Listen To (What You) Love

“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love." I can do that no more - the pain would be too great - My Love is selfish - I cannot breathe without you.”
— John Keats

To those of us who are love fanatics, English Romantic poet Keats' love letters to his neighbour, and later his fiancée Fanny Brawne, are legend. As next door neighbours, they exchanged numerous short notes, and occasionally more passionate ones.

His illness brought them closer, and when he left for Rome, they were engaged and deeply in love. Although Keats's friends were against the match, he died loving her.

In listening to love, Keats left to the world some of the most famous love letters ever written.

Similarly, we listen out to that voice in our hearts all the time. Some of us remember how our parents taught us about God, and religion, and we always carry the feeling, the promise that somehow if we listen carefully God's voice will somehow come to us. Those whispers come from the heart, because that is where we reside - and the true gospel is when we "gossip" with ourselves, as we listen out to what our heart is trying to tell us.

When we listen to our hearts, we can push boundaries. The 2012 International Women of Courage Award Winners are testament to that. All are winners, but one that stands out for me is Safak Pavey. She refused to let her life be over after being disabled in an accident. Pavey listened to her heart, instead, and is now the first disabled woman elected to her country's parliament, giving a voice to disabled people, women and minorities.

It takes courage to move outside your safety net. Children's author Dr Seuss did just that when he wrote an adult book with nude illustrations. His book of nudes is little known, but he listened to his heart.

Likewise, teenager Patrick Kanethe, the boy with the bionic limbs who has decided to show off his disabilities, rather than hide away with them. His heart's voice gives him the strength to be strong. Science can now do amazing things to help rebuild broken broken bodies, but it takes more than bionics to mend our courage when things go wrong, and push us on to try again.

Life is more than simply following a dogmatic "script". Write your own. Sometimes you just have to follow your heart where it leads you. Friends of the late writer Douglas Adams say he was like that - a man who loved ideas so much he had to test everything out.

Find your soul in your heart

Uncovering your heart's voice is more than just doing what takes your fancy - it's about uncovering your soul.

Carl Jung made a connection on writing and the soul, although the Swiss psychiatrist's focus was naturally on the mind. Jung is the founder of analytical psychology and is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration.

Known as one of the best researchers in the field of dream analysis and symbolisation, his advice on how to process the thoughts and visions from the deeper and sometimes frightening parts of the mind was shared by one of his clients. Jung instructed:

I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them… Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.

When we look outside, we dream, but when we look inside, Jung knew we awaken, however our vision can only become clear when we look into our hearts. And to aid us, we need to realise that what we read, and write, fills our hearts. The words we listen to, and use, on a daily basis fill our hearts. And this is the language with which our heart speaks back to us.

It only makes sense, therefore, to fill it with words of love. Because words can be used not just to convey information, but to create an emotional effect. They have the power to hurt, but they also have the power to heal and inspire.

Is the heart like a brain?

The words that make up this blog have all entered into your heart's mind - and it's just one example of the importance of words, and writing, in our lives. You can also tell a lot about a person by the kinds of books they read.

Having our lives filled with negativity, reading negative books for example, can fill our hearts with negativity. On the other hand, reading romantic fiction fills our hearts with positive energies - and as sexual energy is one of our most healing sources - we could say that reading erotica (depending on its subject content) is good for our health, too!

You learn more if you listen carefully

Our health concerns most, if not all of us. It affects our ability to do a lot of things such as live out our dreams that speak to us from the heart. Sometimes things get worse as we age, but it does not have to be that way if you learn to listen to your body and understand what it's saying to you.

Usually when I don't feel well, I try to work with my body to understand what's gone wrong. As with your soul and your heart, you must consider your body one of your guides if you desire to be healthy for the rest of your life. You don't have to be intuitive to be able to listen to what your own body is telling you. It whispers to you, but if you don't understand it, the whispers get louder and eventually it hits you like a ton of bricks.

