Love In Your Life

Intro to who I am and what is the purpose of this Podcast.

How do you ask questions? Do you thoughtfully consider what you are hearing and take a moment to formulate your query? Or are you more reactive, saying what pops in to your mind upon hearing someone say something that stimulates you?

Framing a question in a particular manner can make the difference between inviting a conversation or causing a defensive reaction. Again, the consciousness required in an emotionally intelligent individual allows for improved and more harmonious relationships. We all prefer that, so it is on us to learn how we can be better, do better in our listening and in how we respond so we can have and enjoy peaceful, positive relationships with others.

Consider the idea that a "why" question tends to sound confrontational, while a re-framing of the same question using a how or what can open the door to an open-minded invitation for better understanding on both sides.

Very often, when someone we love dies, it triggers reflection and introspection. We are face to face with our own fate: Why are we here? What happens when we die?

It forces us to look at our own lives and consider its meaning. What are we doing here? If we believe that we were imprinted with our mission in our mother's womb, we might ask, am I living the life that was designed for me?

The only thing we know for sure about death is that everyone here will die. Our experience may tell us that some die living and others live dying. Another cause for reflection. Still, death itself remains a mystery and therefore both fascinates and frightens us at the same time. We have an innate fear of the unknown.

What that suggests is that we know we are headed to the same fate but are we living while we are dying or dying while we are living? How can we be sure that we are doing what we are meant to do?

Most of us sense the brevity of time and somewhere we know that we need to use it well for a there is an intention for us to use this time for a distinct purpose.

Accepting responsibility for what happens in our lives empowers us. We see our part in the creation of our circumstance and we know we can change it.

Looking externally for someone or something to blame leaves us at the effect of what happens, rather than the cause. In this way, we have no power; we are victims of our circumstance.

When we are managing our emotions, we can respond to what happens, giving us an opportunity to positively affect our perceptions, behavior and decision making. We are response-able.

In reactive mode, where our thinking minds are disengaged, we are at the mercy of what happens.

Taking responsibility is understanding that we are creative powerful beings who are given choice and therefore are truly at the cause of our circumstance. Everything that happens is for our benefit and we worked to create it in our lives. Why? Because we need the experience to learn what we came here to learn.

While we often can not control what happens, we can always control what we do about what happens. We have two choices: we can react and place blame on other people or situations or we can respond by simply working to make it better.

It is one hundred percent our choice.

World Mental Health Day was October 10th. It's a time to raise awareness and remind ourselves how we can support our own and others' ability to remain stable.

Professor Laurie Santos (Yale Happiness course) suggests five ways to cope, most of which are preventative maintenance.

First, there is exercise, where we experience the mood-boosting benefits of endorphins. Next is our attention to gratitude. Feeling grateful, expressing gratitude, even writing in a journal about that for which we feel grateful. Sleep is another important ingredient, as ensuring a proper amount of rest fortifies us against the stress of daily life and allows our metabolism to properly function. Our social connections have long been understood to bring us a feeling of contentment and joy so we need to continually attend to our relationships with others. Finally, we will need to build our emotional intelligence. Understanding our emotions, developing strategies to recognize, accept, examine and nurture our own and others' emotions features prominently in our sense of well-being.

Living our passions bring us joy. Our joy is infectious. Others in our field get to benefit from us living our dreams. Where do we find the answers we need?

No one can tell you anything that you can't tell yourself better. Go toward your joy and notice your feeling as you do something you love to do!

It is not that this is a challenge so much as it's not really our way. We are told by those in authority that there are professions that garner respect and make us the income we need to be happy. But that's not true! All the money in the world will not make us happy and we know that. We have seen how little money can mean when it comes to our happiness. And as for respect, everyone respects one who stands up for what he wants. What is most important is that you will respect yourself and that is a guarantee when you live your joy.

We are not born with a religion but we do come in as spiritual beings. As many new age and spiritual leaders remind us, "we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

In our willingness to apologize, forgive and let go of attachments to offenses, we demonstrate our courage, strength and self-content or happiness. This is the essence of spirituality.

We all have the capacity to contribute to the quality of our own lives and those with whom we live, work and play. When we behave in ways that contribute to a positive environment, everyone benefits. All these behaviors are indicators of giving our best in our spiritual presence we offer to the other.

What if we all remained mindful of our inborn spirituality? What difference would it make in the world?

Special love, that which we consider romantic, is not authentic love. The reason is that if we take on another in a romantic partnership, we can easily do so under the guise that they will "complete us." They will "make us whole." We need them to behave in such a way as to "prove" their love to us. We are "special" to one another.

That is a good description of conditional love. If our partner "fails" in meeting our expectations or demands, we end the relationship or exchange it for another. But the other will fail as well if we ourselves fail to understand that no one is in this world to complete you. It is you who is complete and in that completion join another to agree to life together, "warts and all." We understand that in our humanness, we are each imperfect, even as in our authenticness as a spiritual being, we are each perfect.

Sound like a contradiction? It is living as an authentic human, loving authentically, with unconditional acceptance of what is. Authentic love is true love and it does not fail. This is the only way a relationship can withstand the test of time.

The beauty of giving of oneself and one's resources to those in need has been on full display during this time of a world health crisis. So many have found themselves without, having lost the comfort of knowing they can take care of their family's basic needs and so many others have stepped up to help. Do we think that these givers are motivated by recognition for their generosity or simply to satisfy their own need to feel useful?

There is so much at play here. I doubt that those giving are motivated by anything more than love and concern for their fellow man. But that really does not preclude a need to be needed and there is nothing wrong with that, per se. Many people cherish the notion of being needed and work diligently to fulfill that need. If both giver and receiver are benefitted, I see that as a win/win.

Wanting and even needing to be needed is not the same as acting in order to receive recognition. The sense of satisfaction is intrinsic; recognition is usually an extrinsic motivator. Extrinsic motivation is giving to get something, not giving to help another or even oneself feel useful and achieving a sense of well being from the giving.

Statistics in 2018 tell us that about 1 in 5 American adults suffer from some degree of mental illness. One in 25 of us is seriously mentally challenged. The question is, are we born with our mental health or are there forces at work to cause us to acquire attitudes that lead to an issue with mental illness.

We have gone from a view of disdain and ignorance with mental illness, leading us to treat the mentally impaired as pariahs to identifying it as a "disease." And while this helped us in addressing the problem with a degree of empathy and remedy or treatment, much like a physical disease, it may have inadvertently led to creating another problem. This problem is unfortunately bigger than a perception of disgust or disdain. We may be discounting the notion of personal responsibility.

Being responsible for our own mental health is indeed possible and probable. While we can not always link our personal responsibility with our physical ailment, we may very likely link our mental health with it.

Looking externally for the cause of our anxiety is really a way to divert attention from our own responsibility to cure ourselves. Emotional Intelligence can be developed within and that means we can have the tools to improve our mental/emotional health for the benefit of ourselves and those in our world.