One thing I’ve noticed is that most people get so focused on their big goal, the big change they are seeking, that they completely ignore all the tiny changes that lead up to the big change.

It’s like we expect the big change to happen in a BANG! overnight shift and we wake up and everything is different. While this can happen, it is exceedingly rare. So, too, a great idea or an intense inspiration, while profound, is not instantly transforming, as powerful and as true as it may feel. Change requires action to go with the thought.

Big change is actually a series of little shifts. Our relationship to time is what makes it so whacky. Time is measured in a linear way. So we align our goals and expectations in a linear manner to match time. But life is actually cyclical. Everything has a cycle and there are cycles within cycles.

It is very important, if you want big changes, to begin to notice these cycles. Rather than think of things happening on a time line, think of engaging and completing cycles. In order to do this you have to notice and track small changes. Small changes reveal the cycles and also reveal where you are in the cycle. Small changes are like little affirmations that change is happening.

An example of this is parenting. You might have a personal goal and you are a parent. Your children may have a need in their own life that you tend to. Say it’s a school play and the costumes need to be made and you and your partner drop everything and do a three day marathon to get them done. It’s just part of the natural rise and fall of energy cycles. It’s life. But in a linear framework you will be discouraged and feel you got off track from your goal and can feel frustration and resentment. When in reality you just surfed a wave in the energy cycle and are still completely connected to the transformation you seek.

It’s important at times, of course, to have an end goal in mind so you know when you’ve arrived. But not everything can be measured this way. The reason is that we often get ideas about where we should be that are not actually based on who we are. So perfect health for you might mean you are still “big” but radiant and energized. Or that you remain cancer free but still have cellulite. There’s no perfect picture, only our own truth.

The little things reveal our own truth to us so we can grow and expand, not just cram ourselves into some imagined box of ideals. This is as true for abundance as for the physical body.

By noticing the little things we are not driving and pushing to achieve a goal but we are actually engaged in the journey and can be transformed and enriched by it. Otherwise we are just in judgment about what we should be and how life should be and miss all the revelations of who we really are and what life really is.

I highly recommend when you set a goal or seek big changes that you take a complete inventory of where you are when you make the decision. Notice your health, energy level, sleep, mental state, quality of relationships, career health, finances, everything.

Because everything is connected, when you seek to make a change in one area other areas often need to change to allow what you seek to happen. It is very difficult to become energized and healthy if you are surrounded by negative people who eat junk food. You might notice a little thing such as no longer wanting to spend so much time with people like this. That’s a little change that is an indication of a larger shift. But if you don’t track this you will be expecting to wake-up and leap out of bed and get discouraged if the change doesn’t happen how you think it should and when you think it should.

Tracking the little things affirms we are heading in the right direction. It affirms our efforts are paying off. And it opens us to learning how life really works thereby helping us to release the controlling grip so many have on life.

Tracking the little things will make you see how much you are changing and how much you are actually accomplishing. This alone will give you more energy and strengthen your commitment to your efforts. It becomes a positive spiral of transformation.

Try doing a weekly inventory of your life and just noticing what changes week to week. You might be surprised to learn that you are more of a lean, mean, transformation machine than you ever realized! You might also learn that you, gasp, day dream more than you act. Either way it will be beneficial and you will indeed be on your way to the larger life you are creating.

People who know me know that I am always on some new health diet. People never know what I am eating or not. This is because I have been trying for so long to get my health to improve.

Some of my symptoms can be explained by one thing or another but, until recently, nothing explained them all. Let me paint a picture of what a typical day was like for me.

I slept fitfully due to chronic insomnia. Morning used to be my favorite time of day but it became increasingly difficult to just wake up. I would sit and drink very strong tea and wait for the caffeine to kick-in in the hopes of getting some energy from it. If the tea worked I would have a tiny window to be productive if the brain fog weren’t too bad that day. Then I would sit on the couch, mentally berating myself for not getting out and walking or seeing friends. The lack of motivation, focus, energy and passion was bad enough but if I did go for a walk I would be so fatigued afterward that it would take 2 days to recover. My muscles burned from climbing a flight of stairs. Battling dry skin, psoriasis, itchy ears and cracking nails seemed like a daily war.

