“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”  Leonardo DaVinci

I had never understood the virtue of patience as a curative for the things that make you angry.  I never learned how this most evolved form of patience, is actually a form of emotional austerity, which keeps you from getting hooked by our instinctual angry responses. I recently listened to Pema Chodron explain how the virtue of patience keeps you from “biting the hook” that life throws your way.  Instead of letting anger and resentment be the first response, the practice of patience trains you to hold the frustration, anger and pain of the wrong doing before jumping to make things worse.  It requires courage to not hurt back and an inner quiet, which allows you to hang onto yourself  at the same time.

There are other kinds of patient acts that prepare us for this more grown up version. Lessons that help develop this ability include: learning to wait for someone to finish something that should have been done ten minutes ago or the patience to teach and re-teach a child how to tie their shoe. Feeling hungry and waiting for food to be cooked and served is good practice, just as wanting something badly and having to wait and save up enough money to get it.   Growing into the patience that keeps you from saying mean words with increasing speed and frequency, is a form of prayer.

Today, I had the opportunity to feel how challenging it is to be still when  my mind was racing, and every fiber of my being wants to combat the wrong with an equal dose of malice.  Literally this is where prayers become action verbs.   It takes so much strength to overcome the desire to make it worse.  You have to train your mind vigilantly to do nothing in those situations.  Gratitude and compassion feel mostly like a hollow shell with little left to embody.   Holding still with anger, frustration and resentment, and not growing it, feels so unnatural that you lose your appetite.

It is unnatural because when you are wronged, there are so many good reasons to retaliate.  It is not easy to get to this prayerful patience, which isn’t about right or wrong doing.   This capacity for patience lives in the field beyond right and wrong, where things are the way they are.  The question that deserves attention is how long do I want to keep fanning the flames of my anger. How much of my life energy do I want to give to this?

It takes patience to learn patience.  I am happy for all of the  practice I have had on the little irritations.  I am grateful for the many years that I have learned to wait.  It is slowly allowing me  to grow into holding the most challenging patience of all,  the stillness of holding my own anger and overcoming the compulsion to hurt back.

I am so bummed that my bee love affair has lost its fairy tale luster and all it took was a few moments of bad planning.  After successfully feeding the bees twice by myself,  I thought I knew how to do it.   Time is of the essence when working with bees and I discovered that a 10 a.m. warm morning is not the same for bees as a 7:30 p.m. cool evening.   I do not need to smoke the bees in the morning, but now I know for sure that I do in the evening!

Beekeeping lessons are marked with painful recognition.   Somehow a bee got into my full body coveralls and hood, and another one stung me through the net.   As the event unrolled, I tried to remain calm and heard myself say out loud,  its okay , walk slowly away from the hive.   Stay calm.   Then the buzzing near my face, ears and head drown out my attempts at calm.

Fear,  is a powerful response to override.  Our most primal instinct for our own survival is much louder than my voice to keep calm. I have a whole new respect for people who are able to hold onto themselves in the face of their fears.  Courage,  is one of the highest forms of self love because you have to train in it.  Maybe that is what I will learn from the bees.  As sad as I feel about the hot, stinging, itching lump on my jaw line , I am equally sad for the bees that died because of my poor planning.  I don’t want to be afraid of honey bees.  At least I have compassion for the little bees who were lost.

Replacing a fear response with love is a deliberate practice.  It’s how you build courage. On some level, you  know you can sustain injury.   I knew when I was making those beehives that I might get stung, but I hoped that loving them would prevent it.

Magical thinking, I know, but it makes it easier to move towards what frightens us. So now, with an ice pack on my face, I am little by little learning the magical power of courage.

Perhaps the truest thing that the Buddha ever said was,  “You are what you think. With our thoughts we make the world. “  I start the lesson with this quote and make all the students write it down.  I want them to memorize this idea, so that when they start circling around the same old thoughts that sound true, they will recognize them for what they are.  I offer them the  wrist band tool of switching the band from one wrist to the other with every negative thought, and I share that it took me 82 days of switching the band to stop my own negative thinking.

