Day 28: The Virtue of Caring
29 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Caring Tags: anxiety, depression, healing, health, virtues
This meditation is called “Unconditional Love Meditation.” Caring and Love are bound together and unseperable so I thought this would be a nice meditation for this virtue.
Caring is giving love and attention to people and things that matter to you. When you care about people, you help them. You do a careful job, giving your very best effort. You treat people and things gently and respectfully. Caring makes the world a safer place.
Caring appears at first glance to be a simple, child-friendly virtue. It is often one of the first ones that children can grasp and practice. But when you meditate on “Caring” you find greater implications than what a child can understand.
A caring person is easy to be around. A careless person is not so much, right? Caring about a person or a job or a special belonging shows respect and integrity to both you and the object of your care. Being careless is a sure fire way to get fired, or lose a friend, or cause problems with family members.
In terms of personal transformation, turning our care towards ourselves takes an entirely different sort of courage in a culture that is very outward focused. To truly care for yourself, it means to listen to the songs of your own heart, and then follow Your Truth. We show ourselves we care when we give ourselves permission to slow down, to go easy, to release ourselves from judgement and evaluation. We show ourselves we care when we recognize our nobility and love ourselves throughout all of our shortcomings.
Day 198: The Virtues of Infinite Possibilities
11 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Assertiveness, Caring, Compassion, Daily Log, Enlightenment, Generosity, Peacefulness, Trust Tags: healing, health, personal growth, self development, virtues blog
Wow — as I wrote Day 198, it occured to me that this virtues blog has been a part of my life for quite some time now. When I started doing the daily count the idea was that I was going to count the days, like a captain of a ship would, on my journey into health and well-being through the virtues.
Interestingly, last week I came across another inspirational website of people who are also on journeys of 100 day cycles. They call it the 100 Day Challenge (at www.cocreatingreality.com) and the idea is to define a goal at the beginning. It can be any goal — to be healthier, to get a new job, to watch less TV, to eat more veggies, to start an art class — anything…and then they take steps throughout the 100 days to achieve that goal and blog about in on the site.
I’ve joined the 100 Day Challenge group as of March 1 and so I am on day 11 there. My goal is to increase abundance in my life, especially abundance of love and prosperity. My strategies include using my writing strengths to increase my income and putting a focus on my physical body’s well-being and needs in order to remove old toxic build up and increase my physical health.
To align my virtues blog with my 100 Day challenge, on day 201 I will bring it in line with my 100 Day Challenge which will be Day 14.
On this virtues blog I will continue to write about using virtues to overcome challenges and what strategies can be useful in doing so.
In the meantime, I wanted to address the Virtue of Infinite Possibilities and answer what does that mean anyways?
Here is why having an idea of Infinite Possibilities is useful in the journey towards replacing negatives with positives:
When we look at something and say, “this is the way that it is” a flower is yellow or this person is mean or this job is terrible, whatever the case may be…when we say that we close ourselves off to peace and happiness. In order to have the hope for peace and joy we must, must, must have the idea that something can be different than what it is. This flower will look blue at night time, this person has just lost a child and is greiving, this job would be better if you talked to your boss about your need for a raise and got one. You see…there are possibilities for everything.
INFINITE POSSIBILITIES? Really? You ask? How can that be? And what does that even mean and how does it apply to me?
In terms of virtues, it means that there is no end to the ways that we can improve ourselves, our lives, and the lives of those around us. It means that if we release ourselves from limiting thoughts and we allow our heart to guide us, we will begin to see the world in an entirely new way. We may have a renewed sense of hope or faith, we may begin to trust ourselves, we may begin to trust others. We may begin to be more assertive, more caring, more gentle…whatever we need in order to approach the situation differently is at our disposal.
When we even make one small step to re-direct our intentions towards things that will improve our peace of mind, our personal well-being, and the happiness of those around us, then we open ourselves up to more possiblities. And the possibilities are endless.
The idea of infinite possibilities is appealing to me right now because I am giving a lot of thought lately to Abundance. Abundance is not a virtue, per say, but it is a sister to virtues such as Mercy, Grace, and Generosity. When we trust that there is a Merciful, Gracious, and Generous Being that has our best interests at mind, then we begin to let Peace in. And it does not matter what name we give this Being — Do you call it Universe? God? Creator? Blessed Beauty? Allah? Higher Power? These names are all names for the same Divine and Ancient Spirit of Life that created us, loves us, nurtures us, and moves us in our lives towards a greater and greater Peace.
The possibilities for Peace are endless. And what a beautiful gift that is.
