Q: I’ve recently welcomed into my home a family member who is an addict. Normally I’m a fairly balanced person, but now there’s uncertainty about how to manage everything and support her. I feel both resentment and great love. I’m struggling with how to be balanced in my heart amongst all the different responsibilities and give support, without really knowing how. Can you help?
John: Any past investments that you’ve had in hardening or in closing, any excuses that you have for ill-feeling or resentment you don’t need for you to be in your heart toward the other. When you enjoy and then love that you have no real reason for resentment, that leaves you unconditionally in your heart. So your first relationship with your family member is not by doing anything for her. Your first relationship and your deeper relationship is what you are in your heart toward the other. In the midst of anything that you’ve taken to heart of what the other has been, not been, or done to you, you unconditionally open and soften.
Without that, your past, because of how you relate to it, corrupts what you do for the other. Something of that story is present in your self always influencing, even when you don’t feel it. It’s what you’re being toward the other, and then with the other, that determines all of the greater value of what you do for the other. Without that, in your doing, you fool your self. Then you’ll do something to compensate for a lack in your self, concerning the other. In a really coarse kind of way that could appear as doing something good on the surface for the other because you have a sense of guilt for holding resentment, so instead of releasing the resentment, instead of fundamentally opening and softening, you’ll do good. When that’s there, the doing of the good is other than genuine.
When your real relationship from within your heart toward the other is simply clean, whatever you do will easily also be clean. Concerning the other, once you’ve released something of what you’ve taken to heart of any kind of ill-treatment, or anything where you’ve taken your self to heart – when that’s just simply released, then your relationship with the other from within you is clean and clear. Your movement toward the other on a heart level is no longer conditioned by something in your self or something in the other, so your love is unfettered. It’s unconditioned.
Then, when you bring the other into your household to help them, have really kind conditions so their presence there is conditional, while your deeper relationship towards the other is unconditional. You being both the unconditional and the conditional – but they’re on different levels – will bring up everything in your self that you’ve avoided and haven’t dealt with.
Q: Thank you.
