Q: I feel that it’s a very strong responsibility to bring children to this world and I think what I need here is to know a little more about what it takes. I know that I can be a kind of parental authority that can give some kind of safe frame of life, but I also feel very vulnerable about power that could harm the openness and the loving feeling that we all felt once, and that children have a need for. I can see the children being in a situation where they have to be very strong, loving themselves and seeing themselves. How do you respond to this?

John: All that they are really watching with you is your relationship with what you know. Without thinking it and understanding it, that’s what they’re connecting to you, in you, all the time, because that is also all that they have. All they really have is what they know. They have that more than they have you. Real parenting is in you being the same as what they really have. They really have only what they know, and you’re able to be true form of that outside of them.

When you are being all that you know in your heart, you have their most profound attention. They won’t want to miss anything that you are doing or saying. When you are being all that you know in your heart, they instinctively lock into your whole interior. Everything that you are being then, within all of your interior, is everything that they know the truth of. They won’t mind your mistakes or your dysfunctionality and, true to what they know, they’ll want to be just like you: not like your self, not like your life, just like you.

Q: This question came from feeling that my inner child is very weak. So, it’s about love for one’s self and also letting go of control. How we can deal with this control when it comes to bringing up children, and also having this contact to your own inner child?

John: You can’t be in that without you returning to your first self. Your first self is like what you were when you were really little. When you’re in your first self, your heart has access into all of your self and it has all of your self through which to express. When you were really little, you didn’t realize that that’s what you were being and doing. You didn’t realize it, because it was natural to you.

The qualities in them that you find adorable, the qualities in them that move your heart, are the qualities in you that you belong to. You’ve left those qualities but you’re still sensitive to them. When you see them in someone else, you open and you respond. As soon as you see such a quality in someone else, belong to that in you. You being that quality is true to your heart, it’s true to what you know in your heart, and you being that quality matters more than what is in your life.

The real meaning of life comes from you being these qualities, being these qualities in your life. You see them in your children and what you see in them, they’re looking for in you. If they can’t find it in you, alive in you, you’re teaching them to not be those qualities. It doesn’t matter what you think and it doesn’t matter what you say. What you are being is what you’re teaching them.

Q: So I should look at them and let them teach me to find the qualities.

John: As soon as you see those qualities, completely turn into them. All of the meaning that you give to your life and to the things in your life belongs to you being these qualities. Then you, this real you, as you comprehend in these qualities, has a life. It has space and time to move in your life. Everything that you make more important than that, you fool your self.

Q: It seems like it’s very hard to open that.

John: What makes it difficult for you is that you’ve invested in your self. Your life has become about your self. For you to be these qualities that you most deeply know the truth of, the power that you’ve invested in your life and in your self needs to open and return to you being these qualities. You being these qualities that you know the truth of, you being just like your own being, will cost you all of your investments.

Q: That seems like a very big shift: that everything I’ve invested I should re-invest.

John: In what you know in your heart matters more than your life and what’s in your life.

Q: What I feel is like there’s this big stone that I have to remove from my heart, somehow.

John: Yes. You put the stone there. You put it there to cover what you know so that you can have a semblance of ease in pursuing what you want and need in your life.

Q: And what is the most important thing in order to have the courage to remove that, the power?

John: The most obvious is anything in your circumstances, anything in your life that touches a negative emotion in you, anything that touches disturbance in you, anything that frustrates you or annoys you. Those are all little reservoirs of power. They’re holdings in your self. They’re the investments. When you move in the frustration or the annoyance, the disturbance, you confirm your investment by making it matter in the way that it feels, and you’ll justify your self. You’ll use your thinking to support what you’re feeling.

When these little provocations come up, you experience your power. You experience it through your own holding. Instead of insisting on your self when you experience the holding, love your heart by pouring the power that’s in the holding, pouring the power that’s in the investment. Give it all back to your heart, and in whichever way that opens you and changes you, in that way, live. That’s real parenting.

Your children see you. They see how you move in a world and in a society that is not like your own being. It’s like your self, but it’s not like your own being. Your children will see you be like your own being; that it is your being that fills your heart and not your self and your life, and that your being-filled heart fills all of your self and moves freely in your life. They see that you’re being this at any expense to your self and to your life, at any expense to something in your life. They live seeing what you really are, flourishing.

Then when you speak, in whatever you say to them, you’re like a real being that talks. When you speak, you are a living match to what’s deepest in them. When you speak, that matters more to them than what’s occurring in themselves.

When you’re being this, what your own children know of you and experience of you and see in you is that you are way more than a mother. Your children would rather have your being, in form, than their mother. Give them what they already know but don’t understand yet.

Q: I feel it as a big relief to let go of just being a mother, and to entrance a much bigger, wider space or consciousness.

John: When you’re being a mother, you make them deal with a sedative.

Q: I’m not sure what it means, a ‘sedative?’

John: It’s like a sleeping pill. If they want their mother, you’ve trained them that way. If they want their mother, they’re blind to you. What they most deeply want is you, from the innermost outwards; they want all of it, all of you. They want to see all of you in the details. That makes it very inviting for them to be all that they really are, within the details, within the little things. Children love the little things. They flourish in the little things. You flourish in the little things.

When you are being from your innermost outwards, when you are being just like your own being in the details in your self and in your life, their experience of you is like Christmas all the time.

Q: Thank you so much.