Q: My question is about family. How can we be with family in our hearts when we feel very different from them?
John: When you’re in your heart, you’ll see in the others what isn’t different. Your whole sense of meaning in being together will be based on what isn’t different, enabling the differences to have a brightness of color without a sense of polarity. When you’re in your heart toward the others, their differences – how their personalities and selves are different from yours – become dear to you, enabling your love for them to not be based on what they are being to you and how they’re behaving.
As you live from your heart in the midst of family, unconditionally, what you’ll develop toward the others, regardless of how they behave and what they do, is heart understanding. You’ll learn to see from a deeper place and you’ll not easily be taking things personally anymore. In that way, the deeper the level that you’re coming from within, the more you infuse family with meaning. There’s no performance in that. You won’t be performance-oriented. Instead of performing or working for love or acceptance, you quietly receive it wherever it is. You’re not dependent on it for you to be what you really are, and to move that way toward the other.
No one else in your family needs to come from their heart – just you. As soon as you need someone else to be in their heart, that means that you’ll be in your heart as soon as they are.
