Q: I love the truth of what I am beyond my preferences. I can see my inner face in yours and it’s like being in open sunshine. How can I open more to my shadows – those parts of me that I’ve separated from?
John: By seeing the shadows in others – not seeing such shadows with criticism or judgment, but tenderness seeing them. It is only tenderness that has the honesty to see. If someone else’s shadow can in any tiny little way find the same thing in your self, then the shadows of others, instead of being an attraction for irritation, judgment or criticism, are for you a love reflector. It is only surrender nourished by grace that can know such a delicacy. The moment you judge someone else’s shadow then the same thing within your self becomes calloused over. If you ever encounter blame within your self towards someone else, it is only you that is to blame, without being able to see it. Anything other than love destroys everything.
Being annoyed by anything is an anesthetic to grace and goodness. If you wish to know your shadows, you can find them behind every little thing that ever annoys you. If you ever get angry, you are creating total eclipse. When others are angry or annoyed with you, let such energy very gently open all your doors instead of you pulling down the shutters. Then, everything that could ever aggravate you, annoy you or make you angry is, for surrender, an incredible source of grace.
This is you loving the sun within, not just when it warms you but while something that is not the sun acts on you, making you feel cold. It’s loving the sun within in the cold, enjoying the tiniest flower in someone while they are hurting you, while they make you feel uncomfortable. It is such enjoyment of that in them that removes what is of their shadow within you. As long as you are justified in absolutely anything that bothers you, that is not just you unable to see your own shadow, but you protecting yourself from seeing it. Let annoyance be love that kisses you with broken lips. It is only your tenderness toward it that is ointment for it.
What you truly are is grace. Without your absolute surrender to being in your heart and that being what it knows, your true nature will not show. Without total surrender to what tiny little bit you know, you will never be truly gracious. It is only graciousness – you being grace – that is grace, blossoming. It is only total honesty, within, that enables you to see the door, within, to grace, and it is only total surrender that can fully open that door. Then it is no longer about feeling good in what you know is true. Surrender enables you to be the goodness in what you know is true even if being the goodness seems to be only in tiny, tiny measures. That is the space into which your heart goes, however little seems to be there. You not just fully drinking in goodness when you feel it, but when you cannot feel it; you letting goodness drink you. That’s what surrender is. It is such a relationship with goodness that turns you into it. Such a relationship with goodness makes you very gracious.
It is only goodness and graciousness that is free. Freedom doesn’t exist anywhere else. It is only love that is free. It is knowing love that gives you the taste of freedom, but it is only in being love that you are freedom. It is one thing to know it. It is, again, another thing to really feel it, and it is very much another thing to be it. Each comes with a price: varying degrees of you relating only to what you know regardless of the experiences within your mind, regardless of what you think or feel about anything. Through surrender, letting love completely slay you; letting every little annoyance in your life turn into an invitation for love to slay you.
That is what dissolves every core belief within you that blocks out the sunlight within you.
