Kimberly Key

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#30

Purpose is multidimensional throughout our lives. Sometimes our purpose involves being there to care for a loved one as they pass. Other times, it is about showing up to cheer children (yours and others) in their sports and school performances. Still other times, it might be looking up and smiling as a stranger crosses your path.

Purpose doesn’t have to be a difficult process of finding one single solitary thing you do for work in the world. Even people who seem to find their vocational calling and stick to it all their lives can have a variety of purposes that far exceed the work they do.

We are human BE-INGS, not human DO-INGS. So be. Allow the inspiration and life’s flow to wash over and guide you. Trust you are right where you are supposed to be in this very moment (because you are and you can only breathe life into this moment of existence). The future and your path will unfold, so be gentle with yourself if you feel you’ve lost your way. You haven’t. You are right here, right now— reading these words and taking care of yourself. Hopefully, you are uncovering (and remembering) that your Soul is guiding you in ways our material existence cannot always comprehend.

Inspiration for the Day:        I have always known

                                              That at last I would

                                              Take this road, but yesterday

                                              I did not know that it would be today.

                                                                                           –Narihira

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#29

Patience is powerful. Not just patience to steadily work at the tasks that lead to fruition to your goals; it is also essential to have patience with the present moment.

You may not like your current circumstances, or you may discover that tending to the moment—as it is—brings forth feelings of boredom, frustration, fear, and discontent.

Or you may feel exhilarated in the moment while simultaneously experiencing a nagging fear and dread that the happiness will end.

The solution for staying fully present is to pause and focus on the simple things you can cherish. Take a slow deep breath and appreciate how your lungs feel as you inhale and exhale. Relax the muscles in your body. Allow the calm stillness to center you—and trust the path ahead can be filled with this same calmness that you bring to it, no matter what happens in your life.

Inspiration for the Day: Try this for an affirmation as you breathe and relax: “I now choose to create a life that is joyous and abundant. I am at ease.”

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#28

Courage needs fuel.

No one can accomplish anything in complete isolation. The fuel can come from an internal and ethereal Source that feeds conviction and reassures the person of their path. Or it can come from the support of loved ones and mentors around you. Ideally, you have a little of both.

Even so, it does not mean that the path will be free of obstacles. You may want to quit, run and/or hide. You may want to take a safer route yet cannot find one. In those times, engage even more with the internal and external supports you have so they can help to fuel your courage.

Remember the lesson of the blossom in the snow—it is filled with ancient DNA and deep roots that mark the way of the path while also being called by the world to greet the giant sun and essential chemicals that nourish its bloom. Trust the process that leads to your blossom.

Inspiration for the Day: “Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.” –Alice M. Swain

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#27

What is the burning desire within you? Was there something that you’ve always wanted to do ever since you were young? Does it nag at you? Haunt you? Is it difficult to tame? Do you run from it because it seems unrealistic?

Some desires are born out of insecurity and an attempt to prove something to someone or to get even with someone who hurt you. Other desires stir deep inside regardless of who notices and in spite of whether you receive recognition. Some desires may be born out of both causes.

One valuable exercise is to list all of the desires that fill you. Don’t judge what they are or how big or small they are. In fact, take on the exercise with radical self-acceptance and self-compassion. The deeper you go, the more you will find exactly who you are and what stirs your authentic joy.

Inspiration for the Day: “…what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I lost.’” –Luke 15: 8-9

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#26

Timing is everything.

Pay attention to the need to move through stagnation. Stagnation can look like depression, sorrow, fear, and anxiety. When faced with these debilitating feelings, just do one small thing to accomplish your goal. Small things lead to big things and it is action that creates the momentum that leads to fulfillment.

Yet sometimes the timing is not right. Things tend not to work in these situations. It is almost like the Universe has created a barricade preventing you from achieving your goal. Patience and sitting still may be called for. In these circumstances, remember the lesson of winter season. Bare trees may look dead, however, they are doing powerful invisible work during hibernation.

Similarly, you may be in a hibernation phase where your ideas are gestating until the right audience is ready to receive them and/or you learn something essential in order to most effectively deliver your work into the world.

Inspiration for the Day: “Thinking and trying to “understand” can often confuse us and result in paralysis. Only as we participate can we learn.” –Anne Wilson Schaef

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#25

Everything we do has a purpose.

Whether it’s something as simple as brushing one’s teeth for dental hygiene to fulfilling a higher mission like saving lives, teaching others, helping the environment and/or achieving a dream.  Some purposes appear somewhat benign while others  have the power to enhance one’s sense of fulfillment, meaning and self-respect. Still others can incur harm, shame and illness.

A helpful test when taking any action (simple or complex) is to consider what purpose the act is fulfilling and consciously choosing to engage in more actions that lead to fulfillment and increase your self-respect.

Inspiration for the Day: “Everywhere and at all times it is in your power piously to acquiesce in your present condition, and to behave justly to those around you, and to exert your skill upon your present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without being well examined.” –Marcus Aurelius

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#24

Something special and unique exists in each and every living being. No two people have identical fingerprints. Similarly, the mark they leave in the world is just as personal—and can resonate with others in an almost mystical way.