The last several months before I discovered what was going on also involved near daily migraines - the kind that make you light sensitive and nauseous. My enthusiasm, playfulness and sex drive were declining, too. I started watching a lot of TV and surfing the internet just to pass the time until I could justify going to sleep. I became increasingly anti-social as well. My work suffered, my relationships suffered, and I suffered. I even began to think it was all in my head and that I was mental - that I just needed to change my attitude or “think differently” or just use will power and make myself change. I felt nuts because I couldn’t think my way out of it or affect significant change through all my efforts. It was no way to live.

I have studied the human body since I was 8 and herbs and nutrition since I was 16. I have helped people recover from illnesses that doctors could not treat. But I could not find a solution to this. I tried everything I could to affect my health and the only thing that really seemed to give results was a 100% raw diet - which just isn’t realistic for me, especially since my partner at the time didn’t eat that way and I live in Seattle and not hot food ½ the year just isn’t a workable solution. Besides, I had no diagnosis and didn’t even know what I was dealing with.

I finally got the Swine Flu. I love the Swine Flu because it got me to an excellent and skilled naturopath. He gave me a vitamin C injection to boost my immune system. As he removed the needle some blood came out and he commented on how thin my blood is (It was a tiny needle and shouldn’t have bled). I mentioned I am extremely ferritin deficient and just couldn’t get my blood iron levels to increase. He thought it was strange and gave me some really good iron pills.

As I was leaving the office I said “Hey, while I’m here, let me tell you a few of the symptoms I deal with and you tell me if it sounds like anything to you.” I rattled off a dozen or so symptoms and he said “It sounds like a food allergy.”

So I went home sick as a dog from the swine flu and got on the internet and did some research. I had always known I don’t seem to do as well when I eat wheat but I never got completely better when I avoided it. Turns out it isn’t a food allergy. But his suggestion led me to the answer: Gluten-intolerance.

Gluten-intolerance is an immune system response to the protein found in wheat, rye, barley, oats, and relatives of wheat. And gluten is in everything. Including my favorite salad dressing that I used to eat almost daily.

What happens is your immune system registers the protein molecule, i.e. gluten, as a foreign invader and attacks it. This attack also damages the tiny hairs, or villi, in the small intestine that are responsible for absorbing nutrients from food. Even a teeny tiny amount of gluten sets off the immune system - like one crumb in the butter can keep you sick.

Many people have heard of Celiacs Disease, which is one type of gluten-intolerance, but few people know what it is. And not all gluten-intolerance manifests as Celiacs.

Gluten-intolerance results in inflammation from the immune system working overtime and malabsorption from damage of the immune system attacking the small intestine, making it impossible to absorb what you eat. In fact, many people with gluten-intolerance eat all the time and can’t stop eating. This is because the body isn’t getting what it needs to function properly so it sends a signal to the brain to eat more in an attempt to get the required nutrients. I was eating huge amounts and eating all the time like I was driven to food. It’s like being possessed and you feel horrible and guilty about it, especially if you are gaining weight. I now eat very little comparatively and don’t feel hungry all the tie for the first time in years.

Over the years the inflammation causes pain and stiffness, especially in the neck, back and joints. And the malabsorption causes all the other symptoms.

No one has identical symptoms with gluten intolerance. And some people have no symptoms only to wake up one day with some hideous disease.

People typically think of Celiacs as having chronic diarrhea and being really skinny. In fact it is just as common to have constipation and more common to be overweight. I had gained over 25 pounds this last year. When I cut out gluten the weight came off in 3 months.

If you don’t feel well and no one can figure out why, get checked for gluten sensitivity. 1 in 10 people are gluten-sensitive and 1 in 100 have Celiacs. Both are very dangerous.

