Doable) Ways to Increase the Love in Your Life -- As told to Leigh Newman

Can we increase our ability to love and to be loved? Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, author of The Gifts of Imperfection and professor at the University of Houston, has spent the last 12 years looking into questions like this one, scientifically researching the scope of human emotion, from shame to what she calls in her celebrated TEDx talk wholeheartedness. Here, she talks with Oprah.com about what this last idea means—and how it can change your life if you take some practical, down-to-earth steps to cultivate it.

Of all the thousands of people I've interviewed and studied over the years—looking for patterns in the data—only about 15 to 20 percent were folks living with their whole hearts, folks who were really all in when it came to their relationships. So I decided I wanted to find out why. What quality did these people have that made them so capable of both receiving and giving love?

When I examined my research, I discovered that these were people who deeply believed that they were worthy of love and belonging. These folks believed this regardless of the circumstances, unlike the majority of us who think: "Okay, I'm worthy of love and belonging a little bit, but I'll be superworthy if I get promoted. Or I'll be superworthy if I lose 20 pounds." These folks believed that they were loveable and that they had a place in the world, and those beliefs translated into specific choices they made every day. They were aware. They recognized shame, and they knew how to deal with it. They recognized vulnerability, and they were willing to feel it—rather than ignore or numb it.

What I wondered was, How do the rest of us cultivate these same qualities? It's not like we can just decide to be vulnerable or say, "Hey, I'm worthy," after which—poof—this instantly comes true. But there are practical changes you can make in your life which encourage these beliefs. Here are five basic everyday actions that can help you develop a deeper, more loving sense of wholeheartedness, both for others and for yourself.

Letting Go of Exhaustion

Everybody in the world says that you need to work less in order to live a fuller, more connected life. But so few of us address what prevents us from doing it. The reasons are simple: (1) exhaustion is a status symbol in our culture, and (2) self-worth has become net worth. We live doing so much and with so little time that anything unrelated to the to-do list—taking a nap, say, or reading a novel—actually creates stress.

Wholehearted people, on the other hand, know when to stop and rest. Personally, I had to learn this. I'm still learning this. I screw it up every now and then, but five years ago I made some huge changes in my personal and private life. I went from full time to part time at the university, and my husband, who is a pediatrician, cut his hours to four days a week. As it stands now, we never get less than eight hours of sleep.

What did this require? A constellation of choices. For example, one of the things I have to do to cultivate more rest is to say no. Last year, I turned down 85 percent of the invitations I got to speak. Because I have a commitment to be at the family table four nights a week.

To say no, we have to understand why we're saying yes. One of the reasons is scarcity. I, like many of us, was so afraid that maybe all these opportunities would just go away, that maybe next year people wouldn't ask for me to come speak, and maybe my work wouldn't get the attention it needed, and that if I didn't have my work, who would I be? So I thought I had to say yes, yes, yes. The only reason I can now say no is because I work on my shame "gremlins." Gremlins are the tricksters who whisper all of those terrible things in our ears that keep us afraid and small. When the gremlins say "you better say yes, or they won't like you" or "they'll think you're lazy," I whisper back: "Not this time. I get to say no. I get to love myself, stay home and drive soccer carpool."

Painting a Gourd

All of us were made to make things. During my studies, I found out a surprising piece of data: There is no such thing as a creative or noncreative person. Every single human being is creative. Every research participant could recall a time in his or her life when creativity brought him or her great joy. It was usually childhood, and the creative expressions ranged from coloring or finger-painting to dancing, singing or building. What was most fascinating was that the participants never talked about learning how to be creative—they just were.

As adults, what keeps us from being creative—from painting, cooking, scrapbooking, doodling, knitting, rebuilding an engine or writing—is what I call the comparison gremlin (a close cousin of the shame gremlin). People say, "I'm not good enough," or "Why am I the only one with dangling modifiers?" or "I'm not a real sculptor...I'm a total poser." In other words, we shame ourselves into stopping. While we may have all started creative, between ages 8 and 14, at least 60 percent of the participants remember learning that they were not creative. They began to compare their creations, they started getting graded for their art, and many heard from a teacher or a parent that "art wasn't their thing." So we don't have to teach people to find joy in creating; we have to make sure not to teach them that there's only one acceptable way to be creative.

