Month: July 2020

Changing Your Eating Habits: A New Relationship To Food

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Q: I have issues with my weight and my body. It seems like there’s a program that says when I wake in the morning “wow, you ate a lot yesterday” or things like that. I see it and I do nothing, but what I want to know is why is it still an issue?

John: Does the feedback of your body to you point to your relationship, in your body, in your self, to food? If it does, then you can come back into alignment in your relationship to food by letting it be reduced to having to do with you sustaining your body, so that your relationship with food isn’t to do with your self. It really is just to do with your body.

So you’re bringing your whole relationship to food right down to it being in service to your body. You are eating for your body instead of eating for your self. You eat to give nurture to your body and leave out eating to give nurture to your self.

That brings you back into a deeper inner balance in your whole relationship to food.

Q: It sounds easy, but when I do it I don’t see that – I see it later. What could help me to remember it when I am eating?

John: If you’re that forgetful around food it means that your relationship to food is all about your self. That’s a cue for you, so then shift your whole relationship to food to being, away from your self.

Your whole relationship to food is all about what you really are. It’s what you really are giving food to your body, instead of you, awareness, being your self in your relationship to food, and using food to feed your self regardless of what that does to your body.

Like using eating-time for you to be what you really are, so eating-time is not about feeding your self. It is all about you being what you really are, which changes your relationship to food. In being what you really are around the food, you’ll choose what food you feed your body for the sake of your body, which has nothing to do with your self. 

You won’t eat for pleasure. You won’t eat for enjoyment. You won’t eat to nurture a feeling in your self. You won’t eat for emotional reasons. You’re being what you really are, and you’re feeding your body for the sake of your body.

So there’s just what you really are, food, and your body. You’re leaving your self out of all of that, so when you eat, that really helps you to be what you really are.

Eating-time is your conscious being-time.

Q: It feels good, this solution. It feels good inside of me.

John: Your body is in a habit of what food you give it, and your self is in a habit of why you eat. So this feels good now: it won’t feel as good in your eating-time. But if you’re deeply clear that eating-time is all about you being what you really are – that it is being-time – you’ll come to love that, regardless of what it feels like. 

You’ll realize, during your eating-time, that this is so good, regardless of what it feels like. You’ll love how good it is.

What Is True Desperation?

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Q: The question “what am I living for?” has been with me a lot in my life. I’ve felt desperate and known I was not living. Now, there is more peace around the desperation. I know there’s truth in that, but I can relax to the point of being comfortable. You’ve talked about the sharp sincerity of love intelligently evolving. How does that come into form, and how do I be relaxed enough so that only what is true is engaged?

John: It isn’t about being relaxed enough. It is about you, as awareness, being true enough. When you, as awareness, are only being true, then relaxation within works. An entrance is gained within even by being just at rest. 

When you are being only true, then desperation also works. There is a kind of entrance that is gained within through desperation that restfulness within doesn’t accomplish on its own. 

True desperation is restfulness within that is also full of fire. It’s just not a personal kind of fire. It is all of your power coming to a very fine point – all of your fire coming to one clean point. The restfulness within that is that there is nothing extra happening. 

There are entrances within that come only that way. It is like an equanimity of fire, where every part of the fire has within it a perfect evenness. Every part of it is in balance. There’s no personal push in it; it’s perfectly balanced intensity. Without such fire, your restfulness within hasn’t encompassed the whole of you.

Q: I love hearing this but still don’t know how it would look in my life. Is it to do with honesty? I see that when I’m not honest, it’s because of personal desires.

John: That is where you value your life more than the truth of being profoundly honest within. You won’t let your honesty become that hot.  

Q: What would that take?

John: You, as awareness, being only true – all to the cleanest, hottest point. Some aspects of awareness will never open without such heat.  For you to be such fire heightens being true in a way that being completely at rest within doesn’t touch.  

Q: So it’s a good idea to keep looking out for when both the fire and the urgency are there.

John: A fire is perfect and pure urgency.

Q: Thank you, John.