Here is just a partial list of symptoms:

• Mouth Sores (canker sores)
• Cracks in Corners of Lips
• Tooth Enamel Defects or Discoloration
• Frequent Indigestion
• Malodorous frequent gas
• Malodorous light or clay colored stools
• Steatorrhea (floating stools)
• Bloating
• Abdominal Distension (look like gained 2 sizes, belly is hard)
• Chronic diarrhea or constipation
• Irritability or Moodiness
• Depression
• Muscle Weakness
• Chronic fatigue, (Exhaustion)
• Bone or Joint Pain, (Aching Joints)
• Infertility (miscarriage, delayed puberty in girls, irregular menstruation.)
• Skin Rashes (eczema, psoriasis, boils)
• Dermatitis Herpetiformis (skin rash related to celiac disease)
• Peripheral Neuropathy (tingling or numbness in arms and legs)
• Ataxia (gait difficulty, balance problems, uncoordinated walking)
• Weight Changes (gain or loss of weight)
• Anxiety
• Edema
• Back and neck pain
• Migraines
• Headaches
• Adult pimples
• Iron deficiency

If you have any of these symptoms I want to encourage you to get checked for gluten-sensitivity. It’s a simple blood test that looks for particular anti-bodies.

In just 3 months since I have been gluten-free 90% of my symptoms are gone. I feel like a new woman. My energy continues to increase almost daily. My skin issues and headaches and back pain and brain fog are all gone. My stomach is flat again.  I sleep like a baby for the first time in my life. I want to participate in life again and am becoming more and more social. It has been a miracle.

I figure if it took me, with my background and research-obsessed nature, more than 10 years to find an answer then there are a lot of other people suffering without answers as well. I have been to many different health care professionals over the years with these symptoms and none of them went towards gluten-intolerance. You need to ask to be tested.

I hope you do not have gluten-intolerance. But if you do, it really isn’t as hard as people make it sound to be gluten-free. There are many support groups and recipe books and all kinds of resources. My tactic has been to simply eliminate all grains and sugar and it works great. It makes it so I don’t have to work to substitute all the flour products. I have found that restaurants are more than happy to accommodate dietary restrictions and I have yet to get “glutenated” from eating out.

If you do discover you are gluten-intolerant, congratulations! You are about to get your life, vitality, health and self back! It can take several months to a couple of years to fully recover but you can and will recover. And you are certainly not alone. Here’s to your new life - cheers.

All of a sudden, like a veil parting and light coming in, an understanding came to me.

Connection is our natural state. It is the truth under every other reality. Wanting connection like I was is not necessarily a weakness or a problem. It is that we are naturally connected and feeling not connected is the problem.

Our society has an expectation of being okay being not connected. And so many of us are trying to figure out how to be okay with it. We go to therapy and analyze and try and think our way through not needing connection.

I think trying to be okay with something as unnatural as not being connected gives rise to all kinds of problems. I think we can get co-dependent, anxious, sad, drained, lose interest in things, get insomnia, and more. It can even cause physical illness as I witnessed recently in a young woman here in Mexico. We had a talk about it and when she saw she was longing for connection and denying this longing she decided her longing was okay as long as she was balanced and healthy with it. The next day every symptom she had was gone.

I think denying my own longing has made me feel lonely and I have ignored the loneliness or denied it. But this morning I saw it in such a different way, as something so natural. And when I saw this a light came into my heart and I could feel that my longing is a longing of love, not of weakness. It is a longing for something natural that all of us should and must have.

In this moment any weirdness and judgment dissolved and so did the pulling toward the other person. I felt love and my whole self opened to the connection that is all around me. The trees and bugs and dogs and hummingbird met me in this space of love and my need for connection was fulfilled and my own wholeness and truth restored.

What happens if you give yourself permission to need connection? What happens if you open to all the connection you have and not just the one connection you are focused on?

Thank you to everyone who is, without conditions, connected to me. I love all of you and draw strength, sanity, and wholeness from our bond.

We will seem like life boats to each other. A long rope of flesh that connects in some invisible distance to an invisible God. And in seeking this external touch we degrade the truth of our own aliveness caressed by Love itself. Do not look outward for that which you seek. Look outward only for tools and support of your inward spelunking. Know this truth: what you seek seeks you as well and it is inside of you, alive in this very moment, pulsing with breath and wisdom and warmth.

- It’s in there. Everything we seek. And you will find it and the journey will not seem so long then but it will seem like the tiniest price you could have paid. It’s that beautiful. -

This year I am not making resolutions. But I am going to do something.

