Q: I’ve suffered from a chronic urinary infection for nearly twenty years and I’ve tried to cure it with different therapies. Now I’m trying to understand if there’s an emotional or mental cause. I want to get over it because it’s ruining my life.
John: Then your sense of life isn’t very deep.
Q: Well, it’s caused me a lot of physical and emotional pain and brought difficulties in relationship with my wife.
John: The emotional pain is because of your emotional investment in the physical pain. So the emotional pain is unnecessary pain. Physical pain is actually an opportunity for you – not for you on the level of your personality, but just you. When you’re quieted within, in any kind of pain, the pain takes you deeper. The pain opens you. As soon as you have an emotional story about the pain, the pain doesn’t take you deeper; it takes you right to the surface where your emotional investment is.
You can do what you can for your body as a kindness to your body, but as soon as you are not okay because of the condition of your body, then you’re not really in your body anymore. Then what you’re in is what you want to be different. As soon as you’re in need of something being different, you’ll be driven to the surface, so you’ll lose your deeper sense of well-being until the problem’s gone.
You can do what you can to address the physical problem, as long as the problem going away has nothing to do with your present okayness and your well-being. But because you have a story around the problem you can’t be okay until the problem’s gone. The problem doesn’t take away your deep okayness. You walk away from your deep okayness, because of your physical problem. You being not okay with the problem doesn’t help the problem. You being not okay with the problem makes you not okay. That adds to the problem. Then you have the problem and you’re fundamentally not okay.
Q: How can you be okay with something that reoccurs and troubles you on an everyday basis?
John: By being okay regardless of what troubles your body. Then you live genuinely being okay, and genuinely and deeply at peace, while your body has a problem. That makes you kindness to your body, but as soon as you’re not okay with the problem with your body you hold against your body its own difficulty. You’re being hard on your body. You’re holding your body responsible for your happiness. You won’t be okay until your body heals. You’re being dependent on your body for something that your body can’t provide for you, so that’s just hard on your body.
The truth of it is that your body is dependent on you. Your body is dependent on what you are being in your body.
Q: I never thought about it this way.
John: The most beautiful, deep influence on your body is you being unconditionally okay in your body.
Q: With the pain?
John: Yes. You’re not waiting for the pain to go so that you can be okay.
Q: No, but I’m waiting for the pain to go so I can suffer less, so won’t have to live in suffering.
John: In the moment of physical suffering, you have no control over that suffering. What you do have control over is whether you’re going to be okay in it now, or not okay in it now. As soon as you’re not okay with that pain in your body now, then right now you’ll use your emotions and thinking to build a story around the pain, and that’s hard on your body. Then your body has two problems instead of one.
Q: I’m trying to have none of them!
John: Then you can remove the biggest problem, which is your not okayness while you’re in your body. Your body is like a child. If your child would be sick and you’re living not okay with your child being sick, you’re adding to the problem that your child experiences in being sick. When you’re not okay with your child being sick, what’s going to take place is that your child will want to be well for you. As soon as you’re fundamentally, quietly, deeply okay that your child is sick, that that is first, then there’s real connectivity with your child and within that real connectivity you do all you can for the sickness of your child. But the child doesn’t need to be well for you to be well. That enables the child to see in you that being sick is first okay.
Q: It brings a lot of fear, fear from worse stuff that can happen from it, or fear in general.
John: First, it doesn’t matter what happens to you. What’s first is that you are okay, as is. Then your okayness isn’t dependent on anything that happens to you. You are okay because that is what’s deepest in you.
There isn’t anything that happens to you that can take that away unless you walk away from that okayness, and you make your sense of okayness dependent on what happens to you. As soon as that’s there, you will live in fear of something that can happen to you.
Q: I understand. Thank you
