Someone for whom I care deeply has been very very busy for months now and has had little time to devote to our relationship.  At first I took it personally and was very hurt.  I thought it meant that she did not want to spend time with me.  I cleared that out of the way and no longer felt hurt.  I stopped taking it personally.  Then I got mad because I thought she “should” make time, (like time is something you can create out of thin air), because important relationships are important and she was not meeting my expectations of how you honor and maintain important relationships.  I cleared that out of that way.  Then I came to trusting our love and a strong clean feeling of love – pure and easy.  Phew!

photo by Michal Marcol

Having a cleaner vision, with less emotional static, I have been able to interact with her with less tension, more understanding, and a steady confidence in our shared love.  I feel like I’m interacting with Grace, rather than through clouds of pain and disappointment.  Again, PHEW!

Cleaning the windows of the heart requires awareness, diligence, humility, and skillfulness … probably other qualities as well.  Cleaning the windows of the heart is a kind of personal hygiene that many of us neglect or put off.  Yet it is just this type of cleaning that ushers us into interacting with grace.

Most of us brush our teeth everyday.  We get that personal hygiene is solely our responsibility.  Most of us don’t wait for someone else to brush our teeth or even tell us when it needs to be done.  Yet, when it comes to taking care of the various emotional waves and storms that move through our hearts and relationships, there’s hesitation.  There’s denial.  There’s avoidance.  In fact, many of us may differ on what it means to take care of the waves and storms of the heart.

From my perspective, this “taking care of” means first and foremost taking responsibility for.  How we feel, our emotional reactions are ours – we own them.  No one else is responsible.  And in that responsibility lies our power to “take care of.”  When we assume ownership of our emotional experience, when we take responsibility for our emotional experience – we access our response-ability, our ability to respond.

So, if we look at those four qualities – awareness, diligence, humility, and skillfulness – we can see how important each are if we are to clean the windows of the heart.  Washing away the debris of the pain from unmet expectations, for example, is made easier if you are aware of your emotional responses to your life experiences as they are happening.  Diligence means to me that you know that it’s not going to just take one washing to get a clean heart – some pains take some time to make sure that all the streaks are cleaned away.  With humility, there is a kind of willingness to be wrong, to be ‘less than’ your ego’s vision of you.  Well, there’s more I could say about the value of humility.  For the time being, I’ll leave it there.

Now we’re left with skillfulness.  These days, there are numerous skillful means of cleaning the windows of the heart – Z Point, Mindfulness, TAT, EFT, Hypnosis, Self-Talk, —- and so many more.

What do you do to keep the windows of your heart clean?

Stay tuned.  I’m in the process of putting together a couple of recordings to help you clean windows.  If you don’t want to wait, check out my shop for some resources that can help you right now!

winging my way home

On my recent trip to Greece, I once again used EFT to deal with jet lag.  Greece is 7 hours ahead of my humble abode here in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee.  If you haven’t tried EFT for jet lag, go for it.  It’s easy to learn and works like a dream for jet lag and more.

If you don’t know EFT, you can download the basic protocol, here.

Here’s the trick I used for jet lag:

1.  As you are traveling, every hour or so, set your watch towards the time where you are going.  You can set it an hour or 1/2 ahead or back.

2.  Each time you re-set your watch, use the EFT protocol with this set up:  “Even though my body is set to “Tennessee” time, I choose for it to set to “Athens” time.”

3.  Then alternate between “Tennessee Time” (that’s an example ) and “Athens Time” (another example) as you tap.  Do five rounds of tapping.  This means going through all the points five times.  I did not and rarely use the hand points.

On another note, if you are planning a summer vacation, you might want to check out turning part of your vacation into a little retreat.  You can use my award-winning book, An Illumined Life, to support you.  It’s now also available in e-book form so you can print off a bit at a time and play!

1.  I got a migraine today.  I haven’t had one in years.  The good thing is that I had the time and space to lay down and rest in the middle of the day.  I took care of myself with relaxation and EFT and felt a lot better.

2.  My dog, Huxley, did not lunge aggressively at the three large standard poodles we encountered on our walk today.  Huxley is still a pup and has lately been lunging aggressively at other dogs on our walks.  Like the rest of us, he can be a little full of himself sometimes.

3.  My husband just brought me a piece of dove dark chocolate.