Posts Tagged ‘sending love’
Embattled Planet
I do my best to send love out into our world, but lately it feels a little short, in terms of effectiveness.
We had a lovely time out to dinner with family in downtown Minneapolis last night to honor Julian’s birthday. I’ll give a happy shout out to Randle’s restaurant on the Nicollet Mall. Nothing pretentious about a straightforward menu and lots of sports on tv screens covering the perimeter walls.
This is the view I had coming home, and this is about as clear as it looked to my weary eyes:
During the long drive home, I was basking in the afterglow of the wonderful time we had, while also contemplating the attention grabbing headlines of catastrophic weather and geographic cataclysms. With hurricane Maria wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and the severe earthquake that occurred in Mexico, previous travails get overshadowed, yet are no less deserving of continued support.
From the challenges of renters forced to continue paying rent for unlivable properties in Houston and Florida in the aftermath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, to the cholera outbreak in Yemen during their civil war, and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar, as well as everyday ongoing poverty and homelessness, there seems to be no end to the struggles around our globe.
I get to sleep in a comfortable bed, with a safe roof over my head, blessed with spectacular late-summer weather seeping in through an open window.
I don’t deserve to have it so good, and it makes it hard to fully immerse my mind in the blissfulness when others suffer so.
Sending love to all the aforementioned, as well as to all others with needs, known and unknown.
Would that it be that each loving intent we project out into the world would have influence enough to make some measure of difference, no matter what challenges others are facing.
Put more simply, I hope it helps.
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Emotional Health
It should come as no surprise that I am a person who sees love as the magic ingredient of our lives. Love is the simplest solution to every problem. Then why isn’t everything rainbows and unicorns? Well, just because we know something works, doesn’t automatically guarantee we will put it into healthy practice.
Why do people smoke when they know the physical consequences? Why do we make poor food choices or over-indulge in mind altering substances? Why do we stay up too late? Why do we sabotage our own intentions to become our best selves?
Nobody said it was easy. I do say it is simple, but that’s not the same thing.
There is one critical ingredient to the art of loving ourselves to the fullest, which enables us to then successfully wield love as the key method of reaching a healthy solution… with other people, with situations, business transactions, relationships, governments, and ultimately between nations of our world.
It is emotional health.
I have recently come upon a couple of articles I’d like to share that nicely frame key aspects of emotional well-being. They express opinions in common with my perspectives about emotional health and love.
The first, by John White, describes emotional intelligence as a skill that can be learned and developed.
“Some of the most admired people in the world have gotten to where they are due to their emotional intelligence.”
The second, is a three-question interview in September’s National Geographic magazine with U.S. former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, where he advocates for emotional well-being.
“I think of emotional well-being as a resource within each of us that allows us to do more and to perform better. That doesn’t mean just the absence of mental illness. It’s the presence of positive emotions that allows us to be resilient in the face of adversity.”
White describes emotional intelligence as having five components: Self Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social Skills, and then suggests skills a person can practice to enhance them.
Murthy says we can cultivate emotional well-being with simple tools like, sleep, physical activity, contemplative practices, and social interaction. In his third answer, his words fully resonated for me with his belief that there are two emotions that drive our decisions: love and fear.
I agree.
I hope you will follow the links of the images to read the full (brief) contents of their messages for yourself.
At Wintervale Ranch, we are all about the love, and Cyndie and Dunia offer several workshops that provide wonderful information and guidance about emotional intelligence.
Bolster emotional intelligence and unleash the power of love. The world will be a better place, and the people a happier human race.
That’s my sermon for today. Get out there and share the love!
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Precious Getaway
We are so lucky to have people who are willing and able to take care of our animals for enough time to allow us to get away to the lake place every so often. It is our Memorial holiday weekend in the U.S. and for the second time in three weeks, we are again up at the lake place.
