Category Archive:Forgiveness

Sending Out Love or Hate Without A Single Word

Barbara post on March 7th, 2013
Posted in Body Language, Communication, Fear, Forgiveness, Health, Love, Perception

Have you ever wondered why you are instantly attracted to, or repelled by, some people? We’ve all met people who send out “vibes” that make us want to stay close and others whose vibes make us want to run away . . . quick.

Those “vibes” have now been scientifically located and are measurable. It turns out that research by the Institute of HeartMath has found that an electromagnetic field emanating from our heart is the source. Some people really do have “good vibes” (or bad ones) that the rest of us readily feel.

The brain in your heart

We’ve long known that the heart operates through electrical impulses. EKGs (electrocardiograms) have been measuring them for decades, diagnosing or monitoring how the heart functions.

But now more sensitive instruments used by neurocardiologists have shown that the heart isn’t just merely a pump that keeps our blood flowing. It is also a complex sense organ that processes information with its own brain-like “nervous system” that learns, remembers, and makes decisions independently of the brain in our head. And our heart’s “brain” routinely communicates with the higher centers involved with processing emotions, learning, and perception in head’s brain.

The “Vibes” of emotion

But the magic doesn’t end there. The heart’s “nervous system” also communicates information within and outside the body through the heart’s powerful electromagnetic field. Researchers have been able to measure this field up to five feet away.

Why is this important? The ancients long ago posited that emotions began in the heart. But whether they begin in the heart or the brain, the heart reacts to them sending signals, chemicals, and energy not only throughout the body but beyond it too.

Positive emotions like love and compassion create rhythmic, orderly heartbeat patterns and negative emotions like anger create erratic, disordered heartbeat patterns. These differing patterns spread throughout the entire body and into the world through the heart’s electromagnetic field. This has not only health consequences but social consequences as well.

Emotions radiate out

That our emotions affect the functioning of our bodies is not new information. But that they alter our heart’s electromagnetic field in a way that affects our interactions with other people up to five feet away without any other sort of communication is kind of startling. Perhaps this is an explanation for crowd behavior.

Imagine the different behaviors generated when one person’s heart sends out ordered, rhythmic, “loving” patterns of energy that are communicated to, and synchronized with others versus the angry or fearful person’s erratic, disordered, chaotic patterns of energy.

Do you know what kind of pattern is your heart sending out? We might be able to fool the brain in our head and deny our own perception about what we’re feeling but I doubt we can fool the brain in our heart.

The energy from your heart fills the world

The emotions that fill our hearts fill our worlds. So what is in your heart? Fear, judgment, criticism, anger, and frustration? Or love, compassion, forgiveness, calm and peace? That’s what we’re spreading not only by what we say, how we look, or what we do but also through the electromagnetic field that radiates directly from “the seat of our soul” . . . our heart.

Holding the energy of each other’s hearts is an awesome responsibility. Will you do anything different today knowing that your emotions may change everything?

 

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The Secret to Happiness

Barbara post on February 27th, 2013
Posted in Communication, Family, Forgiveness, Listening, Perception

I have long been of the opinion that the secret to happiness is managing expectations. I once read that expectations are simply anticipated disappointments. So if you want to be happy, don’t expect any one or anything to make it so. I’m not saying don’t dream but in the dreaming recognize that the only thing you can control is you. Any other control is an illusion. Circumstances (like hurricanes) happen and we can never control another person but we can always control how we perceive.

photo of a baby smiling

Natural Happiness

Expectations, when you think about it, are merely thoughts. These thoughts create the lens with which we perceive the world and how we perceive creates our reality. Switch the lens, reality changes. Change the thought, change the expectation, change reality.

This became concrete for me in my early twenties. I had spent my childhood moving from place to place, going to multiple schools in myriad states from the east coast to the west and from New England to the deep south. My dad, one of the original corporate turn-around specialists, always had new challenges to conquer. As a natural introvert, all the moving was very difficult for me and I saw it as a burden. I wanted stability. Security. A place to call home.

I eventually met a man whose family had lived in the same town for generations. This was the guy for me! Mere months before our wedding, he was accepted into the Navy’s flight school. My expectation of stability evaporated but at least in my state of newly-wedded bliss my disappointment was short-lived. It wasn’t long before I realized that the resilience and adaptability needed for military life were the very things I had learned in childhood. What I once viewed as a burden had become a strength.

