Q: If love is the answer and we are here to love and that’s what makes us pleasure, then why…

John: Whoops! Oops. (laughter) You were driving along and then you just hit the ditch. Love is the answer, but it isn’t to give you pleasure. It isn’t to make you feel good, it isn’t to give you a nice life, a good life. Love is the answer because there isn’t really anything else. As soon as you make love of use, that’s not love. Then you’re connecting into a feeling of love, an idea of love. That sets you up for a lot of pain.

Q: Okay. Thank you. And if the most logical thing to do is to accept your self fully, then why is it that it’s so easy for me, to, even though I’m doing so much work, to drop into sometime forget my worth?

John: Because you’re not genuinely accepting your self. If you’re genuinely accepting your self, you won’t be accepting your self for any results. You won’t be accepting your self because that will heal something, that will fix something, that will make your self better, that will make you happier, that will get rid of the weight of some of your problems. Genuine self-acceptance isn’t hinged on anything. As soon as you connect it to a reason, a result, a return, it won’t be genuine so it will complicate your self.

The truth of self-acceptance is that regardless of the condition of your self and your life, you are first nurturingly okay with everything as it is; that there’s nothing that needs to change in your self and in your life for you to be okay. That means then that your okayness within is deep and real.

If you have a wonderful day, that’s okay. If you have an awful day, that’s okay. If you’re told you have cancer, that’s okay. Then, what that means is that regardless of what comes and goes in your self, in your life, you are nurturingly okay: that’s you. Nothing can make it worse and nothing can make it better. If things can make you okay, then there are so many other things that will make you not-okay. As soon as you move in that direction you live to escape not-okayness or to fight it, and you live looking for things that will make you more okay. And there’s no end to that. It isn’t real.

All of the things that you believe would make you okay, really won’t. As soon as you have one of them, you’ll want the next one. As soon as you get that one too, you’ll want the next one. If you don’t need any of them and all that remains is that regardless of any of them you are just deeply, quietly, nurturingly okay, and there’s nothing around it, that’s real. It frees you to be genuine in whatever you do because you’re not doing things on the outside for inside results.

When you are already happy without any reason, nothing can make you happier. Try it out for one morning – just half a day – without you connecting your okayness, you being okay, to anything outside of your self. It’s not connected to anything you can do, and you be that inside, in the midst of whatever you do. And see.