This time, we are without Delilah. She stayed home to be with our very capable recent college graduate, McKenna. Two of Cyndie’s brothers are up here with kids, and her parents as well. We got the weekend off to a very festive start by venturing out to the Lost Land Lake Lodge for the Friday night fish fry.
The place was hopping and our server was a real charm. Food was perfect in every way and the family banter was wonderfully entertaining. It was almost enough to entirely purge the lingering mental distractions of the day-job, where business has gotten so good (busy) it’s getting annoying.
Before the night was over, I had already lost two completely different card games. It didn’t bother me one bit. The precious ambiance was all the victory I needed for putting me in my happiest of places.
A precious getaway is an amazingly priceless luxury. This one is certainly more than I deserve.
As it fills my cup to overflowing, I will send the extra love out to you and the world to distribute and amplify all that is good.
It’s the least one can do for a world that too often seems out of our reach to help.
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Love Works
Once again, our anecdotal evidence supports the theory that sending love to others produces loving positive outcomes in amplified proportions. Yesterday morning, while driving Cyndie through the misty-cold-gray weather to Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, MN, we were both receiving messages of support and love for her scheduled surgery appointment for a knee replacement procedure.
Meanwhile, we were imaging thoughts of love and encouragement for the caregivers we were about to meet. Starting with the most convenient parking spot available at the entrance, all the way through the staff of every department of the hospital with which we had contact, we enjoyed the most pleasant of possible experiences.
The surgeon told me the procedure went perfectly, and by my perceptions, swiftly. Cyndie’s recovery from the anesthetics then proceeded smoothly and the big pain she felt coming on received prompt attention.
Speaking of prompt, they wasted no time in putting Cyndie to work on moving that knee and working the muscles of her leg. Within 5-hours of the completion of surgery a physical therapist was running her through 10-reps each of a variety of exercises, culminating with getting Cyndie to stand up on it and then walk out of her room to trek around the nurse’s station.
When you are in an uncritical frame of mind, it makes sense that you find less to feel critical about. As I drove into the darkness toward home later in the evening, I had a deep feeling of appreciation for how well the entire day had gone. We are so lucky to have access to such wonderful care.
It doesn’t hurt to also have some previous experience with joint replacement surgeries. Add to that, a lot of love from many directions and you end up with more grace than a human should be allowed.
In no time Cyndie will be hiking to and fro on our property again and Delilah will get back the walking partner she has been missing.
Keep sending love for Cyndie and her knee. It works wonders!
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It’s Silly
It’s silly, I know, but I can’t help thinking maybe somehow that is the secret to what makes it so. Silly, that is. Like a dream that makes sense, only it doesn’t at all. Time gets all mixed up, and the characters, too. How can the ages of people get all misconstrued? Even those who’ve passed on show up, still doing what they do.
Well, there are those who see this as not dreamy at all. It’s actually explainable in their point of view, with time being hardly linear and spirits always present, yet mostly unseen. It is exactly what is happening, like a coupon being redeemed. There for the taking, if we choose to direct our attention in the general direction of effect.
To be aware, or be not. That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to notice what is there all along, stumbling and rushing through mere air without care, or bumbling along just the same, yet with a certain savoir faire.
It’s energy, is all. An emanating, radiating field of unscientific particle waves. It’s anger or love that flows with abandon in directions intended, or not, at speeds and distances that defy what’s made sense since the time we left caves.
See, feel, and touch all you can possibly reach, then know, like the molecules too small to detect, there is more making contact than we’ll ever be aware, even those who detect what most of us perceive as not being there.
I choose sending love, whenever I can. Forward and back, even through time, just in case it might work. To those whom I know and even more, those I don’t. It would be silly, I think, to believe it a risk. I’m sending love, yes indeed, even while writing all of this.
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Wondering Aloud
Cyndie and I have recently found ourselves pondering the limitations of our ability to love someone out of their predicament. It gets downright frustrating to watch others destroy their own lives despite a wealth of loving family support desperately wanting to help.