This year I am choosing words that I will live by. I have been looking at my life and seeing what is missing and what has, as I’ve gotten older, faded away. I am examining the code or mode through which I have been living and have decided it simply hasn’t been very fun.

So FUN is one of my New Year’s words.

I will be leaving for Mexico for about 5 weeks. (Don’t be jealous, it’s a work sabbatical as in “I will be working my ass off” - well, between sips of tequila and dancing) So back to Mexico…

The woman I am staying with is an artist. She is incredible. In a recent email exchange I discovered the airport is 2 hrs one way from her place and no one is available to pick me up the day I arrive. She suggested I take the bus.

Years ago I would have had no other reaction than “cool!” But I noticed some fear came up. What’s this?! I am a world traveler for cryin’ out loud! I have done things in other countries that would make most people faint with fear. This will not do!

So ADVENTURE is one of my New Year’s words.

This holiday season I have been seeing more friends than I have in quite some time. I have had a tendency to be a bit of a hermit the last, oh, say ten years. I have so enjoyed being social, meeting at different locations, having great conversations, laughing. I am ready to be back in the world of people.

So SOCIAL is one of my New Year’s words.

And I guess the last thing is this…There is something very bad for us about not being who we really are. Something is damaging about holding back our spirits. I am finally at a place where I realize I can not be a successful human being in any sense of the word unless I am fully, unapologetically, my true self. Now there are many words I could use to represent this - “dimensional”, “authentic”,  “full-on”. But I have decided on one that fits the best.

So my final New Year’s word is

JUICY.

I would much rather make space for the flavor of experiences I have rather than what those experiences have to be. With my New Year’s words I will have a fulfilling, yummy, and exciting year no matter what actually happens. Resolutions are like arm wrestling. I’d rather be more alive.

If you like this idea I would LOVE to hear what your words for 2010 are. Let’s create aliveness rather than try and force life to bend to our desires. If you don’t lose those last 10 pounds or make 10k more this year, at least you will still feel successful and have a beautiful time whether you accomplish your goals or not.

Cheers everyone.

And Happy New Year.

p.s. I think “fun” is a good word for everyone’s list. The world needs more “fun” energy. 2009 was not fun. Maybe sneak “fun” onto your list? Please? It may help the collective lighten the hell up and that would be good for everyone.

You can find it on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/What-Love-Does-Collected-Poems/dp/1449976670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261621985&sr=8-1

All of us have character flaws, personality quirks, weaknesses. Really none are much worse than others. Some are more annoying maybe but that says more about the one making the judgment than the one judged. To be clear, I’m talking personality flaws, not psychological issues.

So here’s the thing - whatever your deal is, whatever faults or flaws you carry, just own it. Judging does little good. But owning it does several good things. The first is that it diffuses it so whatever the flaw is has less power and we are less likely to be manipulated or weakened by it, meaning we are less likely to act without integrity. The other benefit is that when you own it you give other people the opportunity to know you and that creates the possibility for just a ton of intensity and love.

When we hide who we are, it isn’t invisible. There is always some trace, some vibration of it in the air around us. And the people who are most connected to us will feel it. But if you lie about who you are then the energy signals that constantly and often undetectably run between people get all wonky. If we don’t tell the truth we leave other people in the wonkiness. This is not a nice thing to do to another person because it scrambles their radar and they feel confused or yucky but have no idea why and no possibility of finding an answer.

This sets off a chain reaction of miscommunication, missed connection, missed intimacy and pretty soon we wind up missing the experience of an entire person. And we feel not connected to them and don’t know why.

Not lying, not hiding, brings a clarity to the world that is healthy and needed. And it is the simplest and perhaps most difficult thing we can do to make the world and ourselves better.

If you are in a relationship that is important in your life, spend less time “working” on yourself or judging yourself or hiding yourself and just tell the truth. You may be surprised at people’s capacity to handle it and you will feel whatever is blocking your heart begin to melt away. You will begin to experience things that bring about amazing, enlivening, vital change. Your whole world will brighten. We are most alive and enlivened when we don’t hide.