Right now, for instance, if you have kidney problems, it could be related to some family issue. If you have leg cramps, maybe stress at work has you cramped up about something. If you have stomach aches, that's generally about fear. It could be fear related to relationships or many other things. When you listen to your body and it's symptoms, it tells you a lot of things, some of which are related to relationships, others are related to your higher path and to having more peace, joy and fulfilment.

Many of you that have contacted me have indicated an interest in having better relationships and attracting your twin flame. Some of you have no desire for a relationship with a significant other at this time, and that's cool, too. Single people automatically feeling lonely is just hype.

If you listen to your heart, and follow the things you love, you'll be on the right road to recovery from any crisis that might come your way. And we should use every difficulty that we find to make our heart's voice speak stronger, and grow spiritually, in order to handle the next problem to come along that much better.

Now I'm not saying it's easy. Taking the time to actually find our heart's inner voice, and then listen to it doesn't come easy for some. But it is easier to listen to and become more attuned to our bodies.

Dismissing that odd creak or groan from your body could be fatal in the long run. The most common mistake people make with regard to their health is that they don't realise to get healthy, live out their dreams, and have better relationships they need to understand what's going on in their bodies.

Never ignore your body's complaints. If you're an opened minded person, the information your body is relaying to you will change the way you look at your health, and your relationships, because they're all related.

Once you can do that, you'll age more gracefully, because you're able to stay healthy by learning to understand your body as your guide. The end result is more joy, peace, energy and fulfilment.

With yours in love,

What's the Point of Love in Life?

Life asked Death, “Why do people love me but hate you?” Death responded, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.”
— Anonymous

There are times in life we ask, what's the point of it all? Kingdoms rise and fall. Lifetimes come and go. Life goes in the blink of an eye. Are any of us even here long enough to make a difference?

When we take a look at our world today, corruption and injustice plague our world now more than ever. Sometimes we feel like merely a consumer in the system, like cattle to corporations and world banks, and some grumble about conspiracies and secret societies behind a new world order.

Literally trillions of money goes to fighting wars, while millions of children die from hunger related diseases across the world. We feel the global quality of life is on a continual decline as food and resource prices continue to increase. And where even people in abject poverty will cut back from food, just to buy a little pleasure in life. The experts call it "a balance" between survivalist behaviour and pleasure-seeking behaviour, explaining that as human beings we need both.

Meanwhile, developing countries are still exploiting the world's natural resources. As forests are destroyed and resources exhausted, we'll all pay the price for the world's uncontrolled consumerism as we slowly run out of air to breathe. We've been taught for as long as I can remember that rainforests are the lungs of the Earth, but despite this, I don't see anybody linking their destruction with rising carbon emissions. Am I missing something, or is profit more important than humanity?

Is this the life we imagined - where our future, and our children's future, means nothing to corporations in the face of profit? Where we live in little boxes, are put into little boxes, with brands even advertising the fact to lead you into their own little box of profit margins - filling our brains with musical earworms. But should the only desired outcome in life be maximum profit obtained with the least possible expense? Doesn't it cheapen life to put a price tag on it?

Put like this, life hardly sounds like the "beautiful lie" from that popular saying we've all heard. And it's not surprising then, if we live in a world intoxicated with greed, monetary gain and material conquest, we'll inevitably come to ask what the point is to it all.

And that's where love comes into life's equation. Love refuses to let human life be outweighed by profit, fuelled by self-promoted consumption. Can you honestly tell me that you are happy with life when it's defined for you in terms of the most profitable investment? In situations like that, who are you? Do you know? While we chase what we think is the dream life with the ideal house, car and inflated bank account, we lose our connection with others, with our community and family.

The absence of love endangers survival.

So, instead of showing obedience to the market place, allowing it to tell us what to do, what to say, how to feel, how to dress, how to be who we are - we need to open our eyes and let love guide us the way back to some real purpose in our lives.

The truth of life

There will be those that say love is the lie itself, or at least the reason it makes the lie palatable, but I believe love uncovers the truth of life.