I had to push myself to rediscover my own artistic side. Unused creativity is not benign. It clumps inside us, turning into judgment, grief, anger and shame. Before I turned my life around, I used to dismiss people who spent time creating. When a friend would invite me to go to an art class or something, I'd respond: "How cute. You go do your A-R-T; I'm busy with a real J-O-B." Now I realize that was my fear and my own frustrated need to create.

To kick things off, I went to a gourd-painting class with my mom and my then-9-year-old daughter, Ellen. It was one of the best days of my life. I'm not kidding. I still paint, and now I'm having a serious love affair with photography. But start with something easy. Why not start with a gourd? Put a silly face on it. Make it smile.

Practicing Calm

None of us get calmer by telling ourselves to calm down. We get it by understanding what calm is: being able to see clearly because we are not overreacting to a situation. We're listening and understanding. We are letting ourselves feel the vulnerability of the moment (the call from the doctor, the meeting with the angry boss) and then managing that feeling.

Calm participants in my studies all have a few things in common. They breathe when they're feeling vulnerable. They ask questions before they weigh in, including the three most important questions—ones that changed my own life. The first is, Do I have enough information to freak out? (Ninety percent of the time, the answer is no.) The second is, Where did you hear the upsetting news? (Down the hall? From a trusted source?) The third is, If I do have enough reliable information to freak out, and if I do that, will it be helpful?

When my daughter, Ellen, comes home and says, "Oh my God, Mom, the school moved my locker, and now I can't reach it!" I stop. I remember what I used to say: "Oh that's it! I'm furious! I'm going off to school tomorrow, and you're going to get your locker back!" Now I say, "Tell me more about it." And 15 minutes later, I find out that the guy she likes has a locker down at the other end of the hall; what she really wants is to have a locker nearer to him.

This is real change. Four or five years ago, I was the least calm person you have ever met. And when people describe me today—people like my co-workers, friends and family—they say, "You're the calmest person I know." Well, it's because I practice it, the same way you practice the violin.

Fooling Around

One of the things I noticed in my research was that wholehearted people tended to fool around a lot. This was how I described their behavior, "fooling around," because I didn't know what this behavior was. It was such a foreign concept to me that I couldn't even name it correctly until I happened to be sitting in the backyard watching my kids jump on the trampoline. All of a sudden, I went: "Holy crap. Those grown-ups in my studies are playing! They are piddling and playing! They are total slackers!"

Then I found some research by Dr. Stuart Brown. He said that play is something you did "that caused you to lose track of time." Which I called work. He called play "time spent without purpose." Which I called an anxiety attack.

Clearly, I had a problem. So I sat down and made a list of nonwork-related things that I love to do where I lost track of time, I lost my sense of self-consciousness, I didn't want them to end, and they didn't serve any purpose except that I enjoyed them. Then I had my husband do the same thing. Then we did it with our two kids, and I made a Venn diagram to understand the data (sorry, I'm a researcher).

Our family-play Venn diagram showed us what kind of play we share in common, and we realized there were only three kinds that we all enjoyed. Because sitting on the floor playing Candy Land? I'm not losing track of time. I've been on the floor for 30 minutes; I could shoot myself. But swimming? Hiking? Going to the movies? All of us enjoy that.

So now, we totally build our family vacations around being outside. Because it's play for all of us. It's battery-charging for all of us. But that doesn't just happen. We draw diagrams. We plan. And then...we goof off.

Doing the Scarecrow

What keeps most of us from dancing—at any age—is usually the desire to be cool, and being cool, even for grown-ups, is a refusal to be vulnerable. Cool starts early. Some of the latest research shows that rather than being an adolescent issue, our kindergartners and first graders are starting to feel anxiety over being cool and belonging. Imagine being 5 years old and deciding that it's not so good to let others see how we feel.

When it comes to dancing, we're afraid that we're bad dancers or that others will laugh at us, so we don't do it enough. About eight years ago, my daughter and I were at Nordstrom. She was in fourth grade, and there were these beautiful, put-together mothers in the shoe department with us. I was in my Jabba the Hutt sweatsuit; I looked horrible. And I was doing the whole shame routine...down to telling myself: "Argh. You're a disaster. You don't belong in this nice store with these fancy, put-together people."

