Love uplifts and strengthens. Its power works through everyday life. It’s the art of living well. 

Show Notes:

Episode 17: Working through emotion and feelings with heart and mind (1 of 2)

 Exercises used to review the episode’s content

Exercise 1: Allow yourself to fully experience your emotions.

Exercise 2: As your emotions and feelings arise, note their origins. Are they from past hurts, frustration from present events, or are due to loss?

Exercise 3: Explore the idea that love lives within and that wisdom is another name for love. If love is basic to being human, wisdom is too. How differently would you live if love and wisdom were built your life?

Note: The idea is not to believe these ideas, but to think them through.

Show Notes:

Episode 16: Trusting life: A spiritual journey

with heart and mind 

Exercises for reviewing the episode’s content

Exercise 1: Love is transcendent. The love one feels for a child, for example, crosses culture and time. That’s how it is with love from the heart, the love associated with compassion. Does this make sense to you?

Exercise 2: We are containers for love. If love lives within us and passes through us, we are connected to the transcendent aspect of love. Do these statements make sense to you?

Exercise 3: Wisdom is another name for love. If we love a pet, we treat it with a love that’s thoughtful and caring, a love that’s wise. How has wisdom guided you in your most loving relationships?

Exercise 4: As you look back at your life, do you see times where love and wisdom were at work? If you see love and wisdom behind the scenes in one setting, then love / wisdom has to be present in all settings and circumstances. Could it be otherwise?

Exercise 5: I should be able to drop worry if love is always with me, not because everything works out well, but because I’m not alone. Does this make sense?

Exercise 6: Life is about growth. Have you ever grown through difficult circumstances? Did difficulties ever bring out the best and most human in you?  Can you see the possibility for wisdom in challenges and difficulties?

Exercise 7: If we know that wisdom and love are present in the events in our lives — even in our most difficult ones — we can face each setting and situation with calm, presence, and focus. We can be ourselves. Does this make sense?

Exercise 8: We can test the idea that our lives are filled with wisdom and love by taking the leap and living and acting as if the idea were true. If the idea holds, we should feel stronger, more competent, more loving — more fully ourselves. Do the ideas in this episode make sense to you? If so, what’s stopping you from taking the leap and testing them in this way?  

Show Notes:

 Episode 15: Conquering self-doubt and self-criticism with heart and mind (Part 3)

Exercises for episode 15:

Exercise 1: Remember a time when you felt overwhelmed because you had too much to do. This pressure could have been due to a school project, the demands of work, or trying to balance parenting and work. Besides feeling overwhelmed, how else did this make you feel? Did you enjoy such pressure? Did these feelings help you get through?

Exercise 2: Think of an activity you fully enjoy, or one you used to enjoy — a craft, a sport, or a creative endeavor. Do you take lessons? Does practice make you better? Do you value your practice time? Does it increase your enjoyment of the activity? Do you wish you had more time for this activity?

Pablo Casals, one of the world’s great cellists, was asked why he still practiced at age 90. “Because I think I’m making progress.”

Exercise 3: Think of the work that goes into healing old wounds, into forgiving yourself for your mistakes, and into living in the moment. Episode 15 describes this as a process of letting in light, developing self-compassion, and learning to feel good about ourselves. The work involved, even it’s a lot of work, makes us feel better about ourselves and our lives. Does this make sense. If so, does this work more closely match how you feel when facing an overwhelming burden, or does it seem closer to the work involved in getting better at a favorite activity?

Show Notes:

Episode 14: Conquering self-doubt and self-criticism with heart and mind (Part 2 of 3)

Exercises for episode 14: A review of the episode’s main points.

 Exercise 1: Does the idea that we think with both heart and mind make sense? Where do you think with your heart and where do you think with your mind in your everyday life? 

Exercise 2: Heart and mind working together

As partners —Where do you use the mind’s objective thinking to carve out space for meaningful moments? Which practical matters go more smoothly when you add your heart’s insights? How / where could you expand your use of the heart?  

As friends — This episode tells us to follow our dreams and to enjoy life’s practical gifts. It also says that our sense of well-being depends on our acting from our hearts, remembering ‘who’ we are not just ‘what’ we are. Does this make sense? How do these two opposites weave through your life?

 As healers — How do you use heart and mind to work through challenges when life takes difficult turns? What advice about working through difficulties would you give to another that you could use?

Exercise 3: Note — Work on this exercise on your own, with a friend, or with a mental health professional. Stop if memories arise that are too strong or too powerful. This work can be done safely, but wait until you feel ready.

If feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism regularly fill your consciousness, seek the roots of these unpleasant voices. Did they start with the words and actions of those who abused / neglected / bullied you? Does it help to know that their words and deeds grew out of their own inadequacies and frustrations, not out of who you are? If so, how might you use this insight?

Show Notes:

Episode 13: Conquering self-doubt and

self-criticism with heart and mind

 Exercise: The exercises for this episode have one theme: think through the ideas in the episode. See if you agree with them. 