I sometimes liken the truth in life to be like the truth in those untrustworthy Wikipedia articles - where the truth is in the edits, rather than the surface article.

The "finished piece" - the latest version of a Wikipedia article - is in fact just the view of editors that we cannot verify, but what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many editors. There is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the "truth" is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide.

Like Wikipedia, life needs to be read in a new way. We need to stop focusing on our differences as being problematic, and start building on and acknowledging our common grounds. We need to start sharing, connecting, teaching one another and learning from each other as well. Build our bonds as human beings, find strength in unity, find our voice and then let it be heard, because what we have to say does matter. When people say that some must suffer for the greater good, who decides what that is? Having the powers that be hide things from the collective view for the good of society no longer works as an argument for me, or at the very least, they have to be held accountable when things go badly wrong.

It's time to start seeing things in a new light. Those that govern our societies need to be reminded that we do matter, and that we want a decent future where life is cherished rather than spent worshipping money - where justice, fairness and liberty is doctrine. A world invested in education, ingenuity and creativity, rather than war and conquest.

We've been given the gift of life. It's a fragile gift, and one you can't keep forever. But it's the most precious gift in all the world, and we need to use it well.

In the end what matters is not how long we've lived, but how fully we've lived. The good we've done, the friends we've made, the love we've shared along the way. It's the journey we take, not the journey's end that defines us. We're all leaves in the wind, here and then gone. But while we're here, let's live to the fullest with love. And that saying about life being a beautiful lie? Well, if we live with love, then death will be the lie.

Regaining the true balance in life with love

Love is about working in harmony with the delicate balance of life. When we achieve harmony - in music, in love, in sex - it's a beautiful and powerful thing - and it allows the bigger picture to emerge, that love is the portrait we're all attempting to paint. And when the harmony of the universe is out of tune (as it seems to be at the moment), that's when we need - and should reach for - love the most.

You don't have to be a tantric guru to feel the power of love, but when love is used as a force for good over evil, then it can open our eyes to see what we're not seeing in times of crisis - the bigger picture that love is the divine design of life.

In its own way, love gives us hope - and if hope is an illusion, then why can't we let go of it, why does it not shatter? Why does it make us struggle even at the end? Love is also our supercali-fragilistic-expialidocious, sometimes allowing yourself to think about fun things that actually don't matter, to help you face the things that do. But mostly, love is our composer - we know that old song - and if we let it, it will be the old friend that stays by your side to the very end.

So, we need to accept the gifts of life and love with great humility, and start using them right. We need to believe we can become the change we want to see, and that we have an obligation to help the new generation by building a better future together. Let's rid ourselves of cynicism, of ego, of fear, and instead open our hearts, our minds and our eyes. Let's broaden our horizons to respect others for their own opinions, just as we can expect the same in return.

It's time to change our ways, to evolve and break free of this vicious cycle, and love can help us do that. That's the point of love in life. It gives us the power and the incentive to battle against corruption, oppression, injustice, and fear - not to end them, but to balance out the odds and bring harmony to the world, and our lives.

Yours in love,

Send Out Love

...to get it back.

Giving out a message to send out some love will sound bogus to some, because modern society has made love big business.

Coffee chain Starbucks has begun asking its UK customers their names in a bid to appear more friendly. They're giving away free coffee to promote this new campaign, and trying to make an economic transaction seem more friendly could end up showing them as fake, but what the heck - they're trying to send out some love.

Besides what's in a name? Well, what we call something seems to matter a lot. The issue with calling same-sex legal unions as marriages is fraught with contention, but hey, if you look at it in a commercial sense, you've just allowed more of the population the opportunity to officially splash out the cash on their big day. Wedding planners will be wowed. Or you could be less cynical and see it as the law recognising that there are many different faces to love.