The Gift Of Cancer: The Sweet Uncovering Of Your Immortality

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Q: When you talked to me about dying and death, you showed me how to hold it lightly. With having cancer, I can do that except when I don’t – which is often – especially when there’s physical discomfort. Holding what’s there lightly can open me to a lightness of being. Often at night I listen to your audio tape Let Cancer Kiss You. It’s really helpful because you’re saying to be intimate with it and not fight it. Could you talk about the gift of cancer for me, for what I am?

John: Having cancer directly addresses your experience in your body, in your self. It directly addresses your person. Cancer exposes the instability in your seen forms. It exposes the fragility of form and your relationship to your self in form. 

The gift of that is that if you are, in the midst of that, anywhere near your heart, with any little bit of equanimity of being, with any little bit of openness, you draw from the deep within. Your usual experience of your body, of your self, doesn’t tell you that you need the deep within. Your usual experience tells you that you need something other than the deep within: that you need to address your likes and your dislikes, that you need to give attention to what is favourable and unfavourable. 

Cancer is a dear messenger in that it circumvents your usual processes. It directly addresses your mortality, which the usual of your life doesn’t. It’s an unusual kind of pressure on your self that pushes hard, inviting you to see a little differently, instead of scrambling to protect what’s familiar to you, predictable in you. You open to think and to feel differently. Anywhere where you have been too busy or occupied to know more deeply, cancer invites you to know and to see more deeply. It moves you to draw from within instead of drawing from everything that’s threatened, instead of drawing from anything that offers promise.

Cancer offers you a corner to be pressured into where it’s inviting for you to realize that you are free to open, and this opening is what you are. Cancer helps you to see by putting unusual pressure on the surface. So, seen from within the quietude of your heart, cancer is like a kiss. The lightness of being in having cancer is from within your realization that cancer really has nothing to do with you. 

A little bit deeper, and all that cancer really challenges is not your experience. It challenges your beliefs. It makes manifest that the power that you’ve given to your beliefs doesn’t hold true to you. Without your beliefs, you don’t know that there is anything wrong with cancer. Holding cancer in doubt, denial or disdain, if there’s any of that, that’s really just you fighting for your beliefs. Any measure of resistance or a fight just brings your belief structure to the surface, where you are then invited to let it all go. What remains is you, at home: you, all cleaned within, cleaned of anything that you’ve been carrying.

Sweetly agree with your mortality, and your immortality, all uncovered, shines, and you start to see it in everything. You might even take a midnight flight when you’re already starting to disappear into the deep.

Q: (laughing) What do you mean?

John: The midnight flight of …

Q: The other side? You make death or dying sound so attractive, so welcoming, but why does it feel like I’m leaving something behind?

John: You are. Just like getting on a flight. You are leaving something, and you are going somewhere.

Q: It’s just that you don’t know what’s ahead.

John: There are resonances of it. Death is the trippiest time of your life! You don’t want to miss it.

Q: (laughs) Yeah, I love what you say. Everything’s more immediate and you can’t be bothered with what’s superfluous, but as the cancer takes over there seems to be a self body that identification is held in. Is it like that?

John: That’s what’s challenged and being addressed, but what answers that is your inner flow body – your being.

Q: Then, it’s like: What cancer?! It answers that sticky identification and the denseness of seventy-five years of holdings in the body. It can be dissolved, opened to. I feel so lucky to have you holding my hand.

John: Seeing you off on your plane. How beautiful! Oh, there she goes!

Q: Well, I’m not dead yet. I love it when you say that to people. 

John: There’s no rush to get there.

Q: Right! No, I’m not in a rush! 

John: And for the life of you, you wouldn’t want to miss it. If you see death for what it really is, in greater perspective, from something of the bigger picture, then your death rests in your heart as a warm goldenness throughout all of your life. 

Q: That’s so lovely. Thank you, John

John: See you later – for sure here or there.

 

Returning To Your Innermost – A Life Of Love

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Q: What is in the way of shifting all at once to being what we really are?

John: Nothing. Believe only what you most deeply, directly know the truth of in your heart and there’s nothing in the way. Without that, your false beliefs are all, impossibly, in the way. 

