Q: My question is regarding the heart. When sadness or pain comes I go into my heart – it could last for a short time or even days – but when it’s gone I’m back to normal, out of my heart. How can I stay in my heart all the time rather than going in and out?
John: By not needing to feel it. People use pain to feel their heart, and what they’re feeling isn’t really their heart. What they’re feeling is what is deeper in their self, so what they’re feeling is depth. As soon as you start to use pain to feel deeply, you quickly become dependent on it. You become pain-oriented and crisis-oriented. Pain does reveal depth, but when you use the pain to identify with that feeling of depth you’re exploiting pain for a feeling.
Q: That’s very true. This is exactly what’s been happening for a long time and I realize that I don’t need to have a pain to stay in my heart.
John: Once you go down that road of exploiting pain so that you can feel deeply and experience your depth, you become addicted to the experience of pain and the experience of its relief. You’ll cycle between the two.
As you develop the patterning in that, you become unable to be your self without engaging pain or pain relief. It will feel like you’re not your self without that.
Q: When that happens I want to shut everything off and hide where no one can reach me. Then there are some moments when something touches my heart so warmly and I’m reminded of the goodness there within me. I want to be in that all the time.
John: You want to feel it all the time.
Q: Absolutely!
John: You don’t need to feel it for you to be it. Similarly, you don’t need to be healthy for you to eat in a way that is healthy. You’re able to be what you really are without needing to experience it. What you really are isn’t an experience and at the same time, being it in the midst of your self creates the experience of it. The experience isn’t it; it’s the form of what you’re being. You don’t need such form for you to be what creates it.
You don’t need an experience, you don’t need your self, you don’t need any learning, any practice, any technique for you to be what you really are. It requires no time.
If that’s too simple then you’re free to make it as difficult as you like. You can work on it as hard as you like but all the while, as soon as there’s a core honesty, what you come to naturally is that it is instantly baby-simple.
Q: Thank you John. Thank you kindly.
