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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Love and your Life’s Legacy:

• I’ll explain how your legacy is a gift to the world that just keeps on giving
• I’ll talk about how what you value and what you love determines the legacy you will leave behind
• Finally, I’ll share a simple exercise that will help you create a life worth loving and a legacy worth leaving

CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE

A legacy is something that is given from the past and received in the present and that will most definitely change the future.

There are many different types of legacies that you can leave behind after your passing. They may include tangible material things like a car, a house, money, a business, a cure, or even a child. Your legacy could also be abstract experiential things like an idea, a philosophy, a religion, a physical training program, or a procedure for dealing with grief.

Now your legacy, whether it is a person, a place, or a thing, whatever it is, it will always leave an impact in the world of the living for many years, long after you’ve moved on and it will change the world. The change may be small or large, but there’s still an impact. Even the smallest of events can lead to massive change, like a butterfly flapping its wing can contribute to the eventual formation of a hurricane, your legacy will have ripple effects on the world stage.

For instance, you and I are products of a lasting loving legacy known as humanity. Each generation of life is a legacy by default. Just by being born you have already impacted your parents, your caregivers, everyone who you’ve come into contact with throughout your lifetime, you have changed. So no matter how short or long your life or how small or big of an impact you have:

“You are legacy in full expression”

And you are leaving a legacy that will change the world, whether you’re fully aware of what that change is or not.

Now the type of legacy you leave behind will be determined by what you love and what you love about life comes from your personal core values.

Your personal core values are the needs you have when it comes to living an awesome life. They define how you want to live. They guide your choices and they determine the type of person you want to be. Core values also influence the types of personal relationships you want to be in and also what communities and organisations you wish to join.

If you value fast cars, big mansions, and money than those material objects will be what you want in your life and these are what you will leave as your legacy. If you value family, friendship, connection with others, than personal relationships and their affect on the people in your life will be the legacy that you will leave behind. If you value food, music, and wine a restaurant may be your legacy. A piece of music could be your legacy, or maybe a food, music, and wine festival, that could be your legacy.

Whatever you love you will pursue based on your values and after the game of life is over for you, those people, places, and things that you valued and have nothing but love for, will become your legacy.

There is one exercise I’d like to share that will help you determine your values, what you love about life, and ultimately your legacy. That exercise is writing your own obituary. Yes it may sound a bit of a morbid thing to do, but once you get into and finish your obituary you’ll be left with a sense of fulfilment and will find yourself really passionate about getting after life.

Really take the time, which could be hours, days, or weeks, to write your obituary and keep in mind these two things:

1. How you would like to be remembered as a person? and
2. What would you like to leave behind as a lasting loving legacy?

After the exercise look at what you’ve written down and you will figure out what your personal core values are. If you wrote down he was a rich man who supported a lot of charities, then you know you value money and also generosity and that you love to give, and your legacy will be the many charities that you’ve helped. If you wrote down she was a nurturing mother who adopted and raised many abandoned and orphaned children, then you know you value family and giving children a second chance of having a loving family and home, and your legacy will be the next generation of adults who once felt alone, but now feel nothing but love.

Whatever you wrote down use it as a stepping stone to align the life you live with what you want your legacy to be.

There’s no right or wrong legacy. No matter what you value you will leave behind a legacy. The point I’m making here is that you’ll either be consciously aware of that legacy or completely ignorant to it.

I’ll leave you with you this thought.

Feeling loved or being loving isn’t really about sharing material things.

“Love is about sharing experiences with others.”

I am grateful for the lasting loving legacy my ancestors have given me and I will do my best to live a life full of unconditional love so that I leave a lasting loving legacy for those who one day I shall leave behind.

Links and Resources

• A Course in Miracles — Foundation for Inner Peace

 
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Love:

• I’ll explain some of the ideas, the emotions, and actions of human love
• I’ll talk about universal love and its absolute nature
• Finally, I’ll give one loving practise you can use to transform any thought, word, or deed into an expression of love

CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE

Love is a word with many many meanings. Thinking about love is not the same as feeling love and they are not the same as acting out of and being love.

The ideology behind love or the way most people think about love is that it is an emotion that creates a bond and a connection between two beings. The bond between a parent and its offspring, or the bond between a plant and the soil, and even the bond between the Sun and the Earth, these connections and relationships between different forms of life can be considered love.