The kids' department started playing a song. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some movement. Then I saw three of the beautiful, put-together mothers and two of the daughters look past me, gasping. When I looked over, it was Ellen. Everyone was looking at Ellen. She had put her shoes down, and she was full-on doing the robot to the music—popping and locking. Without a care in the world. And you could tell these daughters were getting ready to laugh, and the moms were like, "Oh my God, girls, shield your eyes."

At that moment, I had a choice. Previously, shame would have taken over, and I would have looked at Ellen and just said: "Pull yourself together, Ellen. Come on. Jesus. Stop being so...weird." But I just heard this voice, the voice from my research and the voice from what I was trying to change in my own life, and that voice said: "Don't betray her. Be on her side. Be on her side." So I looked over and said, "Awesome robot." And she said, "Hey, Mom. Show me the scarecrow again."

The scarecrow is when you swing your hands like they're not connected to your elbows. I did not want to do the scarecrow in Nordstrom. Inside me there is a seventh grader with sweaty palms who doesn't have anywhere to sit in the cafeteria. But I did it. My daughter and I danced. Maybe I was faking it at little, but actions are far more important than anything we tell children. We have to show them love and self-worth, just as we have to show ourselves love and self-worth. We can't just overlay these ideas on our lives. We have to change the way we live—and, fortunately, there isn't just one way to do it.

The 3 Questions To Ask Yourself When Things Go Wrong - By Deepak Chopra

Challenges are part of everyone's life, but there are dark moments when a challenge turns into a crisis. The outcome of our lives depends on the choices we make at those moments. Will they be breakthroughs or setbacks? What we call wisdom is a crucial tool here. Without it, people usually make their most important decisions based on impulse or its opposite, habit.

It might seem impossible that any three questions can—and should—be asked anytime things go wrong, but the sad truth is that millions of us dwell on the three questions we shouldn't ask, questions such as: (1) What's wrong with me? (2) Whom can I blame? (3) What's the worst-case scenario?

We all feel the urge to condemn ourselves out of guilt, to blame others for our misfortunes and to fantasize about total disaster. But these three questions will haunt you and do untold harm unless you consciously stop them, push them aside and replace them with the right questions, leading to the right actions. Here are three positive, self-affirming ways to approach your next tough situation:

1. Is this a problem I should fix, put up with or walk away from?

Unless you can answer this question clearly and rationally, your vision will be clouded. Without knowing it, you will be acting under the influence of negative emotions such as fear. You will give in to impulsiveness or fall back on old habits.

You must clarify your inner confusion. You must get your bearings in a reasonable way. The first step is to consider—in consultation with those you trust—a course of action that begins with finding a fix. If the fix isn't there, ask why. Perhaps someone is blocking you or you lack the resources of money and time. Yet it is always worthwhile to search for a fix and commit yourself to finding one. Only when you feel satisfied that you've exhausted your realistic options should you begin to decide between putting up with the situation (using patience, not passivity) and walking away.

The three alternatives are easier than they sound, because most people vacillate when things go bad. One day they wishfully hope for a fix and maybe take a few steps toward it. The next day they feel passive and victimized, so they put up with things as they are. The third day they are sick and tired of suffering and simply want to escape. The overall result is self-defeat. No solution can ever be found by running in three different directions. So clarify your situation and act on what you clearly see.

2. Who can I consult who has solved the same problem successfully?

Bad things aren't solved in isolation, yet there is no doubt that our reactions isolate us. We become afraid and depressed. We draw into ourselves. Around the edges we entertain shame and guilt, and once these appear, there is even more reason to shut down.

Finding someone who has gone through the same crisis that you are facing accomplishes several things at once. It gives you an example to follow, a confidant who understands your plight and an alternative to withdrawing into isolation. Victims always feel alone and helpless. So reach out to someone who has proven, through their own lives, that they were not victimized by the bad thing you are facing now.

We aren't talking about hand-holding, shared misery or even therapy. All those activities can be beneficial (or not), but there's no substitute for talking to a person who has entered a dark place and come out successfully. Where do you find such a person? Ask around, tell your story, seek support groups, go online to find blogs and forums—the possibilities are much greater than ever before. And don't stop until you find not just good advice but real empathy from someone you trust.

3. How can I reach deeper into myself for solutions?

There is just no getting around that turning bad things into good things is up to you. No one can be there all the time, and like it or not, crises are all-consuming. You find yourself facing an inner world that is suddenly full of threats, fears, illusions, wishful thinking, denial, distractions and conflict. The world "out there" won't change until the world "in here" does.