Training your mind away from negativity is easier than you might expect. When you notice your own negative thinking, you begin to create the space for positive thoughts to enter.  Kids are often surprised to realize that positivity is not necessarily joyful or happy. Leaning away from the negative has a wide continuum. Just letting oneself wonder or be curious about what is happening is a positive way of thinking.

It is easy to confuse wonder with worry.  One student asked,  “What is positive about wondering what I got on a test?” Worrying is where wonder is suffocated with judgment and doubt.  Anxiety has many faces.  I remind them about the things they wondered about as smaller children.

After they are sparked by the positivity challenge, I share the importance of paying attention to your thinking as the first fundamental step in correcting it and that learning a few basic meditation techniques is critical in controlling 60, 000 thoughts per day.  Meditation is how I learned to rest my thinking brain and guide them through a meditation that has always worked for me.

I smile to myself as I count back from 10 and watch them fall into their bodies with each breath.  The room is quiet enough to hear the breathing of the children.  I walk them through an internal vessel with a sticky, warm, golden light filled column of honey. This is a good way to envision what love feels like.  Soon, the bell rings and the children leave with two potentially life changing tools.

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” -Theodore Hesburgh

Saturday marked the 28^th year of my marriage; we celebrated by going to pick up six pounds of honeybees. I have been building their hives for the last month and my husband has been studying bee books.  The balance of our talents and how our energy manifests was at one time a continuous source of conflict.  Now we each go into projects knowing what we can ask for and are almost always successful at meeting each other’s expectations.  It takes him more time to embrace what is so easy for me to start, but he is always the one who brings the staying power and has a wide knowledge base to fall back on when things go wrong; as they inevitably will.

An old friend came over and was teaching us how to get the bees in the hive.  He was sharing a story about how one day the bees got into his suit and were stinging him. This is the fear that I try not to give much attention. Having had significant allergic response to yellow jackets would have made most people leery of bringing thousands of bees home, but after seeing the beautiful Queen of the Sun, I was inspired to not let fear lead me.    When I asked him how the bees got into his suit, feeling so confident in my own new attire, he said with a laugh, “It is an imperfect world.”

Certainly, 28 years of learning to love someone and having a bunch of kids will teach you daily about the imperfect nature of the world. It also will show you how amazingly beautiful the world is and how much goodness is always around us. It is all in how you look and maybe more importantly what you are looking for.

The bees found their new home easily, and just in time before the rain started. Now we wait to see if the queen will do her magic. Queen bees lay more than their own body weight in eggs every day. Mind boggling, how a tiny number of bees can become a colony of 50,000 or more in a matter of months.

Equally remarkable and inspiring is how the bees sacrifice their individual identity and life for the good of the whole. They are one of few super organisms in life that survive as a whole. A little bee going off to collect pollen will die if it doesn’t find its way home. It can’t live alone. Common pesticides act like nerve gas on honey bee neurology and they lose their memory. Whole colonies of tens of thousands of bees collapse because the bees can’t find their way back home, which is their source of life. Living in a complex family structure requires a little of the super organism thinking to rub off on you. The mythology of the individual rights and needs as the leader cannot be the reigning policy when your goal is family harmony.

Giving yourself over to the needs of the other, or even the many others, can have a surprising effect of actually meeting your own needs in ways that only worrying about your own needs will not. The relationships you prioritize have a life and intelligence of its own. When you can trust the relationship to give, you can learn to be a real receiver. Letting go and listening are the two primary paths that teach you the gift of surrendering to how things are. I am deeply and profoundly grateful for the super organism that is family. Even if I am not always the queen bee, there is a noble existence in all the hive roles- worker bees, nursery bees, foraging bees… it all adds up to a life way bigger and more fulfilling than oneself.

Something startling, or tragic, is usually the impetus for us to look at our past with new eyes. For me it was the re-appearance of my brother after 25 years.  As I wrestled with my capacity to let go of my projections to see who was in front of me, I was also faced with witnessing my own  bad judgments as well as his.  One evening when I was sharing this process with my father, who  at almost 80 was struggling with his own entrenched demons, it brought to light an old injury between us that we had never discussed.

