Dear Friend,

I’m writing to invite you to talk about love as often as you can, with as many people as you can.

How: Talk about love when you communicate verbally, nonverbally, to yourself and to others, whether they look like you, talk like you, feel like you, love like you, believe in what you believe or not. Of course, you’ll have to stand up for yourself from time to time, but even when you do, do so from a place of love

Time: You’re free to talk about love as often as you can, you’re free to live in the vibration of love, and therefore act in loving ways with those around you even more often than you do right now

Place: Talk about love or communicate with love everywhere, without dwelling on the fact that it might be the unpopular thing to do.

What we’re Celebrating: The reason I’m encouraging you to talk about love is to inspire you to make a shift in all the areas of your life and of our world at large by focusing on and acting from a place of love.

• When you love, you feel good. When you act from love, you do good. Both benefit the world.
• When you deliberately seek to feel good, without harming the people around you or harming yourself, you attract to you an infinite amount of blessings which you in turn can give to others.
• You feeling good brings wellbeing, grace, illumination, hope and faith to those around you.
• When people are inspired to explore their highest potential, imagine all the positive change that can come from it.

If you want to read about 5 reasons why having a conversation about love is super important, read my prior post.

Why we’re Celebrating: Love is the answer that many of us seek, but cannot see. It’s what we ask for, and do not answer the door when it knocks. With love at our core, we can literally change our life, change the dynamic of our interlinked lives and change the world. It is worth repeating that love makes us feel good. And when we feel good, we don’t seek to be fulfilled by things that  leave us feeling more empty and strip the world of its inherent joy. When we feel feel good, we’re more willing to serve, to create, to uplift to inspire.

If you accept this invitation to talk about love, perhaps I don’t physically see you putting love into practice, but some way, some how, I’ll feel the energy that YOU helped make more loving. Incrementally, the world will start to talk about love thanks to you. The world, or at least your world, will realize the importance of love, how we’ve taken it for granted, and what a powerful force it is to shift our ability to create a better life for ourselves by simply following our bliss, as Joseph Campbell so eloquently inspired us to do. When we watch the news or anything that perpetuates negativity we consciously or unconsciously fixate on the negative, and therefore increase our creation of more negativity. Totally not what we’re after is it? 🙂 Besides, all the tragedies in the world will not help us shape our loving world, as I stated in a prior post, it’s easier to learn lessons the easy way, such as through love, than the hard way, often expressed as tragedy.

So join me in spreading the importance of love in the best way that reflects your talent. Acting loving in as many circumstances as possible may seem like the weak thing to do when there seems to be so much danger, adversity and negativity in the world… but remember that the world is as you see it. If you believe in love, and spread love, love is what will abound in your life. Throughout history, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa have believed in love without limits… and notice how their efforts live on. Nowadays, you have sublime people like Dr. Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Oprah, and Louise Hay that believe in love like I believe in love and I’m sure you do too. Together, famous or not, when we talk about love, we can really make the difference… and making the difference through love, is what this blog is about. 

So please join me, in spreading love in the way that feels the most joyous to you. You don’t have to R.S.V.P. and you’re free, or rather encouraged, to bring a friend with you along on this journey. 🙂 All I ask is that you leave a comment below stating why you are interested in joining me.

When something negative happens to someone as a result of what we consider a decision based on poor judgement, we often say “Hopefully, he/she learned his/her lesson,” sometimes sincerely, sometimes judgmentally. We also say, “I’ve learned my lesson,” often as a last resort when all is said and done and when we can’t change what’s happened. Our solace and consolation after a challenging life event, oftentimes is that we do learn. Sooner or later, we understand what life is trying to tell us. However, have you ever wondered if in fact we need to suffer greater tragedies or go through something truly difficult before we learn?

Is Life a Fair Test or Does it Just Want to Fail Us?

I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer to learn via a positive experience, somebody else’s negative experience, intuition, common sense or life’s little hints that something is off. And we do get those, it’s like someone throwing a cotton ball at us to grab our attention, then a pebble, then a stone, then a brick, until finally, if we have not paid attention or done anything about this situation, the whole brick wall comes tumbling down on us.

What Lesson Do You Want to Learn, the Easy Way?

The number 1 thing I would like to learn how to do very well, without any tragedies attempting to teach me any so-called lessons, is to appreciate life and love even more than I do. It is through this appreciation that I can show my love to others, be truly present for them and be truly present in our life to enjoy this gift called life.

