January 22, 2022 @ 11:00am
An unfamiliar depth of love has opened in this person. It feels scary and likely to change her life. What’s happening and where will it take her?
Letting Go of Self Importance, Letting Go of Pain
When: August 25, 2017 @ 3:30pm
Topics: Feelings & Emotions
Questioners ask John about the inability to forgive and move on from an abusive relationship, what to do with feelings of self doubt and hatred, and how to deal with an inflamed self. John speaks about self importance, the concept of holding oneself as more important than others, as the cause of negative emotions, and an obstacle to being in the heart.
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Video Transcript
Q3: After leaving an abusive relationship how am I going to forgive and move on from that?
John: Sweetly.
Q3: It was going on for a long time. I keep going back to the pain. It’s not really ended, there’s still smear campaigns and things going on.
John: Then you’re making it all about your self: you’re making the pain all about your self. You’re making what someone’s done to you all about your self.
Q3: Why? Is it from past, long ago past or anything like that?
John: It keeps your sense of self as being central to you. It keeps your self central in your experience.
Q3: How to break it, break away, in those times or moments? I understand what you’re saying.
John: By letting your sense of self importance relax and become quiet everywhere that it is in your life.
Q3: A letting go of some kind?
John: Letting go of self-importance. Letting go of needing it, letting go of using it. Letting go of believing it. Letting go of speaking it.
Q3: How do you identify self-importance?
John: It shows up in negative emotion.
Q3: So as soon as you start dive-bombing or something? That’s what’s going on? Anything else you can give me on that?
John: When you’re a little bit annoyed, a little bit frustrated. When that’s there, you believe that your self is really something.
Q3: Really something.
John: A core belief that runs your self, that keeps telling your self that your self is really something.
Q3: Good, like better-than or something?
John: More important than everything else. (Q: mmm) More important than others.
Q3: Even though it may not be a good feeling?
John: That’s right.
Q3: So move somewhere else.
John: Into your heart.
Q3: Mmhm. Let that go, sweetly. Okay. Thanks.
Q4: Just the last couple of days I’ve been experiencing a lot of intense self-doubt, hatred and I guess it’s there in the background a lot and right now it’s much more (tearful). I’m just wondering how to be in that. Is it a similar thing of self importance? It feels the opposite.
John: It’s a negative self-importance.
Q4: I know it’s not real.
John: Instead of thinking and feeling things about your self, in the little things in your life give movement to what you’re deeply, quietly clear in. Let your deep, quiet clarity have movement and action within little things in your self, little things in your life. In that way, you make your clarity more real than the feeling of your self.
Q4: Okay. That makes sense. Because by being in this more I make this bigger, more real. When it comes up so intensely, is that an opportunity for anything or it’s just to try to not feed it?
John: Feed something that you know is good. It can be as simple as how you are when you brush your teeth. When you do the little things that you’re clear about instead of just being in the habit of doing them, like doing them because you’re clear in it. You know that you’re doing something that’s good. So instead of just doing it, like doing it.
Q4: Okay.
John: Like doing the things that you do because you’re clear instead of occupying that doing with how you feel about your self. You will start to really like all of the little things in your life. You come back into your innocence. You become happy without a reason again.
Don’t do anything in your life without liking what you’re doing. Engage the really light, sweet liking. Let that have everything that you do.
Q6: I wanted to ask, when the self becomes really inflamed, I’m experiencing my self becoming really inflamed and I’m trying to deal with it and
John: That’s inflaming.
Q6: So you’re saying not to deal with it. What would you do, then?
John: Deal with something else.
Q6: Like what? Knitting? (laughter)
John: Just whatever it is that’s at hand.
Q6: Yeah, but there’s not always things to do. A lot of the time there’s just empty space where your mind’s filling it with everything.
John: Then do something.
Q6: So that’s what you’re saying I should do to distract my self from it. Isn’t that just distracting my self from it?
John: If you’re doing that to distract your self: yes. But if you engage a sweetness inside in doing something, you’re engaging something deeper than your self. You’re engaging a beingness.
Q6: That’s sort of what I try and do, like I try and love it. Would that be on the right track? Okay. Even if it doesn’t really seem to work.
John: Find something in it that does work and that you like how it works.
Q6: You make it seem really easy. It’s not always like that. It’s not always like that, I just want to tell you that right now! (laughs)
John: Then let it always be like that. It makes you simple-hearted, a simple heart in the midst of a complex self.
Q6: I don’t want to voice my doubts right now but that’s what I’m predominantly feeling when you’re speaking what you’re saying.
John: What you’re used to being in your self comes quickly to your support.
Q6: So that’s what you’re saying the doubt is.
John: Yes.
Q6: So don’t believe it, then?
John: Believe something that nurtures you. Your doubt doesn’t nurture you. The way that you doubt is a misuse of power. It is a use of power but it doesn’t do anything that’s good in your self. Use your power to move what’s quietly clear in you, to give what’s quietly clear thought and feeling, and then movement outside of your self. It’s easy to break something. It’s difficult to build. In your self and in your life be sweetly attentive to not break anything, and in really little things, that you’re always building. In that, you have your clarity and there’s no room for doubt.
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