I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John

Latest Episodes:

217. DEAR CARING ONE. Jan 20, 2022

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Reading a selection titled, Dear Caring One, from my book, Legendary: A Tribute to Those Who Honorably Serve Devalued Children. My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books, are available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...

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216. HERE'S THE THING ABOUT FEAR. Jan 08, 2022

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Reading an unpublished piece from 2012 which begins, "Here's the thing about fear..." My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books, are available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com...

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215. MAY YOU OPEN UP YOUR HEART. Dec 21, 2021

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Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A passage that begins, "May you open up your heart and soul to Creation..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...

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214. WHEN YOU SPEAK A BOUNDARY. Dec 15, 2021

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Reading an unpublished piece which begins, "Dear One. When you speak a boundary..." My new book, Fragrance After Rain, is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...
Episode text:
Dear One. When you speak a boundary and do not uphold it, you have not actually set a boundary. You see? A boundary is not a word. A boundary is an act. An act of integrity between you and you. A promise not to betray yourself. A follow through on your sacred word. A consistency between word and behavior. A boundary is also a practice of being true to yourself.
Maybe you are so afraid of being abandoned that you abandon yourself. You abandon making space and spirit for what you desire and need. You prevent the people and things that could be your blessing from having a place in your life. Who are you holding space for and why? It is good to ask this question daily. And to answer bravely.
Trauma can cause us to act against our own interest by filling our life with people who violate our boundaries, and impeding the presence of those who would honor our boundaries. Gentle now. No need for guilt or shame. These words are Love's clarity.
People pleasing is not just an inconvenience to yourself. It is a theft of your life space, energy, and fertility. Gentle now.
If you were violated when you were young, you may very well associate being violated with Love. If your habit muscles for pleasing others are stronger than your habit muscles for healthy Love relations, sacred Love will be elusive. The answer is to strengthen your discernment muscles for healthful, mutually honoring relationship. Yes?
When you speak a boundary and then accommodate a person's violation of that boundary by remaining available to them in the same way as before, you are inviting them to interpret your accommodation in ways that serve them, not you. They can with good reason tell themselves that you must not have meant what you said. That you must want them to be with you how they have always been with you. You signal this by betraying your boundary.
And if you yearn for more space for yourself in your life, but keep flooding your life with the presence, energy, spirit, and motives of others who violate your stated boundaries, you are creating your own drought of space for yourself. You see?
When you uphold a boundary, you are nullifying an agreement with another person written in the ink and ether of your joint history together that says, "I assent to how you are with me." You are presenting new, non-negotiable contract language backed by your willingness to release the prior relationship.
A boundary is a personal habit. A form of hygiene. You keep yourself and your life clean and free for what you want by honoring what you say through what you do. You exude this habit energetically. You do not control how others respond to your boundaries. This is not the point of a boundary. Your boundaries are for your wellness, peace, and fulfillment of the life your soul desires.
You can learn to be gentle with yourself, within yourself, in the way you nurture your boundaries. You do not have to destroy your soul with rage. Each day, pay Loving attention to how you exist in this world. Learn to discern what heals and helps you from what numbs, distracts, harms, or uses you. Speak your boundary and you plant a seed. Honor your boundary and you bring your seed all the way to its fullest, most beautiful life...

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213. YOUR BOUNDARY. Dec 01, 2021

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Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A passage that begins, "Your boundary need not always be an angry electric fence..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...

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212. HUMAN KIND OR HUMAN CRUEL. Nov 24, 2021

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Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A passage that begins, "Human kind or human cruel..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...

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211. ALL YOUR LIFE. Nov 09, 2021

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Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A passage that begins, "All your life..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...

