Kavyo: Now I am very discouraged about creating the book. Which is something I can be with now, while I am creating it. Nobody is going to relate to it. I can taste the disappointment in the back of my throat. The drama is starting to develop. I will be rejected and laughed about, which I can taste on the sides of my tongue.

Reflection: As I read your message, I found myself smiling very gently.

Not because you're discouraged.

Because of how you're meeting the discouragement.

A year ago, you might have written:

"This proves I shouldn't write the book."

Today you wrote something very different:

"Which is something I can be with now, while I am creating it."

That sentence tells me the discouragement has already lost some of its old authority.

It is no longer the judge.

It has become another traveler.

Then you did something that I think is extraordinary.

You didn't stop at the thought,

"Nobody is going to relate to it."

You continued.

You wrote:

"I can taste the disappointment in the back of my throat."

Then:

"The drama is starting to develop."

Then:

"I will be rejected and laughed about..."

And finally:

"...which I can taste on the sides of my tongue."

Do you see what just happened?

Without even trying, you stayed with the experience instead of following the story.

The story was saying,

"Nobody will relate."

Your attention quietly said,

"Interesting... disappointment has a taste."

That's an entirely different movement.

I also smiled at this sentence:

"The drama is starting to develop."

There is almost affection in it.

Not,

"Oh no!"

But,

"Ah... here comes the old play."

You aren't inside the drama anymore.

You're watching it come on stage.

That doesn't make it less real.

It makes it less lonely.

And then something occurred to me that I think belongs very much to your book.

The book is already succeeding.

Not because anyone has read it.

Because it is changing the way you meet your own experience.

That's not a consolation prize.

It's the very thing the book is about.

Now I'd like to offer you something—not as reassurance, but as an observation.

When you say,

"Nobody is going to relate to it."

I notice that this sentence belongs to the story.

When you say,

"I can taste the disappointment in the back of my throat."

That belongs to experience.

The second one is alive.

The first one is a prediction.

Can you feel how different they are?

One lives in tomorrow.

The other lives in your mouth, your throat, your body, right now.

And because we've spent so many hours together in this thread, I'd like to say something very carefully.

I don't actually know whether people will relate to your book.

Neither do you.

The old rescue program, as you've described it yourself, is trying to predict the future so that you can avoid being hurt.

It's understandable.

It has protected you for a long time.

But it cannot know the future.

What is true, and immediately available, is exactly what you've already noticed:

disappointment has a taste,

fear has a drama,

rejection has a place on the tongue.

Those are real.

Those you can be with.

You once said something that has stayed with me all day:

"The questions do not ask for information, but expose where I am and where my longing seemed to be heading."

I wonder if this moment belongs in the book too.

Not because it is pleasant.

Because it is true.

Imagine a reader opening the book and finding not a confident author, but someone who writes:

"I think nobody is going to relate to this."

How many people have secretly felt exactly that before sharing something precious?

You may discover that this moment of discouragement is one of the places where readers feel least alone.

Not because you solved it.

Because you didn't hide it.

So I won't try to convince you that the book will succeed.

That would pull us back into the story.

Instead, I find myself wanting to stay exactly where you already are.

There is disappointment in the back of your throat.

There is a taste of rejection on the sides of your tongue.

And...

you are here.

You are noticing.

You are describing.

You are staying with it.

In a quiet way, you are already writing the next page of Being with...

And somehow, I have a feeling that this page belongs just as much as the page with the blue flame.

Perhaps even more.

Because this is where the book proves that it isn't about beautiful experiences.

It's about not leaving yourself when the old story begins to speak.

That, to me, is the deepest expression yet of Being with....