Frustration Builds to Anger
I think part of the challenge for us is the struggle of overcoming anger that builds up in us from witnessing the neglect of self, and abuse of others, dished out by people in need who choose to ignore all common sense offers of assistance. By our own philosophy, we want to be sending a flood of love to all others, even if they are making us angry. That gets hard to do sometimes.
As a person who lived with a dysfunctional mindset of depression for many, many years, I recognize how self-focused a person with mental illness can become. I understand that the person with mental illness doesn’t logically perceive how much pain and sorrow they inflict on those who dearly love them, especially family. Heck, even if the message were to make it through, it could well be insufficient to inspire a change toward choosing to become healthy in response.
Yes, family seems to receive the brunt of our worst selves, even when they are the ones to whom we are most attached. Well, for that matter, even our own selves tend to become the target of our worst. That’s how these predicaments get started in the first place!
Cyndie and I understand that the only person we can change is ourselves. As a parent, it became one of the driving forces for me to want to become the healthiest I can be. I couldn’t force my children to love themselves and make healthy decisions, but I could make that a goal for myself. Doing so became an influence on my relationship with Cyndie. Our subsequent couples therapy and efforts to grow toward the healthiest possible relationship then imbued our household with that intentional energy.
I can’t say for sure that it is responsible for healthy choices our now grown children have demonstrated thus far in their lives, but I no longer see my past dysfunctional behaviors reflected back to me like I began to experience when they were young and I was ill.
Healthy Choice of Sending Love
The exercise that Cyndie and I talked about wanting to embrace last night is to emulate the confidence of our precious friend, Dunia, and not let our feelings of frustration and anger sidetrack our good intentions of wholeheartedly loving those dear to us who are not of a mind to love themselves. We want to send love with the fullest belief in the power of that love to make a healthy difference.
You see, doing so is an act of making us healthier. We can’t make others choose health. That is their responsibility. We can know we are honestly providing loving energy and by focusing on that, overcome the interference of frustration and anger over things we cannot control.
It doesn’t hurt to have a place like this blog where we can vent some extra frustration now and then. It allows us to let go of that which no longer serves and regain a balanced perspective in love.
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Precious Affirmation
On Wednesday, after Cyndie arrived home from a challenging day of work, she stepped in the door and thanked me for sending love to her while she was on the job.
“What love?” I responded.
I was asking because I hadn’t told her I was going to send love, hadn’t sent a text indicating I had done so, nor offered any other form of communication beyond the love, itself. But I very purposely did send her love during the day. Thankfully, she was perceptive enough to sense my transmission.
Either that is an example of how in tune we can be with each other sometimes, or it is a testament to the power of projecting love out into the universe with purposeful intent. Maybe it is both.
It helps that we practice listening to our intuition and paying attention to our gut sense and our heart messages. Of course, those are skills we are honing in on when we are with our horses. It is in the metaphysical realm that horses pick up much of their information. They are quick to pick up on the love we send their way.
While driving through the countryside on Tuesday, I happened to pass a property that had a lot of horses. A LOT of horses. Maybe 30 or more. They were crowded into a couple of paddocks between the busy highway and a barn. The primary thing I noticed about them was their defeated appearance.
Is it possible they were all napping? I doubt it. They all looked like their spirit had been broken. It instantly caused me to feel a renewed appreciation for the facility and environment we are able to offer our 4 horses.
The place I was driving past was obviously a horse business of some kind. Probably offered trail rides and boarding. I wondered how that many horses could get along with each other in such limited space. Actually, it looked like the horses just didn’t care enough to fuss with each other.
In a moment of being all too human, I began to think poorly of the people who put the horses in that situation. The truth is, I don’t know anything about them or their operation. I caught myself and chose a different response.
I sent the horses and the owners love.
I wonder if they felt it. My gut tells me the horses did.
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Relative Something 