Author: Danielle White

Heading to California- 2248 miles ahead 🤠

“One day you will take me completely out of my self,

I’ll do what the angels cannot do.

Your eyelash will write on my cheek

The poem that hasn’t been thought of” – Rumi

I saw this amazing picture taken during a summer storm in Chicago this week capturing lightning striking twice. Lightening is most commonly a symbol of either something unexpected (“A bolt from the blue”) or a weapon of punishment from a God (“God strike me down”). In fact according to a NASA study strike in the same place because that is where the perfect conditions are that conjure up this form of nature’s magic. In French and Italian the word to describe falling in love is also the word for lighting. Is this because love is a surprise or because it is some sort of punishment? Maybe with the tradition in Romance languages of love and pain so interconnected, perhaps lightening symbolically encompasses both. However, this picture of a double-lightening strike and its symbolic connections got me thinking about love.

“The subject tonight is Love

And for tomorrow night as well,

As a matter of fact

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!” – Hafitz

So what is love?

“This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, take a step without feet.” – Rumi

On a basic level you could argue that love simply exists to elicit lust so we procreate and create a support system to help rear the young. It involves chemicals in the brain, hormones and other impulses; however, psychologically it is more complicated. Robert Sternberg argued that love has three different components: intimacy, commitment, and passion. Similarly Zick Rubin’s work states that three factors constitute love: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Scott Peck maintains that love is a combination of the “concern for the spiritual growth of another” and basic narcissism.  In combination, he concludes that love is an activity, not simply a feeling.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi

“Someone who does not run

Toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

Senses the love-hawk floating above,

And waits, and will not be driven

Or scared to safety.” – Rumi

“I have found the paradox; that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” – Mother Teresa

Not only are there different kinds of love, but different cultures and moments in time define love in various ways. In the late 1960s there was the political movement referred to as ‘The Summer of Love’ that started with The Beatles US release of ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and ended with Woodstock. Some of what this movement was about was defining what constitutes ‘love.’ Free love, communal living, multiple partners and mind-altering substances where part of a revolution against the strict conservatism of the post-war 1950s. This period in history was one of the most transformative in gender and race equality, music and the arts at large. The stark contrast this revolution made struck like lightning and the world was never the same again.

“Do you need anybody,

I need somebody to love.

Could it be anybody

I want somebody to love.

Would you believe in a love at first sight,

Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.” – The Beatles – With A Little Help From My Friends

Again reminded of the image of lightning, there are the qualities of the unexpected vast force of love as well as the uncontrollable nature of who and how we love and the power of love. Through love comes transformation.

“The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.” – Joseph Campbell

The poet Rumi sees love as the door to transformation. He uses imagery of sacrifice, of love as a kind of death. For his loving is about merging with the Beloved. There is a theme of love being a madness that should be embraced. For him loving is being alive. For him the experience of love is the experience of the Divine.

“The way you make love is the way God will be with you.” – Rumi

This past week saw Summer Solstice – the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of summer. While spring is where we start to get frisky with spring fever, summer is the season of love.

“Summer lovin’ had me a blast

Summer lovin’, happened so fast” – Grease (the musical) Summer Loving

For me living in NYC where the seasons are marked with extreme changes in climate, never ceases to be surprising. In my native New Zealand the seasonal changes are blurred with summer being more sunny and winter being a little colder and rainier. Here in NYC seasonal change is sudden and extreme. The white winters freeze you indoors and the entire landscape is transformed into a magical white winter wonderland. People here literally hibernate; withdrawing their energy, and socializing is minimized. From the first hint of Spring people burst out of their caves, often misjudging wardrobe choices while the weather oscillates from hot-cold-hot-hot-cold until by early summer it settles to VERY hot and humid. Any patch of grass in NYC during summer is transformed into bikini-clad tropical islands of pale bodies strewn around desperately sucking up some vitamins from the sun’s rays.

