What Is Real Groundedness?

Q: Welcome to New York, John! I’m wondering, what’s the best way to stay grounded? 

John: By deeply not needing to. Any real grounding comes from deeper within than we relate to as our selves. It comes from deeper within than any kind of thinking or feeling. The access to it is through openness and softness of heart. If we’re looking for any kind of grounding, we’re misunderstanding what we really are.  

All there is that is really worth being grounded in and therefore coming from is what we know the truth of in our hearts, aside from anything that we experience in our selves, aside from our past, aside from any kind of conditioning. When we are most deeply quieted within, we realize that tiny little bit that we do know the truth of. That tiny little bit may not even be something that we understand, but we do directly know it. It’s what enables us to rest, within. 

So a real grounding is when we are relaxed as awareness, simply being one with what we actually know the truth of. Believing what we actually know the truth of is deeper than any belief. When we have beliefs, we’re fundamentally ungrounded.  

You do come into most profound groundedness, one with what you know the truth of, every time you go to sleep. You completely turn into that. When you lie down to go to sleep you first relax as a person, so you come into a deeper level of your person. As you come into a deeper level of your person, your person begins to pass away. With that, your day also begins to pass away and you come into your self, a deeper groundedness as you relax as awareness. You naturally rest within your own interior.

As you continue to relax as awareness, your self also passes away and you are soon coming into an even deeper groundedness where it is enough for you to reside in your heart. As you continue to relax as awareness, your heart also passes away. You enter your being, and you are being what you really are. You come into that, as awareness, the moment you fall asleep. At that very moment you are grounded in the deepest of what you really are.  

When you realize how much home that really is every time you fall asleep, and you realize the fundamental value of that which is deeper than your life, your person, your self and even your own heart, right there you have direct knowledge of what to be in your self, in your person and in all of your life. Then you are profoundly grounded.

It isn’t mysterious: it’s natural and immediate, and requires no process. You can’t work for it. You can’t earn it. You can only respond to it.

All-Weather Cleaning: The Purification Of Your Heart

Q: When you say that we need to do inner cleaning, what do you actually mean?

John: When you first recognize the value of cleaning, the tendency is to respond to your self and not what you’re knowing. Then you’ll be a fair-weather cleaner, so you clean your self when your environment is stable, everything feels good, while people are nice to you.

But the cleaning that counts the most is when you’re most under pressure, where the weather is not fair and everything feels terrible. The only way to do that is when the cleaning starts in your heart and not in your self. If you’re not first purifying your heart and you work on purifying your self, you’ll have a self-oriented, self-centred purification. It will be highly conditional.

Purification of the heart means that you’ll always be in your heart with openness and softness, at any cost to your self. Purification of your heart is really simple. If you’ll purify your heart in its simplicity, then you’ll be able to move into purifying your self, which is full of complexity. It’s the simplicity of heart purification brought into your self which enables complex purification.

The way to purify your heart is being what you actually know the truth of in your heart, at any cost.

Q: So there is nothing to clean? Just to be there in the heart?

John: Yes. Being openness and softness in your heart cleans out what is closed and hard in your heart. When you’re being openness and softness in your heart, it cleans your self out of your heart. Anything of your self that you’ve taken to heart, including your conditioning, will be cleaned out. Then your self is being conditioned by an open and a soft heart. It’s being cleaned out and it’s being changed.

When you work on purifying your self but you haven’t purified your heart, that’s like cleaning your house to favour appearances. So when company comes over everything is nice and clean, but they’d better not open a closet!

The Purpose Of Memory

Q: I have a question about my memory. It’s getting worse all the time. I’m going to have it checked, but I’m also wondering if it’s an expression of something that’s not physical. I can see some of the benefits, like not clinging to things, but I’d love to hear you talk about this.

John: The whole purpose of memory is to manifest your being in. The moment you’re even concerned about your memory, you’re separate from your own being, and you’re making the substance of memory of greater importance than being both in your heart and in your being.

Q: I can understand that because much of the time I’m even enjoying it, but there’s a scary sense of dissipating.