There is a simple spiritual truth that I believe in deeply: The level of the solution is never found at the level of the problem. Knowing this, you can escape many traps that people fall into. What exists at the level of the problem? Repetitive thinking that gets nowhere. Old conditioning that keeps applying yesterday's outworn choices. Lots of obsessive thinking and stalled action. I could go on. But the relevant insight is that you have more than one level of awareness, and at a deeper level there is untapped creativity and insight.

Your higher self contains the potential for new solutions, but you must find it. Instead of "higher self," you can substitute any term that applies—soul, Atman, Holy Spirit, muse, inspiration—because linguistics are not nearly as important as the experience itself. You must experience the place inside where the light dawns and brings hope, where peace is possible and there is certainty about finding a viable path forward.

It's not a mystery that such a place can be reached, because even in the worst crisis we experience flashes of it. The trick is to be able to inhabit the level of awareness that brings solutions. First, know that this level exists. Second, make a plan to get there, through all the techniques open to everyone: meditation, reflection, contemplation, prayer. Reduce your stress by every means you can find. Seek others who understand consciousness. Read books that inspire you but also books that realistically describe what it means to go on the inward journey. I've given an abbreviated plan of action, but the important thing is that you take the first steps inside.

Of course, I can't know what bad things are happening to you specifically. I just urge you to quit the majority who live in confusion and conflict. Join the minority who see a clear path out of present darkness, who never submit to fear and despair and who in truth lead the world into a future full of light.

What the Happiest People Know for Sure ot how success really works? By Dawn Raffel -

I grew up revering goals of all kinds: big, small, and bite-size; readily attainable; wildly ambitious; broken up, written down, projected on the stars. My attitude was hardly surprising, given the adages that are central to our culture: If you can see it, you can be it; if you don't know where you want to go, you're never going to get there; the road to bliss is paved with goals. Okay, I made that last one up, but a lot of us seem to believe it.


Which is why Stephen Shapiro, a cheerful subversive in casual business attire, comes as a shock to the system: He's making a cottage industry of what he calls goal-free living. (His book is titled—what else?—Goal-Free Living.) If you want to be happy—successful in the broadest sense—he suggests you take your nifty five-year plan and your lifetime to-do list and throw them out the window. And while you're at it, get some air.


Shapiro had a long track record of running motivational workshops for major corporations when he had his epiphany on the road. He had published a book called 24/7 Innovation and was planning to interview business leaders throughout the country for what he envisioned as a sequel. Not far into his research, though, he spotted a pattern: The most fulfilled people were also the most spontaneous and the least goal oriented. Fascinated, Shapiro chucked his agenda and drove 12,000 miles in his techno-wired car (equipped with cellular Internet access, digital recording equipment, and everything else short of an espresso bar), interviewing risktakers and box breakers, and asking for their suggestions about who else he should meet. He spent time with everyone from Doug Busch, a VP and a chief technology officer at Silicon giant Intel, to John T. Martin, then curator of one of the world's only voodoo museums, as well as 148 others thriving in such fields as education, technology, and philanthropy. After learning about the circuitous paths they'd taken, Shapiro was convinced that the key to happiness lies in checking out the detours and back roads, literal and figurative, without fear of changing course. Road maps for life, he believes, might lead to material gain, but there's a good chance that if you follow them unquestioningly, you'll lose yourself.


"I was giving a speech on a cruise ship recently, and the other speaker was a professional athlete," he says. "Her session was on setting goals, and mine was on not setting them. Someone in the audience raised her hand and said, 'I have a question. I've been very good at setting goals and very good at achieving them, and I'm still miserable. Why is that?'"


Give Shapiro a minute, and he'll rattle off the reasons, as he did that day at sea, and as he does almost every day, everywhere he can. "Number one I'm calling 'Whose goal is it, anyway?'" he says. "Most people's goals aren't their own. They tend to be driven by society and family pressure."