What do you want to learn, the kind way? If you stop to really think about it, what type of lessons has life taught you recently? How to value family more, friends more, money, job, health, freedom or something else? What kind of “grades” have you gotten in each of these areas? Do you need life to test you rigorously in your worst-performing areas in order for you to “prove” that you’ve learned what you need to learn? So, knowing what you want to learn, and the fact that you most likely don’t want to learn things the hard way, why is it that many of us wait until someone dies, we get divorced, we file for bankruptcy, we lose a family member, we lose our friend, we lose our child’s respect, or we lose our health, we lose the ability to enjoy the simple blessing that we have at our disposal each day, or we’re about to lose our life before we show that we truly care about that which we lost or about to lose? What on earth are we waiting for? That may depend on your circumstances and your mentality, but you want to know the ultimate lesson that life is probably wanting to teach all of us? That we shouldn’t take things for granted. Nothing is a given. We “deserve” nothing. We’re entitled to nothing. That promotion, that vacation, that salary, the car, the cruise… isn’t yours forever. Nothing, belongs to us. As trite at it may seem, we really do need to value the presents in our present while they last. Now, the point here isn’t to become paranoid… the point here is to become truly joyful and loving… NOW, when it TRULY matters. Of course, some of these life events where we experience loss are inevitable and sometimes, as hard as they may be initially, they’re even the best thing for the people involved, but if we’re feeling guilty or remorseful about whom or what we lost, it probably means that at some point, we weren’t appreciating or treasuring to the degree that we wanted to or that we know the other person needed.

Those degrees of separation between being at peace with something and not being at peace, is what hurts— it’s what damages us, and it’s what traumatizes us. We feel we were so close, and yet we were so far.

While there are times when we can say with quite a bit of conviction that we’re the victim of our circumstances, most of the time we’re not the victim– we are the conscious or subconscious perpetrator of our life circumstance.  Most situations that result in us hurting, came about because we took the important things in life for granted. This brings us to the question, if we know that it’s absolutely unnecessary to suffer greater tragedies before appreciating life and love, why do we not act like we know this? Is it because it takes more courage to love, be present, be active, be involved, than it does to experience the pain that we get if we distance ourselves from whom and what we love? That’s a question truly worth exploring. In other words, why do you subconsciously or consciously allow the tragedy to happen before you act? After all, if we care enough about ourselves and we take a moment to listen to ourselves, our feelings, and sense our intuition, you can almost immediately pinpoint what’s wrong with your life. Maybe “wrong” is to harsh of a word. You can pinpoint where you’re not interacting with life and with others to the degree that you would like and where you can appreciate life and love more. You may choose to ignore this awareness, but that’s your decision and it doesn’t mean that your feeling is not there, or that it’ll go away just because you don’t want to deal with it.

Waiting for a tragedy to strike so that you can “confirm” what you already know is an utter waste of time and of your potential.”

If you know that a job is going nowhere or a relationship is going nowhere, then, what are you waiting for?!

In life, we meet, court, go after, and eventually “marry” situations that we think we want. However, we can often feel it inside ourselves if what we’re going after is worth it, or if it isn’t. Yet for some absurd reason, we think we have to complete the cycle with everyone and everything. Let’s face it, not everyone and everything is deserving of this great commitment of ours. But yet, we choose to not do something about the dissatisfaction that we’re experiencing. That’s why there are unhappy strangers celebrating their 40 year anniversary; there are people who died today who never fulfilled their dreams because they were too busy being responsible; most of us live with junk that we bought which we’ll never use; and there are unhappy, unfulfilled and overwhelmed parents raising unhappy, unfulfilled and overwhelmed children. Worse yet, we often don’t realize that in our pursuit of following everything that doesn’t matter or that doesn’t provide us with true happiness, we plague our world with joylessness. How sad! Can you see how this emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual baggage that we’re carrying around is insane, something that affects us all and will continue to affect the generations to come unless we wake up and practice true love and true appreciation with one another and with our collective world?  Of course you can see this!