The idea of human love usually brings up images of intimate romantic partnerships between two people. But there’s also family love, and friendly love, national love, and enemy love, fiery love, free love, violent love, and the love to complain and to hate things, and the love to give and to share, etc. There are many forms of human love. So thinking about love it isn’t just one thing, it’s many things.

Now just like the idea of love the emotion of love isn’t just one feeling. Love brings up many different emotions. Actually human love is a collection of hormones and neurotransmitters interacting together. The coordination of these molecules of energy in motion or molecules of emotion create different sensations in your bodymind that we call love such as:

• Gratitude
• Joy
• Happiness
• Peace
• Serenity
• Hope
• Awe, and
• Inspiration

 
For example, when I see a sunset I feel inspired and in awe of its beauty. It gives me hope for tomorrow, which gives me peace and serenity in the moment. I feel a sense of joy and happiness and I have nothing but gratitude for being alive and being able to experience such a fantastic event. Altogether I could simply say I loved witnessing the sun setting over the horizon. Again like the idea of love, feeling love isn’t just one thing, it’s many things.

When it comes to acting out of love and being love, again this ain’t one thing. Acts of love or loving deeds and being love are actually the culmination and the final expression of the way you think about love and the way you feel about love.

If you think love is being loyal to your nation and this inspires you to want to protect your country and the values it represents, your act of being love may lead you to sign up to the army and defend your country. If you think love is being listened to where people give you their undivided attention and you get filled with joy at being the focus of attention, then your act of being love will most likely make you quite the talker in your tribe where you seek a lot of the attention. And if you think love is all about food, something I know personally all too well, and eating makes you happy, then your loving deed will be to eat and the more love you seek, usually the more food you will eat.

So your thoughts about love, dictate how you feel love, and then ultimately how you express that love.

Now I’d like to move on from the human concept of love, where it can be many different things depending on your own unique view of the world, to the universal picture of love where love is absolutely everything.

This quote from the book The Voice of Knowledge by Don Miguel Ruiz perfectly summarises what I mean by universal love:

“The energy of love is just like the light that comes from the sun. Like sunlight, the emotion of love looks different depending on what is reflecting the love.”

This quote means that universal love is whatever it reflects. You see universal love is a form of energy that permeates everything, including you and me, and this energy reinforces and reveals the true nature and essence of the object that it’s infused with.

Universal love is the full experience. By that I mean it is all of the experiences one can experience in the universe even the negative experiences, such as fear, or neutral experiences such as the experience of no experience or emptiness and nothingness. So looking at it this way, love and fear are really two sides of the same coin, the yin and the yang of the same energy that I call universal love.

In this sense love is good and bad. Love is health and disease. Love is pleasure and pain. Love is laughter and sobbing. Love is for and against. Love is kindness and abuse. Love is peace and war. Love is order and chaos. Love is life and death. Love is the teacher and the student as well as the lesson and it can be all of these things because universal love is potential energy and it’s only when this potential energy fuses with a physical entity does love manifest and become what it needs to be depending on what it is a part of in that moment.

Human love again is many things dependant on your personal thoughts and feelings, whereas universal love is everything and shines a light on whatever it touches.

Now in the previous podcast I gave you three ways to accumulate more love for yourself:

1. Understand how you give and receive love
2. Practise being in an attitude of gratitude
3. Build a loving tribe and community

The loving practise I’m going to give you now will help you reflect more love instead of fear and to transform any fear you perceive into love and I hope you practise this as much as possible until it becomes second nature, a habit, a loving habit that becomes a part of your way of being. It really can change your life.

Whenever a person, or your environment, or anything, anything at all causes you to react and to think about fear, feel fear, or act in fear one of the best things you can do in that moment is to do nothing, absolutely nothing.

Just pause.

Stop everything, except for your breathing of course.

But do take a moment to sit with what’s coming up in your bodymind. The thoughts, the feelings, what you want to do. Now don’t stay too long in these thoughts and feelings of fear. Just take a few secs to a minute to wash yourself and wallow in this stew of fear.

Now focus on your breath and nothing else. Breathe through your nose and as you inhale focus on expanding your belly out in front of you, make yourself look full. As you exhale focus on shrinking your belly and bring it in, make yourself look empty. Focus on the flow of the air in and out of your nose and the movement of your diaphragm. Feel the air come in and out of your lungs. Feel your rib cage and core muscles expand and contract.