As I told my father about how I recognized how I had abandoned my brother so many years ago, he told me that I had abandoned him as well.   “You left and never looked back.  Not even a letter….” Decades later, and somehow for the first time, I realized how I had hurt my father deeply.  It was easier to understand from the vantage point  I have of being a parent myself now, but it was surprising too.  I was so busy running from the painful, violent situation that became my family after my parents’ divorce that I never thought of my father who was there trying to hold together the broken pieces.

My father’s response to emotional pain of all sorts was anger.  His rage became so huge and unpredictable that it was impossible for me to move towards it.  Receiving anything from him felt like it was covered in blows. This is  a truth about aggression and anger in general that I was slow to comprehend.  I never saw how my own anger made it so difficult for others to accept my loving gestures.  I was so accustomed to growing up in the context of ongoing violence that I didn’t see the toll that it took for years in my own life.

Then suddenly, almost as if a veil was lifted, I saw the cycle of pain that I had contributed.  My father was equally hurt by my abandonment as I was by his rage. The more that I stayed away, the angrier he got. I was filled with regret.  I was so very sorry that I didn’t know how to go home. I was sad too, that all these years I had unknowingly and inadvertently stoked the flames of his anger by my inability to acknowledge the home he tried to offer.

These vicious cycles are what  often happen in dysfunctional relationships.  Everyone is being hurt by the other in ways that neither one can see.   My father still has no idea how his angry, caustic comments destroy the relationships he misses. I had no idea that I was missed.

It was a true moment of forgiveness, all these years later,  when my sadness about what had been missed was translated in my apology, which he was able to receive. At the same moment that  I was able to experience my regret for how badly hurt he was by my silence and absence, he was able to hear how much I had  longed for the family connection that was waiting all along to be discovered.

It was tender and soft, this healing the past in the present. It opened me to memories that I didn’t know I had about all the many ways I felt loved by him as a small girl.  We both remembered the same moments and I wept for the soft voice he had for me that I hadn’t heard from him in decades. This is the miracle of love that heals the past in the present and releases you to a new future.  I want to go see my dad and hear him call my name in his soft voice.

I knew I had abandoned my brother years ago. I didn’t have the courage to go back home. Instead I set out on a lifelong journey to learn how to make a home.  My brother’s destiny lead him to run away also. For more than a dozen years no one knew how to find him. What became of my brother was the mystery we would briefly wonder about in our infrequent visits.

Seeing someone you know after decades is kind of like looking at yourself in the mirror. In your mind you don’t look like who is peering back at you. My self image is still young and vital. The circles around my eyes and the sagging skin at my jaw line are not yet part of my self image.   Meeting my brother again after all these years felt like that, too. I saw my father, my younger father that I remembered from before the divorce in his face and his mannerisms. The way he held out his hands when he spoke. Then when I just was able to listen,  I saw my younger brother as I remembered him in his eyes. It was like time travel.

Life has taught him a deep spirituality through great loss.  His calm wisdom, acceptance of life and self was both inspiring and surreal. His philosophy and belief system was perfectly articulated while the answers to questions about the past were vague. The peaceful calm became a choppy sea under the force of scrutiny and lacking trust. Family reunions clarify our weak spots like little else. They always serve to provide the deepest and most searing insights into my most challenging personality traits.

Bringing our past into our present, being with people you haven’t seen in decades reminds you of the maxim: the more things change, the more they stay the same. There is something unchanging and unchangeable in our deepest nature that my long lost younger brother reminds me. At times, I felt like I was in a movie script. Words are often not enough to bridge the gap and the silence that lays between them is unfamiliar. I was surprised at how easy it was to close down and let my tendency to self-protect lead. It took me several days to realize that the gap of estrangement is only crossed by a will to do it.  You have to want to love. You have to choose to let go. It is not the natural outcome.

It was hard to believe some of what my brother said.  It was easy to let my disbelief turn into suspicion. Curiosity and wonder only thrive without judgment. My brother has become a spiritual mystic of sorts and is also still carrying around a lot of unexamined history. He has made peace with some of it though, and reminded me that our shared history was the seeds that brought us to where we are.