Try walking through a museum and notice what art you are most drawn to. Why?

Art has a way of connecting us to the language of the Soul and inspiring us (or reminding us) of our purpose in the world.

Give your Soul the gift of an art tour of some sort and see what your stirs your Soul. It might be experienced as a flutter in your heart, an inspired idea, or a sudden recognition that you need to make a change. Conversely, you may be filled with immense gratitude and a sense through an inner knowing that you are on your Soul’s perfect path.

Inspiration for the Day: “One of the reasons the essential self has to resort to such extreme measures in order to communicate is that it can’t talk.” -Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#23

Getting out of ourselves and reaching out to help someone else in need can have paradoxical magical cures to our own pains.

Moreover, the foundation of one’s purpose is often filled with the resilience and grit from surviving struggles and pain. One of the cornerstones of resilience and grit is shaped through connection with others.

When connecting to another, suddenly the broken heart, lost job, financial difficulty, grief, trauma, and stress becomes a powerful tool for empathizing with another person in similar pain. Helping them aids the healing and meaning for both of you—and a greater purpose is discovered in the alchemical healing connection.

Inspiration for the Day: “If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.” –Barack Obama

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#22

Purpose frequently gets blocked by fear and ego-centered pride. People can stumble when they fear making a mistake or getting negatively judged and rejected. Sometimes people allow their ego-centered pride to become so inflated that they narcissistically seek endless attention, adulation, respect, and admiration from others. These relational energies can thwart the progress of genuine purpose and connectedness with others.

Think about the heroes that have most inspired you.

Now think about some of the heroes who let you down after meeting them or learning more about them.

Can you notice the difference between what inspired and what repelled you? Let that be your guide.

Inspiration for the Day: “The Ego is a veil between humans and God.” –Rumi

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#21

A room of darkness can be transformed by lighting one candle. Living your purpose is much like a lit candle in a dark room. When you shine your light, it imbues light onto the surroundings and others around you.

Shining your light also models it for others. It can inspire others to cultivate purpose in their lives. If you had to overcome any obstacles, the steps you took may have carved a path that others can follow.

We are all role models. You never know what influence you may have or what unintended gifts you’ve given to others. It may be with the people you know, don’t know, or future generations. Give the gift of your light and let the rays touch where they are needed.

Inspiration for the Day: “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” –William Shakespeare

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#20

So far, there has been a lot of focus on finding and listening to one’s internal voice while embracing healthy self-care as necessary ingredients for cultivating purpose. As always there is an art in finding balance along a continuum, so let’s look at the benefits of caring for others as part of one’s purpose.

We are deeply interconnected. To live is to breathe. Life is filled with multiple systemic and symbiotic relationships. For instance, just as we breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, the bountiful plant life and trees surrounding us, via the oxygen cycle of photosynthesis from the sun, emit large quantities of oxygen while they take in carbon dioxide.

Purpose is like breathing. The gifts we produce from our purpose are taken in by others. Some people receive it in the form of love. Others may be inspired. Perhaps some people are healed.

The fruits of purpose are plentiful and the rewards of returned love, appreciation, and recognition can incite renewed inspiration and energy for us to continue our purpose. Sometimes the unrecognized gifts go even further, like when we give an anonymous act of kindness to a stranger or make a heroic sacrifice to save someone or an entire population of people.

Inspiration for the Day: “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” –Winston Churchill

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#19

While it is healthy and positive to find gratitude in the moment, heeding the Soul’s call of deeper discontent may also be a lifesaving wake-up call to spur you into action.

As an example, one study examined the effects of prescription drugs on the survival responses in a group of minnows. A predator fish was introduced into two tanks of minnows. One tank was filled with non-drugged minnows while the second tank contained somewhat sedated minnows who had been exposed to prescription medications. As you may guess, the “sober” fish fought for their lives while the drugged fish responded lackadaisically and gave no sign of fight at all.

Sometimes questioning authority or where you’re at is a lifesaving call to action that saves you—and others.

Inspiration for the Day: “Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.” –Henry David Thoreau

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#18

One of the greatest obstacles to finding purpose is the belief that it doesn’t exist in this very moment.  It does! As the axiom goes, you ARE right where you are supposed to be.

Every decision, every step along the way is part of your individual journey. Each step is an essential ingredient in your personal stew. Some herbs and flavors become dominant while others take a supportive background role.

Even dreaded failure can serve as some of the best gifts in life. It teaches us our greatest lessons and can be necessary in our development and our relations with others. Fear of failure and perpetual seeking of something better are some of the biggest challenges we overcome in life. They also make us very human and connect us to each other.

Acceptance of the here and now and the ever-unfolding process of life is our salvation.

Inspiration for the Day: “It is better to remain human and imperfect than to attempt the impossible task of becoming perfect—that is, of becoming divine, and therefore, inhuman.” –Richard E. Lind

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#17

Finding meaning and fulfilling one’s purpose can be accomplished through many activities.

Having a proverbial “day job” may provide income for paying for home, food, and basic necessities while painting, writing, or restoring an old car can serve to sate other essential soul needs. The combination can work together to fulfill one’s purpose.