Second, he says, when you focus on a goal, "you put blinders on. You lose your peripheral vision and miss out on all the great opportunities around you. Third," he says, hardly pausing for breath, "you're always living for the future. You end up saying, 'I'll be happy when....' You sacrifice today in the hopes that something wonderful is going to happen tomorrow. But it almost never does." Yes, you might win the promotion or bag the trophy, but you rarely feel the lasting satisfaction you'd imagined. "Mountain climbers have a concept called the false summit, where they get to what they think is the peak and then they realize they're only at the bottom of an even bigger mountain," Shapiro says. "That's what happens with goals. You're constantly chasing them. The fourth issue is that you're courting failure." Meaning, he says, you become attached to one outcome, and even if you get it, reality seldom matches the dream in all its Technicolor splendor.

But just a minute here. Aren't goals, however idealistic or elusive, crucial to achievement? How much greatness would be lost to the world if artists, athletes, scientists, and thinkers fled potential disappointment and boredom to wander off in search of delight?

"Goal-free living isn't about being aimless or saying, 'Oh, this is getting tough. I've got to stop,'" Shapiro contends. "It's about being passion-driven in the moment, while knowing you can change course." It's also about "getting out, playing, and trying lots of new things." You can't find out what you love to do by sitting and thinking about it, he says; you must experience it.


Intel's Doug Busch, for instance, started off picking fruit during college, then maintained machinery in a poultry processing plant. "Most people think that's pretty low-end, but he actually loved it, and realized the reason was that he wanted to work with his hands," Shapiro says. "So he went back to school and became a mechanical engineer." Next, he got a job at Intel and grew more interested in other aspects of technology, eventually growing into his current position. "This is meandering with purpose," Shapiro says. "When you're living a life of passion, you're almost always making a contribution.

"Let's say you'd like to be a healer," he says. "You can move down the road to medical school but look around and see that maybe you don't want to be a doctor after all. Maybe you want to be a nurse, or work with the elderly, or start a charity. You don't lock yourself in."


If, like me, you are a goalaholic, you can't be expected to quit cold turkey, nor do you need to. "The question is, do you have the right goals, and are you relating to them the right way?" Shapiro says. Some people abuse goals "as a way of escaping from being present. They distract themselves by looking ahead. I'm much more into enjoying every single moment for what it is and allowing things to unfold." He suggests thinking in terms of aspirations (work in the visual arts) rather than goals (get a painting into a specific gallery by date X) because they give you pleasure today and are more broadly defined.


Even corporations—in fact, especially corporations, Shapiro tells his clients—suffer from rigid planning. No one can foretell how the world will look in just a few years—witness the quick burst of the dot-com bubble. His biggest beef is with the popular institutional concept of goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, results oriented, and time based. The idea that you'll know right away whether you've succeeded or failed is misguided and crippling: "Not only have you set yourself up for failure but you've put a time limit on everything," Shapiro says.


His antidote to the pain of a failed goal is to step back and ask yourself whether you defined the desired outcome too narrowly and whether you tried to control the uncontrollable. "Life is unpredictable," he says. "So give up control. Create many paths. And play hard."


Above all, trash the "If I don't succeed by Tuesday, I'm a loser" mentality. "You know what?" he says merrily. "I'm not going to be done with what I'm doing till I'm dead. Sometimes I think of things so audacious they couldn't come true, so I just keep playing with them. It's really about applying creativity to every aspect of your life."


And that, if you'll excuse me, sounds like a worthy goal.

Kony2012

A Note from Gary Zukav: Occupy Your Heart

The Occupy movement spread around the world despite beatings, arrests, evictions and the loss of so much personal property, frequently by people who have little personal property. The energy in general, as far as I can see, is not defiant in a superior way or angry in a personal way. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech the night before he died, "There are some kinds of fire that water can't put out." He was on fire and so was the civil rights movement in the United States—with courage, clarity and commitment unto death.


Now another fire is burning. Its intent was not to consume Wall Street, but to occupy it, to make it our own, to become one with it in order to change it for the better. There is no other way to change something or someone for the better except to occupy it first. The only person you can occupy is yourself. That is why the only person who can change you for the better is you. Without your decision to change and your commitment to change, you will not change.

Religions cannot change you. If you are angry, you will be angry. If you are righteous, you will be righteous. No dynamic other than your own ability to distinguish within yourself between love and fear—and choose love—can change you, moment by moment, decision by decision. In other words, the only things standing between you and the compassionate, wise and creative person you want to be are matters of choice. Your choice. No one can occupy your generosity except you. Who can occupy your patience when impatience roars through you? Who except you can choose not to act with judgment when all of your thoughts are judgmental? Your life is yours to live, no matter how you choose to live it. When you do not think about how you intend to live it, it lives you. When you occupy it, step into it consciously, you live it.