You are an A+ student in this school of life, so for the love of anything or anyone you think is worth loving, don’t wait to fail another of life’s “grueling tests” so that you can become “enlightened” after-the-fact, to do what you know you should do today.“

• Be the great friend
• Be the loving parent
• Be the caring spouse
• Be the bold entrepreneur
• Be the one who gives time lovingly and generously
• Be the one who gives a damn about the hunger and poverty in the world
• Be the one who questions the garbage we’re teaching our youth and falling for ourselves
• Be the one who takes care of your wellbeing– YOU are your best doctor
• Be the one who believes in your dreams- no matter how unrealistic they are or seem
• Be the one who makes your dreams happen so that we can all continue dreaming

You have such a full and rich life already regardless of what’s going on, that despite what the world may think and what you may have foolishly accepted, you don’t need a guest called “Tragedy” in your life. Trust me, been there, done that… you really don’t. If by chance, Tragedy does come, make sure that you are living today in such a way, that due to the enormous amount of love you give, that loving people can help, console, support and ease your pain during an inevitable tragedy. If nothing else, make sure that your mentality attracts as much positivity into your life as it can and is able to deal effectively and efficiently with Tragedy. If it must, let it come in, accept it’s offering, which is usually a lesson that you already knew, and quickly show it the door so that it can exit. Dwell on love and appreciation because ultimately, your circumstances are filled with trivial details trying to teach you what the important lessons of life are.

Share Your Wisdom Treasures

So after analyzing whether you personally do or don’t need tragedies in your life to learn about what matters in life, what proactive measures, if any, are you willing to take to demonstrate that you know the lesson?

I first became acquainted with Iyanla Vanzant when she first came out on Oprah. Something that struck me about her then and that continues to strike me now, is the loving manner in which she tells it like it is. She invites you to reflect about your life as a sister would… with love and compassion, but truly encouraging you to live a life that allows you to be better and freer. In other words, she has very little tolerance for B.S. and she inspires you to have very little tolerance for your own B.S..

What Is Our Biggest Issue with Forgiveness?

While living a better and a freer life can sound like a cliche or a generality, Iyanla’s book, Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive Everyone and Everything, is a flashing, bright, neon, symbolic sign (which many of us can’t see or simply ignore) of what many of us need— to forgive— in order to live unchained to our past and little by little, untether ourself from our issues. Think about it, what usually holds you back? Fear that you’ll get hurt if so and so does such and such to you. Put another way, you’re afraid that you’ll taste humiliation again, and you’re afraid because you dislike the taste of humiliation (who likes it?) within your own body. And who controls what goes on in our own body? We do. The act(s) you lived through that you think is/are so horrendous happened in the past, but you continue to relive it/them in the present. It’s like watching the scariest movie scene that “traumatized” you over and over again, instead of focusing your attention elsewhere. Who does that? As incomprehensible as it might be, we do. Why? Because at some subconscious or conscious level, revisiting these undesirable episodes in our life and rehashing them to the people in our life and the new people that we meet works for us.

You willingly let fear paralyze you because you would rather be be paralyzed than be hurt.

Paralysis, isn’t as painful as hurt. As you’ve probably experienced, many times, after we’ve been hurt, we build a wall around us SOOOO high that we prevent others from entering our lives and sadly, those people who WANT to be in our lives hardly ever are “out to get us.” Sadder still, those people who love us dearly, hardly ever get a chance to truly enjoy us… because we’re so adamant about keeping these walls up and we have a super annoying laser-focus on how we’ve been hurt in the past  (rather than an appreciative focus on the present) that we can’t fully experience the love that surrounds us. But hey, I understand, shifts happen, and even the people who love us, hurt us from time to time. Being close to someone poses that “danger.” Think about it this way, just because there are traffic signs that warn us and help us maneuver our way on a physical road, doesn’t mean that there won’t be mistakes and/or accidents along the way. Likewise, knowing that the people who love us don’t typically want to hurt us, doesn’t mean that they won’t. They could misread our signals (especially the yield, stop and go signs), get the signs mixed up, be stuck in traffic in their own life and have their own issues to deal with. Their reaction to you is not always just about you... they have a life, too, you know? 😉 Plus, nobody’s perfect. Even you’re not perfect with yourself. And honestly, sometimes you don’t show (not demand from) the world how you would like to be treated. Think about it, we say we love ourselves, but sometimes, we hurt our own selves. Two of the many ways that we do that is by not forgiving ourselves and forgiving others. Believe it or not, there are things that we have to forgive that we’ve done to ourselves. Do you consider yourself your worst critic? You see? That’s what I mean!?  When it comes to forgiving others, please, don’t use the phrase, “I’ve been working on forgiving so and so for (x number) of years” and think that the higher the number the more heroic your efforts. If you haven’t forgiven someone it’s because you don’t want to. Forgiveness doesn’t require years of constant effort, because it’s a decision. And a decision can be made in a small amount of time… often in an instant. As the book Forgivenessshows, though, there are many areas of our life that need healing, and we may have some blockages along the way, but 21 days should be, and is, more than enough time to forgive… especially when you consider that the person who most benefits from the act of forgiveness, is you.