You can resolve the conflict by expanding your mind to embrace multiple possibilities. It helps to remember that it is not an “either/or” (like, either I do this job or that job)—it can be a both/and. I can do BOTH this AND that. And maybe a little of this and that too!

Inspiration for the Day: “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” –Hegel

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#16

Finding our purpose is often a balance between responding to life’s responsibilities and taking care of our internal needs.

Living a life that sacrifices oneself to take care of everyone else can backfire. What may not be recognized by the conscious mind is that the sacrifices are often veiled attempts to receive love, attention, security, and to feel worthy.

Worse, they can be a rich breeding ground for deep-seated resentments that can come out in unexpected ways—moodiness, controlling behavior, guilt-tripping, eating disorders, addictions, depression, and a profound sense of disconnectedness from one’s self.

Taking time to examine the source of our desires can illuminate any ulterior motives and serve to access clearer intentions and a more fulfilling purpose.

Inspiration for the Day: “What we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.” –Plutarch

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#15

While our job may not necessarily equate with our purpose, it can be a complement to it and provide the fuel and energy that motivates and sustains us in the totality of our lives.

The energy of our purpose is like the attitude we bring to work—all the work we do in life. Some of the most fulfilling activities can be the most mundane daily chores. In fact, many faiths and cultures around the world (from ancient Eastern Zen practitioners to modern-day Western Christian monks and the multitudes of people in between) strongly herald the values of the simple tasks in daily living.

In his book, The Turning Point, Fritjof Capra explains that routine repetitive work is spiritual and, “helps us recognize the natural cycles of death and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic of the universe.” That may explain why some people share how gardening, washing dishes, carpentry work, and even high-tech repetitive computer programming tasks can be relaxing and almost mesmerizing.

Inspiration for the Day: “Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” –Zen Proverb

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#14

Our sense of purpose can change over a lifetime, so it’s important to be flexible with the natural changes that emerge over the course of life.

A child may have dreams of becoming a clown who tours with a circus but change as they get older (and compounded by the final circus performance in 2017).

Education tends to reveal new paths as one discovers options they never knew existed before. Available career opportunities and technological impacts can also influence one’s direction in life.

Raising a family often instigates new priorities and shifts in desires.

Medical issues, death of a loved one, experiencing a significant life change like an empty-nest, and/or surviving a trauma can also illuminate new life paths.

Sometimes a person returns to an old childhood dream later in life—and perhaps performs as a clown in a new type of circus after all.

Inspiration for the Day: Plants often need to be repotted to grow.

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#13

We can be inspired, motivated and even coerced by others to make a change in our lives, yet the burden lies with us to take action.

Thinking we need outside help to get us moving can be a self-deceptive lie that keeps us from engaging with life the way our soul is urging.

Remember the lesson of the baby chick. The baby chick is developing essential muscles and neural pathways necessary for survival when it painstakingly chips away at the eggshell that’s containing it. The chick would actually perish if someone, or something, were to come along and help it break out of its shell.

You might be experiencing a similar situation where necessary “muscles” are being developed from any obstacles arising along your path, allowing you to ultimately thrive.

Inspiration for the Day: “Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.” –Carol Burnett

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#12

Purpose means being part of something larger that is connected to others. While one cannot be fully authentic if they escape their inner truth, they must also be wary of becoming too self-absorbed.

Self-absorption, or naval-gazing, means one is so caught up with their own feelings and experiences that they can’t make time to comprehend what is happening for others. Moreover, they falsely assume that their experience is identical to another person’s—and that is rarely ever true. Two people have different feelings and experiences to the same stimulus in the same moment.

A paradox is that knowing oneself wholly—and the depth of one’s own feelings—is what allows a person to become more fully present, available, open, and curious about other people’s perspectives. When that happens, one’s purpose is able to to be more powerful as it enables a purposeful flow from one soul to another. Purpose needs more than one person. It is a gift from one being to others.

Inspiration for the Day: “We don’t accomplish anything in the world alone and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.” –Sandra Day O’Connor

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#11

Living authentically is the key to fulfilling one’s purpose. The challenge arises when we don’t have a sense of who we are.

One couple spent years singularly focused on the husband’s medical career and building their wealth. They were so consumed by building a grand home and sending their kids to the perfect school that they imploded and sought counseling for marital and personal help. They both felt lost, unhappy and expressed they were living a fake life that neither of them wanted. After personal and couples work that examined the various areas of balance in their lives, they blossomed into new people. New careers for each of them were a byproduct of getting in touch with their deeper soul’s truth. They were also able to grow closer as a family.

Inspiration for the Day: “We are constantly being invited to be who we really are.” –Henry David Thoreau

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#10

What happens after you try to pursue a dream and fail?

First, what are the conditions that you deem your pursuit a failure? Is it other people’s opinions and/or rejections? Is it monetary circumstances? Competing family obligations? Ill health or physical limitations?

The first definition of failure was from 1643 and it meant an omission of performance or action. If you tried something and learned it is not for you then it is not a failure, however, if you’ve learned that you still feel a yearning in spite of an obstacle then not pursuing a creative way to reach your goal IS a failure. Keep trying!

