All Transcripts

Relationship

If You Had Someone Else’s Self For A Day …

Several people speak with John in the Jewel Cafe:

Q1: Things are better with my daughter.

John: It’s better between you and your self.

Q1: What do you mean by “better between me and my self”?

John: It’s not really between you and your daughter; it’s between you and your self. If you had a different self, then what you experience between you and your daughter would be completely different.

Q1: Yes, but that’s the self I have…

Read More »
Relationship

Dealing With Stress In Relationship: A Softer Heart, Not A Bigger Hammer

Q: We have a lot of stress at home because my husband doesn’t have full time work. We’ve talked about how he gets himself into these situations, but he doesn’t seem to want to hear anything from me. It’s his learning, but it’s also very hard for me.

John: It’s very hard unless you make it easy.

Q: I think I should love him more rather than put pressure on him to listen to me, yet if I think he doesn’t want to listen I close my heart…

Read More »
Feeling & Emotion

Core Okayness: The Safety In All Vulnerability

Q: I have a question about vulnerability and the fear of being hurt. I want to surrender completely to vulnerability, but every time I try there come some images and feelings that are not from this life. They are really old – very strong violence – and I keep making these mechanisms to defend my self.

John: As those images come, instead of working with them be in a quieted, core okayness with anything that those images present to you, and a core okayness should any of those images manifest in your life...

Read More »
Consciousness & Awareness

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...

Read More »
Consciousness & Awareness

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...

Read More »
Consciousness & Awareness

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...

Read More »
Relationship

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?..

Read More »
Pain & Suffering

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...

Read More »
Feeling & Emotion

Integrating Anger And Reactivity

Q: John, I find I can get really quite angry in social interactions where I feel unfairly treated. It happened recently that I wanted to speak with someone who refused because I was getting angrier. There’s a point at which I close off. I’m wondering whether there’s something I’m missing, or if it’s okay to get angry with others sometimes?

John: For you to be angry in a situation like that exposes that you lack depth in your reasonableness. You’re well acquainted with and value reasonableness, but if you’re pushed to a certain point, you give it up...

Read More »
Parenting

Teaching Children How To Handle Power

Q: I think my young son is testing boundaries, and he sometimes quite intentionally does things we’ve asked him not to do. He seems to want our reaction or response.

John: He wants to play with power, so you need to play back to him with your power.

Q: How do I do that?

John: By being in your power and really moving it, while carefully reading your child. If you use too much, you’re going to overwhelm him. If you use too little, you mistakenly empower him...

Read More »
Meaning of Life

This Golden Life: An Immeasurable Opportunity

Q: I know that this body will be gone, and everything will be gone with it. Life is just like experience, because it comes and it goes. It brings nothing.

John: It comes with an immeasurable opportunity, and that is for you and what you first are. It offers pure awareness the possibility of evolving with great, great speed, because in every little way that pure awareness moves into manifestation, it has accurate and immediate, full reflection. 

Q: But when there will be full reflection, it will be nothing, because…

John: It’s not nothing...

Read More »
Consciousness & Awareness

Magically Taken By Knowledge: Being Your Soul In The Midst Of Life

Q: I want you to show me how to give top priority to my heart, to be in it to the fullest extent. I’ve had enough of the ignorance.

John: For you to be that far gone into your heart, start with what is even deeper. The language of what you’re speaking of is a lot deeper than your heart. In your life, within all of the spaces that you’re in, in all of your time, in the midst of everything that is going to pass away, in whichever way you can, quietly lean into what you are after you’ve died. ..

Read More »