fine if your mind takes over. While your mind is taking over, breathe what you know is real. Look into your love and breathe it.

Q: You said to somebody “you don’t exist but you are in existence”. That came into me in such a deep way.

John: Everything is just like that. All of existence doesn’t exist because of anything in existence. Existence didn’t start with existence. Existence is a manifestation of what precedes all of existence.

Q: So when you say to breathe, that’s incredibly powerful.

John: The breathing is natural. When you are all about your patterns you are breathing. You are always breathing. You can’t stop breathing. What matters is what are you breathing? That’s everything. Breathing is your movement, your movement as awareness. The breathing is you, awareness, believing. You, awareness, taking in, absorbing, drawing in. As awareness, you are incapable of not believing. To be aware is to believe. What matters then is what you are believing. When you believe the truth you know, when your belief is based directly on knowing, then as awareness what you are being is real. The movement of that realness is love, but when as awareness you believe something that you don’t know the truth of, because you’re in a body and in a self, that belief makes real in your body what you, awareness, are believing. This isn’t in reference to what you believe of what you think. It isn’t about forming your reality with how you think. This is way deeper than thought. Thought is a part of your existence. It belongs to the level of your self. Belief in you as awareness comes from what you face. When you face what you know, it’s because that’s what you’re absorbing. That’s what you’re believing. That’s what you belong to. That’s what you are. When you face the truth within, that’s what you’ll be manifesting.

When you face something that you don’t know the truth of within, that’s what you’re becoming. That’s what you’re creating. That’s what you’re forming and that’s what holds you to the same and it’s all in your body. The wonder of that power in how that works in your self, your brain, your nervous system, your body, is that it all originates in truth and all of those powers belong to your being so it doesn’t matter what kind of genetics you have, what kind of body you have, what patterning, what upbringing. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done to your self. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve ruined your self. None of that matters. All that matters is what are you, awareness, facing that you know the truth of? As soon as what you’re facing shifts, all of creation connected to your forms begins to shift. That fundamental shifting of form – transformation – occurs from the tiniest, tiniest, most subtle, formless shift: you, awareness, facing you and not your forms, regardless of what they feel like, regardless of how they move because of how you’ve moved them.

With that fundamental shift of awareness your entire destiny of form is changed and it’s only a matter of a little bit of time and you’ll see. Power is in that most subtle shift. The power is not in anything you can do.

Q: Just that shift of awareness.

John: Yes.

Q: Facing.

John: That’s what shifted the climate of your interior that resulted in your ice breaking- up. You didn’t break the ice.

Q: Thank you. You bring clarity and love.

John: I bring you you, and you are believing you.