Accept Your Trauma and Have No Drama

Q: I wanted to talk to you about trauma.

John: Trauma or drama? Drama creates trauma. Trauma is the damages of drama.

Q: I see myself playing with it, and it starts because of feeling that I can’t feel this feeling. I resist feelings and hate the world.

John: Not being able to feel, that’s the trauma that’s the result of the drama. Drama causes damage such as not being able to feel. When you do have trauma, don’t add to it any drama. Trauma heals; drama doesn’t heal. Love healing. When you love healing, there is no more drama.

Q: The resistance…just be with that?

John: When the resistance comes up, find the trauma while having no drama. Behind the resistance there is sensitivity to trauma. When you have damaged yourself because of drama, you’ll be naturally sensitive to that damage which does show up as resistance. Distinguish between being obstinate and the protection of something that has been damaged; obstinate in being stubborn and being dramatically resistant. Distinguish between dramatic resistance and the protection within of something that has suffered damage. Remove the drama from the trauma, then there’s healing. Protecting what has been damaged is understandable. Enjoy being understandable.

Q: Is it ok to protect something that has been damaged?

John: Yes. It is also okay to remain being open in the midst of what is damaged. Protection and openness are a balance.

Q: How to protect?

John: With openness. Accept your trauma and have no drama. As you feel, you will heal.

Your Higher Power Is In Your Weakest Weakness

Q: I seem to have lost faith in a higher power and also a faith in myself. Can you help me with that?

John: Instead of looking for a bigger power, power in yourself or a higher power, begin with the power that has the greatest reach in you. It isn’t found in your strength. It isn’t found in your beliefs. It’s found in the midst of your weakness, and not just your weakness but most particularly your weakest weakness.

Within your weakest weakness there isn’t anything that holds you together; there is no relationship to power. There is no kind of holding, holding together or even a longing. There isn’t any kind of looking. Your weakest weakness within is that when you are quieted, you know in your heart to be the most simple openness, a most fundamental and simple softening. This knowing in your heart – not what you think and feel, not what you’ve been taught, not anything of past experience – is the simplest beingness. As you respond to that knowing, you simply come to rest and it’s from such a sublime, nurturing weakness that you begin to know more.

When you lose faith in a higher power and in your self, it’s because the way that you, awareness, are moving in your seeking, your looking and your trying, isn’t of the same depth and quality of movement as that of your own being. As soon as it is the same as that of your own being, you’re home. You’re home in a tiny little bit of what you really are.

At that level of tiniest realization within, you’re not relating in your life in the accustomed way that isn’t working for you and doesn’t answer you. You’re relating within that tiniest little bit in the way that answers you in what you really are. It is you, awareness, at rest in pure you, unadorned by familiarity, unadorned by your efforts, unadorned by all of your looking and trying.

The first movement from within that tiny, tiny little bit within of complete restedness is love, not a strong experience of love, not an emotional love, but a pure touch of love. If you’re looking for more than that you’ll overlook it. If you’re looking for something big you won’t see where it actually is, in the little.

Q: Thank you.

From Anxiety To Innocence

Q: Lately I’ve been experiencing a lot of anxiety and heaviness in my chest. It sometimes seems connected to events in the world. I’ve gone through and through my thoughts and emotions to see where it might come from and I can trace it back to a sense of separation from God. Yet after all that work, the anxiety is still here. What do you suggest?

John: The anxiety comes from your way of being within your self. If you have anxiety, particularly a deeper level of anxiety that’s difficult to pinpoint the source of, that tells you about your relationship with your self. You’re not clearly distinguishing between you and your self. When you buy into your self as being you, you’re caught into believing your experience. Your experience tells you much about your self; it doesn’t necessarily tell you much about you.

You get to know you much more when you lie down to go to sleep. Regardless of your levels of anxiety, what kind of past you have, what kind of day you’ve had, what kind of relationships you have, as you lie down to go to sleep it doesn’t take long before your past and your personality fall away and your day begins to disappear. Your familiar sense of self also dissipates. The more that you relax, as awareness, the more you’re naturally residing in what you really are.

Right before you fall asleep – just at that tipping point – is when you’re most easily being what you really are. Everything else is already gone. There is no sense of separation and there is no anxiety. When you begin to notice that, it shows you what you’re able to be in your day, but the sense of value that’s there is of a completely different level. The level of meaning within you doesn’t first relate to your past, your mind, or your self. What you really are is simply most quiet love and goodness. It’s there underneath everything, regardless of your past and regardless of the conditioning of your self. It really has so little to with what you’re familiar with in your life.

If you awaken to that difference between you and your self – what you really are within and everything else that you’re familiar with in your life – then instead of looking for meaning in how you experience your self and looking for it outside of your self, you realize that meaning is what you really are. That’s why you’re looking for meaning because you already know what it is: it’s you. Your capacity, then, to find meaning outside of your self is completely dependent on you realizing meaning within.

Meaning isn’t a ‘something’ to comprehend with your thinking: it’s you. Being that in the midst of your self, regardless of its conditioning and in the midst of your life regardless of its shape, what you’re coming from is already complete. It needs no fixing. Most quietly being that within in the midst of whatever kind of self and life you have, you’re beginning with what needs no change. When you’re rested in that and no longer looking outside of it for meaning, you begin to see depths of meaning in everyone and everything. Your seeing opens to what you’ve been deeply looking for.

Q: Is the willingness to see enough to enable seeing?