When your heart is unguarded and open like this you naturally become a more loving person, a more compassionate person, a more feeling person and a more connected person. We become jucier. We become all the things we think we need to go off and learn somewhere else. And we being to experience all the things we think we need to go seek to experience. It just plops in our lap without us going anywhere.  It’s a chain reaction set off by telling the truth and what results in being truly seen. This makes your whole world more free and frees up incredible possibilities for being truly alive.

Question:

“Love it, Sadee.  But, what if the ego (who still is generally taking main stage), feels like the heart self is being taken advantage of?  So, like the dishes example….how many times could you do the dishes selflessly before some voice inside, said “wait a minute, here…” you know?  if you are trying to find that “love self” inside, but aren’t surrounded by people always doing the same, how do you prevent yourself from becoming depleted?  This is something that I have been contemplating…

What I suppose is that if you truly learn to give from a place of love,

then ego falls away.

But I haven’t quite figured that one out yet :-)……………”

Answer:

Wow, thank you for this.

You are asking about something very real, and it’s a great question.

First let me say that my main answer is - I don’t know. But I do have some thoughts.

I think the best thing one can do is start to address this by being where you really are.

It is super common for us to try and be something we imagine, like being “selfless” or “living from the heart”. I think it’s worse to try and be what we imagine than to just be who we really are.

Imagining what we should be only works by rejecting or judging the present self, right? Otherwise, why would you need to change anything? This isn’t coming from a place of compassion and love. And if you aren’t in a place of compassion and love with yourself it makes it pretty hard to be all Mother Theresa-y with others.

You ask: “…what if the ego (who still is generally taking main stage), feels like the heart self is being taken advantage of? ”

I think it’s really important to understand that it is not the ego’s job or within the ego’s power to protect the heart self. I think from ego perspective we have all kinds of ideas about how delicate or vulnerable the heart is, but it’s not. So it’s the ego imagining the heart then feeling a need to protect what it imagines.

If you are living mainly from ego, as you say, then the self you are protecting is the ego self and you are getting your feelings hurt and feeling taken for granted. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just be where you really are.

If we start from here - being where you really are-we can say a few things:

• I am living mostly from ego.
• If this is true then my heart-self isn’t running the show.
• If my heart-self isn’t running the show it is because I haven’t developed my heart self enough because when the heart-self is well developed it naturally runs the show more and more without effort. (Ego is super full of effort)
• So, my heart self is not well developed.

If you can agree with this then we can take the next step.

I hear that you would like the heart-self to run the show more - that you experience pain with the ego-self running the show. So you have desire for the heart - to live more from a place of love. (otherwise you never would have asked me anything)

If this is true then I would say this:

Stop fighting the ego and trying to do what you imagine you should do and stop trying to be what you imagine you should be.

Living in a state of self-judgment like this will make it very difficult for you to receive all the love that is around you because you are too focused on your imagination of how things should be versus being in what is really going on. From experience with thousands of humans I think it is safe to say that there is probably a TON of love flying around you that you don’t get pelted by because your vision is filled with imagination rather than reality.

Here’s what you do:

Stop fighting the ego and instead, get to know the heart. You can start by simply saying a prayer - to God, to the Universe, to Santa Claus, whatever, but just pray and in your prayer say three things:

• State your intention to live more from your heart.
• Admit you don’t know how to do this.
• Ask for help.

At the bare minimum you are doing a cognitive behavior technique that will help you change the neuro-pathways in your head. At the biggest there is really a God who hears your prayer and sends you help. Either way, just pray.

When you do have the judgment “I should be Mother Theresa” voice come up, notice it and silently say “I don’t know how to be Mother Theresa but I would like to live more from my own heart. Please help me.”

LEARN from your heart. Let it teach you about it rather than you trying to do what you imagine. If you can be compassionate and gentle with the fact that not living from your heart causes you pain, you will begin to see that the people who hurt you are in the same boat - they are hurting from not living in their hearts either.

Let this be an internal process and not a mental “processing” with whomever you are feeling hurt by. Just notice. And be patient. When you really begin to engage the heart it WILL change you. You are just so used to lots and lots of effort and the heart doesn’t work that way so maybe you wont be able to notice anything at first. But slowly things will change and you will expand and be completely tripped out that the dishes are still not getting done by anyone but you and for some reason it isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be but you can’t figure out why.

