Shining Light into the Darkness
Nurturing Your Body: Loving Yourself From Opening Hearts Chapter 5 Healing & Nurturing the Body The body is a miraculous self-repairing system of awe-inspiring complexity. To maintain adequate function and prevent disease, the body requires a few vital things from us: good nutrition, adequate exercise, and protection from toxins and the elements. Making good choices …
Rule 4: Manage Stress by Finding Balance and Inner Peace From Opening Hearts: Chapter 5 Five Cardinal Rules for Healthy Living Excessive, chronic stress can literally kill you. Our emotional, mental, and physical response to actual or perceived threats triggers the adrenal glands to release a flood of hormones including cortisol and adrenaline.42 [Footnote 42: …
Rule 2: Maintain a Healthy Weight From Opening Hearts: Chapter 5’s Five Cardinal Rules for Healthy Living; Weight – The Shape of Your Physical Self Weight literally shapes the person you see in the mirror. An underweight emaciated person appears gaunt or even skeletal while an obese person often resembles an apple or a pear. …
Recently I had the great honor of being a guest on Connie Whitman’s internet radio program, Architect of Change to talk about Opening Hearts, the book I co-created with the amazing cardiovascular surgeon Lester R. Sauvage, MD (1926-2015). Connie and I discussed the advice Dr. Sauvage shared about how to nurture the body as part of living a healthy …
Our Novena of Peace concludes with the realization that peace is the fruit of love. Love is expressed so many ways large and small. Love is mercy, gratitude, vulnerability, forgiveness, responsibility, awareness, and all the habits we consciously choose that reveal our belief in the sacredness of all life and of our world. It gives …
Like peacemaking, mercy is a habit of being. Conscious choice is the key to creating any new habit. Habits are the things we do repetitively. They are helpful to our being (such as exercise or meditation) or harmful (substance abuse or smoking). Habits are conscious or unconscious. To create peace we have to consciously choose …
Mercy flows from response-ability; the ability to respond. This story illustrates how we are intrinsically hardwired to respond to each other: Once there was an elderly couple who delighted in the little boy who lived across the street. They loved his daily visits to play on the tire swing they had put up for their …
Peace is impossible without truth and reconciliation. On December 29, 1890, soldiers of the US Army’s 7th Cavalry massacred 300 Lakota Sioux (including women and children) near Wounded Knee creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Tomorrow, December 29, 2015, Lakota elders who are descendants of the original seventy-five survivors (known as Takini) …
Here, then, is the reason for the Jubilee: because this is the time for mercy. It is the favorable time to heal wounds, a time not to be weary of meeting all those who are waiting to see and to touch with their hands the signs of the closeness of God, a time to offer …
Mercy and compassion flow naturally from gratitude. I’ve seen this exemplified in people who have instinctively grateful personalities. One especially inspiring, grateful-by-nature person I’ve observed was Dr. Lester Sauvage. I was lucky enough (and very grateful!) to work with him on his final book Opening Hearts, which was his treatise on everything he found important: …