Talk: Self-Awareness And Authenticity

Awareness & authenticity, when applied to our relationships & sexuality in our everyday lives, can bring about much greater connection, meaning, and juiciness between people while aiding us to have greater fulfilment in our relating and with ourselves. This bright and funny, subtly deep talk was given by John in Manchester, UK.

Transcript

It's really gorgeous to be here with you. I had a walk around at the break just having a proper look at you all because once you get up here you can't see properly and I just want to commend you on how gorgeous you all are actually. So it's just really nice to have such an attractive audience. Really. Thank you. I applaud you. What I'm more interested in than providing information or talking about something is our experience. And our experience is continuous. Our experience is now. You heard this word a lot in the last 20 years, The word now and presence and such like. And even just listening to Nicola now, You can hear that we consider presence as an act of doing more than an act of being. That there's something to be done. So I want to introduce you right at the beginning of this and I don't know where we're going to go with this. Quite honestly, When the 12 minutes is up they're just up basically to a simple way that I work with my I've been working with my own students of late and I'm very fortunate that I get to work with many many thousands of people sort of online and so on sort of around the world and the recordings really help as well. So I've been asking people to do recently because we think you know what we hear the word like meditate for example. So say this is a meditation class which is not of course. The minute you hear a word you lean into what you've read about it or what you've heard about it what you think it means and then you try to project into that. And it's very much like how we live our lives of how the past we look at the past and therefore create predictable futures by predicting forward and most of our lives work out exactly as we think they're going to work out like because that's what we're thinking you see and you can't out think it. You know Einstein said that you can't change something at the same level that it's being created at. So we need to come to another place. So what I invite my students to do and I'm inviting you in this moment to do is not to make an egoic effort but I would invite you to see if you can allow this moment. Can you allow yourself to be here. Now immediately you're probably going to feel your mind kind of take over and an effort being made in some way. So once you feel that effort all you've got to do is back out you back out from the effort you make the non effort. So the way that we can meet that is notice the effort that you're making and just see if you can just back off a little bit and just notice how that is for you. Can you allow yourself to simply be here in this room. The reason that I'm introducing this to you and I just would like you to not do that for the rest of this 12 minutes. People have this idea of spiritual practice or meditation. It's being doing something for like 20 minutes meditating for 20 minutes. We're going to have sex for half an hour or whatever you know. And so it's not a case of doing something for a specific amount of time. It's this non effort of being and allowing it to take as long as we would like. You know so if you want to meditate 20 minutes you allow this unfolding of the moment. And of course you're aware of your mind and you're aware of your emotions and you're aware of fear and the past and all that. But what we don't realize most of the time is that we're living in things. We're living in those things. And that's what's getting in the way of our juiciness. The thing is presence is damn juicy. Authenticity is juicy and you can't do an act of authenticity. I've heard people acting authentic a lot. And in the game that I'm in believe me you know people act authentic at me all the time to show me their spirituality you know. And I'm like like this you know like like like somebody just read me a profoundly bad haiku. So which is really good just if you're ever worried about kind of a proper reaction somebody just hear a haiku and go inside yourself. So it's this non effort this this dropping back that allows for our authentic heart to kind of come into existence. And the reason I'm telling you this the reason I'm talking about this is because my whole life I didn't set out to be whatever this is. This is an accident. It's not an accident. It's just a side effect of living this human life at this time this being living this life. I just feel absolutely ordinary. And and yet I can't help but be a human being I can't help but love us. I can't help but see how separate we are from each other all of the damn time. And wonder what we can do about it and see that every solution that people offer through a dualistic system of this is and that just never brings us into any kind of wholeness. And yet the the duality that we're talking about only exists with this wholeness behind it. The wholeness is already there. It hasn't gone anywhere. We just got to back out you know not as an egoic effort but back out. And something I've observed nobody here of course I'm sure. So I'll just talk about as if I'm talking about me but I'm not talking about you obviously. What I've noticed my whole life is people not being with each other missing each other. I know people who have been married or in relationships for 30 40 years who have never met. You see them in restaurants you see them on buses you see them on trains you see them in the bar you see them talking endlessly you see them interested in things you see them engaging in culture but they've never met. All that has ever met is their ideas of themselves. And we go around looking for each other in ideas all of the time. And this is not to problematize us it's conditioning it's the way that this this society and this culture is operating to turn us into somebodies and we need to get away from being somebodies to being just us just me just you. Naked true spirituality is naked baby which is just absolutely beautiful. We have to kind of be naked with each other with authenticity with our awareness. Where I want to introduce awareness is not what's on the piece of paper at all. I want to again this is not information I just want to introduce it something. How are you getting on with the effortless effort. You still here or have you just notice where you are. And you know has the idea taken of oh my God this guy's crap isn't it. You know the voice in the head or you know oh really you know I really should have put that lasagna out of the freezer before I came out. And that sort of thing you know that's where we live in those things and it's nothing wrong with that. But when we actually allow for this moment then we just can be here and all of that can be attended to as well. But we keep projecting forward. So all we need do if we're missing each other is we need to introduce another thing into our relationships basically and that's awareness. When this is a visual thing really but when let's just call it two people I know there are many modalities and how enjoyable they are. But you know just in the basic model of one plus one what we tend to do is our ideas meet another set of ideas and we hope that those ideas mesh or add to each other in some way. And then we spend our lives kind of looking through those ideas at each other kind of face to face like this and we expect the other to be the answer to the things that we're seeking. You know the loss the pain body and so on. And yet if we were to turn you know authentically just drop it and turn just slightly like this to be kind of 45 degrees with each other and put awareness here make ourselves responsible to awareness as a kind of an overriding thing. Then we have a third person or a third aspect in our relationships and that will always kind of see us right because then we serve our awareness sort of through the heart as it were. So I want to just kind of offer you that that's kind of something that I'm seeing more and more that we need at the moment. I think my time is kind of heading away quite quickly so I just want to go back to two minutes thank you you're doing that so beautifully. Just going back to this being here because I'm not really as I say not that interested in talking in a way or providing some information. I only just want to introduce let's be authentic about our nakedness with each other and awareness introduced into our relationships because otherwise all we've got is living through ideas with each other and we never meet and we're worth so much more than that you know. And sexuality is great because it is a place that we break that down for a moment here and there but I want more than a moment. I want to be seen and I want to see you and I want you to see me. You know I want you to know that you've been seen and we can't do that through this realm of ideas all the time and information when not information and ideas and not everything is to be added to ourselves. So I want to go back to just you being here in this moment. Just allow that feeling in your body. Allow yourself to feel your bum sitting on the chair your feet on the floor and the space of this room around you and just allow that. Just allow yourself to actually be here with each other and I would invite you in this last moment to simply look at the people next to you. Just actually in being look at the people next to you even take their hand if you want to. Just allow yourself the intimacy of the moment with each other. Welcome to church ladies and gentlemen. Hallelujah! Thank you very much.

Reviews

Thanks

Spellbinding

First rate message. Deep and light. So much better to stay light than the egoic, heavy, fakey fakey spiritual cloak many teachers assume. 🙏❤️🌸

Thank you, as always! Lovely! You nailed it.
Not easy but I've been practicing Being in the moment..for a long time. Doing nothing. Being nobody. Just here. Now. Namaste!!

Excellent- so true! Thank you for reminding us .🙏