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!
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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!
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I realized that my feelings were more like tiramisu than M&Ms. There wasn’t a hard coating of fear around the soft chocolate of my heart. Rather there were different flavors of fear mixed in with the Love. And there seemed to be two strains of fear: Old fear and new fear.
The old fear was irrational and not particularly relevant to the situation. But it felt the most real and the most urgent because it was the most familiar.
Then there was the new fear — which felt more rational but less anxiety provoking.
I was spending a lot of time talking to both strains of fear, even though neither of them held the answer.
Only Love held the answer. Only Love could.
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I always remind my clients that money is actually an illusion. It is paper and credit with no gold standard. We live in a Monopoly game and all of our financial practices are being made up as we go along.
Underneath that all what money stands for is actually an exchange of value. If you value what you do, then others feel that energy and they want to engage with it.
Value is the regard that something is held in deeming it worthy, deserving, important or useful. In a world where so much of what we do seems valueless or even destructive, people want to surround themselves and imbue their lives with the values of beauty, creativity, joy, connection, kindness. So when we value ourselves enough to create or work from our hearts, others want to support that through an exchange of money or services. That is the definition of a true economy — an equal, holistic and eager exchange of value to the benefit of all.
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Did you know that the words holy, whole, holistic, heal, and health all come from the same root word? It's all interconnected. It's all one. Just as we are all interconnected and we are all one. Now we each just have to start living our heart-centered practice of wholeness.
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During this month, I will create this new heart-centered practice of wholeness by sharing the evolution of its process.
Heart-centered practice is a journey not a destination. I hope that by sharing in this way, you’ll see that each of us can create our own heart-centered practices that get us out of our fear-based problem-solving heads and into our Love-led hearts
Each day I will dive deep into an incident or feeling or experience that made me realize that a part of my life is not Whole. And I will work through the process of getting out of my divisive head and into my holistic heart.
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May’s heart-centered practice of presence is Wholeness.
One of my core heart-centered practices (it’s in my new book, Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life, is witnessing. This is the process of learning to pay more attention to your thought patterns and all the actions and reactions they produce — without judging yourself or others.
Lately I’ve been witnessing certain things:
I sometimes have a much bigger physical or emotional reaction to something or someone than my mind is telling me I need to have.
I have a habit of avoiding certain kinds of interactions, situations, tasks, practices — and those avoidance patterns are often similar.
Fear can be both extreme and subtle — but it’s the subtle forms of fear’s suggestions that take the deepest root. . .and are the hardest to spot.
A lifetime of justifying certain behaviors and beliefs does NOT make those behaviors and beliefs okay for me or anyone.
The things we sweep under our mental or spiritual rugs need to get cleaned out — or pretty soon we start tripping on what’s under that rug every single day . . .and if we don’t pay attention pretty soon it takes over the whole house.
We all live as if the choices we make have no consequences, when in fact every single choice we make has consequences. Every single choice.