John: Yes. To have a delicate willingness within means that you are opening and softening. It’s openness and softness, that manner of being, which enables you to see. Openness and softness of heart is what you naturally rest in when you lie down to go to sleep. It comes so naturally because it is what you really are. Because you so naturally move through your own levels from the surface to the deeper, you, within, are most easily taken for granted. Your self and your life easily become a covering that you try to wade through, looking for a sense of meaning. The meaning is quietly just beneath that, as realizable in your life as you’re able to easily realize it when you lie down to go to sleep or when you hold a baby.

When you hold a baby, it’s a little bit like meeting what you really are. You naturally come from the same level of meaning that you see in a baby. When you’re quieted within, as you hold a baby, and the baby’s looking at you or right into you, what you are is known. You’re known by something that’s difficult to understand, but your response isn’t hard to understand; your response is love. You’re reached by what you see because what you see is the same as you really are, just devoid of your self, your past and your life.

As you become acquainted with these deeper levels of meaning within – deeper levels not of your self, but of you – what you first realize is the meaning of your own heart. As you continue in deeper realization you realize that your own heart is really the door to your being. When you’re quieted in your heart, you’re being the same as your own being. That’s your entrance to your being. Your real beingness is easily found in your self and in your heart.

For you to be free of your past and your self, simply live no longer taking your self to heart. What remains is you, meaning, that is pure and complete. Profound realization and awakening is simply you, uncovered: you, awareness, no longer covered up by your self and your past. Your experience in your self is innocence and happiness without a reason, just like what you easily see in little children.

What you’re really looking for is always so close. It’s just beneath your relationship with your self.

Real Meeting, Real Relationship

Q: Hi John. I would like to talk with you about your concept about relationships, because I know you are very clear that first it’s a long time to get to know each other, and then marry, and then have sex. To me the last years is total, I would say, opposite, without marriage and almost without relationship. But actually something in me is longing for deep relationship. The question is how I come from this concept to the other?

John: A real relationship is based on the two of you meeting. If you have any personal wants or needs, you can’t meet. You’re not available to meet. You’re already occupied with your wants and your needs.

Q: Aren’t the needs and wants just natural things of the body?

John: You don’t need them for the two of you to meet. Where there’s real meeting you have direct access into each other without acquiring anything, without getting something. When you were still in your innocence and you would directly meet with someone, you didn’t do that to get something.

Q: Aren’t these two different things: the meeting and the living?

John: The dearness in meeting is everything. For real relationship you don’t need anything else, and nothing comes in between the two of you, Your selves don’t come in between the two of you; want and need don’t come in between the two of you.

Q: These things happen in parallel? There is a deep meeting and there is physical meeting. It comes together or is it totally different, has nothing to do with the physical?

John: Totally different until it’s everything, and then it also shows in everything. It comes through in everything.

Q: It starts from the very inside and it shows on the outside?

John: And everything that it shows through doesn’t make it better. The dearness that’s there in the two of you meeting is complete. Nothing from the outside-in can make it better and, when you stay there, it grows from the inside-out.

Q: What you say increases my longing for this kind of meeting.

John: When you meet with anyone, don’t take that to any next step in your self. You’ll compromise the meeting and the clear dearness that’s there, so that you can have what you think you need in your self. You don’t need your past, your self, or your patterns for you to meet with another.

When you build a real relationship, you’re building together with that unseen substance that doesn’t appeal to your self but is directly dear to you. The more that you build being together, levels within deeper than your self move. That movement, the movement of your being, is your mobility in the relationship.

The movement of your being, of any level deeper within than your self, is your mobility in the relationship. That makes your movement love. The physical won’t do that for you, and engaging your selves won’t do that for you. The physical and engaging your selves belongs to your being. Use that for your self and you won’t be able to have a real relationship. What you’ll have is mutual exploitation.

Q: This needs time to meet in this and it has to be first.

John: If it isn’t first, it won’t be there. It’s first because it’s everything. Then you can add all of the containers to hold it, to carry it, without making it about the containers.

Q: I’m not sure about the containers?

John: The physical and your selves. They only matter as much as what they belong to. It isn’t their use that gives them meaning. It’s what they belong to that gives them all of their meaning. That re-contextualizes all that’s yours. Everything that’s yours is returned to your being.

Relationship isn’t for your self. Use it to satisfy your self and you’re using relationship to separate from your being. Relationship belongs to your being. You can’t use any regular model of relationship.

Q: Because they prove to be wrong?

John: Not wrong. It just doesn’t work. What makes it not deeply work is when it doesn’t belong to your being.

Q: It means that both need to be rooted in the being?

John: Yes, or at very least, residing in the heart and not leaving the heart to acquire anything.

Q: This is quite rare, to find together in the being?

John: Yes. It’s rare.

Q: But possible.

John: It’s what every relationship belongs to. It’s what every relationship can belong to. The basis of a real relationship is two, deeply being together. It isn’t a companionship.

When two are being together, the fullness of love is there without anyone doing something. Then, in whatever you do, your beings are right there and love moves. It isn’t really about anything that you do together. Your unseen levels, the levels of your being, are meeting and communing without the two of you doing something. Then, in whatever you do, you are meeting and communing.

Q: Somehow I’m reminded of what you say now. Somewhere in my being there is this knowing about what you say…this old experience of knowing. Now this very, very old memory came up. It can reach to oneness and relationship with all that is around?

John: If it begins with the heart and relaxes even more deeply.

Q: Thank you John.