Month: February 2018

Above is an excerpt from “The Destitute Child”, a mindful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Thich Nhat Hanh is truly speaking from his heart and you can feel the love and compassion in his words.  Honestly, to me it seems all of his writings, spoken words, and deeds are expressions of his heart.

We all want love but, even more precisely, what we want is to feel love, experience it in our hearts, our souls, our being.  We often come to love with a lack mentality that love is something to seek out and find.

For instance, we think we need to be in a loving relationship with someone who says that they love us and if we are not in that kind of relationship we don’t have love.  And perhaps, what can be even more challenging, are the times when we do find ourselves in a relationship, where the person we are with says they love us, but we still do not feel loved.

So where’s the love?

You want love.  How do you get it?

The truth is you never lost love. You don’t have to find it.  You don’t have to protect it.   You already have love.   If you do not feel loved, you need to reconnect to the love that resides within you.

There are many ways to feel love again.  One way is to feel the love you have for those in your life you love or have loved the most deeply.  Connect to that feeling and magnify it by reimagining experiences with them where you felt that love with them.  You can take this further by writing down these experiences of love and reconnecting to that love.

Another way to connect to love is to express love, share your love, speak love.  Maybe there is someone in your life right now whom you love but you have not shared this with them.  Be brave and express your love and share it with them.  Even if you just write down how you feel this act can help you reconnect to love.

Or perhaps you are already in a loving relationship that does not feel as loving as it once was.  Reconnect with those times where you felt the most love in the relationship and talk with them, sharing with them those loving memories.

There may be no one in particular you are feeling love towards right now.  If so, you can simply connect to the present moment as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests in the poem.  You can also connect with all of what makes you feel loved that others have done for you and do an act of service for someone else, giving to someone else one of those same loving acts.  Experiencing how your loving act affects another is one of the strongest ways to connect to and to feel love.

Regardless of how you connect to your love, what you may understand now is the true reciprocity of love.  Any love we feel, express, or give to someone else is also directed towards our own hearts.

So, if you want love, find the love in your own heart and share it.

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“The Destitute Child” by Thich Nhat Hanh

Precious gems are everywhere in the cosmos and inside of every one of us.

I want to offer a handful to you, my dear friend. Yes, this morning, I want to offer a handful to you, a handful of diamonds that glow from morning to evening.

Each minute of our daily life is a diamond that contains sky and earth, sunshine and river.

We only need to breathe gently for the miracle to be revealed: Birds singing, flowers blooming.

Here is the blue sky, here is the white cloud floating, your lovely look, your beautiful smile. All these are contained in one jewel.

You who are the richest person on Earth and behave like a destitute son, please come back to your heritage.

Let us offer each other happiness and learn to dwell in the present moment.  Let us cherish life in our two arms and let go of our forgetfulness and despair.

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” -Mahatma Gandhi

We are all on a journey of self-discovery that feels at times, like this sketch, where a lone traveler walks an unknown climbing terrain seemingly to nowhere.

However, it is in our relationships with others where we are driven to look within, to become our best self, and to reveal our own truth.

The source of our desire is love.

In loving service to others we can discover ourselves as we do not really “lose” ourself in service, we find it, as it is reflected in those we serve.

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This is where my instagram post ended but I want to expand on ideas mentioned in this post further.  Here I am starting with the general notion of ‘finding yourself’ and in later posts I’ll discuss more about love and service.

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The idea of ‘finding yourself’ as we traditionally conceive of it, such as the lone traveler who ‘finds themselves’ on their journey through mere self-reflection, is a bit misleading.

Yes, inner reflection and contemplation is absolutely a part of the process.  But it is not the only part of what is necessary for true self-discovery.

You are, in large part, a reflection of and co-creation with everyone who has been a part of your life.  You cannot truly sever who you are from these relationships be they great or small.

Think of your family of origin, for instance.  Some of your first self-concepts were generated from your relationships with the people who raised you.   In your family you were taught their idea of what it means to be a person either explicitly, by telling you directly, or simply via their example and interactions with you.

Let’s say that when you were growing up you saw your mother and father work all day at jobs they did not love.  You internalize, at least to some extent, that working is an important part of what it means to be a functional person in the world and that enjoying your job is not as important.  Your parents may have even directly told you that “You need to work to make a living and contribute to society”.

Self-reflection is the means by which you can not only discover your internalized values and beliefs but also decide whether they are values and beliefs you want to truly embrace.

Let’s go back to our example. Through self-reflection, you can come to an understanding that the ‘Working is important but enjoying your work is not important’ concept was modeled to you by your family. Then, once you have brought this into your awareness, you can intentionally decide whether you want to reject or accept this family modeling that was given to you.

Maybe you feel that working is still important to you but you also feel that it is important to love the work that you do.  However, you’ve noticed you feel guilty every time you try to leave your current job that you don’t enjoy to pursue work you love.   This can be due to a conflict between what you were raised to believe versus what you have come to believe in time through other personal experiences.

The solution? First, you need to discover that you have this conflict of values and beliefs and then you need to consciously choose the belief that is in alignment with what you truly value.

In our example, you would need to realize that you do not identify with what you were raised to believe: ‘Working is important but enjoying your work is not important’ .  Then you need to embrace and consciously choose the belief and act from the belief that is in alignment with your values: ‘Working is important but enjoying your work is also important’.

In some ways it really is this simple but old beliefs and values can be resilient since through time they become habitual and internalized.  Changing your beliefs to be more in alignment with your values is a process.  The more ingrained the belief, the more patient and compassionate you need to be with yourself to support yourself to forge a new path and way of being.

Finding yourself is a process of coming to understand yourself, what you value and believe. But it is also a process of understanding all of the people and relationships in your life and how they have all been a part of who you have been, who you think you are, and who you are becoming.  Finding you is finding others.

Becoming a better person in this way is finding the best part of you and others that you have internalized within yourself and choosing from all the beliefs and values you have been given what you truly want to be and become.