One former athlete who lost his dreams of playing professional baseball after a debilitating injury discovered he could still fulfill his love for baseball by becoming a sports psychologist.

Inspiration for the Day: “Failure serves a purpose—it asks us if we want to go on making things.” –Clive James

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#9

Are you measuring your worth by the money you make, the importance of what you do or the applause from other people?

We all depend on a certain level of income to provide housing and basic needs. Having a sense of contribution can enhance our self-respect. Having positive feedback from others can be extremely valuable as it reinforces a sense of belonging and our place among people. The difficulty arises at the extremes.

Emotional and spiritual health come when we realize we matter no matter what we’re doing. We realize every breath and each heartbeat is present in the work that we do. Nothing is too small or too great. We discover we are valuable—not because of money, perceived level of importance of our job, or popular support—we are most valuable when we allow ourselves to bloom as our most authentic self. Don’t try to be a rose if you are a tulip or a dandelion or an apple blossom. Bloom your innermost truth.

Inspiration for the Day: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” –Lao Tzu

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#8

Bravery.

Daring.

Courage.

These are the hallmarks of a Soul’s escape from bondage—bondage of self-ridicule; bondage of other people’s opinions; bondage of the ego’s temptations to sate greed, pride, envy, lust, gluttony, and power.

When you find yourself in the very human trap of succumbing to these ego foes and losing your sense of purpose, think of what a firefighter instructs when caught on fire.

Stop, Drop & Roll.

To stop takes bravery. To drop involves daring to order to shed the pretense and pride of the ego. To roll involves the continual maintenance of courage to live one's truth.

When the flames of the ego have been extinguished, the Soul’s dreamer can be free to imagine, create, innovate, and fulfill its deeper purpose.

 

Inspiration for the Day: “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” –Harriet Tubman

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#7

Comparing yourself to others is akin to death. It disconnects from self and the essential inner-guidance system that leads to purpose, meaning and living one’s truth. Comparing provides a distorted view of reality and reinforces an externally-driven life. When external motivations become the dominant driver of live, the essential inner-guidance recedes into the background.

Comparing yourself to others also sets you up for perpetual disappointment and self-loathing as you succumb to the greatest lie of all, “You’re not good enough.” Externally-motivated people attempt to cover up the lie with desperate attempts to make their life look good to the outside world while they silently suffer on the inside.

Looking at others and pictures of people’s lives on social media and feeling immediately depressed or discouraged is a red flag that the dangers of comparing and external motivation are taking over.

Inspiration for the Day: “Stay in your lane. Comparison kills creativity and joy.” –Brene Brown

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#6

Finding our path often involves learning what doesn’t work for us.

Like flashing hazard lights, experiencing drudgery can alert us that something is wrong. Accidents and illness are other wake-up calls that can indicate we are not living the life we want to live. Status and monetary success often cannot fill the hole in one’s heart that hides another calling.

Numerous people throughout the ages have stories of living unfulfilled lives due to an inner urging that ached to do something different. Their powerful stories serve as heroic breadcrumbs for others as they tell of breaking away from a former life clothed in seeming comfort and jumping into an abyss of unknowns that ultimately led to self-discovery and a new soul-rewarding vocation.

Some paths led to lives as research scientists while others were artists, public servants, teachers, inventors, ministers, volunteers, healers, diplomats, and more.

Inspiration for the Day: “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” –Aristotle

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#5

Sometimes our biggest enemy stems from fighting the reality that is right in front of you.

If something is really bothering and upsetting you in your life right now, take a pause and breathe deeply while imagining that everything in your life at this very moment is there to teach you something—or for you to help someone or something in your world. Keep breathing into any area of your life that is causing you tension. With each breath in, imagine sending love and healing to that person, place, situation, or thing that is causing tension. With each exhale, consciously release the tension. Continue until you feel a lightness and appreciation for this very moment.

Cultivating a mindset of wonder and curiosity can fill you with gratitude. From gratitude comes a heightened sense of freedom, acceptance and love.

Inspiration for the Day: “Healing in ho'oponopono means loving yourself. If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you want to cure anyone…you do it by healing you.” –Joe Vitale

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#4

Fear has many disguises. It is one of the biggest causes that deter people from identifying and pursuing their personal purpose.

Fear is the voice that tells you you’re not good enough. It challenges you to play it safe and be grown-up. It dismisses dreams and inner desires as silly fantasy or delusion. It even tempts you with endless preparation distractions like continued education, training, classes, and seminars on top of already attained education.

Fear can also take you to a living hell as it lures you into disconnecting with your inner self and others through escapist behaviors on the addictive spectrum such as, alcohol, drugs, sex, love, technology, work, exercise, food, and media.

Inspiration for the Day: “One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.” –Joseph Campbell

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#3

Where do you fit on the scale of people pleasing? How does it impact what you do in your career and your relationships?