And not just different faces, but there are many different facets to love, too. Our pets give us unconditional love. My twin cats Davey and Goliath are so protective of me, it's like having two extra men in the house. They patrol about like lions (so much so I actually considered changing Golaith's name to Daniel) and they consider it their whiskered duty to take care of me in many ways. But maybe it isn't love, maybe I just buy the best cat food and they know they're on to a good deal with free meals every day, so that's why they stick around.

But to me, my cats are a very real part of my family, and I firmly believe the best way to give back to your pets is to love them unconditionally. I dote on them, hug them, play with them and thank them for taking on the baggage that comes with being part of a family. We forget that our pets take on our toxins, which can make them sick. Other things can make them ill as well. If there is tension between human members of a family, they feel it, too.

Davey and Golaith aren't just animals between my feet, they've given me companionship, and it's only right to give back to your pets since they give so much to you. Having a pet is the best example of how sending out love returns back to the owner, which isn't made bogus by any financial incentive. The love of an animal, especially for single people, can be very healing. Or when you've lost a beloved pet, although they can't be replaced, taking care of another animal can help with the natural healing process during grieving.

Cassie's story

When I first met my twin flame, he was looking after a golden retriever with leukaemia he had rescued from a bad home. The vets had only given her a week to live. Cassie was absolutely smitten with my man, and a little wary of me when I first came on to the scene, but I sent out my love to her, and in time as I gained her trust, she returned that love. About six months into the relationship, Cassie died from her illness.

We were not the perfect parents, yet the vets were amazed at how long she'd lived and asked us what our secret was. I just told them that we fed her healthy, and gave her lots of love - that's the best form of hands on healing. During the weeks after Cassie's loss, my other half was distraught. Davey and Golaith seemed to sense this, and my lions quickly included him into their pride. Whenever he came home, they would jump on to his lap, walk across his shoulders and purr into his ear. Their presence helped him to get through the death of Cassie.

We were talking about her only the other day, and my twin flame put forward the theory that he hadn't rescued her, but that really Cassie had rescued him. He had hit a lonely dip in his life after a previous relationship went sour when he'd found Cassie and decided to care for her.

And he reminded me how if it hadn't been for Cassie, we might never have met.

"She brought me to you. Stayed around long enough to make sure you were the one, and then left. Job done," he said.

And I believe such love is an indisputable fact of life - as coffee is to Starbucks - and that if you send our your love, someone, somewhere, will pick up your call.

Yours in love,

The Love You Desire

...and how to get it.

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

What exactly is the difference between wishing for something and actually making it happen? The answer is simple: belief.

When you believe that something is possible, you'll take action to make it happen. You'll push forward through obstacles because you know you can - and that means that anything you believe can happen. The secret, is to tear away the limiting barriers your mind puts up against the things that you truly want.

Then, with all your heart you must add strong belief to the mix. The same way you believe the sun will rise tomorrow, you must believe in the things that you truly want. That's the first, and most crucial step in all great manifestation.

Ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, the youngest dancer ever to be made a principal with the Royal Ballet, whose skill had earned him comparisons with Nureyev and Baryshnikov, quit his profession, because he no longer believed in what he was doing.

Losing our passion is the worst thing that can happen to us. Sometimes we hate our lives, we feel trapped, or we get lonely, and when we find someone in a similar situation, we feel maybe it's better to be trapped together. It makes us feel safe, although it's a false sense of security.

Loneliness, or rather the fear of it, casts its own spell. Its magic can sometimes make us fall in love with someone, because the alternative of living with ourselves is too frightening to contemplate. But sometimes being lonely is more than being miles apart from someone, and being happy is more than being together with someone. It doesn't mean couples in these situations are unable to find happiness with each other, but they're missing out on a different kind of magic.

One where it doesn't matter how many thousand of miles apart you are from that certain someone, you're still under their spell, and even when you're alone, you're never lonely. You're not with him or her out of fear, but out of no other reason than you love them.

That's the type of love worth believing in, getting passionate about - it's a love worth getting up for in the morning.

And how can you bring this type of love into your life? Simply by believing in it.

Yours in love,