We have all peed in the water. We have all contributed to the pollution that is destroying this planet. Just as we have all acted in thoughtless, judgmental, disconnected, hurtful, angry, unfair ways toward our fellow human beings and toward the flora and fauna of our planet.
Everything single thing we do has consequences, but we’ve all gotten really good at pretending it doesn’t.
This disconnect has to stop!
Read More
The world is broken right now. The good news is that none of us can pretend it isn’t. Yes, the good news. Because we cannot heal until we recognize that we need to heal.
Until we are willing to break down the old, we will not see what we have forgotten. We can only be whole when we recognize that we are only Whole in Love.
We cannot create new ways of living until we stop choosing the old ways.
Read More
If each of us approached every single situation in our lives with Love as our language, Love as the basis for all our beliefs, Love as the impetus for all our actions, would the world look the way it does? No.
Do we need to still have conversations about racism and bigotry and prejudice? Yes.
Do we all need to unpack our own beliefs to see where we are racist and bigoted and prejudicial against anyone “not like us”? Yes.
But at the same time we all need to realize one fundamental thing: No one is “not like us”. We are ALL the same. We are all human beings whose fundamental language is Love.
In other words, we are all snowflakes. Unique individuals all made of the same stuff.
We are all here to be and do the same thing: To love and to be loved.
We all want the same thing: To be able to live a life where we can freely love and be loved. Love ourselves. Love our families, Love our friends. Love our communities. Love our world.
So to live Love IS a game changer because it understands that this world will never be whole unless Love is our guiding ethos in everything we do. And we can only start with ourselves.
Love must be our litmus test.
Love must be our GPS.
Love must be our Bible, Torah, Quran, Tao Te Ching, prayer beads, prayer mat, ancestral rituals, kachinas, candles, incense, dreamcatchers, statues, crosses, crowns.
This is an inside job. Unless each of us lives Love, our world will never be whole.
Read More
All any of us want is to love and to be loved. And yet people die senselessly every day because of fear which turns into anger or hatred or -isms that kill.
When I say that living Love isn’t optional, this is what I mean. When I say that every day we need to choose Love instead of fear, this is what I mean. When I say that we all need to become heart-centered practitioners to change this deeply-ingrained habit of fear, this is what I mean.
Read More
Well, my dad is no longer here. Does he know that people, including me, still celebrate his birthday? Who knows? But we celebrate anyway, because we’re celebrating for us. And what we’re really celebrating is not so much a birthday but rather the love we have for him — and the fact that our mutual love for him brings us together in Love.
John O’Donohue also said: “There’s something really holy in celebration. Real celebration is about the lyrical dance of joy at the center of the human heart.”
Read More
We can’t care for others if we do not know how to care for ourselves.
If we can’t find peace inside, it’s not going to manifest on the outside.
If we can’t ground ourselves in calm, our lives will never be calm.
Love is reflected in love. If we don’t know how to love ourselves through our frustrations, how can we possibly love anyone else?
Read More
If our internal lives are not harmonious, how do we expect our external lives to be any different?
Harmony in music is different notes coming together to form a concordant sound.
If we want our world to be harmonious, each and every one of us must make harmony a heart-centered practice.
Read More
Is every thought we think, word we say, action we take guided and governed by Love?
This is the bottom line. I’m not talking about love with the little l. I’m talking about the Love that created us all. The Love that loves us all. The Love that truly does not see anything but Love.
Read More
Studies show that we are five times more likely to retain the negative than the positive. Which means that we have to consciously shift that ratio. And the media doesn’t help. The news consists of thirty negative stories to every one good one. So right now it’s even more imperative that we learn how to Velcro Love.
We can’t ripple out Love to others until we invite Love to ripple through our own lives. So let’s take action together! Let’s create a Love Library of all the Lessons in Love we’ve learned and lived and loved.
This is how we #LoveViral. This is how we remember the Truth that is Love.
Let’s remember that to ripple out Love to others, we have to ripple Love in ourselves.
Read More
How have we come to this? How do we not understand that we’re in this together, and the only way we’re going to get out of this is together?
It immediately brought to mind the kind of sci fi story that most of us loved as kids. We’re all abandoned on a dangerous planet and we either have to band together and survive, or dissolve into hatred and enmity and die. We love those kinds of stories. Well, right now, we’re all living one.
Read More
Worry is just about the most fruitless activity in the world. It is low-grade anxiety swirling around in our head with a backlog of tense what if’s — and doing nothing about it. Not taking action. Not praying. Not looking at things from other perspectives. That worry feels exactly like the water underneath me. It just puddles up and then gets deeper. It accumulates and rises. It creeps up the walls and slowly but surely our lives get waterlogged with worry.