Belonging is fundamental need, so doing anything to disrupt one’s state of belonging can be frightening. On the other hand, seeking to make others happy at the expense of your deeper convictions can only lead to resentment and grief. This can often be seen when trying to fulfill a parent’s wishes over one’s real desires.

Like all things, there is a continuum to pursuing one’s own interests and serving others. Ironically, it can be just as selfish to sacrifice and make others happy because you want them to like or approve of you. Check in with your motives and seek behaviors and goals that align with your vision, values and enhance your self-respect.

Inspiration for the Day: “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived life of a parent.” –C.G. Jung

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#2

Momentum is fantastic unless you are in a rut and find yourself going through the motions. Generally, it can also be a wake-up call that you are not in the present moment.

Living in the present can help you be in the “now” and better connect with others in the moment. What is this moment teaching you? How are your feelings in this very second influencing you? What is your body telling you?

Anxiety multiplies when ruminating about the past and focusing on fears of the future. Anxiety and related depression tend to diminish when we take deep breaths and fully awaken to the now.

Try making small changes to your routine to re-engage in the moment. Brush your teeth with the opposite hand if you can. Drive (or walk) a different way to your destination. Stretch your body between appointments. Take an inhale of a fragrant essential oil.

Inspiration for the Day: “Mindfulness isn’t difficult, we just need to remember to do it.” –Sharon Salzberg

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

30 Days of Purpose from The Key Essentials Day#1

Any day can be the start of a new year and a new beginning. Before jumping in and making resolutions for improvement, try checking in with yourself and assessing if you’re receiving what you want in your life.

 Is anything bothering you in your life? What purpose is it serving? Have you desired to do something yet been too afraid to pursue it? Is patience required in any area of your life?

One exercise is to document your satisfaction level with different areas of your life. Work, health, spirituality, time in nature, physical exercise, intimate relationships, friendships, family, home, where you reside, adventure, art, and rest.

After scoring, write down ten things that make you grateful. Even if it’s running water or simple things you take for granted. Once fully immersed in gratitude, review your assessment again and see if any of the scores changed. Pay extra attention to any areas that may have worsened. Potential solutions can be added to a third column. Then give yourself three-four months to re-review the list and see if circumstances have changed.

Inspiration for the Day: “Effective (people) have an identity. They know who they are, what they are capable of becoming, what they want out of life, and what is essential.” –Gerald Corey

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about purpose. As you remain quarantined during this COVID pandemic, perhaps you can take this time to evaluate your plans and cultivate a deeper Soul purpose in your life. 

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #30 (Creating a Sacred Space) from The Key Essentials to Balance

Creating a sacred space in your place can provide innumerable benefits as it can serve as a place of respite during chaotic times and provide a touchstone of peace for your soul.

Such places of refuge can be as large as an entire room that is dedicated to your own personal form of meditation and relaxation or it can be a wall or an area of a bedroom and/or office. It can be outside or inside—the only necessity is that it is easily accessible and a place you can turn your attention on a daily basis to pause, breathe, restore, and renew.

Examples of scared spaces may include a spiritual prayer room, a library, a wall housing a fish tank, an area filled with family and vacation photos and cherished objects that fill one’s heart, an art room, or a completely empty space possibly filled with a single candle.  You can do any combination of these things or something else that helps feed the higher parts of your heart and spirit.

Inspiration for the Day: “Your sacred space is an area where you can find yourself again and again.” -Joseph Campbell

 

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #29 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Detached love is a concept often described yet difficult to fully comprehend and possibly even more challenging to employ.

To understand detached love is to understand what it isn’t. Detached love isn’t aloof, nor is it clinging, controlling, or filled with expectations. Detached love is the free flow of loving energy that does not burden its receiver with unconscious demands to fill an empty space, to provide security, or to give steady streams of attention that builds the ego.

Consider this simple test: imagine giving a gift to someone and having them immediately discard it or give it away. How would you feel? Is there an attachment to the outcome of their actions? If so, then the gift is not free for it is given with unspoken expectations. Loving someone with detachment is to detach from their behavior. It is giving the gift of love freely. If you find you cannot detach from the other person’s behavior in response to your love, then it may not be a genuine flow of love and may have unconscious expectations to meet egoic needs that cannot be filled.

Inspiration for the Day: “Your heart must become a sea of love. Your mind must become a river of detachment.” -Sri Chinmoy

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #28 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Practice loving listening.

Real listening is a lost art and probably explains why so many people feel hurt and defensive. When people don’t feel understood, even simple communication can become a battle.

We are all guilty of interrupting, assuming what someone really means, and/or zoning out altogether when someone else is speaking. The key is to make a connection with someone and really focus on what the other person is saying. Notice their facial expressions and listen for their feelings. You’re less apt to interrupt or think about your own response when you’re completely focused on what they’re saying and how they’re feeling.

In response, the person who feels genuinely heard will experience a fuller heart and often reciprocate with loving listening in return.

Inspiration for the Day: “We think we listen, but we rarely listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces of change that I know.” -Carl Rogers

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #27 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Healthy self-soothing is essential to love.

