How to Stay Open To Love

How to Stay Open To Love

Let’s have a discussion on how to stay open to love.

The kind of love I have in mind here is Agape love, unconditional love, the broader more expansive love towards ourselves, others and the planet. How can we cultivate that love all of the time?

Everybody has love inside of them. You don’t need to search for it, you need to trust that you have an abundant amount of love to give and receive. We are wired to love and we are wired to respond to love with kindness.

Nobody can survive without love. If you take a look at your exchanges, love is everywhere around you. All day long we are exchanging love, like we are exchanging money. One we see, the other we feel and sense. A hello is love, a smile is love, nice words are love, your presence is love, showing up is love.

Always cultivate an open heart. I was in meditation today and was observing my heart. I know from personal experience that when we experience a conflict, rejection or disappointment, we tend to close our hearts.

We close our hearts because we are sad but also because it hurts to feel the pain and disappointment of rejection. This is exactly why we need to reverse our course, and stay open. By keeping our hearts open, we are letting them heal, and allowing them to receive love from other sources — our pets, friends, parents, neighbors, and all of nature. Let the exchange of love keep flowing.

All our hearts are like giant flowers with petals. What happens to a flower when it is closed? We don’t see its essence, its colors, we can’t smell its fragrance. That is why we need to keep our hearts open and beautiful despite adversity. Our hearts are made to be appreciated. Everyone is worthy of love, everyone is worthy of receiving love. We are loving and lovable.

Cultivate the love you have. Let it grow. Love the small acts of love, they will grow your love.

As you expand your awareness, your love will expand. You will naturally make space for love to flourish inside of you. As you start to embrace your essence which the present moment reveals to you, love will replace what is not love inside of you….

So chirp your hearts out and pay attention to the love that flows all around you.

 

 

Your Thoughts Matter

Your Thoughts Matter

If the universe can spring out of nothingness, maybe our whole being can spring out of the thoughts we form in our minds. As we change our thought processes, we are constantly reshaping and retraining our minds, leading to feeling better overall.

Thoughts are charged with emotions. They carry power. They can bring healing, or they can make feel depressed. They can put a smile on your face or they can send you into a downward spiral. They can uplift someone or they can crush someone.

Challenge negative self-talk
Become aware when you are not kind to yourself because it affects your overall energy. Every time you put yourself down, your energy level goes down and you start feeling off. Start elevating yourself with good and upbeat thoughts. Pay attention to the language you use when you talk to yourself. Positive thoughts will bring more gratitude, more positivity, more acceptance and satisfaction to your life.

Focus on the positives in your life.
Validate yourself!!! Stop for 10 seconds what you are doing and write or say 10 positive things about your life and yourself. Acknowledge the beauty of your experiences, or reflect on the lessons you are receiving. That is beautiful in itself.

Embrace curiosity.
Hmm, things and people are interesting… Life is full of possibilities. So when we shift to a place of curiosity, our critical voice diminishes. We observe and notice, without judging.

Meditate to shift your thoughts
Color creates a certain mood in you. So next time you are about to be really hard on yourself or someone else, mediate in silence and give yourself a healing bath of meditative color to shift your thoughts instantaneously.

About Empathy

About Empathy

Most people would probably agree that our world needs empathy.

The dictionary defines empathy as the action and the capacity of understanding, being aware of, and being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another person.

If we can feel our own pain, can we naturally fee the pain of other human beings or animals? Are we really wired for empathy, or do we learn empathy?

Psychologists talk of three types of empathy. Cognitive empathy is when you can put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. We cognitively understand what people are going through. Understanding that somebody is hurting is limited, as it doesn’t produce the kind of acknowledgment the other person needs.

Emotional empathy is when you feel and sympathize with the feelings and emotions of others. We need this capacity to maintain relationships and friendships. Some people are better at this than others, for example therapists. Emotional empathy can be treacherous for sensitive people. Feeling somebody’s else emotions and pain without boundaries can cause you to become ill.

To have healthy empathy, we must practice Compassion. With compassion we understand and we feel for someone else, but also are capable of holding a safe place for them to have their own emotional experiences. Compassion is felt more in the heart. We are extending our heart to someone else’s heart, thus making the other person feel seen, heard, and acknowledged.

