Q: Since my baby was conceived I’ve seen how grounded my self is in certain beliefs. I’ve moved into what opening and softening really is in connection to the baby, and it’s something very different. What does it truly mean to be a mother in relation to the beingness of the baby?
John: Being a mother is a role of yours, and the real relationship isn’t first that of a mother and a baby, or a mother and a child. The real relationship is directly within the bond that’s there: how the two of you directly connect as beings.
Q: There are moments when that seems to be happening, but my mind wants to know how to do it.
John: You don’t need to understand how because you know; you know the deeper reality of it. It doesn’t come from an understanding, and understanding it doesn’t put you into it. What puts you into that deeper reality is that you respond to it.
As the two of you relate directly through the bond, you are in a fundamental level of communication – the one that matters the most. If you compromise that for anything in your role, in how you relate as a mother, you separate from that real connectivity and the depth of real parenting is compromised.
Real parenting is you remaining within the connectivity of the bond, a deeper level of reality between the two of you. As you’re being that together, your child grows up being that in the midst of everything, and that ‘everything’ matters less than being the connectivity. It enables thriving as a being in the midst of every kind of development, in the midst of any kind of gain or loss: a knowing child, being reality.
As a mother, you are a most delicate custodian of this. Everything that you do as a mother is first dependent on this.
Q: It’s as though the baby is a doorway into the deep.
John: Directly reflecting to you what real depth of parenting is: that you live being the doorway to the deep. That’s what your child, growing up, lives having in you. Turn into what you know and see in your baby, and you’ll manifest that depth of parenting.
Real parenting is you guiding a being within its development, in its body, its self, and as a person. You’re guiding not first a child, but a being as it comes into all of its forms: a being child, growing up listening to your words because of what you are being in your words. Then, as soon as you speak, the real bond is moving.
The child grows up as a being, comprehending through its forms what is unseen within everything that is seen.