If you’ve lived a little, you’ve probably been hurt. We all have. As a consequence, we’ve developed scars, fears, and triggers to protect ourselves from pain. Sometimes, these triggers can create irrational reactions. For instance, a trigger can get pulled and bring up feelings of panic when someone says the exact same phrase used by an assailant just before they wounded you. A person, even a smell, can also remind you of a happy time.

Triggers are normal but become a problem when they interfere with our relationships by making us react to a previous event rather than the separate event that is happening in the moment (“overreacting”). Then we set ourselves for feeling judged and may respond defensively if our feelings aren’t honored. The key in these sensitive situations is to self-soothe.

Understand your feelings and triggers and calm yourself down. Recognize that two events are simultaneously occurring for you, emotionally. Take a deep breath and share it with the other person if you feel safe. Otherwise, take a deep breath, reassure yourself that the events are separate, and refocus on the moment. Then you can listen and respond with more neutrality.  

Inspiration for the Day: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” -William James

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #26 from The Key Essentials to Balance

To love is being able to honor others. Paradoxically, by honoring yourself, you can more effectively honor others because how you treat yourself often reflects how you treat others.

For instance, you’ll be more comfortable with other people’s feelings when you’re comfortable with your own feelings. Perhaps the biggest way you can honor someone else is to be comfortable with their feelings—and not by not mistaking your feelings for theirs, or their feelings for your feelings.

The biggest problems come up when people incorrectly assume what someone else meant by an action, word or expression. The receiver of the message may be hurt, so they’ll interpret the message as hurtful. Or the messenger may be angry at their self and will take the anger out onto the receiver. It’s a lifelong process, but try to clearly differentiate your feelings from someone else’s feelings so that you can honor them and their feelings.    

Inspiration for the Day: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” -Carl G. Jung

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #25 from The Key Essentials to Balance

How often do you allow yourself to fully experience joy?

One of the rather stealthy causes of people’s misery is the subtle believe that joy is not possible. Moreover, some people subconsciously feel they deserve pain. Or that pain somehow pain makes them a better person or will provide a reward. It goes back to a lot of the stories heard in childhood, like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the beast in Beauty and the Beast that needed rescuing from one special person who offered “real love”; or Wonder Woman, Rocky, Superman, and stories about capitalist heroes that pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and only triumphed after difficulty).

These stories help frame the way we look at suffering—and love—in our lives. Sometimes we become so attached to the suffering that we sabotage ourselves and our relationships and miss out on experiences that offer joy. By doing that, we inadvertently numb ourselves to the fullness of life and the joy it offers in this very moment.

Check in with the stories and fantasies that might be holding you back. It doesn’t mean you’re a self-centered hedonist if you allow yourself to experience real joy in this present moment. It’s okay. Life is full of experiences with ups and downs, just don’t be afraid to experience the ups. You do deserve it. Honor yourself by releasing suffering and embracing your bliss. You might be surprised to discover the love pouring forth from your heart and all around you when you do.

Inspiration for the Day: “Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.” -William Blake

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #24 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Remove the judgment.

This is probably one of the hardest things to do because we’re so conditioned to it. We judge. We judge each other and we judge ourselves. In fact, we’re probably the worst on ourselves.

Think about it. What do you tell yourself all day long? What does that inner critic say when you’re running late or when your project failed? How about when you look at yourself in the mirror? Remember how feelings move? Well, our inner critic creates a lot of feelings—fear, self-doubt, shame, embarrassment, sadness, loneliness, and so on.

Quiet the inner critical judge and try replacing it with love and gratitude. You’ll save yourself, and the loved ones around you, from a lot of pain.

Inspiration for the Day: “Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.” -Louise L. Hay

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #23 from The Key Essentials to Balance

To love, look within.

Don’t be afraid to look within and understand what you are feeling. Sometimes we get so wrapped up with responsibilities that we go into autopilot and just respond. Then time goes on and we forget to feel, or think it’s a selfish luxury. But, it’s not. Feelings move. They don’t go away just because you don’t acknowledge it.

The danger of not addressing one’s feelings is how feelings will reveal themselves in other ways to get you your attention such as, manifesting physical ailments (headaches, stomach aches, back aches, sinus problems, etc.), or through damaging habits (drinking, substance abuse, shopping, eating disorders). It’s when we turn away from our feelings—from ourselves—that problems arise. Then we’re no good to anyone.

Take it simple and acknowledge what you’re feeling. Honor your inner truth. That’s why sharing troubling things in a group or with a counselor can be so helpful. Journals and tape recorders are additional ways of expressing your feelings.

Inspiration for the Day: “If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.” -Abraham Maslow

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #22 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Remember the expression, “Stop and smell the roses”? There is a lot of wisdom and science to this—and helps to better enable the free flow of love.

The essential two biological components that come into play when deeply inhaling the pleasant fragrance of a rose is that we tend to relax our muscles and take a longer inhale and exhale.

When we are in any stressed state (think stuck in traffic, meeting deadlines, listening to the news, arguing with a loved one) we tend to engage in shallow breathing, which limits the oxygen to our brain and organs and leads to further stress.

