Sitting around focusing on my heart and repeating that I wish myself and others well, and expecting it to actually change anything? Please. I felt way too far gone for that. But its simplicity is precisely why the practice of loving-kindness is so brilliant. It's like a backdoor into self-love.

Once we acknowledge what's really up for us in this moment, we can appropriately address it and clear it through that awareness. We keep the channels clear by staying as honestly and objectively aware as possible of what our energy and emotions are up to in the present moment.

When you stay plugged into your sense of what really feels right for you, when you stay open enough to be willing to try out just this one little shift, you can have those breakthroughs. You don't need to wait for some gigantic shift in outer circumstances to break through your inner barriers.

Worry is a subconscious way of keeping ourselves comfortable - aka (emotionally) safe - aka small. But if you stay aware, you can use worry to your advantage. You can start to view it as a signal that you're about to step into some sweet, new, expansive territory.

In hindsight, it seems a little crazy that I couldn't see where all this was heading given all the synchronistic arrivals of one "just what I needed at the perfect moment" circumstance after another in those years. But that's how it is. We're ready for what we're ready for when we're ready for it.

The more we resist, the more we suffer, and, without making a conscious choice to do things differently, the more we suffer, the more we'll resist. Eckhart Tolle puts it this way: "The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment." 

But when we stop taking our "small s self" so seriously, our "capital S Self” reminds us it's been there all along. And the (capital S) Self is constant. It's whole and centered and perfect and at ease, and its wholeness depends not one ounce on concepts or circumstances. It just is.

At first the details will likely seem fuzzy. No problem.

Pieces of your ideal day vision that at first might seem frivolous hold powerful information about what your soul is longing for.