Kimberly Key

Daily Inspiration Excerpt #10 from The Key Essentials to Balance

 

Living in love means taking the time to see the beauty around you.

Recognize the way the sun glistens as it peers in a window, shines on a tree’s leaves and sparkles on the water. Feel the exhilaration of the wind as it blows from the different corners of the Earth. Fully taste the sweet ripeness of the fruit and vegetables gathered from a garden.

Bask in the loving care of a stranger that opens a door or nods as they pass. Watch with appreciation the parents and caregivers playing with children. Allow yourself to smile when seeing young (and old) lovers holding hands.

See the effort and sincere care in your loved one’s eyes. Feel the warmth of their embrace. Listen to their breaths and take a moment to revel in the delight that they are still alive and breathing. Marvel at the gifts only they can uniquely share with the world.

Inspiration for the Day: “It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.” –John Wooden

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 #9 from The Key Essentials to Balance

When you hurt, I hurt. At the heart of love lies empathy—and the relatable compassion one is able to feel for another living being is one of the strongest evolutionary traits.

To put yourself completely in someone else’s circumstances is a gift that reveals other perspectives and experiences. It’s easy to do this when watching a movie and hearing a narrator’s explanation or following the storyline through a main character’s perspective. It is far more difficult to do it for other people—and even harder to do it with someone you are battling or someone who’s cultural background and viewpoints are completely different than your own.

Take a moment to pause and consider the other. Doing this as a regular practice will increase your emotional intelligence and your overall capacity to love.

Inspiration for the Day: “I do not ask how the wounded person feels, I myself become the wounded person.” –Walt Whitman

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 #8 from The Key Essentials to Balance

There are some biological aspects to “falling in love” that actually create a chemical imbalance in people. The initial rush of infatuation is not sustainable, nor was it supposed to be. In the very beginning of romance and crushes, it can feel like a possession that robs your attention, appetite and momentarily makes your beloved the object of your obsession. Blame dopamine. It floods your system with the exciting high of a drug. While some people perpetually chase the high that can come from dating and repeatedly falling in love, real love survives temporary highs.

Once dopamine levels recede, real love’s oxytocin takes over. This neurotransmitter is the bonding hormone that is activated when a mother nurses her infant and when couples are physically intimate. It is also present in the daily acts of kindness and hugs in long-term committed relationships. The feel of this deeper love replaces the former “high” with feelings of trust, security and contentment (which are shown to have long-term health benefits for people).

Inspiration for the Day: “The use of love is to heal. When it flows without effort from the depth of self, love creates health.” –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 #7 from The Key Essentials to Balance

The hidden secret to building a loving relationship with anyone is listening. Remember the old adage, "You're made with two ears and one mouth for a reason"? I will add a third ear to this.

In our fast-paced, technology-supported lives, real listening is becoming a lost art. It also explains why so many people feel hurt and defensive. When people don’t feel heard and understood, even simple communication can disrupt into a full-blown battle—or prolonged silence.

We are all guilty of poor listening skills from time to time (e.g., interrupting, assuming what someone really means, thinking about your response while someone is speaking, zoning out, or purposely refusing to pay attention). The key is to make a genuine connection by listening from your heart and using active listening skills (e.g., fully tuning into the person, noticing body language, feeling their feelings, and repeating what you’ve heard to allow for any correction and increase understanding).

Notice the word “ear” is hidden in the word heart. Keep practicing the art of listening from three ears (your heart’s ear and your mind’s ears) and watch how love grows.

Inspiration for the Day: “The first duty of love is to listen.” –Paul Tillich

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 #6 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Artists of all talents have been inspired by love.

Millions of sonnets have been written about love and some of the grandest buildings and monuments were erected as a symbol of love’s testament. Even the Billboard Top 100 and Rolling Stone top music lists reveal that nine out of 10 songs are about love (whether it’s romantic love, heartbreak, or universal love, like John Lennon’s “Imagine”).

Love calms the existential angst of loneliness and death. It survives us and moves us in ways we least expect.

While science attempts to understand it, it only glimpses love's full mystery and power. The one consistent finding it does reveal is that babies need love and people thrive when loved.

Inspiration for the Day: “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” –Claude Monet

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 #5 from The Key Essentials to Balance

Love does not try to coerce.

Love does not condemn.

Love does not cut off.

Love fully accepts, appreciates and embraces with a gentle and giving flow.

The journey to the state of love can be immediate at times, yet many relationships experience turbulent threats to love’s flow. Love cannot endure when ego battles take over. After time, the ego’s defensiveness, criticism, expectations, score keeping, controlling behaviors, resentments, silence, and ill wishes can serve as clots in the arteries that block love’s flow and destroy a relationship.

