The year after I lost my son, I felt moved to return to podcasting. It had been years since my first forays into podcasting – originally under shows like “The Opening Door” and “Lunch with the Loveologist” – and I had fond memories of learning during those early days. In such tough times, I felt called to do something that would bring the joy of real conversations and open dialogues about important questions.

Recognizing the miracles in the everyday begins with how we think, which creates our focus. Opening to seeing bigger is the next crucial step in developing resilient and reliable skills for self love. For the last couple of weeks, we have been focused on noticing the negative thinking patterns in our lives. By pausing in those moments and noticing the repetitive thoughts, perhaps by using the bracelet technique, you create a space where new kinds of thinking can emerge.

For those of you out there who have been looking for more activity oriented projects, this is not one to miss. Putting together a visual that wakes up joy, wonder and curiosity and then having it as a reference point for your daily thinking is a powerful launch pad to pushing your life in the direction of your best self.

Most of us would love to have a more sustainable lifestyle. But most of us are also very busy and don’t always have time to think about even easy ways we could be more sustainable. So we’ve come up with some easy ways you could start being more sustainable this week! And many of them you’d even save some cash!

Our heart is hands down our hardest working organ. It never sleeps, beating over two billion times in a life time and circulating 50 million gallons of blood. It is the first organ structure that comes to life in the embryo and holds us until our last breath. It is hard to imagine how we could ever take this life-sustaining organ for granted, but so constant is the heart that we rarely stop to celebrate its function or recognize and listen to it’s needs.

The Buddha famously taught “With our thoughts we make the world.” True wisdom begins when we recognize the extent to which we are a captive audience to the voice inside our head. It is this inner reality and the often invisible relationship we have with ourselves that literally creates our lives. More surprising – and perhaps more subtle – is how this world inside our head also acts as a filter for everything we perceive outside of us. In short, the world happening around us becomes what we tell ourselves it is.

As early as 44 BCE, the Romans hosted a fertility celebration called Lupercalia, in which they sacrificed animals and procreated. Romantic? I’m not so sure. It wasn’t until the 14th century that Valentine’s Day as we know it really started to emerge. And no, it wasn’t named after just one saint; in fact, it was named after three!

For the last year since losing Ian my heart was too shattered to feel gratitude. I missed it like the feelings of joy or appreciation of beauty that used to easily transform my day. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I constantly reminded myself of all the many gifts that remained in tact, but I just couldn’t feel it. 

I have always preferred the company of children in my life. They speak the truth. They are present and awake to life in a way that seems to slip away as we become adults. Somewhere around the time when we become conscious of being seen, we lose the freedom to see what is actually happening around us.