No matter how hard you concentrate on your breath and your body your mind will always want to wander and want to go back to that fear. Every time it does this, gently bring it back to your breath and your body by refocusing your attention here.

The idea behind this practise isn’t to forget about what just happened or to avoid fear entirely. The idea is to see the situation from a new perspective, from a perspective of love, shining a new light on it, hopefully changing how you see what just happened.

You don’t need to do this focused bodymind breathing for long. Just long enough where instead of feeling vulnerable and unsure about what’s going on and how you should react, you feel more empowered to come from a place of peace and love with a more holistic and grounded personal understanding of what just happened.

This mindfulness practise of learning to respond from love instead of react from fear, if you can practise this daily, multiple times a day as is necessary, over time you will begin to see things and life in an entirely new way where loving options that were once hidden from your view suddenly appear out of nowhere.

As inspirational speaker and author Wayne Dyer used to say:

“Everything in the Universe came from nowhere, now here.”

And Wayne Dyer also said:

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

So if you can see fear as another form of love you will be more present to the love that has always been there, surrounding you this entire time.

I’ll leave you with this thought.

You won’t always give love to others as they want it and you won’t always receive love as you want it, and universal love doesn’t always give you what you want, but universal love will always, and I mean always, give you what you need in that moment.

In my Universe and how I see life, love is the circle of life, the beginning and end of all things. It is the alpha and the omega of everything that exists.

“Love is creation.”

Love is the process of creation. It is the creative process and this process is eternal, it never ends and it’s constantly changing and in flow. This creative process begins with the receiving of love from another, which is received as a thought. This thought is then transformed into a feeling, and this feeling manifests itself in reality as a physical act of love being given from within to without, from you to another.

So in essence to me love is the transformation of itself between itself from itself to itself. To put it another way:

“Love is love experiencing love.”

And all there is, is love.

Links and Resources

• The Voice of Knowledge — Don Miguel Ruiz
• The Official Website of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
• A Course in Miracles — Foundation for Inner Peace

 
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Healing and Love:

• I’ll explain the difference between conventional and natural healing methods
• I’ll talk about unconditional love and why it is the most important factor when it comes to healing
• I’ll talk about a couple of things that can stop the healing process from happening properly
• Finally, I’ll share a few ways you can make love your drug of choice to help you with any healing journey you may be on

CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS THAT WILL BRING MORE LOVE INTO YOUR LIFE

There are two main belief systems out there when it comes to healing. One is used by the conventional mainstream model and the other by more traditional natural healers.

The current conventional medical model used mainly in western societies focuses on treating health symptoms and disease with medication or surgery. So they have a pill or a procedure for every illness. What conventional treatment misses is the fact that health symptoms and disease are really signs of underlying hidden malfunction that has been going on in your bodymind for days, weeks, months, perhaps several years in terms of certain cancers and neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Conventional mainstream medicine is based on a mechanistic, reductionist, allopathic model of healing where the human body is separate from the mind and works much like a machine that can be reduced down to different parts and by treating the symptomatic issues that are appearing in the parts you will fix the rest of the machine.

On the flipside of this you have natural traditional ancestral healers that use a holistic approach to healing where they may or may not treat health symptoms and disease directly, but they do look for the underlying root cause of the issue and they will look to support your bodymind’s own innate ability to heal.

This holistic approach by natural healers aligns with the theory of Vitalism, which is the understanding that there is a life force energy that beats your heart, breathes your lungs, and heals your bodymind.

To compare these two very different models of healing let me use the engine check light on a car’s dashboard as an analogy. Conventional mainstream medicine would treat the check light in the following ways. They would test the bulb, make sure that there wasn’t anything wrong with the bulb. They may remove the bulb. They may also tape over the check light so you can’t see it. They may even ask you to put a blindfold over your eyes so you can’t see the check light. This is what it means to see things as a machine and to reduce things to their smallest parts and to treat only the symptom.

Now natural healers would see the check light as a sign of some other underlying issue going on. Then they would find that this engine check light relates to an issue with the engine itself and so they would go directly to the engine and do further tests on the engine. Once the problem is found a natural healer would choose from a number of different strategies that they feel would fix the specific issue that they found in the engine and once the engine is fixed wouldn’t you know it the engine check light on the dashboard inside the car is no longer lit. That’s how a holistic root cause healing model works. It treats the underlying cause of the symptom.