For me the true sign that summer is here is when the freaks come out in droves. NYC is known for its ‘characters’ and friends know me, well, as a freak-magnet. Walk anywhere with me and sure enough someone will start talking to me or want to pat the dog or (silly them) ask me for directions. Apparently I am a beacon to freaks everywhere (poster child?) for a good conversation. My New Zealand ‘don’t want to be rude’ nature drags out these interactions and, well, I am not complaining as it makes every day interesting. My point is rather: it is very noticeable that the freak-value in the NYC population goes up dramatically once the heat hits town. Perhaps this happens in each of us – our inner crazy comes out with the heat. We love the heat and its surprises, but it is not heat it is a lot of crazy that is necessary to fall in love.

“Let the Lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the Lover be” – Rumi

“Got me looking so crazy, my baby

I’m not myself lately

I’m foolish, I don’t do this

I’ve been playing myself

Baby I don’t care

Cuz your love got the best of me

And baby you’re making a fool of me

You got me sprung and I don’t care who sees

Cuz baby you got me so crazy

Got me lookin so crazy right now

Your love’s got me lookin so crazy right now” – Beyonce Knowles – Crazy in Love

Romantic love at least makes the sanest person crazy at times. Even by law love has been is recognized as a legal defense in the form of temporary insanity. This defense was first used by U.S. Congressman Daniel Sickles of New York in 1859 after he had killed his wife’s lover. To serve the purpose of a defense in law, the disorder must therefore amount to an absolute alienation of reason. Here also perhaps is an acknowledgment of the ‘reasonable’ tie between love and violence (hate): the powerful Passions.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet portrays the chaos and passion of being in love, combining images of love, violence, death, religion, and family in an impressionistic rush leading to the play’s tragic conclusion. Strong motifs of both Light vs Dark and opposing points of view throughout the play point to the indefinable nature of love – it escapes categorization and is perhaps beyond human understanding. Like many things that are beyond definition we can turn to art to express and understand it further.

“Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.” – Saint Thomas Aquinas

“There is a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen

“A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways – by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.”  ~Plato

“Such knowledge can only be had by actual experience, nor can the reason of man define it, or arrive at any cognizance of it by deduction, just as one cannot, without experience, know the taste of honey, the bitterness of patience, the bliss of sexual union, love, passion, or desire.” – Ibn ‘Arabi

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. “ – Freiedrich Nietzsche,

The chaos and craziness of love and the embracing of these freedoms from control are what we endeavor to embrace to stay ‘in love.’ We create a chemical experiment that one undertakes when mixing two humans’ emotions and then how stable this mix is. How capable are we are of staying inside this transformational interactive experimentation? It is not about the nice tidy catagorizable logical existence here. It is one where there are no opposites, no rules as such. It is consistently challenging our primal sense of emotional safety. The mysterious indefinable nature of love is perhaps what makes it so enticing.

“The finest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.” – Albert Einstein

“The way of Love is not

A subtle argument.

The door there

Is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles

Of their freedom.

How do they learn that

They fall, and falling

They are given wings.” – Rumi

‘There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”

– Rumi

“Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.”

– Gandhi

“Moment after moment, completely devote yourself to listening to your inner voice.”

– Shunryu Suzuki

What exactly is this inner voice? How do we listen to it? What is its ‘job’?

I believe is that it is this inner voice that connects us all. This voice is a collective wisdom. I equate it with what my heart or gut tells me – my intuition. I believe that aligning myself more with this inner voice is what brings me more freedom from being ruled by my ego (the ‘other’ voice), which are fears and other negative things that keep us small, disempowered and feeling separate. This voice is also the voice of our greatness.

“There is a moon inside every human being.

Learn to be companions with it.

Give more of your life to this listening.

As brightness is to time,

So you are to the one who talks

To the deep ear in your chest.

I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears

When that one steps near and begins to speak.”

– Rumi

Who is what Rumi calls ‘that one’ chatting to us and giving us the inside scoop?

There is a long history of a spiritual element being attributed to this phenomenon; in fact the word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word intueri which is roughly translated as meaning ‘to look inside’ or ‘to contemplate’. What researchers say is the main differentiation between intuition and thinking about something is exactly that – there is no weighing up and thinking about the pros and cons of something with intuition. One study (see NPR story) found that following your intuition in fact made you happier with your decision in the long run that when you weighed up the factors involved.

“Your mind knows only some things. Your inner voice, your instinct, knows everything.