In addition, clenched muscles (a practical default for everyone...go ahead and notice if the muscles in your face are tight right now? Is your jaw clenched? Are your shoulders a bit high and tense? If so, pause and deeply breathe into your muscles and imagine all your muscles relaxing like melting butter dripping off your skeletal frame). When we fully relax our muscles, we open neural pathways to our higher brain functioning and can think and process more clearly—which gets us out of triggered states that impede love.

If the rose can represent love, then remember the lesson of inhaling love throughout the day, every day.

Inspiration for the Day: “The world is a rose, smell it and pass it on to your friends.” -Persian Proverb

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #21 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Misunderstandings can foil the flow of love.

Many times, a misunderstanding can be healed through communicating about it. Try sharing feelings and perspectives without criticizing, blaming or complaining.

It also helps to seek to understand the other person’s perspective in advance.

A common issue that leads to frustration for people is when one person is in a position of waiting for a response from a person who is running around with many things to do (be it work, kids, endless chores, issues with other people, deadlines, homework, etc.). In these situations, it is like the people are in two different time zones. These vast “time-life zones” can make it feel like a week has passed for the waiting person while the busy/distracted person senses only a small amount of time has passed. Complicating this factor is that some people can process their feelings about a situation rather quickly while others may need days or even weeks to allow experiences to fully digest.

Inspiration for the Day: “Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing the rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.”—Rumi

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #20 from The Key Essentials to Balance

The initial infatuation high of first love has created many challenges to the free flow of genuine love.

Infatuation, or the first stages of attraction, floods the brain with excess dopamine along with redirecting one’s thoughts and focus onto the beloved. Such a mesmerizing state feels exhilarating—and thinking of a joined future together brings joyful hope of neverending bliss.

Many people feel they’ve fallen out of love when the heightened state of infatuation begins to plummet and disappointment sets in, however, this is where real love gets to flourish. Practicing gratitude, trust and respect for each other—and the relationship—keeps the love flowing AND growing.

Inspiration for the Day: “Trust is built in very small moments, which I call 'sliding door' moments. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner. One such moment is not important, but if you're always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship- very gradually, very slowly.”—John Gottman

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #19 from The Key Essentials to Balance

How we deal with loneliness often reflects how we deal with love.

Do you swing from isolating and cutting-off from people to somewhat desperately seeking attention from people who can’t give it? Are you surrounded by detached people or people who are inconsistent with their love and attention? Do your primary love relationships seem to cause more anxiety and frustration than comfort?

Sometimes such inadequate love relationships mirror our own intolerance and fear of love. The underlying fear is that the love object will abandon and/or consume us, so we play out a desperate dance that feeds the very loneliness we believe we want to avoid. Loneliness can feel safe and familiar—yet can keep us from forming genuine loving relationships with others who are truly available to reciprocate.

One of the keys to developing healthy free-flowing love relationships is to recognize any anxiety you feel when people get too close. Can you try tolerating the discomfort and even sharing the angst you feel in the moment with your loved one? Another trick Dr. John Gottman suggests is to hug your partner for at least six seconds (or longer!).  

Inspiration for the Day: “If you can’t regulate your own emotional temperature, you’ll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable.”—David Snarch

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #18 from The Key Essentials to Balance

One of the biggest benefits of experiencing the flow of love (for one’s beloved, family, living creatures, universe, and beyond) is the ability to connect to the present moment and play.

The wisdom of not taking oneself too seriously is a great reminder to let go of preconceptions, expectations, scorekeeping, self-pity, fear, and anxiety. Allow oneself to play in life and feel the joy of the breeze blowing on one’s skin and the incredible healing release of a good bout of laughter.

You are never too old for play or love. One way to remind yourself of this is to keep a bottle of bubbles nearby and blow them when you get too serious, feel down, and even when excited. Try it with a partner or friend. Watch the bubbles with the delight of your inner child’s eyes and blow on them as a game as you try to pop all of them. Imagine the bubbles as a symbol for life and the free-flowing gift of love.

Inspiration for the Day: “The real secret of life is to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And, instead of calling it work, realize it is play." —Alan Watts

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #17 from The Key Essentials to Balance

The active work of love involves seeking to understand the other. There are multiple ways of seeing a situation and oftentimes our own self-protective defenses can cloud our view of the other’s experience. One simple word or look can be fodder for a misunderstanding. To love means to seek ways to clear such misunderstandings.

A challenge for overcoming misunderstandings is knowing when to pursue a conversation to clear the confusion and when to wait to allow ruffled feathers to smooth.

Some things can simply be dropped for they aren’t that important in the big scheme of life. Yet a continual effort to thwart communication and understanding can cripple the flow of love.

Inspiration for the Day: “Love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant." —Deepak Chopra

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #16 from The Key Essentials to Balance

The definition of beloved is “dearly loved” and “dear to the heart.”

A further breakdown of dear is “precious” and heart is “the central or innermost part of something.”

If you were to write a list of what is precious and central to you, what would it contain? Can you start a list and add to it each day?

Inspiration for the Day: “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” –Aristotle

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #15 from The Key Essentials to Balance

While loving energy is boundless, loving relationships require boundaries in order for each participant and the relationship to remain healthy.