Earlier I mentioned life force energy and how your bodymind can heal itself. Think about a cut on your skin. A band aid or plaster over the cut isn’t actually healing it. It’s simply preventing the cut from getting infected and getting worse and can actually improve the speed of healing, but the band aid or the plaster isn’t doing the healing. Think about a broken bone. A cast isn’t actually healing the bone. It’s job is to prevent the bone from healing out of alignment, but the cast isn’t doing the healing.

This life force energy that is healing the cut and healing the bone has many names:

• Qi
• Prana
• Breath
• Spirit
• GOD that’s god all in capitals
• Innate Intelligence
• Universal Intelligence or simply
• Energy

There is another name for this life force energy that heals your bodymind – Unconditional Love.

Not to be confused with conditional love, which I’ll talk about soon, unconditional love is love without conditions, without boundaries, with no limits, labels, or separation. Unconditional love is holistic and integrated and given without any real thought or expectation. It just is. The perfect example of unconditional love is the sun. The sun gives its energy willingly. It doesn’t ask for anything in return nor does it expect anything in return. It doesn’t need specific conditions outside of it to be met before it shines it just shines from within to give its energy without. The sun just gives and gives and gives off radiant energy to the entire Solar system supporting all life.

Compare this to conditional love which is all about setting conditions that must be met before love is given or received. Conditional love means there must be a giver and a receiver so there is also separation in conditional love. For example a parent may show love for their child only after they’ve cleaned up their room. Or someone may love you only if you do x, y, or z. Another example is you will love yourself and your life only when you have the money, the car, the house, the spouse, etc.

Remember that life force energy that heals you. It doesn’t wait for x, y, or z. It just is. Your bodymind is constantly breaking down and being rebuilt every second. You have 2 million blood cells turning over every second in your bodymind right now. There’s 2 million, there’s 2 million, and there’s another 2 million. When you get injured this life force energy actually gives even more of itself and doesn’t stop, it won’t stop. Now that is what I call unconditional love and without unconditional love you would never heal.

Now there are a couple of things that can disrupt this healing process and block unconditional love from working its miraculous magic: human thought and incorrect application of healing techniques.

The book A Course in Miracles teaches you that human beings experience two fundamental emotions that all other emotions come from: fear and love. When you come from a place of fear you are excluding unconditional love from the experience. Fear can be seen as another form of conditional love where you feel it is safe to let go of fear only when certain conditions are met. The problem with this type of conditional love is that it is born out of fear and love that comes from fear is finite, it’s not consistent, it’s not empowering, and it’s not fulfilling real deep-seated needs. Whereas unconditional love that doesn’t come from fear, because it doesn’t come from anything it just is, is infinite, it’s persistent and consistent, it empowers all and it fulfils everything.

If you get into a fear mindset you’re blocking unconditional love from entering your life and entering your bodymind, and your bodymind’s ability to heal will diminish. Because fear blocks love and when there is no love there is no healing.

Think about the many stories about someone who was as fit as a fiddle until they get diagnosed with a terminal illness and die weeks or months later. Would they have died so early if they hadn’t visited the doctor’s office and hadn’t been diagnosed? Was the fear that was instilled into them by the doctor what actually caused their death? And some diagnoses turn out to be wrong, but people still get sick because their fear is so strong that they believe what they are told and this stops unconditional love from giving them vitality, from maintaining their bodymind, and from healing. So fear sucks the life right out of people who have been misdiagnosed all because of a thought that grew in their bodymind, which was planted there by someone else.

So human thought, very powerful.

“The perception of fear will block love and prevent healing.”

Another thing that can block healing is using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Whether you use natural holistic therapies or conventional pharmaceutical and surgical techniques if what you are doing is getting in the way of unconditional love from doing its own thing you are not helping with the healing process. For example if you break a leg, sure you could choose to avoid the hospital and not get a cast and let unconditional love do its thing, but unconditional love works without conditions or boundaries and so it just gives and it will just heal the bone no matter the orientation it is in. So you need some type of cast to support the healing process otherwise you’d be left with a very wonky looking leg and terrible posture. Plus the initial pain of breaking your leg may be so great that a pain-killer would most likely help more than even the most potent of essential oils and herbal teas.

