Heart Lines

Could there possibly be more ways to be connected?  Spectacular now, the ways we can access, link, be in person without our persons present.  I've got one more to add to our list of options.  I'm going to call it heart lines.  You'll see why.

• Release yourself from all forms of electronic communication.
• Access that internal power source--the breath.  With full deep, rhythmic repetitions until the body sinks into a neutral space free of thought or intention.
• Shift focus to the heart, in whatever way that occurs.
• Imagine the richness of its energy.  Its warmth, the color of its light, its movement.
• Now utilizing the capacity of the imaginative state, locate the heart energy of the one you wish to connect with.
• Send out a stream of light from the heart center in the direction of that heart.  Distance is irrelevant as light can travel easily. 
• On that beam of light energy, send out a query to connect.
• Keeping with this subtle awareness state, wait for a response.  When the offer to connect is welcomed, there will be a responding flow.
• As with any connection, the time to release it will correspond with any sense of efforting.

If you enjoyed this first play with heart lines, you may find there's more to be discovered with every heart line you set up.  First because no two hearts are the same and and also because our energies are in constant flux.  Endless possibilities for play.

Bad Happenings

Bad things happen.

Is it so that in all things, there is a purpose? 

I would guess that a sage of the very highest level of sagery will see purpose in every act of man.  For the rest of us, there are things that will remain irredeemable.

When we are in that place of despair in the aftermath of unthinkable acts, without answers, as there is no sense to senselessness, we have something more than hope.  We have opportunity.  Always.  Even when we cannot imagine how there could be.  It may take courage to find that light within and let it guide us.  I promise you, it is there and it will.

Baselines

Lately I've been getting my eye care at a school of optometry.  Student clinicians having their first stab at patients man the clinic, ever alert to anything that could be going wonky with the eyes. 

I do have something wonky with my left eye, I knew it when I first came there, having had that wonky thing since birth.  Something about how an artery curves instead of going straight into the retina.  It was a real hit with them, and as they saw potential for further wonkiness, they insisted a battery of pictures of the back wall of my eye be taken to "establish a baseline."  In case that artery had decided to curve in an as yet unknown direction the next time they take a look, they'd have something to compare it with.  My baseline.

Since my eyes have been given their baseline, a new experience for both of us, I've noticed folks are fond of establishing baselines in other care-giving situations.  Again, as a way to gauge if things are swerving off course, or maybe crashing.

I like this baseline idea.  I can see how it can be put to good use by applying a bit of creativity.  

We could give ourselves a good feelings baseline.  Not to monitor if one day was low compared to our baseline of good feelings and so to recognize it as an ugly, irredeemable day, but to go with the idea that we have one in the first place.  Then--this is the creative part--to do things every day to build up that baseline.  Incrementally, with one small good feeling at a time. 

There's endless options for making good feelings--internal, external, mind-focused, body-focused, others-focused.  Let me get you started:

• Count your blessings, as they arrive.  The blessing of a new day, the blessing of being loved, the blessing of food that nourishes, the blessings in challenges, in laughter, in opportunities. 
• Give gifts.  Of time, of caring, of sending good thoughts, of help, of things.  
• Hook up with the highest part of your being.  Breathe slowly and fully, connect to the light within, sing, dance, take yourself to a beautiful place on our earth just to be with it for a moment or two or twenty.
• Let good feelings come into you.  Let yourself be loved, appreciated, vulnerable.

The thing that differentiates a good feelings baseline from all other baselines is, first of all, it can  be directly influenced.  When that is done, when it is built up, overall well-being is built up as well. 
Because when we feed our hearts and souls in this way, our level of wellness shifts as well.  And that could only be a good thing.

New Year

My Jewish friends see this week as the beginning of a new year.  I am on the outside of the celebrations, and since I don't really know what's going on, I've made my own completely unorthodox, and unblessed version And as a new year beginning now is not a part of my heritage, I feel free to take liberties with its significance.  I make a choice to see it as less of a shared event and more of a time to take a breath, to be with what the passing year has brought.

To say it another way, rather than celebrating the out with the old and in with the new of January First, I love the thought of a year beginning with the harvest, with gathering all the goodness of the passing year and using that richness to launch forward into what is to come. 

I look as well at what I choose to leave behind.  Enmities in all their forms, unforgiveness, regrets, losses, fears.  In doing this, I see them for what they are--burdens that do not serve.