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210. TODAY I WILL WRITE POETRY FOR YOU. Oct 29, 2021

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Reading from my new book, Fragrance After Rain. A passage that begins, "Today I will write poetry for you..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...
TEXT OF BOOK EXCERPT READ IN THIS EPISODE:
TODAY I WILL WRITE poetry for you. You will be my poetry, writing me. Today is writing all of this poetry. Sun is rising again and again inside this day. Light has learned a new Love song. Now, beneath the shade tree with blossoms of purple fountains, I usher this river through. Now, with a tender breeze patting my face with the same Love your brown hands pat into the white belly of tortilla dough, now this joy moves through.
Life is a song soaked in beauty. Life is a dance with no rules. No hours. No curfew. Just callouses building and breaking open again. Just the mist in your eyes. Eyes of a forest fawn. Eyes of dew. Plunging eyes, swimming great lakes of soul. And your brown hands, supple and survived, your brown hands kneading dough, pleading Love into bread, bread into Love, Love into hunger, into bodies browned by Love, into lives leaning against kind moments of Love.
And I taste the bread your Love has made. Sky sings inside my bones, inside my breath, in the streams streaming my blood. You wake my ancestors. Everything is drumming now. Drum song is a vibration melting away what is not life from my life.
Come, place your brown hand in my brown hand. Today, we walk the Red Road, earth like blushing coffee. We walk the hills, green and billowing. We walk beneath oaks and eucalyptus, redwoods whispering wild languages. We walk along creeks and lips of lakes. We walk a million sunrises. Watering all living things with tears of Grace. We walk Creation, kneeling to smell and stroke the smallest grain. The bread you make is the rising of Love in every soul it feeds. Earth Loves you, sainted one. Your brown hands are how this life holds itself. In Love...

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209. FRAGRANCE AFTER RAIN (BOOK RELEASE READING). Oct 20, 2021

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Discussing the October 18 release of my new book, Fragrance After Rain, and reading a passage from the book that begins, "I sat on the mountaintop..." Fragrance After Rain is available online at booksellers worldwide, in both hardcover and softcover. You can be a precious part of our October book launch by posting your copy on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, and by sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Jaiya John follows up his books Daughter Drink This Water, and, Freedom, with this aromatic delight for your soul. Fragrance After Rain is a sensitive, hopeful, intimate movement through your many seasons of tenderness, and the beautiful meaning and grace that grow from that fertile ground. If you love Rumi, Hafez, Gibran, and other classic mystic poets, here is your honey jar. This book is pregnant with balm and salve so personal and intuitively attuned, you will be certain the words were birthed just for you. Sustenance as you live through your personal moments, and through the collective moods of the world.
Fragrance is a free flowing melody of petite stories and mystic whispers, a wildflower meadow you may enjoy wherever you lay yourself within it for a moment and breathe beautifully. These inspirational pieces are entirely liberated from chapters and sections, freely roaming, drifting on spirit breeze as they wish. Each word-bouquet is gathered and growing according to the sunlight, soil, and water of Love’s orchestral conducting. Open this book, turn to a page, let your eyes arrive to any brief orchard of words, and allow your heart to taste the fruit and meet its craving. Whatever words you meet are the words you need in the moment. In this Fragrance story, the one who speaks, is spoken to, and is spoken about is you, BeLoved. All of this is you.
This is a book of bright clouds in the sky of your life. Bringing you beauty, meaning, the downy reflection of sunlight, life-replenishing rain, and a sweet fragrance thereafter. Walk, dance, sing, and repose yourself through this aromatic pasture, and feel a peace that is both medicine and music for your soul. Be careful, dear Lover. If you sip these words slowly and savor their essence, you may become a mystic. 5.5 x 8.5. Hardcover and Softcover. First Edition. 306 pages. Inspiration / Personal growth and healing / Spiritual growth. ISBN: 978-0-9987802-6-9

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208. A YOUNG BOY AND A SPARROW. Sep 23, 2021

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Reading a short, short children's story I wrote at age 18 when I first started writing. The story begins, "A young boy walking in the fields..."I also update you on the status of my upcoming book, Fragrance After Rain, when you can expect your exclusive website preorders to ship to you, and when the book will be available on the open market. jaiyajohn.com. Books online everywhere...

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