Pretty soon love becomes this shield that protects and fortifies you and you start to feel more and more safe and less and less fearful of being hurt. And your ego will feel relieved because it has been trying to do the same thing but it will realize the heart does it better and it will stop making such a fuss.

But your brain is going to think about all this and I’m telling you, the heart doesn’t have a brain but it is a lot smarter than you or I will ever be. Give it some room, learn about its ways, and it will change you. Effortlessly.

And while all this is happening be mature about your emotions by not letting them run the show. Act out as little as possible. Don’t let anger or fear come out and do damage. Self-control that comes from a mature perspective is not restrictive. Rather, we understand the longer-term consequences that come from acting out and we make a choice to restrain the damaging aspects until we mature enough in our understanding and heart-response to no longer have such intense reactions. Self-control simply buys us time to not make things worse, to break the cycle, until our consciousness and love catch-up and we are just naturally less reactive. And don’t worry, you wont become Spock, you will still feel but the feelings will be deeper and more real, not reactive and ego-y. (Ego likes drama)

I think that’s everything. I hope it makes some kind of sense. I so appreciate the opportunity you’ve given me to think more deeply about this and to write about it. Thank you Cheri.

Basically it goes like this:

Love is in everything. So when we look at someone through eyes of love, love looks back at us. Love gets activated by love. Maybe this is obvious to you but hang in there with me.

I have always been a teacher. Teaching is a sacred act to me because what I teach is sacred. Over the years I have had to mature as a teacher so that I could learn, as well.  Being a teacher in a pliable, multi-directional sense rather than a teacher who just downloads and is unidirectional has been part of that maturing - so has being a teacher who listens and doesn’t just talk. (I still struggle with this one) I think all of us has some version of this. We are in a role that has certain parameters. And as we mature as humans those parameters loosen.

But the information I woke up with takes this a step further.

What I now understand is that, because love is in everything, when we engage with love, rather, when love engages though us, the love in others (animals, people, bugs, plants…) engages back.

The thing that is so remarkable about this is what happens next.

When we see with love and love sees us, everything else falls away and there is only love. “Me” and “you” disappear and all that is present is love.

Love is the great leveler. In love everything is equal. Love doesn’t care about age, size, social status, money, clothes, color, power, gender, job title, role. When love loves through us and the love in others loves through them there is only love and nothing else.

I actually experienced this last night at an event I went to. The woman whose house it was at looked at me with this kind of love. It poured out of her and poured out of me and there was nothing but love. I became completely disarmed, ego fell away, peace entered, and everything was perfect and beautiful. There was no me and no her, just love. I could still see her as distinct and different - we didn’t merge or anything metaphysically miraculous - but everything I saw had no meaning except love.

The trippy part is I knew that nothing she saw in me meant anything except love either.

In the moment I wasn’t thinking about it this way, I only experienced it. And a couple of times thought “wow, this is really beautiful” or “Wow, she really only sees love right now”.

It was so beautiful and so liberating!

So there was the experience then came the spiritual understanding via the dream of just what that experience was. Love showed me another layer of itself then explained to me what had happened.

Please note that this was not an intellectually based thing. It wasn’t me thinking love and overlaying this high concept onto the situation. It was not mental at all.

There are many people reading this who might say “duh, Sadee, of course that’s what love does and how it is and how it happens” but that is your thought or notion of love, rather than the lived and transforming experience of it.

When love is alive, not a thought in our head or a philosophy we espouse, but actually a lived experience, we wont be the same. It expands us and we shed a layer of our former self. If you have an experience of love and you don’t lose something and you don’t expand as a result, you were in your head watching it, like tv, rather than being in it.

Every encounter with love changes us in some way.

And we need to be willing to let it. We need to be willing to be seen and not be who we think we are and the identity we’ve constructed but to be profoundly beautiful and completely equal to the one who sees us with love. Our philosophies and smarts and looks and “issues” don’t matter to love at all.

So who am I now? I feel like a few more encounters with love like this and all the layers of me will be stripped away and I will only be love. It sounds so pretty and nice but how will I function? So I’m just going to walk around as a big love glob, loving everyone I see? Not caring about the things I once found so important? Well, maybe. We’ll see.

