Shining Light into the Darkness
From Opening Hearts, Chapter 5’s Cardinal rules for healthy living: Rule 3 Exercise Human beings are created for activity; our bodies are made to move. Yet in our technological world too many of us spend most of our lives sitting. We sit in cars, at computers, in front of televisions and desks, and at sporting …
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. …
Opening Hearts: Chapter 5 Nutrition’s Nemesis: Sugar’s Outrageous Growth If I could select one substance to decrease in our diet it would be sugar. This unhealthy substance feeds the inflammation that damages arterial walls and has a long list of other harmful health consequences including cancer. Yet the average American consumes about 150 pounds of …
From Opening Hearts, Chapter 5’s Five Cardinal Rules for Healthy Living – Rule 1 Nutrition When we consider all the gifts and resources we have available to us, we begin to understand that our food choices have spiritual as well as health consequences. Mindfulness and intentionality are just two of the spiritual aspects of …
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) …
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: …