Most people take a lifetime to fully integrate the lessons of love. The contrasts learned from feeling the scorn of someone’s unloving behavior and experiencing the remorse of our own unloving behaviors toward others is part of how we learn to grow and evolve into more extended states of love.

Inspiration for the Day: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”     –1 Cor 13: 4-5

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 #4 from The Key Essentials to Balance

The things we don’t like about someone else tend to reflect the things we don’t like in ourselves. Psychologists refer to this as projection.

Projections can be positive or negative and include self-traits that are both conscious or unconscious. The unconscious projections tend to prove most difficult when we view and negatively assess a trait in someone else that we disavow in ourselves as it can escalate tension—and in severe cases, lead to hate and dangerous behaviors.

The next time you feel strongly reactive or judgmental toward a person, try examining if any of those same feelings or traits reside in you. Take a moment to imagine feeling the feelings you don’t like in the other person. Does it possibly trigger any memories that you have not liked in yourself?

A little self-reflection can go a long way toward uncovering hidden motives and self-criticism that block the full flow of love.

Inspiration for the Day: “The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow on to others; this is the root of almost all conflicts.” –Carl 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 #3 from The Key Essentials to Balance

First love experiences reveal the purity of appreciation and openness to connection that the energy of love embodies.

Think back on your first love experiences. It can be with a person, place or moment. For instance, have you ever experienced “love at first sight” where you became almost hypnotically enchanted upon seeing your Beloved’s eyes for the first time? Or how about the first time you visited a new city or town and fell in love with its unique flowering trees, architectural elements of the buildings, and feel of the place’s energy? Perhaps you can recall moments in time that were filled with something so extraordinary that your mind can still recall the imagery, lighting, mood, and smells to this day?

These “firsts” are untainted because they haven’t been infected with expectations, defenses, resentments, fear, or anything else that the human condition inflicts on the purity of love.

Inspiration for the Day: “You are love. You emanated from pure love. You are connected to this Source of love at all times.” –Wayne Dyer

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 #2 from The Key Essentials to Balance

One of the most rewarding and selfless forms of love is that for a child. Even if you, personally, cannot have a child or you can recall an example of a mother that treated her children with abuse and neglect, try to imagine the countless other examples of a mother’s devoted and unconditional love. Consider the act of allowing another human to grow inside of you and then to nurture its defenseless being upon its birth.  

What motivates the mother to continue through the pain of pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing? Is it instinct or something different? What drives a mother to put her life on the line without question for her child and to make life decisions around the safety and health of that child? 

If these considerations brought any degree of sadness or sense of frustration that you didn’t feel this type of love from your birth-mother, then please take some time to process your grief and explore how this sadness might keep you from fully allowing other people to give you love and nurturing. Difficulty accepting compliments, loving acts of kindness, gifts, and even long hugs may be a sign of discomfort receiving love. 

Inspiration for the Day: “Many people are living in an emotional jail without realizing it.” –Virginia Satir 

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 #1 from The Key Essentials to Balance

    In light of these challenging times, I will share daily excerpts from my book, The Key Essentials to Balance. One of the essentials is social connections and I realize the experience of social distancing can be heart-wrenching and grueling - especially when you can't see loved ones. Loneliness and isolation are difficult. Fortunately there are other ways of connecting, like the Internet, phone and old-fashioned letters. The other key essentials include purpose, mind, environment/living space, body, family, intimacy, spirit, nature, service, self, and love. Since 1 Corinthians 13:13 says, "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love" (NIV), the next 30 days will provide the daily readings for love. Please stay safe and take the best of care. My deepest thoughts and love to all.

 

Daily Inspiration #1 - Love 

    If oxygen sustains life through breathing, love provides much of the inspiration for continuing to breathe.

    Love is by far the most influential feeling a person can experience. Love has an extraordinary way of knocking people off their feet, leading them to a new paths, and causing them to behave in the most unexpected ways. It has been opposed to war (think 60’s slogan “Make Love, Not War”), has incited war (like Helen of Troy) and street fights (West Side Story).

    Of course, many spiritual leaders say jealousy is not love. They say real love would not cause war, fighting, or anything negative—that real love rises above conflict and wants the best for everyone.

    Can you distinguish between lower and higher love within yourself? Is it possible a lower love acts possessive and reacts with insecurity and while a higher love is filled with compassion for self and others?

    Inspiration for the Day: “Love is what is left over in a relationship after all the selfishness is taken out.”   –Nick Richardson