Or another example if you get an infection, a slight small infection can be taken care of naturally with antibacterial herbs and raw honey and even coconut oil. With all of them working together to aid in the healing process and supporting unconditional love. But if your infection is left to linger for too long and grows deep and wide then at this point the healing process on its own becomes stunted. So before the infection becomes systemic and spreads now would be a good time to get out the antibiotics and give unconditional love some conditioned loving support with medicine.

It’s not about one method of healing being better than the other. It’s about understanding which method of healing will support unconditional love and your bodymind’s innate ability to heal. It’s as simple as using the right tool for the right job.

So how can you ease your fears and find the right healing techniques for your specific healing journey? How can you allow unconditional love and healing to flow effortlessly through your bodymind? Well you are going to have to cultivate, accumulate, build more love into your life.

Love begets love. Love attracts love. If you’re sick physically, sexually, emotionally, or mentally then it’s not just tree bark, herbs, essential oils, medicine, antibiotics, antipsychotics, and surgery that you need to be looking into. You also need to cultivate a sense of love and wellbeing into your being, into very your essence, into your soul.

If you’re sick and come from a place of fear this will lead to confusion, to anger, anxiety, and poor choices. But if you’re sick and come from a place of love this will lead to certainty, to confidence, and to the best choices you can make in the moment.

The first love you need to work on cultivating is love for your self. Self-love and self-directed loving are prerequisites for you to give and receive love. You cannot give what you do not have so if you don’t have love for yourself how can you give love to anyone else and how can you allow love to heal you.

Learning what love is and what love means to you is critical when cultivating love for self. Because even though people may be loving you with what they perceive as love you may not see it as love.

I like the book The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman for helping you understand how people give and receive love. The 5 love languages are:

1. Words of affirmation
2. Quality time
3. Receiving gifts
4. Acts of service, and
5. Physical touch

 
Personally I love to give gifts as an expression of my love, but I feel more loved by other people when they choose to spend quality time with me compared to if they were to buy me a gift. So the way you receive love can be different to how you express love. Understanding how you receive love will make it easier for you to love yourself. Since I feel loved when people give me their time I love myself by giving myself time with myself. I do this by going on solo walks, but mainly I spend time with myself through my daily Qi-gong movement meditation practise. So find out what your love language is and begin loving yourself in that way and let others know that this is how you feel loved and let the receiving of love begin.

Another way to cultivate love is to appreciate more of what you have in your life and not concern yourself with what you don’t have or are missing out on. Remember fear blocks the flow of unconditional love and if you’re watching the news or focusing on comparing yourself to other people’s highlight reel on their social media accounts then this may stress you out a bit and is going to cause you to have negative feelings of anxiety and jealousy all of which stem from fear.

So practise being in an attitude of gratitude to fear less and love more. Giving gratitude daily is a simple yet powerful way to feel awesome about what you have going on in your life and to not worry about what you don’t have. Gratitude keeps you in the here and now, in the present, in this moment, and in this moment there is no fear, there is no past, there is no future, there is no learnt fear from the past, there is no projected fear of the future, there is just love for what is right now. Just like unconditional love which is always in this present moment.

A very simple way and yet very powerful strategy to cultivate more love is to surround yourself with a loving community. Whether it’s family, friends, and if you are on a healing journey specifically health practitioners they should all be on your side. They are your cheerleaders and they will help you move in the direction that allows for the effortless flow of unconditional love and to support healing using all available and relevant resources at your disposal. If you have people in your life that promote fear or demand conditions before love is given than don’t focus too much of your time and attention on them. You don’t have to completely shut these people out of your life if that’s too difficult. But if you can spend as little time as possible with these energy vampires the better off you will be. Spend as much time as you can, however, with people that give willingly and freely and who love you for being you.

So what’s love got to do with healing? Everything! Unconditional love is what’s breathing your body, what’s beating your heart, what’s growing your nails, what’s allowing the sounds and the sights to be downloaded, transformed, and uploaded into your nervous system. Unconditional love is what heals your bodymind.

Remember:

“Love isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Links and Resources

• A Course in Miracles — Foundation for Inner Peace
• The 5 Love Languages — Gary Chapman
• 5 Love Languages Online Test

 
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