Living by heart

My life has been working weirdly well lately. It always works, but lately, things are flowing like magic, even more so than usual. I no sooner ask for help than help comes… as long as I’m aligned with love in some fashion.

“God, I want to take down my spring decorations and put up the summer ones.” I imagine how much I love a clean, organized, and happy space. A client cancels at the end of the day, I get the sudden urge to haul boxes, and less than a day later, a task that usually takes a whole weekend is done.

“God, my storage unit smells horrible. Please fix it.” I imagine the scent of fresh air. The management there suddenly discovers someone in a nearby unit had food that had turned into a rat buffet! The unit was cleared out and now everything smells fresh and clean.

“God I want to find time to prepare the garden for summer.” Suddenly, during a lunch break, I found myself wandering into the yard, shovel in hand. Quickly, the tomato seedlings were replanted in their permanent homes, the cucumbers were staked, and I harvested peppers, zucchini, and kale.

These are small, silly examples, but ones that made life flow more smoothly and freed me up to do more of the work I do.

I’m seeing many clients pop into this space too, where things are coming far more easily as they surrender to their spirit. I’ve also seen a lot of chaos. With so many conflicting energies around us, it is easy to wobble out of love. Luckily, it is just as easy to return to it.  When something wobbles me—be it personal or something in the world—I focus back on simple pleasures. My squash are blooming. The chives are producing like like crazy. I am drying lemon thyme and oregano this week. The bees are buzzing on the lavender. I just finished another coloring book, and have others in the works, and I love my clients. The newsletter is flowing even though I put it off till Friday night. Life is good. I live by heart.

Heart-based living is far from an inactive state of being. It is a state of being in which you actions are loving, guided, and effective. The more you focus on what feels like love to you, the more love you will feel. And the more love you feel, the more loving you can be. The more loving you can be, the better you feel. It is an upward spiral, and as you practice focusing on things that make your heart happy, you enter into a state of positive momentum in which life itself seems to carry you to the good.

When I fight my heart for even a moment, I feel the fatigue of resisting the currents of love. When I get back in alignment with my heart, I have unexplainable energy. I was passionately working on a project the other night when I suddenly got tired. So, at 3am, I took a short nap and woke up energized and ready for more. This “schedule” made no logical sense to my scientific mind, but my heart told me it was OK in the moment.

Best of all, as you practice honoring the heart, it becomes easier to get back in alignment when you have a wobble or when someone is unkind.The other day someone took out their pain on me. Because I took a moment to go out and breathe in the fresh air and look at nature in its glorious majesty, I was able to offer this individual a kind and loving response. It felt good to respond rather than react. I was in integrity with my spirit. “Giving in,” “being right,” or “defending yourself” never feels as good as deciding what to do consciously and doing it with love.

So when you see the crazy dance going on around you, when someone is upsetting or unkind, or when you simply feel out of sorts because you’ve accidentally tuned into something unpleasant, remind yourself that it isn’t that hard to get back in the stream of love.

Here are a few pointers to help you get back to your heart, even when you wobble:

1.   Try not to take anything personally

Remind yourself that no matter what comes at you, other people are acting, speaking, and thinking as they are because of their own alignment or misalignment with love. It has nothing to do with you even if they aim it at you. If a person aligned with love praises you they do it because the love inside of them wants to flow. If a person far from love attacks you they do it because they are so pinched off from their own connection to love they want company in their misery.

Remind yourself often. The words, behaviors, and thoughts of others are about them. Enjoy the kind ones. Love in any form is part of the One love. Meanwhile, make the unkind ones irrelevant. Pray for the souls lost in their anger and pain, but there’s no need to engage with that energy.

When I was learning to deal with unpleasant behaviors, the angels had me watch two shows: “The Dog Whisperer” and “Supernanny.” In both cases the star of the show handled either badly behaved dogs or kids with firmness, but with love. It was a revelation to see people exhibiting strong boundaries without a trace of upset or misalignment from love! Neither of these “role models” ever took the unpleasant behaviors personally. They had compassion for the animal or child exhibiting them. In that powerful vibration of love, they were able to transform the situation.

2. Remember that other people do not think like you

One of the things that used to drive me nuts was wondering how on earth unkind people could think and act as they do. Quickly I learned—through the angels’ eyes—that everyone sees life very differently. Everyone has different life circumstances, a different history, and different beliefs. Behaviors I might consider insane are normal for others. I no longer assume others will, or even should, think as I do.

It will save you a lot of time and energy if you can accept that people think very differently than you and instead of wondering how they can be so ridiculous, you ask God to help you understand them. If you pray this with sincerity, you will see some of the craziest people on earth, even some with the most heinous behaviors, as children crying for love. With understanding, we can stop wasting our time in judgment or confusion and pray for the upliftment of all.

3. Give yourself permission to feel better

It is hard when something has wobbled you out of grace to remind yourself that you have permission to be happy. When someone is nasty, or you see something unthinkable on the news, or you have something challenging pop up in life, your first = thought is not likely to be, “Time to get happy!”  However, if you can remind yourself, “No matter what is going on, the better I feel, the quicker life will get better,” then you can give yourself permission to look for anything good to raise your vibe. I wasn’t conditioned this way, but now, when someone is unkind or I see something disturbing, my first thought is, “How can I feel better right here and now?”

When you make your vibration the most important thing in your life it makes sense to find something to feel good about no matter what else is going on. In grief you will find your connection more easily. In debt you will plug into abundance more quickly. In relationships your positive mood will uplift or drive away the negative. We can’t help but move toward our solutions when we find a happier vibe. It makes sense. Give yourself permission 🙂

We can’t change the world all at once. We can’t fix the anger flying around in the world. But we can a our own space, our own mood, and our own vibrations. We can give ourselves permission not to do the crazy dance with others even when they want to engage. We can choose to be kind to ourselves and, in so doing, find greater compassion for ourselves and others.

One soul at a time, often one thought at a time, our world becomes a kinder place 🙂