Q: Hello John. It’s about a year ago that I came across a pattern of reaction that I probably had for many, many years that was really very disturbing. When people did things that I felt were not agreed upon, people did other things than they told before, I ended up feeling like a victim. I felt betrayed, or not seen, left alone. This was very hurtful, painful, and it still happens. It really hurts and for a few days I’m more sad and I’m not really myself.

John: It will continue to happen until your deeper happiness is no longer kept secure by people keeping their agreements with you. Your deeper happiness isn’t dependent on someone else. When that becomes deeply real to you, you’ll also no longer make agreements to be able to secure your happiness. You may not be consciously doing that, but when you make an agreement with someone, it does secure, in a deeper sense, your control of happiness. It gives you surface control of your happiness, which means that others also need to be controlled by that. They need to keep their agreements with you. If they don’t, then you suffer. 

Your deep and delicate real happiness isn’t dependent on anyone. It isn’t dependent on agreements, on agreements kept. 

Q: I fully agree with you. But still it happens, and I do find my happiness back … but it still hurts.

John: It will hurt because a goodness is compromised. When an agreement is made, a trust is made between two. That trust is a goodness. When the agreement is broken, the trust is broken; the goodness is compromised. When an agreement is broken, when someone breaks an agreement with you, while that hurts, it doesn’t need to do anything beyond that. If a breach of trust goes beyond hurt in you, and if it turns into reaction, that reveals in you a core belief that your happiness is dependent on someone else; a core belief that someone else is responsible for your happiness. 

Any time you go into reaction, any time you go into emotional reaction, that makes manifest a belief in you that isn’t worth keeping. It exposes false belief. When you go into reaction, emotional reaction about something, what actually occurs, that isn’t cognitive, is that you have a key. You have a key to your own freedom and it will cost you what you want. 

When you have an emotional reaction, you’re not getting what you want to have. The emotional reaction is an exercise of control to get what you want to have. Instead of using your power in an exercise to have what you want, which comes from a false belief within, you can use that power to let go of what moves you to reaction, a deeper letting go; a deeper letting go than anything you relate to in your self that is either a promise to your happiness or a threat to your happiness.

Q: What do you mean by a deeper letting go?

John: A letting go of existing on a level that isn’t reaching you. When you go into emotional reaction, you’re exposed in living on a level and holding to a level that is proving to be faulty. Instead of securing that level, you can let go of identifying with that level, and you let go to respond to a deeper level of understanding within, a deeper level of knowing within. 

When you are in an emotional reaction, you are exposed in believing goodness to be where you believe it needs to be. The emotional reaction is an exercise of power to reinstate what you believe to be a goodness that belongs to you. An emotional reaction is like using power to secure the goodness you want; to secure what you perceive is the goodness that you want.  

As soon as you’re in emotional reaction, you’re already self-deluded. When an emotional reaction comes up and you realize you’re fooling your self, your seeing opens. You realize a deeper level, within, that matters more than what you’re holding on the surface. The surface holding loosens and you begin to settle into a real goodness, within, that you don’t need to hold onto.

Q: I normally do succeed in this, but in particular when this happens between people mostly close, then it’s the most heavy, the reaction.

John: As soon as you’re close to someone, there is an implied agreement that you’re going to trust each other and love each other, that you’re going to take care of each other. With that implied agreement, if you’re not owned by goodness within, then you’ll take hold of the goodness that is agreed upon because it has to do with your happiness. 

For your real happiness, you owe everything to what you know the truth of, and no one owes you anything. Then when someone does love you, that love goes all the way in. Their love for you is not personally used by you. It is personally all let in by you, making you vulnerable to its loss.  

Any implied agreement that matters more to you than your own deepest goodness, within, will take you away from your own deepest goodness within. When you’re not coming from your own deepest goodness within, you are compromising the implied agreement and you’re an influence for the other to do the same. You are then a sabotaging influence to love within two. 

You’ll be a sabotaging influence within the love agreement between you and another. You’ll love as long as the other loves, and the other needs to love more than you. 

That which makes a love agreement real is that you are coming from goodness within, and being that goodness within. That goodness in you matters more than any level of love achieved or experienced within a love agreement makes you safe in a love agreement. Someone compromises an agreement or an implied agreement and goodness comes up in you instead of a reaction. It’s a different level of personal reality. Instead of the personal translating into what is owed to you by another, the personal for you means what you belong to. No one fundamentally owes you anything, while you know that you belong to goodness, within.  

A high level of relationship is completely dependent on each involved in the relationship belonging exclusively to goodness, within. Goodness isn’t going to be less goodness when an agreement is broken with goodness. 

Q: How can I be sure to be able to reach this goodness continuously?

John: By loving that it is goodness you belong to and that you love that within all of the little things in your life. You determine the littlest bit within, a quality within, a quality that is not personal that you know is worth everything…whatever that is…and what that is, is really you. And then love belonging to that. Love realizing qualities of real you and then love belonging to those qualities. Then you are being what is really you. 

Reaction exposes a false investment, a false belonging. The goodness of a reaction is that it exposes you. When you love being exposed because within exposure you see more and you see more truly, then you’ll open as soon as you suffer an emotional reaction, within.

If you love being exposed because you belong to goodness, then all exposure leads you to what you belong to. When you have an emotional reaction, you’re exposed; you’re exposed to holding onto a false belief. Then as soon as you’re exposed, as soon as you emotionally react, you open because you realize that you’re holding onto something that you don’t need; that it isn’t what you’re holding onto that you belong to. It’s what you love, within, that you belong to. 

When you love that, then you live realizing that as soon as you have tightness within, there is the gold of what is really you, just beneath the surface. Let go of the surface that you’re emotionally hanging onto and you reside in that gold. 

When you are quieted in your heart, you know that you love softness within. When you live with that being real to you, as soon as you harden, softness is available to you. As soon as you harden, as soon as you are being hard within, there’s so much softness that you get to drop into. As soon as you harden, as soon as you realize you’re hard, you get to drop into your love. When you harden to defend the hardness, you’re lost to your love. You can’t see your own real love. 

Your love points you to your love. When you’re not very far removed from your love, then emotional reaction and hardness will also point you to your love. When it no longer points you to your love but it points you to hold on even harder, then you’re becoming really lost. As soon as you begin to see that, you are quietly pointed to your love again. 

Q: Thank you.