John: When you don’t want it to dissipate, you cut off the supply of your own being to your memory. The supply of being matters more than memory, but it isn’t going to matter more if you’re not connected to it. So be the supply of being to your memory without any focus of result.

Q: I understand it as just relaxing. Is that it?

John: Yes. Do what you can on the same level as memory for your memory, but don’t use any movement of your being to improve it. That’s not what it’s for.

Be unconditionally open and soft in your heart within the context of memory. That includes the loss of memory as much as having more memory. The existence of memory isn’t less when memory dissipates. Your experience of it changes with the decrease or the increase, yet it isn’t about either.

It’s you being open and soft in your heart within memory, and that openness and softness doesn’t become less when your memory becomes less.

Q: I think it’s even helping me to get deeper. Am I using it? Is this what it’s for?

John: If you’re being openness and softness within memory, when memory increases there’s an impetus to openness and softness, and openness and softness deepens. If you’re being that openness and softness and memory decreases, the impetus is the same to openness and softness.

If you try to use openness and softness for the benefit of your memory, you disconnect from openness and softness. Or, if you notice that decreased memory feels open and soft, you will subconsciously compromise your memory.

The balance is simply being open and soft whichever way your memory goes.

Q: So my wanting a high-functioning memory back is not something I should give energy to?

John: On the level of your self, yes, and deeper within than your self, for instance in your heart, no. And you’re able to do both at the same time. On the level of your self, work on your memory, while in your heart it makes no difference to you.

It’s the truth of multi-tasking, but if you connect the two you fool your self. There needs to be a full flow on a heart level and a full flow on a self level. They work independently of each other. You’re moving on both levels at the same time, and you’re all in both levels.

Q: Okay. Practically, what I’m getting from this is just to relax.

John: Yes. The more relaxed you are, the less you’ll cross the levels. When you’re profoundly relaxed as awareness, you will naturally move in your heart and in your self in the way that you know.

 

 

The End Of A Relationship: At Rest In Your Heart

Q: My question is about how to be in the ending of a relationship. My partner has decided it’s not right for him to be with me and I’m ready to let go, to see the good in what is there between us and just to be with the pain as it is. Yet there is also the pain of desire and longing, and a feeling of not being good enough. This has happened lots of times in my life. How can I just have the goodness without having to prove that there is something wrong with the situation?

John: By being openness and softness instead of being your self. As soon as you’re being your self, you have a story. Your self is important, but it is not important for you to be your self. What’s important is to be like your own being, in the midst of your self. That adds a thickness to your own being instead of a story.

Q: This is something really new for me; I heard it for the first time today and it really resonated that I might connect to my being rather than to my self.

John: When you’re being your self you’ll have some kind of story about how you experience your self, whether that’s a happy story or an unhappy one. Either way, the story isn’t what satisfies you. It satisfies your self, but you’ll always need more and there’s an endless supply. If you’re being your own being in the midst of your self, you’re truly satisfied.

Q: This resonates, and I would love to be present enough to do this, yet I feel there’s such a fine line.

John: Yes. When you’re in your self, your self feels important but when you’re quieted within your heart you know that there’s something more important than how you presently experience your self. Be what you know is more important in the midst of what feels so pressing. That turns you right-side up. You’ll be manifesting your own being within your self, without a story. There’s an experience to that, which generates a story, but there isn’t first a story.

As soon as you have a story about anything, you are in some way separate from your heart and your being. When there’s an openness and a softness of heart, that relieves you of your story. The openness and softness of heart is fundamentally real and immediate to you. It satisfies you.

In a relationship ending, the story of it is “what about everything that was? And what about this pain? What about what I would like to have?” You can have stories when you’re in the relationship and you can have stories as the relationship ends, but when you are being openness and softness of heart there is no story – either to being in a relationship or to a relationship ending.

The relationship doesn’t need to end, and if it ends despite the truth of that, openness and softness of heart doesn’t end.

Q: I think I had a little glimpse of that earlier in the meeting. I felt connected to my being and didn’t have pain.

