Q: I really loved what you said about love, before being a person or being a mother.
John: You’re better off being in and coming from deeper womanness, just clearly, than being a mother or a wife. Your deeper womanness offers a lot more to what mothering is, and to your relationship, than what you are on the surface.
Q: What’s the relationship between deeper womanness and that deep love?
John: There’s a palpable connection between what love is and deeper womanness. Where there’s a deeper womanness, what love is, rather than being loving, is palpably real to you and you’re consciously, deeply dependent on what that love is and your connection to it.
Q: I really entered that deeper love one night when I was tucking my child into bed. I was just connecting with what I know of what love is, and it changed. Even my physical vision felt different. I just felt I was something so far back, being a being.
John: Deeper womanness puts you right at the door of you as love. If you try to connect with you as love, you can do that but that’s more of a stretch and it’s easier to sort of fall out of it and forget. Deeper womanness is closer to you, in your experience, than that love. From deeper womanness, the connection is immediate.
Q: I’ve always really loved it when you talk about womanness. It really moves me and I don’t want to make it into an idea, a mothering idea, and romanticize it somehow.
John: You won’t romanticize it if you respond to it.
Q: Could you say more about what it would look like for me to be real womanness?
John: Deeper womanness is like the difference between a tree and a Christmas tree. A Christmas tree has all of these adornments, overlaying with all kinds of lovely and beautiful things but that’s not the tree. That’s what you put on it and what people relate to as womanness. A deeper womanness is just the tree. And having such presence in just the tree brings a strong resonance of what’s really there.
To relate to your child and your husband from there is different from how you relate in your self. It’s also a little bit intimidating for people when you come from a deeper womanness, because the adornments aren’t there. The adornments on the surface can make it feel safe because adornments relate to adornments, like projections having a relationship with each other. There’s a strong, safe buffer away from relating from what’s real. When you’re just simply coming from what’s real, someone else’s adornments get shaken and they’re uncomfortable because they know that you’re just relating to what they are as a tree directly.
Q: I see my pattern of trying to make other people feel safe and comfortable and how I do that. I experienced how uncomfortable it was not to do that.
John: Eliminate all of that. Once the habit is gone, you can do things from a deeper level to make people comfortable. Then you’re not making them comfortable for the sake of comfort, but because you’re easing a discomfort while reaching them. The purpose is really different.
Q: I liked it when you spoke about being safe for others. It really empowers what I know and there’s no room for my old ways of relating.
John: You can’t be safe for others and be adorned with something. You can’t have any inner adornments and without them there’s just deeper womanness.
When men come to the same place as what deeper womaness is, it costs more. When a man comes to it, it’s much dearer and worth much more than when a woman comes to it, but a woman can come to it more easily.
Q2: What’s a good way to make that more real?
John: Never disconnect from just a quiet dearness.
Q2: Does that include being less in our personalities and less in our selves?
John: It’s fine to be in your selves and your personalities, but without breaking that really fine heart thread. The heart thread is everything.
Q2: What do I need to do to become more of that womanness that you’re referring to? What’s the cost for me?
John: Your self won’t have any importance, so being right about something won’t mean anything to you. Making her wrong about something means nothing to you and you being right means nothing to you. The cost is that you’d rather have meaning together than your selves together. And you’d rather have meaning than your self. So then you are just very simply together in whatever is or isn’t taking place; you’re just simply together. So that thread in whatever’s there, that thread is clear. The thread is clear to you.