Q: I feel as if I’m in the biggest crisis of my life. I’ve been married for twenty years, and thirty years ago I was in love with a man twenty years older than me. He was married, with children. A few years ago he called me and our love is still there. My husband knows about him. It’s so hard to choose between these two men. I need your help! And recently the word “stay” has been coming to me.

John: Stay in your relationship with your husband...

Q: I want to talk about forgiveness. We’re often told to forgive this and forgive that, but if we’re really coming from our heart there is no need for forgiveness. 

John: Yes. When you hold a grudge, or when you’re closing and hardening towards someone because of how they’ve treated you, it doesn’t matter how wrongly you’re treated, you’re not right in closing or hardening. So in that way no one has a good or a real reason to close and harden. 

We can close and harden when we’re mistreated, and what we understand in ourselves is that ultimately we need to come to a place of forgiving, forgiving the other...

Q: My question is about family. How can we be with family in our hearts when we feel very different from them?

John: When you’re in your heart, you’ll see in the others what isn’t different. Your whole sense of meaning in being together will be based on what isn’t different, enabling the differences to have a brightness of color without a sense of polarity. When you’re in your heart toward the others, their differences – how their personalities and selves are different from yours – become dear to you, enabling your love for them to not be based on what they are being to you and how they’re behaving...