At its best, the Occupy movement expresses this, draws from it and creates with it. It is a movement of self-responsibility uniting countless self-responsible participants—an impossibility for the mind to grasp, but not for the heart. Commitment and creativity cannot be captured and handcuffed. Inspiration cannot be jailed. The heart cannot be contained. Who can occupy your heart except you? What will happen when you do?


Love,
Gary

Set your heart Free--By Martha Beck

Our hearts are imprisoned for just one reason: The only language they can speak is truth. Unlike the mind, which can be persuaded to accept the most bizarre ideas ("Look, it's the Hale-Bopp comet! Time to kill yourself!), your heart tells it like it is, without bothering to be tactful or socially appropriate. Free hearts rock boats, break rules, do things that disrupt the system—whether that system is a dysfunctional family, a bloated bureaucracy, or the whole wide world.

As a result, few of us speak the truth out loud. All our lives we've been hearing things like: What you are thinking/feeling/saying/becoming, etc., is stupid/rude/scandalous/sinful/depressing/ridiculous/unoriginal, etc. All the infinite variations on this theme convey just one message: Silence your heart or you will be rejected. Rejection hurts our little social-mammal hearts so much that just the threat of it convinces most of us to cooperate with our enemies. This is a two-step process: First we go dumb, learning never to speak our deepest truths. Then we go deaf, refusing to hear our own souls.

To release your heart, you simply reverse the two-step process by which you locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart—messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world. It's lucky this process is so simple, because it's also terrifying.

People with captive hearts often spend years thinking very hard about things like reawakening their passion or discovering their destiny. This never works, because such information is stored in the heart, not the brain, and is expressed by feelings, not thoughts.

Not to worry. Paying attention to any feeling unlocks your heart, and if subtle emotional nuance eludes you, physical sensations will do nicely. Try this exercise : Write a detailed description of everything you're feeling in your body. If you do this for more than ten minutes, you'll find that you've also started describing your emotions.

Think of This As "Shock" Therapy:

Once you begin listening to your heart, I guarantee it's going to say some things that shock you—otherwise, you wouldn't have locked it away in the first place. You may discover that your heart wants to spend your paycheck on flowers or wear purple spandex to a board meeting. You don't have to act on these impulses, but you must not judge or repress them.

Treat your heart like a tired, hurt child: Accept its tantrums, revenge fantasies, and pity parties, but don't get stuck in them. Say kind things to yourself: "It's okay that you love your goldfish more than your in-laws" or "Of course you want to stab Billy's third-grade teacher with a meat fork—all the moms do." When you acknowledge your forbidden feelings calmly, you'll find that you actually have more control over your actions. It's when feelings are repressed that they burst out in dangerous, unhealthy ways.

The more you tune in, the deeper the truths your heart will tell and the more intense your emotions will become. You may feel great pain about times others have hurt you—and, worse, times you have hurt others. But as this pain flows through you and begins to dissipate, you'll find something beneath it, something astonishingly powerful, something one philosopher called the "all-pervading radiant beauty" of your heart of hearts.

Defy your inner jailer:

At this point you'll begin to realize that your heart is telling you where to steer your life. You'll know the next step because you will begin to long for anything that connects you to it.

When desire really comes from your heart, deciding to act on it will bring another strong sensation. You'll feel an extraordinary clarity, the sense that something inside you has clicked into place. Of course, your Inner Jailer might not agree. You may be flooded with reminders that your heart's instructions are stupid or boring or rude. Don't listen. Run.

Spread the word:

Toni Morrison said that "the function of freedom is to free someone else." This is the final step necessary for keeping your heart at liberty, and you do it in just one way: by telling your story. However you do it—a journal, an artistic creation, the pictures you hang on your walls, or the way you raise your children—telling your story demolishes the barriers between your heart and the outside world. I won't lie: This means that your heart will be exposed and, yes, broken. But it's important to remember that a heart is imprisoned not by being broken but by being silenced. There will be people (often the people you most want to please) who won't like what you say. It's going to hurt—and it's going to heal.