With what I learned last night I don’t feel afraid of that possibility anymore. It feels so weird to say it but I finally don’t feel afraid of love.

I came upstairs to dirty dishes and the kitchen in general disarray from last night’s meal with a guest. I got a little huffy that I was going to have to clean it up since my sweetie had gone to work early today. Not super huffy, I just noticed a little “hrmph” about it.

So I made some tea and sat down to the pile of books I’m reading. I decided to open up the Christian bible. I opened it to Proverbs, in the Old Testament. Wow. Proverbs has some amazing stuff in it.

Here is what I looked at:

As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart. Proverbs 27.19

So many thoughts rushed in at once. First I was mortified that my life - me getting up in the morning and seeing the dishes and “hrumph”ing - reflects that my heart has pettiness in it.

Then I began to reflect on all these notions of “you create what you think” and “thoughts create reality” kinds of things. And I thought of the many people who work very hard at manifesting their thoughts who don’t have the kind of success they want. Or have to work really, really hard for the success they do experience.

This verse doesn’t say: As water reflects the face so one’s life reflects the mind. It says “the heart.”

My ego isn’t really all that keen on me living from heart. Take this morning kitchen incident fro example. My heart says to joyfully clean the kitchen - that the mess is the result of a lovely evening with a friend and the abundance of our lives and the beautiful home we live in. Cleaning it without complaint is an act of love and acknowledgement to my boyfriend. It is also an act of love and acknowledgement of my own blessings.

My ego says “Oh, sure, leave the mess for me. It was your friend who came over. What am I, a servant? You shouldn’t treat me like this…blah blah blah.” I mean, really ridiculous stuff.

If I were focused on my mind I would have to do a lot of thinking and wrestling to get my mind to not have such thoughts. I would have to put effort into figuring out what thoughts I need to manifest a different scenario in the future. Because right now what I have is dirty dishes and a messy kitchen.

But by living from my heart and letting my heart lead, I notice what my little petty self is like and it hurts me because I do not want my life to reflect pettiness. I want my life to reflect love. So I tap into my heart for guidance and it appears the thing to do is to clean the kitchen mindful of my blessings and to see those blessings evidenced in the empty, food stained dishes and dirty pans and messy countertops.

All of a sudden the kitchen looks beautiful. Truly.  And now all I can see is the beauty of the kitchen. It’s practically shining. A big love glow is coming out of it. It reeks of blessings. There is nothing to change, in me or anyone else. I don’t have to think different or go get therapy or life coaching, I simply need to let my heart run the show.

When I was in Nepal on a Buddhist mediation retreat I learned of the notion of Buddha Consciousness. Buddha Consciousness is the concept that there is already a fully realized, perfect self in the center of each of us. There is no evolution or growth required. We are already fully enlightened. And every one of us has it - no one is more special or better than anyone else. We are all equally endowed with this Buddha Consciousness.

And I think that is what love is. I think we all have love alive and well inside of us. That we all know how to love perfectly and wholly. That all we need to do is turn our attention to it and let it run the show.

How much love are you hiding? How much love do you hold back and refuse to let out every day? Maybe instead of all the therapy and seminars and books and working on ourselves we simply stop holding back the love?

I know that it embarrasses me to love sometimes. I have so much of it, like you do, and I think “oh, I can’t possibly love that person right now, they’ll think I’m crazy!” Or “I will look weak if I let the love out.” For you parents it might be “I can’t do what my heart tells me right now because they need to learn a lesson.”

Loving is a very humbling thing that the ego and the mind are not all that happy about. I think working too much with the mind is a huge distraction. I think working too much with one’s psychology and “issues” is also a huge distraction. You don’t have to fix yourself before you can love. Love now and your life will reflect love. Isn’t that what drives us to “fixing” ourselves anyway? We simply want love to be more alive in our lives. If that’s true for you then today’s glob brings good news: you can have a life of love right now! (Now go put the money I just saved you on books and coaching to good use - feed the hungry or buy blankets for someone who is cold or get some school supplies to little kids or diapers for babies in a shelter)