The more that you work with them to be rid of them, the stronger you make them. When you don’t like them you’re feeding them. When you like them, you’re feeding them. If you’re sick of being separate you’re not finished with being separate. The being sick of it is an indulgence. When you simply, so simply, have no need of being separate anymore, you’re not. 

If you favour even a tiny little bit of doing so that you can be, then you must suffer being separate a little longer. When you unconditionally no longer have such need, you’re home. Lift a finger to help that, and you’re not home. 

There isn’t anything, on its own, in all of existence, that can separate you from what you really are, that can separate you from your being. There’s no kind of self of yours that can separate you. There’s no kind of past that can separate you. There’s no weight of patterning that can separate you. There’s no kind of abuse in all of existence that can separate you. 

No one anywhere, at any time, has a good reason for being separate. No one needs therapy, no one needs a change, no one needs a difference. The real is from the innermost outwards, and it works. 

You see it in a baby’s smile, or its laugh. There isn’t anything there that can be improved. What is there is innermost, sweetly outwards. You’re welcome to it directly, instantly, without a touch of process. It doesn’t matter what condition your body’s in, your mind, your feelings, your emotion, your will, your self, your life, your past. None of it is a hindrance.

Q: It’s always seemed like there’s a jumping-off point – a movement, a quarter-step, a half-step. I hear you say there’s no step.

John: It seems, yes. As soon as there’s a tiny little stepping-off point, what you create is the fear of that step. There is no step.  And deep, deep within you have no fear. 

There isn’t anything that you have to lose for you to be this everything. It costs you only absolutely everything. Once you’ve paid it, you realize it wasn’t everything at all. It’s only after you’ve paid the price that you experience in your nervous system that it was really just an illusion, made real by you in your nervous system at some point in your past. It costs you only your false beliefs. It costs you nothing.

Q: And are we preferring something known, as opposed to something unknown?

John: What you really are is unknown in its entirety to your nervous system, but not to you. If you’re looking for an experience of being what you really are, you’re not finished with illusion yet. But if opening unconditionally into what you really are is story-free and result-free, you’re home. 

You don’t need a good life. You don’t need happiness. You don’t need ease in your life and you don’t need to be rid of any difficulty at all. You don’t need peace. You, beautifully, have need of nothing, and there, in what you really are, you’re at rest. 

It doesn’t change when your self is in difficulty. It doesn’t change within any kind of loss. It isn’t made better with any kind of gain. Enlightenment doesn’t make it even a tiny little bit better. The worst of pain, on any level, doesn’t tarnish it. 

When you’re being it, all that really remains, in the midst of anything, is love. This is your life. This is like essence of baby, free to have your whole life. You won’t miss anything.

Q: Thank you.

John: You see. And in the seeing, you quietly love. Your question isn’t answered: you’re answered. 

In this, everything that is real is available to you – even the stars. You have no limit.

 

 

Your Body: The Gateway To Your Soul

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Q: I want to talk about something I’ve been dealing with my whole life. It’s the body I’m living in – my body. Deep inside there’s such a wish to live in freedom with it, but I can’t let some things go. I’m so ashamed of my body. I treat it with diets, and had an operation some years ago.

John: Let your body be your kindest friend. Let it teach you how to be in it.

Your own body is the gateway to your soul.

Be gentle with your body.

Be only kind to your body, and through it you will find your own soul.

Q: I am so afraid of letting things be as they are.

John: Then you will be very unlike your own soul.

In you not being gentle with your body and only kind to your body, then it is you that is splitting your self.

Enjoy dwelling in your body, regardless of what you think your body looks like or feels like.

Enjoy dwelling in your body. It is your own body that is your home.

Home is in your body. It is not in changing your body.

Q: So often I don’t feel like I am at home in this body. Sometimes I feel unable to love it.

John: Be at home in your body, regardless of what you think it looks like or feels like.

Your body welcomes you. Be welcomed by your body.

As soon as you are being welcomed by your body, the whole universe changes.

You will begin to see the universe as it really is, instead of seeing it the way that you see your body.

Q: Does it take a long time?

John: Only as long as it takes for you to give permission.

You will not belong in this universe until you truly belong in your body.

The way that you are treating your body, that is how you are treating what you know.

Your relationship with your body shows you your relationship with truth.

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