Q: My question is to do with my daughter. Sometimes I think I’m too judgmental and don’t accept her personality. I’m always thinking about what others think of her, wanting her to be a certain way. It’s hard for me to accept that she has her own way and personality. I love her very much but don’t know how to deal with my feelings – or her, sometimes.
John: Everything that you feel about her that is nurturing, every feeling you have for her that touches your heart, say to her without adding anything else to it, so when you start to speak, that’s not a reason for you to say everything else that you think and feel. Say only what you feel in you toward her that’s nurturing.
As soon as you’ve said it, say no more and just enjoy her. Anything that you feel that’s negative is yours. It has nothing to do with her. You leave her out of it, so it doesn’t matter what you feel that’s negative toward her; you’ll deeply, quietly within not say it. And again, enjoy her.
Q: I will do that, and I sometimes do, but I feel I have to be in control of her way of being in this world. I’m used to feeling that I need to have control in my life, but now that I’m a mother I feel it 100% of the time and it’s exhausting.
John: That’s good. Your control in your life is not making you golden. Your control in her life is not going to make her golden. What makes her live from the inside out in her life are not your instructions. What makes her live from the inside out into her life is that she knows the goldenness – that she knows the goldenness within.
Q: But how can I get rid of the feeling of needing to have control?
John: By you, in openness and softness of heart, giving no voice and no movement to the feeling of control in you. You not only don’t give it voice and movement on the outside, but you also give it no voice and no movement on the inside. So you don’t speak with it, you don’t listen to it, you don’t argue with it. You don’t represent it in any way. All of your energy goes right into what you love within.
That’s what has your voice and your movement: that you are into your love instead of being into what bothers yourself.
Q: Thank you.