Deciding to love him again allowed me to listen more, interrupt less, and ultimately know that I cannot tell him anything. It was the hardest test of  loving that I have faced in a long time.  I am so grateful to know that I have the courage to still open my heart. Therein lies a completely different view of where you have come from and the only way to a fresh start.

I love kids. They are so awake and honest and their affections or disappointment is real and immediate.  Our group holds more than fifty kids, all of whom I adore.  Many have been close with my children for many years. Watching kids grow up is an epiphany.

At any rate, for more than 6 months now we have been planning, designing and fundraising to re-landscape an old  ratty courtyard,  last used in the 1950s, into a new Positive Change memorial courtyard.  Someday, it will include a fountain, a walking labyrinth and a glass block wisdom wall.

Creating the new requires dismantling the old. In our case, the dismantling was full of the nastiest and most prickly plant I had ever encountered… Fire thorns make rose thorns look like hangnails; we learned they are full of venom.  It’s hard to understand what they would be doing in a school courtyard.  Yet, even this obstacle was overcome with the creativity and ingenuity of people working together.

I began the day with anxiety about how our first day and attempt to clear the space would go and wondered as I often do when things start to take shape, exactly what I was thinking and why. The day’s weather encouraged us; after a week of cold, slushy rain, the sunshine was warm and you could feel the potential of spring coming.

However, not long into the day, we were basking in not only warm sun but community action at its best.  Parents and kids working side by side, cutting and hauling brush.  Even when the volunteered chipper didn’t quite have the capacity necessary for the huge amounts of brush we generated, the guys in charge came up with a plan B and we managed to get everything out and hauled away.

It felt heroic actually to complete a big task like that in relatively little time. We did sustain a little fire thorn damage, but nothing lethal. The cleared courtyard was stunning and full of potential. Now everyone is excited for the next work day, which is only moving hundreds of pounds of sod into a new slope.

Meanwhile we have sold out of our first bunch of positivity wrist bands and are awaiting the arrival of the next shipment. We already have hundreds of pre-orders. Amazing to watch positivity multiply itself.  A wonder of opening and a flood of gratitude is all I can report about our first days labor.

Positivity may be the key  to our capacity for high level humanity. We were the top story of the day this week, too…

Unfortunately, when you are looking at a mountain of paper it is hard to know where to begin. It is kind of like when you tell your kid to clean his ridiculously messy room, and you come in an hour later to a child sitting in the middle of a mess. Cleaning up and organizing requires a structure.   Otherwise, you have no way to gauge where the beginning is.

For the book, the only outline that makes sense given the chronology that it was written in is to break down the book into seasons of the quest.  Rather than one year, this book will transpire over two, or maybe even three by the time of its completion. The challenge for me about working with a manuscript is that it prevents you from writing new material.  It also demands that you pay attention to details.

Still, I am intent on getting my new book, which at least has a title: Life that Works: A Guide to Positive Living. What do you think? Any comments or suggestions from  those readers who have been watching the positivity quest for so long? Actually, one thing that could make this writing easier is to get some reader involvement. So as I post ideas,  all of you out there in my virtual community should take some time and tell me if I am on the right track or barking up the wrong tree. In turn, my posts will become more regular again and we will get to revisit all of the original content with more positive eyes.

The most challenging aspect of getting this blog into a book is going to be filling in the stories that I have left out over the years.  Transparency is a noble goal; not always easy to manage in the blogosphere, but those are the stories that change us and stay with us.  The ones that we know are true, that speak to our heart.

“The way to know life is to love many things.” – Vincent Van Gogh

It is safe to say that Valentines Day is a loaded gun. For as many people truly get to celebrate the love they share with their intimate relations,  there are at least as many who struggle with feeling unloved and, worse still, unlovable.  Our collective sense of being unlovable might well be the single most toxic belief our culture suffers.  We buy into the narrow, exclusive  concepts and images that bind love with romance, but never reflect the power of what real love can do. As we search for the holy grail of what love is supposed to look like, we miss all the many ways that we are all loved deeply.