Transformation is a process. As we heal, we also learn and develop more empathy. Feeling the pain of others is an essential component of good health.

Revere the Sacred

Revere the Sacred

The famous author Caroline Myss says that “people are hungry for the sacred.”

Once, people in masses went to churches to reflect and to connect with a force stronger than themselves, one that brought them relief and peace and hope.

“Religion is part of the human make-up. It is our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing,” writes Christopher Hitchens.

Whatever the Gods represent for you, quantum intelligence or a divine intelligence, we need the humility the sacred brings into our lives to make sense of our illogical human existence. I heard one of the victims of the California fires say “only gratitude matters going forward.”

Collectively we need more inspiration, more beautification and purification of our characters, our personalities, our souls, and our energies.

We are a sacred temple, and everyone on earth is a sacred temple. Together we make one sacred tribe. We walk on sacred earth, and we desperately need to accept ourselves as sacred beings. No shift in collective consciousness will ever happen if we don’t welcome back this basic truth.

We need to respect the sacred each one of us has decided to pursue; it is the right one for you at this point of your human evolution.

The true sacred inside of us doesn’t wage wars, doesn’t wish bad things to people, doesn’t look down at other sacred beings.

When you are feeling stressed, bring to mind the image of a sacred space, feel the peacefulness and the tranquility of sacredness inside of you. Respect, devotion and faith are a part of who you are.

In my yoga class this morning, blessings were sent to my body, my friends, the people all over the world who are suffering and lacking peace. Send blessings to your own body, and your own friends, and all other places you wish to send some sacredness and healing

Secrets of The Placebo

Secrets of The Placebo

I would like to take you into the world of the placebo and show you how powerful a thought or a belief can be in making you feel better.

Imagine participating in a surgery trial where there is a 50% chance that you will receive a fake surgery. You are made to believe that your surgery is real and that an actual surgeon performed the surgery on your spine. Miraculously, you feel better after the surgery despite the fact you were in the fake pool, but you don’t know it.

“It appears that the mere belief that patients had received a potent treatment was enough to ease-and in some cases banish-their symptoms,” says Joe Merchant about this real spine surgery study in her book Cure.

This is one example of the placebo effect and the power of belief to improve and make our health better. The Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, who is the biggest expert on placebo in the world, thinks that placebo can be applied in all areas of life from sex to music, writes Merchant. Maybe just by believing that the music is wonderful, its effects on us will be more powerful in terms of positive emotions and experience.

Beneditti’s team in Italy is conducting real studies on the placebo effect, and measuring the role belief plays in improving symptoms. Let’s say you take a drug and you feel better after taking it. The kind of questions they would be asking are: Is the improvement due to the medication you took or your belief that you took the medication? And it looks like this can be measured through clinical trials, according to Merchant’s research.

The placebo has been proven to work for a variety of psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression. The more we know that we are taking the medication, the stronger the effect. For example, Joe Merchant says that Benedetti has discovered that Valium, which is an old drug for psychiatric disorders, has no effect unless patients know that they have taken it. Studies show that some painkillers are effective only if we know that we have taken them. If we don’t know that we took them, they don’t work.

When scientists discovered endorphins- the brain’s natural painkillers, it became natural to inquire if taking a placebo triggers the release of endorphins in the brain. And they have discovered that it does. This is how the science of the placebo was born. There is a mapped out neuro-chemical mechanism occurring after taking a placebo.

A study at the University of British Columbia discovered that when a placebo medication is given to patients with Parkinson’s, physiological changes do occur in the body, as dopamine levels increase significantly. In some trials involving Parkinson’s disease patients, the placebo effect has been shown to have the same effect as a response to a real drug.

So something interesting is going on in our bodies, and probably by extension, to our external realities, when our minds are focused on sending a positively charged belief and thought. At least scientifically, the placebo effect has been proven to reduce symptoms of patients and improve the quality of their lives. So let’s ponder on that, and when you feel down, think of the placebo and how you can apply it to your own life to turn things around. Hmm, something to consider today for everyone. As I’ve heard Joe Dispenza say, we are the placebo effect.

Source: Jo Merchant, Cure: a journey into the science of mind over body, 2016