Q: Hello. I’d like to talk with you about intimacy. Earlier when we were at lunch, we spoke about being able to be intimate in nature, and I feel like sometimes if I’m at the beach, listening to the ocean or looking at the stars, something in me can relax and I almost lose that ability with people.

John: You don’t lose it, you withdraw it. When you’re out in nature and when nature is suitable to your experience, so when it feels nurturing, you let depths of intimacy come out of you and go way, way out into nature. It changes your whole sense of you and of reality. Then as you turn around and start to leave the location of that release of intimacy, you withdraw your intimacy so that you can feel safe and protected in what you consider to be more of a hostile environment.

The way that you deeply let out your intimacy: you let it come out of you, out of your body into your environment. When you’re in nature, let it stay out. As you turn around and you walk out of nature, out of that location and you change locations, you let that much intimacy stay all out there. So as you come into a different environment, with that much intimacy freely moving outside of your self, your self will feel exceedingly vulnerable.

If you remain in the intimacy, despite the vulnerability, it won’t be painful. But if you withdraw the intimacy, you’ll suffer a split of missing the intimacy, missing the sweetness in the vulnerability while being all back into your self. Being the conditioning and missing the intimacy. It’s the split in that that creates the pain. The pain manifests as a story: the story of what you miss, the story of the split, the story of the difference in you.

If you get all mixed-up, that’s fine. Go back to nature, or meditate again. As soon as your intimacy moves and comes out of you again, so that the intimacy isn’t confined to your experience, it isn’t confined to where you hold it, that it is freely loosed. As soon as you have that, leave your meditation, leave nature, stay that way and be like that in environments that don’t feel like that, at any personal cost and the magicalness of what you really are will magically start to change your self. Instead of just you being like nature, your self will slowly become like nature.

It will be a different kind of experience for others, some others. When they’re with you, they can’t quite figure out why you feel just like nature; that when they’re with you the intimacy of what they really are comes out, just like it does in nature.

Q: I also wanted to ask you about sexual intimacy because it’s been a source of a lot of confusion for me, lately. Maybe it stems from similar places, like letting go of everything I think I know about it.

John: Now when you speak of intimacy, what specifically are you referring to?

Q: Being together. Truly being able to be calm with another person.

John: By being the same intimacy all loosed and let out that you’re able to have in nature, but while you’re with someone, and as there is the movement of that intimacy that registers in your selves and in your bodies, that you remain in the intimacy itself without focusing that in your experience, in your self, in your body and using your self and your body to keep that experience – to have it. To use it to feel so good. Without using it to produce pleasure. Being in the pleasure of it without adding anything to it. Without laying hold of it.

As soon as you start to lay hold of it, the intimacy that is coming out of you is being withdrawn because your attention is going to the experience; you letting your awareness remain in the intimacy and as that produces wonderful experiences, that you don’t transfer your awareness to those experiences and quickly catch them. That you’ll continue letting your awareness in the intimacy regardless of all of the amazing results. Regardless of how that person may turn on you, not be nice to you, close or harden, shift their behaviour, that you will also there let your awareness remain in the intimacy that has all come out. That you won’t withdraw it because of the pain, because of the effect on your self.

You letting out your intimacy is without conditions. You let it out like that because that’s what you really are, regardless of what anyone does with it. Regardless of what anyone does to you – favourable or unfavourable.

Q: I know what you’re talking about.

John: You not only know it, but as you hear it your intimacy comes out to meet it. Your love comes out. As all of this comes out of you, you are in love.

Q: Thank you.