I also had stumbled upon the power of changing my thoughts. With my change in perception came many other benefits, like:

  • forgiveness for the losses I’d held and stored as treasures
  • a recognition that adaptability was a skill learned only in the cauldron of change
  • a realization that place doesn’t confer stability but love does
  • the understanding that home is a state of mind not a physical location
  • the knowledge that I could recreate myself and start fresh by letting go of mistakes without anyone else around to remind me of them

What I learned is that circumstances could not define me but my choices would. I had experienced the reality of the power of my thoughts to create my life (and life continues to teach me that valuable lesson). I had found the secret to happiness.

We have so much power within us to create our own happiness. It all depends on our thoughts, our expectations, and the lens we choose to look at the world.

See how TED presenter Sean Achor learned this valuable lesson at the tender age of seven: his story involves a little sister, a fall from great heights, quick thinking, and unicorns.

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A Valentine’s Day Greeting

Barbara post on February 14th, 2013
Posted in Family, Forgiveness, Love, Prayer, Spirituality

I’m guessing that most Valentine’s Day greetings today will be from one person to another. I’d like to share what I think is a close approximation to the kind of love greeting that, if we were silent enough long enough, we might hear from our Source today.

For this greeting, I’ve taken a few liberties from the opening lines of one of my all-time favorite prayers whose authorship remains a mystery to me. I have no idea if it was written by St. Ignatius of Loyola, some other Jesuit, or Jacqueline Syrup Bergan & S. Marie Schwan the authors of the book Take & Receive: Love a Guide for Prayer (the book in which I first encountered the prayer many years ago).

If these words were in a greeting card, I imagine the scene on the card would be something beautiful in nature; a grand tree, an ocean scene, a wondrous flower, a delicate butterfly.  It would be something pastoral that would set your mind ready to hear the following words from your Creator:

Mark Groves photo of a sunset

Yaquina Head Lighthouse At Sunset by Mark Groves www.MarkGroves.us

When my love spilled over into creation, I thought of you. You are from love, of love, for love. . . May your heart always recognize, cherish, and enjoy the goodness in all creation. It is my gift . . .My love created that too . . . especially for you.

These few sentences hold all we need to live in truth and freedom. We are the physical manifestation of the Great Spirit’s overflowing love. We were created out of love and we are designed for love. The Maker of all things had a loving thought, spoke the creative word, and all that we see in the universe spilled forth from love.

When we are able to accept that truth, we can cast off fear and live out of the love that flows naturally in us. We forgive, we have patience, we trust ourselves – others – life – Spirit.

Those of lucky enough to have created a child or those who have selflessly devoted themselves to the needs of another have an approximation of this kind of love. It is powerful. Awe inspiring. Generative.

None-the-less, in our imperfect humanity, our woundedness, it is hard to remember this deep well of love that created us and flows within us and out of us. We can forget this powerful energy and fall into criticism of ourselves and others as a knee-jerk reaction to the daily struggles of human life. We often don’t take even a moment to reflect on why we’ve lost that loving feeling; we simply react out of our disappointment, impatience, failure, or anger.

But days like today remind us of the enormous healing power of love. Love heals the vagaries of life. On this one day of the year devoted solely to love, it is a good time to remember that you began as a loving thought that could not be contained.  Revel in this love and share it with anyone and everyone you meet.

Happy Valentines Day

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Willing to Forgive

Barbara post on June 8th, 2012
Posted in Fear, Forgiveness, Meditation, Prayer, Spirituality

Forgive

Forgiveness is an act of the will
An act of self-love in response to anger borne of injustice and hurt

Anger turns to resentment which disperses its consuming poison
Spreading like a cancer of the soul
Consuming every particle of love and hope

A survival skill, this act of will
Forgiveness is not at first felt
It is practiced
It is deliberate
It is difficult
It is work

Slowly, forgiveness heals the wound borne of injustice and hurt
A scar forms over the hurt
Life slowly takes on the beauty it once held
The eyes see and heart embraces the strength that grew, the love that survived

Pain gives way to understanding
Forgiveness is finally felt

 

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