It begins with the idea that love is only true or real when it is reciprocal. We get stuck in the dead end  of believing that if we love someone and that love is not returned to us, it is lost, or worse still, shameful.  It confines love to the exchange between people and ignores the fact that love is an energy that lives inside of each of us with or without exchange. We are never taught to tap into the energy of loving awareness that we all carry with us as our birthright.

Tragically, this lack of awareness leads us to never learning to love ourselves. We spend years stuck on the imperfection of some body part, allowing the flaws of our character or courage to define us. We miss how lovable we are and refuse the love that is coming to us because it resembles the imperfections we see in ourselves.

Take this Valentine’s Day and wipe the slate clean of everything you thought you knew about love and being loved. Begin with a simple practice of learning to feel the seed of love that lives within you. Remember a moment when you felt love. Think of any place in nature where you felt centered or at home. Also, think of a time when you laughed freely with someone, even a stranger; or when you noticed someone on the street and you felt tenderness.  All of these moments are experiences of love.  They are everywhere around us if you look for them. Don’t take anything for granted as you create this new filter of love. Take breathing for instance. Can you imagine that the air around you is loving you? Experience light as loving presence. Can you imagine that the sun shining into you is love?

This is a radical approach to love. It will change everything you see if you let it. When you begin, be prepared for your ego to fight this easy love, but if you can go with it for a few days,  suspend your disbelief long enough to feel the love coming towards you, surrounding you. It will be enough to change course. Life will lighten up, your heart will open up and gratitude will replace grief and cynicism.

In fact, once you start to realize how many times in a day your ability to feel love gets activated, gratitude is the only reasonable response.   Become responsible to and for this filter of love. Make your relationship to witnessing and cultivating this healing awareness the most important part of your day. You will feel loved. You will know how lovable you are. You will be able to love anything or anyone that you want freely, because love will not be an exchange any more, it will just be the life force that lives in you.  This could be the best Valentine’s Day of your life!

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”  -Buddha

It was about five months ago that I sat behind a table at our local high school recruiting kids to join the new Positive Charge club. Our mission was to design and landscape an interior courtyard at the school as a memorial to a pair of students who were lost in a tragic accident last year.  These two boys were full of life and vibrant with positive energy. Our courtyard project is a memorial to that spirit. The kids were all really motivated by memorializing this tragedy and were equally inspired to regenerate the community support that grew up around them during this difficult time. Many of them voiced the feeling that they didn’t want things to go back to how they were before.

It is not always easy to know how to get involved when your kids are in high school.  So I started this group believing that with the right vehicle, the community would  help the kids again  Also, I knew from my own positivity work, that there is nothing like an action plan realized to make you truly understand how much positive power we all carry inside.  I wanted the kids to have this real life experience of imagining something beautiful and subsequently working to make it real.

The last time anyone did anything with this courtyard  space was in 1958 and it has been decades since the space has been open to the students. We began the project by getting more than 500 signatures to get the administration’s permission  to do the project. We spent the last several months working with a  local landscape designer to create a beautiful space that facilities management approved.  Now, we have a great idea of what it will look like when we raise the $20,000 we will need for its completion.

The Positive Charge club meets two to three times per month. We have grown from 15 kids to more than 50, in part I think, because we provide home cooking at the meetings. It is a small price to pay for the positivity we are already generating by our first fundraiser. The group also designed a wristband that says, “you are what you think”  and inside “think positive.”

We have so many cool kids in the group wearing the bands that they are becoming wildly popular. Inspired, new  members to join the group everyday.  Soon, we will have enough money to start the real work in the garden.  They are so motivated that they are thinking about how we can sell them at the other high schools in town.

Best of all for me, is how the kids are soaking up the work of generating positive  thought energy.  It is so simple to learn to watch your thoughts and,  just by paying attention, to realize how quickly negative thinking can become neutralized with space for positive thoughts.  The positive wrist band program really works;  I know because I have been practicing for years now. What a gift it is to watch it become a new trend in high school.