So the only flood I really need to watch is in my thinking. Am I allowing my thoughts to get flooded with low-grade fears, or am I listening, leaning into, and learning from Love?
Read More
When I was working with my wonderful editor, Robyn Karney, on my dad’s biography, she introduced me to a phrase I’d never heard before: In the event.
It means — as it turns (or turned) out.
Here are some uses: Bob was worried that he was going to lose his job. In the event, he ended up getting a promotion. Many possible solutions were put forward by the world’s most distinguished experts but, in the event, it was a little girl who solved the problem.
Read More
This month I’m working on a heart-centered practice of wholeness. This month I’m looking at the ripple effect of those things that aren’t whole but that we just accept or avoid dealing with.
And this may be the biggest one of all: The That’s Just the Way It Is Syndrome.
Whenever something new is introduced to the world, initially there is often a huge resistance. Things are the way they are, we think. This is the way it’s always been. Except that that isn’t true. And it never has been.
Read More
When you love something or someone or some place or some idea or. . .anything. . .love it with your whole heart. Live that Love, lean into that Love, share that Love.
My brother once said of my dad, “He loved life so life loved him back.”
It sounds simplistic, but it’s true. How many of us really love our lives?
When I was a little girl, I could feel how much my dad loved life. And it was infectious. I thought being a grownup was going to be amazing if we all got to love life this much and live around others who love life this much, too.
But how many of us can really say that we love life with our whole hearts?
Maybe it’s time for us to start. . .
Read More
What’s the difference between judgment and discernment? Fear and Love. To discern is to recognize not only the heart-centered truth of a situation, but it is to led Love guide our actions and reactions. Discernment is an essential heart-centered practice of wholeness. Right now it may be more essential than ever!
Read More
Acceptance doesn’t mean laying down in the middle of the highway and letting ourselves be run over by oncoming traffic. It means assessing a situation and showing up to it as it is, while keeping our own heart-centered values intact and in operation.
Resistance, on the other hand, immediately shifts us out of wholeness into us/them. And once that happens, we have invited fear to the party, where it proceeds to convince us that we are not all in this together.
Wholeness is heart-centered, because it sees everything as connected. So in each situation, we need to choose the nearest right, the most heart-centered choice we can make in each moment.
Read More
Are there certain habits or health conditions or ways of being that you have come to think are “just the way things are”? You might say: I am depressed, bad with money, a late-night eater, a poor sleeper. The list could go on and on.
And on most days, you can live with that. After all it’s just the way you are.
Are you? Are you really? Or at some point did you let that asterisk attach itself so thoroughly to you that you have come to think of it as you.
And when that day comes where that little asterisk threatens to take you down, is it finally time then to claim your wholeness? Or is doing that something that should be a daily and deliberate, conscious and committed heart-centered practice every single day?
Read More
As I pulled up the blinds, I thought to myself: It’s Groundhog Day. Here we go again.
And then the most amazing thing happened: I saw myself as a small thread in this tapestry of our planet — and my own little personal experience as one tiny fleck of color and texture. And I realized that every single person will wake up and face today with some feeling and have their own experience of it. And either I could continue to see myself as the star of my own movie — or I could embrace my place in the whole as the whole reason I am — any of us — are here.
And when I did that, everything eased.
Read More
compulsory means required by rule or law or obligation
compulsive resulting from, relating to, acting on an irresistible urge, especially one that is against one's conscious wishes.
a compulsion is similar to the above but is also the action or state of forcing or being forced to do something; constraint.
to compel is to force or drive or use pressure
compelling is evoking interest, attention, or admiration in a powerfully irresistible way — and therefore not usually able to be refuse
So most of these words imply something forced from the outside perhaps resulting in behavior that may harm us or others and that we may regret. And then compelling turns that on its ear — and what is irresistible is not necessarily bad, and most probably beautiful or fascinating and powerful.
Read More
If we lose sight of our inherent wholeness we might begin to believe that we are not whole. That something is wrong that needs to be fixed, when all that really needs to happen is some good deep spiritual cleaning.
This heart-centered practice of wholeness is about re-learning how to begin and end in wholeness. Not how to fix something that has gotten irrevocably broken. This is true of ourselves, of one another, and of our world. This means — and this is the tough part — if we don’t want to see ourselves as broken, we can’t see anyone else as broken. If we want to see a vibrant and hopeful future for our economy and our planet, we have to start from its place of inherent wholeness.
Mother Earth shows us this every single day — as skies get bluer and bluer, rivers run cleaner, birds, fish and animals return to places they had long abandoned. A little cleaning, Mother Earth reminds us, goes a long way. She is showing us the way.
Read More