Q: If love is the answer, we are here to love and that’s what gives us pleasure …
John: Whoops! You were driving along and then you just hit the ditch. Love is the answer, but it isn’t to give you pleasure. It isn’t to make you feel good; it isn’t to give you a nice life, a good life.
Love is the answer because there isn’t really anything else. As soon as you make love of use, that’s not love. Then you’re connecting into a feeling of love, an idea of love. That sets you up for a lot of pain.
Q: If the most logical thing to do is to accept your self fully, why is it that it’s so easy for me, even though I’m doing so much inner work, to forget my self-worth?
John: Because you’re not genuinely accepting your self. If you’re genuinely accepting your self, you won’t be accepting your self for any results. You won’t be accepting your self because that will heal something, fix something, make your self better, make you happier, get rid of the weight of some of your problems.
Genuine self-acceptance isn’t hinged on anything. As soon as you connect it to a reason, a result, a return, it won’t be genuine, so it will complicate your self.
The truth of self-acceptance is that regardless of the condition of your self and your life, you are first nurturingly okay with everything as it is; that there’s nothing that needs to change in your self and in your life for you to be okay. That means, then, that your okayness within is deep and real.
If you have a wonderful day, that’s okay. If you have an awful day, that’s okay. If you’re told you have cancer, that’s okay. What that means is that regardless of what comes and goes in your self and in your life, you are nurturingly okay. That’s you. Nothing can make it worse and nothing can make it better.
If things can make you okay, then there are so many other things that will make you not okay. As soon as you move in that direction, you live to escape not okayness, or to fight it. You live looking for things that will make you more okay. There’s no end to that. It isn’t real.
All of the things that you believe would make you okay, really won’t. As soon as you have one of them, you’ll want the next one. As soon as you get that one too, you’ll want the next one. If you don’t need any of them, and all that remains is that regardless of any of them you are deeply, quietly, nurturingly okay and there’s nothing around it, that’s real. It frees you to be genuine in whatever you do because you’re not doing things on the outside for inside results. When you are already happy without any reason, nothing can make you happier.
Try it out for one morning – just half a day – without connecting you being okay to anything outside of your self. It’s not connected to anything you can do, and you be that inside, in the midst of whatever you do and see.