Healthy boundaries in relationships are like the protective layers of muscles and tissues surrounding the organs in the body and keeping them intact. If an organ has been ruptured, not only is it in crisis, it threatens the other organs and the entire body.

The protective layers for you in relationships can be discovered by knowing your values—and enforcing them in your relationships. Does honesty matter to you? How about kindness? Or being fully present and listening? Authenticity versus shallowness?

Once you’ve identified your values, live them in every interaction in your life. Kindly reinforce them in the treatment you receive from others. Reconsider the relationship if someone doesn’t respect you, your space, your values, and constantly criticizes, demeans and dismisses you.

Lovingly tend to infections in relationships by talking openly to find solutions or seek a third party to help. Extricate yourself from toxic and abusive situations as they can seriously risk your sanity and health.

Inspiration for the Day: “When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated." –Brené Brown

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #14 from The Key Essentials to Balance

These excerpts are from a daily reader (The Key Essentials to Balance) that follow the Gregorian calendar. This series of love is from the month of February and today's post falls on February 14, which inspired the topic. 

While the Catholic Church recognized a few different saints named Valentine, one of the recited accounts is that a priest secretly conducted marriage ceremonies for couples after Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men seeking marraige (based on the idea that single men performed better as soldiers). Valentine’s secret ceremonies were eventually discovered, and Claudius ordered his execution on February 14 around 240 A.D.

The first recorded marriage took place in Mesopotamia in 2350 B.C. It wasn’t until 1563 A.D. that the Catholic Church canonized marriage as a sacrament (over 1,300 years after Valentine’s death).

The evolution of marriage has continued to transform to this day. While marriages served as a legal entity that granted the transference of a woman’s ownership from a father to a husband, it has only been in the last 100 years that women have gained increasing equality in marriage, property ownership and rights. It has only been in the last few years that marriage between same sex partners have achieved recognition and protected rights in some places.

No matter the legal entity or condition, something about the dignity of love has continued in spite of external attempts to control its enduring nature.

Inspiration for the Day: “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate." —Geoffrey Chaucer

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #13 from The Key Essentials to Balance

When love is called blind, it often is used to suggest that one has fallen in love with an illusion. When first struck by Cupid’s bow, it is easy to see a person’s attractive appearance and impressive accomplishments and fill in the rest of the unknown aspects with positivity and unconscious expectations of perfection. Any red flags and causes for concern tend to get overlooked and/or justified.

If expectations are premeditated resentments, casting the expectation of perfection onto the beloved is just as much our fault as it is for the person who we may feel deceived us. Instead, seek to see the other person in their fullest expression. Take the time to cultivate a genuine understanding of each other and ensure that the love felt by each other can stand the test of changing seasons, human fallibilities, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.

Genuine love blooms over time after each person has seen the multifaceted aspects of each other’s personality arise throughout multiple conditions and situations and still find themselves reaching out for each other with mutual love, appreciation, trust, and respect.

Inspiration for the Day: “You can’t rush something you want to last forever." —Unknown

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #12 from The Key Essentials to Balance

There are many experiences for love.

The Greek language differentiates four types of love:

   -eros is romantic love,

    -agape is the unconditional Divine (or God) love,

    -philia is friend and brotherly love, and

    -storge represents a love that is based on a deep bond and attachment like a parent has for a child and one that also can be experienced between partners, family members and even pets.

To experience one is these types of love is a gift. To nurture and experience all of these types of loves in one’s lifetime can be greatest jackpot of all.

Inspiration for the Day: “The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart." —Helen Keller

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #11 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Resentments and criticism can clog the flow of love for generations.

One’s tendency to hold resentments and maintain a critical outlook can sometimes be related to attachment style, as children observe parents and often mimic their attachment style and their associated attitudes toward criticism and resentment.

For instance, some parents keep an emotional distance and barely give children the attention they need, so those children grow up and repeat the pattern of emotional distance. Other parents are so emotionally needy, inappropriate and overly controlling that children question their love and feel like they are walking on eggshells. Such abuse can create a needy and fearful attachment. Children then grow up and respond to their romantic partners, children, and even employers in a similar secure, distant, anxious, and/or ambivalent way that was formed with their parents.

Examine the patterns your parents inherited and see if you can identify similarities in yourself and your siblings. List your resentments and criticisms and then try to see if you can find gratitude for what you’ve learned, compassion for the generations in your family tree, and tolerance for the love that wants to flow from your heart. Letting love freely flow from your heart allows forgiveness to emerge and heal the patterns for future generations.

Inspiration for the Day: “We do as we have been done by.” –John Bowlby

 

Note: This is an ongoing series to help provide support during these challenging times. These daily readings are part of an overall book on balance, which includes 12 essentials for maintaining balance to support resilience and your best self. The 12 essentials include mind, body, love, service, self, family, intimacy, purpose, environment/living space, nature, social relations, and spirit. This series is sharing 30 days of lessons about love. It will examine multiple aspects of love and provide knowledge and inspiration for hearts to heal and love to flow. It is designed as a daily reader to allow time to reflect, process and incorporate.