Q: I wanted to speak with you about my connection to women in my life. I’m used to ease in different areas in my life and looking back I see that getting in touch with women, meeting women, connecting with women had been hard for me to do even in childhood days. There was a shift in this a couple of years ago which made me experience my self much more open, which led to a lot of encounters; experiences on my side which were quite hard to digest for me.
John: Referencing your self while you’re close to a woman doesn’t tell you what a woman is. Your self won’t tell you; your self doesn’t help you in this. Referencing your self when you’re close to a woman brings pressure into your self because it isn’t in your self that you know about womanness. It’s in your heart, and not you being in your heart so that you can understand in your self about womanness and how to be with it.
Go to your heart and, while you’re close to a woman, stay in your heart despite any of the vulnerability that you experience in your self. You can be close to a woman while you’re in your self and not in your heart, but it won’t satisfy your heart, and while you’re in your self you won’t be able to be close to a woman’s mystery. It’s only when you are really in your heart that you can be close to a woman’s mystery and that her mystery has access into you, that her mystery is free to do whatever it does to you while you’re in your heart. You’ll not try to understand it; you’ll not try to cope in your self with it. You’re just there, in your heart, at rest, clearly affected by her mystery. In that, you get to know what a woman is.
Q: This sense of disconnection which I have experienced a couple of times is a result of this sort of misalignment or misconception.
John: Yes. You can’t be aligned with her mystery without you being at rest, open and soft in your heart. Her mystery is how her being moves through her humanness. She doesn’t even really get her own mystery but, when you are at rest, open and soft in your heart and a little bit close to her, she gets her mystery because it moves to you. Neither one of you will understand it.
Q: So I’m like a mirror of her to see.
John: It’s a pretty special kind of mirror. It doesn’t just reflect, but it also draws and absorbs. As it does, that deeply opens you to your mystery. When you’re transparent because you’re in your heart, what you really are is present and it registers her mystery. In registering it, it awakens it. In awakening it, it draws it and it absorbs it. A man’s mystery is a little bit further from the surface than a woman’s.
Q: Is there anything that I can do to support this development?
John: Nothing. When you’re in that, that leaves you vulnerable in your self, through your heart, to her mystery and by that your mystery is uncovered.
When you’re close to a woman, don’t try to cope. Don’t try to understand her and don’t at all try to relate to her. You can’t. You can only relate to her if your mystery is moving. It’s only your mystery within, uncovered and moving, that can relate to hers. And without the meeting of mysteries it doesn’t matter how much you think you might understand a woman or how much you think you can relate; you don’t really. Open to that and you are available to meet.
Q: As this sensation of dis-connectivity occurs, it’s already too late?
John: That sensation of being disconnected and separate has nothing to do with what you really are. It’s present there in your nervous system and it isn’t telling you the truth.
Q: So it’s literally nothing.
John: In reality, it’s nothing. In your nervous system it’s really something.
Q: So not coping with her, but how to deal with this situation knowing that this is inside of me and not real?
John: Toward those sensations and that experience, be kindly un-listening.
Q: Un-listening…not listening?
John: No. Un-listening.
Q: What is that?
John: Better than not listening. Un-listening works; not listening doesn’t. Not listening makes you resist, which means you’re listening to it. Inside, this is how you be when you’re close to a woman.
Q: And being close makes being a lot easier for me.
John: In your heart this comes naturally to you. Now you see. If I were your mother now, I would be kissing you all over your face.