1) Picture your best times with friends, loved ones, while engaged in an activity, or during prayer / meditation. Were self-doubt or self-criticism present? What would have happened to those moments if self-doubt or self-criticism entered?

2) Were those who criticized you or treated you harshly psychologically sound? If they weren’t, and if your encounters with them created your negative self-images, shouldn’t you be able to discard these negative self images?

3) Love passes through us when we act compassion We can experience love by opening to it.

4) Love is strengthening and it is timeless. It has the power to heal inner hurts.

5) If we can care for another, we can care for ourselves.

Show Notes / Exercises — Episode 12:

 Successful, guilt-free inner work with heart and mind                                           

Play:

• Being a teammate
  • Picture the benefits in being a good teammate and boosting others on your team
  • See the various people in your life as teammates
  • How could you help them thrive through your attitude and approach?

• Playfulness
  • Look at your most difficult settings and situations
  • Is it possible to see them differently?
  • Could a spirit of playfulness help? Even humor?

 A play on Einstein’s thought experiments:

• Picture yourself filled with light and love
  • This feeling has nothing to do with outer events or circumstances
  • If necessary, start small. Feel love in the tip of your finger
  • Don’t be discouraged
  • Don’t give up
  • Einstein’s ideas took years to develop

• What qualities would you add to make you the person you’d like to be?
  • Note: Consider qualities, not abilities
  • Why did you pick these?
  • Which ones are you already good at?

• Test these out in your imagination
  • How would you bring these into play in different settings?
  • How different would you be if you had these qualities?

Quotations

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

 — Albert Schweitzer

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is. 

— R.D. Lang

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

— Dylan Thomas

Show Notes:

Exercises for Attitude & Gratitude with Heart and Mind

 Exercise one: Reviewing your attitude

• Consider your attitude in all the settings of our life settings
• Are you pleased with your attitude? Does it include your heart?
• If there’s difference between how you’d like to be and how you are, why is this so.
• What stops you from being the way you’d like to be?

Exercise two: Considering gratitude

• Do you think there’s a connection between gratitude and the heart’s love? Why /why not?
• Think of the people involved in getting a favorite manufactured item to you.
• Allow a feeling of gratefulness to grow.
• Notice a feeling of wanting to give back.
• Explore your channels for giving back.

Quotations

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

— William James

Everything can be taken away but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

— Viktor E. Frankl

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.

— Meister Eckhart

Show Notes: Making Decisions with Heart and Mind

Exercise one: Review your life and test the episode’s idea 

• Does good decision-making increase happiness? How?

• Exercise two: Reviewing your decision making

 • Think about these four kinds of decisions in your life. Which are you best at Which need work? 

Intellectual / practical decisions.

Decisions involving heart and mind

First impressions 

Decisions based on love and compassion

Quotations

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.

—Dalai Lama

In difficult circumstances always act on first impressions.

—Leo Tolstoy

Nothing happens until you decide. Make a decision and watch your life move forward.

—Oprah Winfrey

Show Notes: Bonus 9a

A Daily Practice with Heart and Mind

• Begin the practice before opening your eyes in the AM

If you set your alarm, give myself an extra 10 minutes

Turn off phone alarms without seeing any notifications

Practice this, if necessary

• Let in light and love

Steps in Episode 9

Use an image of the sun poking through clouds

Say a prayer or verse

Stay with this feeling as long as you like

• Cursory view of the day

Glance chronologically

See all the events that will be happening

• Look over the day a second time

This time hover more closely

Look at practical details

Look for helpful tips and reminders

Not a ‘to do’ list, it’s a ‘what’s doing’ list

Avoid getting too lost in detail, though do so if important

• Pause where events seem hard.

Break into two groups

Don’t see how I’ll get things done

         Discomfort connected to people

See what you need to do to get through the logjams

Massive schedule changes can be saved for review at a different time

Save interpersonal challenges for next layer

• Go through day again, looking with eyes of the heart

How I want to be?

Seeing interactions from the viewpoint of others

Work at places of discomfort

Reviewing ‘forgiveness’ in Episode 5

Finding a heart-based response > see Episode 10

If stuck, ask love to join you and move on

• When days or lifestyles are more about being than meeting scheduled demands

Same process

Focus on feeling love, on carrying love

• When finished with reviews, fill yourself with light and live the day

• End of day

Before going to sleep, fill yourself with light

Glance over the day backwards

• Stop where things went particularly well

Appreciate that you’re loved

• Stop at moments that concerned you

How did you do

Non-judgmentally look

Think of ideas for similar situations in the future

• Review situations that didn’t go well

Dissect them

What were the problems?

How could you have made it better?

How could you avoid this in the future?

Feel closure: you did your best

Save issues that need more time, and get to them when you can

• When finished, fill yourself with light and love and drift off to sleep.

• Notes on process

The day ahead is coming

The goal is to live fully and be in flow as much as possible

It’s about being you

Continued work has definite and real effects