John: When you realize that the value of openness and softness of heart exceeds the value of your self, that it is what gives meaning to your self, live in that openness and softness. Don’t look for another relationship. Realize what is fundamentally meaningful to you, and it isn’t your self that’s meaningful. You use your self to pursue meaning but the meaning is in you being in your heart and connected to your own being.

From here forward, live in that openness and that softness of heart. Live quietly connecting to your own being and there you realize that you have need of nothing. You don’t need a relationship, but you are open to what may come. Don’t move into another relationship unless it’s really clear to you that your potential partner is coming from the same place and moving in the same direction as you, with openness and softness of heart meaning more than his self or what he’s experiencing.

Because this is new for you, don’t move quickly into a new relationship because it will be a huge distraction; you won’t settle into just simply being in your heart and connecting to the quietness of your own being. Become established in that before you take on a new relationship.

Q: That’s good to hear, even though I thought I’d done that before this relationship! It feels good to take time for that.

John: And if he sees a change in you and he wants to stay in relationship, don’t be quick to resume what you had with him before. Set the terms of the relationship continuing based only on what you are newly realizing.

Q: What you say feels so true, yet I hope the temptation of the love that comes with a relationship doesn’t pull me to resume the old, or begin a new one.

John: It’ll pull you – as will every other distraction in life – unless you are fundamentally clear that openness and softness mean more to you than anything you can have in your self.

If you don’t make that clear, every distraction will come along and you’ll be tempted because of your investment in them. If you’re not invested, you won’t be tempted. If it’s real that you value openness and softness in your heart more than your self in the present, there isn’t anything that can entice you. It’s real to you that you belong to openness and softness of heart.

Q: How will I know this is established? I feel it’s taken all of my life to develop this, and I still feel I have so far to go! I guess it’s just about doing it.

John: It’s really being it and really doing it. If anything distracts you, let go of that distraction … and more. It’s not actually what’s on the surface that distracts you; it’s that you’ve been selling out to the promise of something in your self.

Your real satisfaction is not from anything that comes from outside of you. It’s from what is present and quietly within. When you’re rested in what is quietly within, you are in your heart and connected to your own being.

 

Micro-Moments Of Realness In Chronic Pain

Q: I work with people who suffer from chronic pain and I’m wondering what would assist them in dealing with it.

John: To have no personal issue with chronic pain. For the most part, people who have chronic pain are attached to it. Only profound honesty can be in pain and make no story about it.

Q: So the story is the problem, more than the pain?

John: Yes. The dishonesty of awareness to what it knows is what creates that story.

Q: What’s a way in to assist someone in that situation?

John: The way in will be very short-lived. There are many ways in, for example a kind look. When someone who is in chronic pain receives a kind look, for a moment they’re distracted from their pain. They’re distracted from their story because they’re touched in their heart. The touch in their heart has nothing to do with their story.

Q: So, compassion?

John: It’ll be a very short-lived distraction from their story. For that short moment they realize again, without a thought process, what works. The touch in their heart works. Their story doesn’t work, their chronic pain doesn’t work, their whole relationship with it doesn’t work.

The touch in their heart works. Right there, someone in chronic pain knows how to be, and it has nothing to do with their story or their pain.

Q: It’s giving them something, another way of being. If you’re in your story all the time, then that is your experience.

John: Everyone is distracted in micro-moments of being throughout every day. Everyone is distracted from their story.

Q: So is it a matter of bringing their awareness to that valid distraction?

John: Yes, but that won’t do because you’ll need another momentary distraction. When someone becomes honest within that moment, doubling the time of that moment, they realize what they know the truth of.

Right there is where they’re able to be completely free of themselves by sustaining being in agreement with what they know, despite anything that they’re experiencing. Right there is either a micro-choice to remain in that or a micro-choice to turn back to the story.

Q: Is it necessary to get a sense of the response within the body for them to know that’s happening, so it’s a body awareness and not all in the head? 

John: Everyone has micro-moments of that throughout the day. You can do something to bring more awareness to that, but that won’t necessarily make a person better. It won’t necessarily really help.

It costs the whole story to walk away from the story.