As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story, calling your tribe, and liberating not only your heart but the hearts of others. This is the very definition of love, the process that makes all-too-human people and societies capable of true humanity. It will chart you a life's journey as unique and authentic as your fingerprint; send you out, full of hope and breathtaking exhilaration, onto paths you never thought you could travel. It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along.

How to Escape the Matrix By Edwin Harkness Spina

The Matrix was one of the most popular and thought-provoking movies of all time. Viewers all over the world were captivated by the film’s primary message: People get into deep trouble when they mistake what they perceive for reality.

What most viewers do not realize is that prior to the release of this groundbreaking film, western intelligence agencies were already using the term "the Matrix" to describe today's world. This was in contrast to their work with remote viewers, who would "escape the matrix" to gather intelligence. Art truly does imitate life.

In the movie, the Matrix is an elaborate Artificial Intelligence computer simulation that's so captivating that people mistake it for reality. People perceive they are walking about and interacting with others, but their physical bodies are actually submerged in fluid-filled pods, "plugged into" the Matrix, while their vital life force is harnessed to power the Matrix.

After Neo (Keanu Reaves) learns the truth, with the help of Morpheus's (Lawrence Fishburne) training, he is able to overcome his misconception that the Matrix is reality. Neo rebels against the machines that create his false reality and, eventually, he escapes the limitations of the Matrix. To others, he has developed superhuman abilities, but, "in reality," he has merely recognized the truth.

Escaping the Matrix is a metaphor for the mystic path to enlightenment.

The Matrix can be defined as the world that we perceive, which includes the physical world, as well as higher planes of emotions and thoughts, which also affect us.

Within the Matrix are countless fear-based thoughts and emotions that condition us to accept limitations. We are taught that we have little power, and what little power we do have, we are advised to delegate to authority figures and experts. Swimming in a sea of negative thoughts, we are prompted to use our creative ability to imagine even more negative thoughts. Without introspection, the Matrix gets darker and more dense.

Anyone who blindly accepts these prevalent, negative thoughts will have his or her life path dictated by the Matrix.

But those who recognize that it is our collective thoughts and beliefs that power the Matrix will recognize the way out.

When we incarnate on earth, we temporarily forget the higher truth of who we are. Our life mission is to remember, to connect with our innermost self, so that we may transcend the Matrix.

The reality we perceive with our senses is not the true reality, but merely a small portion of reality, masquerading as the whole. But, unlike the "alternate reality" that Neo must extricate himself from, in our "reality," there is no need to rebel. Rather, our goal should be to transcend. We want to "be in this world, but not of it."

The outer world is a reflection of our inner thoughts and beliefs, whether individual or collective, which have been conditioned by our experience in the Matrix. Consequently, the Matrix is a learning environment, where we get feedback on how our thoughts manifest. Thankfully, our negative thoughts do not (typically) manifest instantaneously. Otherwise, we would risk the spontaneous destruction of our world by thinking negative thoughts

Using Meditation to Escape the Matrix

Clearing yourself of negative energies through daily meditation can provide a direct link to the "ultimate reality," i.e., the pure consciousness residing within each of us. As your negative beliefs are purified through regular contact with the "light" of your divine nature, unhealthy emotions, such as fear and anger, will naturally begin to diminish, and you’ll be free to transcend to higher states of consciousness. You will "download" more of your own true self, while simultaneously and automatically attracting others of similar vibration

Your world will become more synchronistic. You will repel angry, fearful people, and those who stick around will become calmer and more centered. You will radiate love. By simply being in higher consciousness, you will have a greater effect on the world than the most gifted orators and political leaders.

The higher your consciousness and energy are vibrating, the faster your thoughts will manifest. When you align with your innermost self, you are aligned more closely with the Source of all creation. At the apex of your individual consciousness, you are connected with The One. You then have at your disposal the entire universe to help you manifest the highest good for all.

In actuality, we are single points of awareness in the Oneness that is Reality. What we interpret as the physical world is the projection of this awareness, which is taking place in the Mind of God. We are, as Shakespeare pointed out, merely "actors" in a divine play.

When we wake up to this knowledge, the play does not stop. We are free to act or interact, in bliss and peace, unattached to the Matrix. We have within us the power to create "heaven on earth."

In my new program I teach various methods you can use to release fear, eliminate anger, dis-identify with your emotions, take back your power, listen to your inner master, and be yourself. The goal of all of these exercises is the same: to help you escape the Matrix.