Q: I’ve been in relationship for almost twenty years, and in all these years of living next to each other we don’t have togetherness; we can’t connect and communicate. It’s as if we speak different languages. Something in me says this part of my life is over, but I also wonder if I’m creating the problem and don’t give him a chance to understand me.
John: He doesn’t need to understand you. To be in a real relationship the two of you only need to be together.
Q: Why hasn’t it ever happened?
John: Because you’re looking for more than that. You’re looking for too much.
Q: Why too much?
John: You’re looking for the bakery, so then you can’t see the bread that’s there. Or you’re looking for the bread but you can’t see all of the crumbs that are there. Any time you’re looking for more than what is there, you’ll be blind to what is really there.
When you’re just delicately being there with him, or even just delicately being toward him, as you are settled in that you start to see differently. You start to see in him what is so touching for you to see in him, and then when you come into little bits of that, don’t make any of that about your self: how to have more of that, or how to communicate to him what you see.
Q: I listen to you but don’t understand anything. Why does nothing touch me? Even you don’t understand me!
John: That’s how projection works.
The way that projection works is that whatever it is that you’re coming from, what you at present are relating from is what you’ll see through. When you’re coming from the belief that nobody really sees you and understands you, then that’s what you’ll find and that’s what you’ll see.
If that core belief wouldn’t be there, you would see the subtleties in people’s faces and in their eyes of where you can see that they understand you.
Q: Maybe it’s not that you don’t understand me. It’s with all people. I’m not feeling that I have a real connection with people.
John: Then you’re also not giving to others, not freely giving to others what you’re looking for from others.
If you find that you’re not really connecting to anyone, then, without looking for results, start giving tiny little things to people: a look without needing anything back, a word without needing anything back.
Enjoy the connectivity and the goodness, the flow of giving tiny little things to people – so little that most won’t notice.
Q: I think that I do that a lot with people.
John: If it’s genuine, a garden in you will grow.
