Snowflakes

May 29, 2020

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.

Living Love is Not Optional

May 28, 2020

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.

Harmony

May 25, 2020

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.

Listen to Love

May 24, 2020

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.

Velcro Love

May 23, 2020

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.

In the Event

May 20, 2020

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.

The Way It Is

May 19, 2020

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.

Ripple Love

May 18, 2020

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. . .

Removing Asterisks

May 15, 2020

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?

Clear

May 12, 2020

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.

Lean

May 10, 2020

Here in the US, today is Mothers Day.

Wherever she may be, my mother is undoubtedly chuckling . . .because today’s blog is about planning.

Clean House

May 9, 2020

We have become so good at avoidance, that we no longer know we’re avoiding something.

You know how you can go up and down stairs without thinking. That’s what we do with stuff we don’t want to see. We pick up that corner of our consciousness and sweep unpleasantness away, all while having a conversation or cooking breakfast.

That’s why we have to clean house.

The Blue Dye

May 8, 2020

This pandemic is like contrast dye used in a medical test: Contrast dye is injected so that medical professionals can better see what is normal or abnormal. It doesn’t change what is being seen; it just allows them to distinguish what is healthy and unhealthy. This, then, allows them to make a more accurate diagnosis which leads to better healing. This pandemic is revealing so many things that all of us have tried to ignore. That’s why this heart-centered practice of wholeness is ESSENTIAL. And that’s why it’s so hard. We weren’t brought up to look at the hard stuff. But we have to do it. We can stay in avoidance -- OR we can avail ourselves of the Power of Love that always always heals!

Wholly Holy Whole

May 3, 2020

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.

Dear,

May 2, 2020

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.

The Heart-Centered Practice of Wholeness

May 1, 2020

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.