Today, I wanted to come up with the most simple way to give.  One that doesn’t involve money or special abilities or very much time.  In part because altruism is a good thing, and in part because it m

akes our soul feel great.  And when that happens, all of ourself feels great. And so here it is: Notice someone in your field of vision.  It can be someone in your thought vision, or someone you are physically looking at.  It can be a human someone, an animal someone, a plant someone.  Send them this message: “I love you.”

You won’t believe how truly great this feels until you try it.

Every now and again, science collides with the experiences of higher states and produces a result that is stunning in it’s everyday usefulness.  I’m specifically referring to a recent discovery that brain wave patterns observable in recognized meditators matches the brain waves produced by laughter.

I suppose this bit of news is unremarkable for anyone who has spent time with the ones we honor as great spiritual leaders–they laugh easily. At times, they actually giggle. The meditation state, you could say, being so similar to the other.

Here’s the everyday usefulness part of the discovery:

We all have it in us to get the juicy benefits–the peace, the open-heartedness, the ability to be in the flow of the moment–of higher states of consciousness.  Because we are engineered to laugh.

I invite you to take this nugget of guru-ness you posses, treat it with the highest respect and consider it as important a daily practice as a master of meditation considers their daily meditation time.

You’ll be glad you did.

There seems to be a widely-held belief that meditation takes long, uninterrupted stretches of time.  With maybe the word “boring” coming into the picture. So we skip it.

How about if we give it five uninterrupted minutes:

Long, slow breaths at the beginning (which should be good for about thirty seconds) Sinking into our body consciousness (20 more) Finding that point of light in our center (10 more) Letting be whatever is there to be (3, maybe 4 minutes) Long, slow breaths at the end (another 30 seconds)

I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.

It seems to me that we often relate to our emotional selves in the same way we do our cars–we see ourselves as getting bashed up and dented in our interactions.  Then, unlike the way we treat our cars after a collision, we let the damage remain.

Can you imagine having a bashed in fender and weeping over the loss day after day instead of getting the insurance company on the job to fix it?  That is exactly what we do when we admire the wounds relationships inevitably cause and impress ourselves with what a terrible loss we have suffered.

“I’ll never get over this” successfully stops our inborn ability to heal.  And the wonderful thing about our inborn ability to heal is that we do not have to understand how it works.  We just have to let it.

The activation process for healing, regardless of how deep and complicated we see ourselves to be, is mindlessly simple.  Make two statements:

• I know how to heal.
• I let myself heal.

Then, let it go.  Do this every time your thoughts head back to feelings of woundedness.  Say them with love and conviction.

You absolutely, in your core, know how to heal.

Here’s a few things I learned from my father:

• When crossing a stream, don’t look down at the rocks, look straight ahead to the opposite bank.  Same goes with driving.
• If you take the coin the tooth fairy left to be a nickel and it’s a quarter, it will still spend like a quarter.
• When whittling, always face the blade away from the body.
• Do not sing while fishing.  Neither the fish nor the other people fishing will appreciate you. I believe this may apply to public transportation as well.
• It doesn’t matter if you don’t sing in tune as long as you put your heart into it.
• If you love your garden, it will love you back.  He never came right out and said it, but it was hard to miss.

When I sift out the gist of all of this, it comes out something like this:

Keep your vision uppermost, embrace your gifts, you are responsible for your own well-being, give respect to every being, lead with your heart, don’t be afraid to love. Amen.