Q: I had a call from my 21-year-old daughter who left home a year ago, telling me she needed to talk to me and she’s in a lot of pain. I could feel it in myself; it seems we’re in some kind of symbiosis since her birth which was quite a violent first experience for her. How can I transform this?
John: By you not going first to what you think and feel in your self about her situation, her story and her pain; that you first drop down into a gentle okayness, enabling you to relate to her in a way that would bring her to the same. The pain that she’s in is a spin. It’s an emotional spin.
As she explains her pain to you and what she sees in you, back to her, is a nurturing okayness, she experiences in the midst of her pain what’s real. She sees it in you. If you go into pain about her pain, you validate her pain with your pain. In that, she experiences in what she says to you that there is no way out of her pain. That makes it easy for her to go from pain to depression.
Q: I can feel when you talk that it dissolves inside of me. I think it’s the same with my son. I can bring them with me deeper to that deep okayness. I knew this with my mind but it didn't help. The pain is dissolving. Thank you.
John: Your real beingness isn’t painful. So when you shift into your real beingness in the midst of whatever you experience in your self, that dissolves the pain.
Q: Is that what has been happening a lot to me in these last days here with you?
John: Is it?
Q: Yes it is. That brings up so much joy, and now this possibility to even bring it to my children. How wonderful!
John: Beingness within the self displaces what matters in the self. The beingness that comes up into the self displaces pain. The healing of pain is beingness. The healing of pain isn’t about answering the pain; it isn’t about speaking anything to the pain.
Q: Wow! It feels like this is making a great shift in my life. I understand and receive what you say on deeper levels. I only had glimpses of this truth before.
John: As soon as you know this, what you can do for a good long while is to eliminate words like “pain” from your vocabulary, because the moment you even say that such-and-such is painful, you’re drawing upon your mind to give supporting evidence to that feeling. So as soon as you use the word you’re already climbing into a story.
Q: And I work as a therapist! I’m curious about that.
John: As soon as you know your way in how beingness displaces pain then you can move in that way with others. You can give explanations that start with beingness instead of it starting with pain. The other person is reached with your beingness despite their pain, instead of you trying to reach them in their pain.
The other person matters, the humanness within the other person matters, and the beingness that fills that humanness in that person matters.
Q: Thank you very much. No one’s touched my heart as deeply as you, before. I’m so grateful.