What Can the book Forgiveness Teach Me?

Thankfully, this book, Forgiveness, teaches us how to use self-reflection, journaling, honesty in answering Iyanla’s questions, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), Iyanla’s guided meditations, forgiveness scripts and our willingness to focus on something other than our past and our wounds to move forward. In other words, we can learn to acknowledge our pain, and our hurt, but we need to move forward. Otherwise, we’re just scratching the wound and it’ll never heal. And really, isn’t that sad! and literally painful?

Working on Forgiveness Is a Gift that Keeps on Giving

As if the gift of forgiveness wasn’t enough, this book is a gift that keeps on giving. If you know Iyanla, you will have noticed that she is generous and so is her publisher, Hay House. For that reason. It shouldn’t surprise you to know that you can get bonuses with the purchase of this book. They can be found by visiting the following link: http://promos.hayhouse.com/vanzant/120313email/ This book stands on it’s own, but the resources make the book even more vivid and applicable.

Does EFT Work?

Now, in order to address what is perhaps your biggest question: does EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) work? It does work if YOU do the work. You have to commit to doing it and do it as often as needed. And there are other things that work as well of course. If you are experiencing blocks in love, work, relationships, health, mental wellbeing and in your finances, you need to take proactive action, but you also have to forgive. Many times, forgiveness, is the first step to moving ahead in life, but we’re often so conditioned to take action, think positively and/or accept our reality as “status quo” that it doesn’t occur to us to forgive. After all, we’re also encouraged to compartmentalize the way that we live and to separate the good, or in this case the so-so, from the bad. You think… “I haven’t forgiven _____, but that can’t possibly have anything to do with why my income is less than it once was.” But as this book teaches us, things that don’t seem to have a connection do. And forgiveness and lack of thereof, has a huge connection to our blocks, sabotages and in life.

What Does it Take to Forgive?

Forgiveness requires a high degree of self-love because it necessitates that you have enough compassion to not necessarily let someone else off the hook for what they did, but to let YOURSELF off the hook for letting that incident happen to you, for not removing yourself from the situation sooner, for making a decision that you could’t exactly know would yield an undesired result, stop thinking that you have to avenge or keep score of any misdoings and continuing to believe that you have to be affected by the negative incident(s). You have to especially let yourself off the hook by not punishing yourself and stop believing that due to what’s happened to you, that you can’t or shouldn’t be happy.

Happiness should be what redeems you from your hurt and your pains.

Asking you to be happy may seem like an impossibility, but look at it this way, since you can’t change the past (although I KNOW you wish you could), what would make all your suffering “worth it”? Being happy, right? Meaning if you had to go through that tough time, the least you can expect/wish for is going through a really good time now. Of course, you can (and should) learn from and be wiser thanks to your past hurts (because yep, as hard as it is to accept, or as cliche as it may seem, everything DOES in fact happen for a GOOD reason). As Oprah and Maya Angelou have said, “when someone teaches you who they are, believe them.” So be wiser with whom you allow to be a guest in your life. Don’t justify their misdoings for them and don’t stop listening to your intuition just because you feel sorry for them. Apply this to yourself as well… if you don’t want to be the victim of a situation, make sure that your mentality is not that of a victim. Don’t fall into the trap that “it’s better to be the victim than the perpetrator” just because it’s more socially acceptable to be the former instead of the latter. Don’t retell your sad stories to the world over and over again just because you want other people’s empathy. You know what society loves even more than victims? Heroes of their own story that inspire others to live THEIR life fully. In sum, it comes down to one question: Are you going to continue being a victim and publicly lick your own wounds forever or are you going to use your voice to speak your truth, to state your dreams and to take your stance?

I received this book for free from Hay House for review purposes.

Now It’s Your Turn

If you’re really up for it, I’d love for you to take the opportunity to answer this question:

•  Are you going to continue being a victim and publicly lick your own wounds forever or are you going to use your voice to speak your truth, to state your dreams and to take your stance?

If the above question is a little TMI (too much information) for you to answer right now, please answer these questions:

• What is your best advice for forgiving? What has the process of either forgiving or being forgiven taught you?

Please share your responses with us. This is the type of topic that matters and can really inspire us to move forward in life and simultaneously, move life forward.