If you listen to what you know instinctively, it will always lead you down the right path.”

– Henry Winkler aka ‘The Fonz”

Nobody is suggesting that there is no place for the mind – let me be clear! It is very useful for doing taxes, putting together IKEA furniture and assembling the everlasting TO DO list! But what I am talking about is two other things. First, what are the big things that get on the lifelong To Do list – what is important and the right thing for you? Second, getting to know the WHO that is in your heart.

“The mind is the instrument

By which you detect

The inner world.”

– Muktananda

”When developed sufficiently, intuition brings immediate comprehension of the truth.”

– Paramahansa Yogananda

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.: – Carl Jung

I have experienced that when I start to follow this inner voice, it starts to reveal more to me. This is the inner relationship.

Contemplation, meditation and other practices are – in part – designed to quieten the conscious mind in order to be more open to the inner voice. Often the constant chatter we all experience is more tied to our fears, to do lists, issues we are trying to resolve in our hearts. This chatter is not the Inner voice, it is the ego. It is this that assists in purifying the mind and heart as a way to connect more deeply and often with this inner voice, this voice of the heart or the voice of God.

“What is this mind?

Who is hearing these sounds?

Do not mistake any state for Self-realization.

Continue to ask yourself:

What is it that hears?”

– Bassui

The ‘clean’ heart allows us to experience this closeness to that voice of the heart, just as the quiet mind allows us to hear it. All of the various religions and spiritual schools of thought have rituals and prayers and guidelines that tell us and guide us how to go about this purification of the senses.

“What is deep listening?

Sama [Sufi worship] is a greeting from the secret ones

Inside the heart, a letter.

The branches of your intelligence

Grow new leaves in the wind of this listening”

– Rumi

These spiritual practices range from things like physical yoga, which helps our bodies be ‘pure’ (or not ‘noisy’ and distracting), to meditation or prayer, which involve conscious turning within to connect with this voice and our heart. They help align the mind with the Inner Voice so that they are not separate and so that they begin to work together. Even rituals like lighting candles (representing the flame within the heart) or singing songs (that open our hearts and still the mind and connects us to the other singers, if there are some) purify us in this way. Then there are the more active ways of purifying ourselves as well. Therapy or other self-development help us cut through all the ‘dirt’ we build up in life by letting go of fears and bad experiences and learning to have a fresh, un-jaded heart and mind. This take constant ‘spring-cleaning’!

We should have clean and pure heart.

(Psalm 66:18, 1 John 1:9)

“Develop the inner vision and the habit of listening to the inner Voice; and you are assured of unshakable Peace and infinite Joy.”

– Atharva Veda

While it takes practice and a certain quietness and ‘purity’ to tune into this inner voice, it can scream really loudly sometimes – especially if you ignore it! In fact I have noticed n myself and in others that if you ignore those gut feelings or heart’s desires (not to be mixed up with just plain of desires!) then either you get really miserable or numb. In fact it takes courage and, well guts, to live holding this voice, this illogical logic! To trust that your heart, your gut, your self knows what the heck it is doing! Any of us who have taken a leap of faith to follow our dreams know this!

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs

Another reason we strive to tune in to this heart-voice is because the quality of anything spiritual can only be understood by the heart and not by the mind. It is experiential and involves the emotions and is at its essence love. Who can understand love with the mind!? Nobody!  This is why different saints have used songs, poetry and allegorical stories to communicate the experience of the heart

“Someone asked once, What is love?

Be lost in me, I said. You will know love when that happens.

Love has no calculating in it. That is why it is said to be a quality of God and not of human beings.”

– Rumi

“Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without a doubt you shall be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart.”

– Bhagavad Gita

“The heart is the resting place of the mind. When you release the mind from unnecessary thoughts, very naturally it flows into the heart. This is when meditation takes place of its own accord, spontaneously.

A mind that has united with the heart is called great because it generates golden ideas. Such a mind can turn an ordinary moment into a divine occasion.”

– Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

Imagine a life where every ‘ordinary moment’ was a ‘divine occasion’! Living in this constant state of ‘divine occasion’ is what is known as self-realization, perfection or nirvana. Where we have 24/7 connection to the Inner Voice. This is living in love. Don’t be fooled! This may sound a bit fluffy but to live this way and to get there in the first place you need courage. You need strength. You need stamina and perhaps most of all you need to be fearless! To live like this you need to be surrendered to this world of the non-tangible, the non-logical at times and what we don’t understand can bring up our fears about the unknown, the uncontrollable, the unpredictable.

Luckily for us, we can take baby-steps and build our trust in this inner voice. As you follow your heart and take risks to leap into this unpredictable world. The more we do it, the more we align ourselves with our hearts he more we trust it and the easier it becomes. Also, luckily for us, this takes us toward what is known in Sanskrit as dharma, meaning both ‘right action’ and ‘that which supports. Dharma is like pro-active karma and is also known as the path of righteousness. Dharma is both the path that the Inner voice reveals to us and it is that which supports us when on this path. Basically it is magic! If you follow your heart then you are supported to keep following your heart. Bonus!

“The secret of dharma is hidden in the cave of the heart”

– Mahabharata

So this is my conclusion. If I listen to my Inner Voice, heart, gut, intuition then I will follow my dharma (while being supported by it!) and purity of body (umm.. aka going to the gym and eating good food!), mind (meditation and other things like that), then I live a life of love. For this I foster courage and while taming my senses and practicing non-attachment for the outcome (remember this is not a logical path!) then I trust in the crazy adventure that is my life!

“On this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure. Even a little effort toward spiritual awareness will protect you from the greatest fear.”

– Bhagavad Gita

For me an important postscript about the relationship between ourselves and our inner voices – between which there really is no difference – is that this is a private conversation that does not need to be justified. It is for you to discover what is your own path and what is right for you. I believe that when we ignore this voice because we are scared that our heart’s desire may not be what other want us to do we cause ourselves so much hurt. It is in this light that I also strive to accept other’s life decisions as them following their hearts and that I can never really understand the mysterious relationship between another and their own inner self.

“Giving thanks for abundance is sweeter than the abundance itself…” – Rumi

My understanding of abundance was revolutionized when I went to India in the early 90s to study with my meditation teacher. As part of the philanthropic work her foundation does, I was working with a rice distribution program for a village where many people had died of starvation the year before. This was in the middle of nowhere and although I was possibly the skinniest I have ever been in my life, my fleshless skeleton would have been fatter than these people’s bodies! As the half a bucket of rice was distributed to each family that lined up and received this gift in the one piece of clothing that they owned, and were wearing, the men in their turbans un-wrapped and the woman of the family receiving it in their part of the sari that usually hung down the back from their shoulder. My job was to write about what was happening and so a local woman took me on a tour. I saw the different public areas and then she took me into her own house. I felt quite overwhelmed being so hard up against people living so close to death’s door. Everyone in this village had experienced someone close to them die of starvation. Die of starvation. This is where you get a bit real about what is important in life. My hostess took me into her home – a simple hut with a rammed dirt floor. It was immaculate. She showed me the pictures on the walls of the various gods and goddesses. The hut was divided into two areas. On the left hand side she pointed to the place where she and her family slept and then she showed me the right hand side was where the family’s animals lived. She beamed proudly as she showed me her home. Her home was beautiful and nothing in her or in this place had the air of grieving or sorry or poverty that I was imagining would await me in a place so humble where such hardship had fallen.

“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Epicurus (Greek philosopher, BC 341-270)

In the middle was a small open fire where one of the children made japatis (unleavened bread). I soon realized that the japatis where for their guest – me – and to be honest I was overcome. Still now as I write this I want to cry because it is just too much to comprehend. These people were in the middle of a famine. They were facing not just the pain of people already having died of starvation, but surely some of them would die this year of starvation too. They owned nothing even by virtue of being born in a caste system where they are unable to own land (Adivasi) and are basically owned by the landowners on whose land they live. In spite of this, in spite of what seemed to me a horrifying life – starving, living in a mud hut with animals and no food. In spite of this they were some of the most proud, happiest, joyful and most of all generous people I have ever met! How was this possible? This moment changed me forever. This woman stayed with me forever. She is in my heart if I ever dare to complain in my life or not be generous to myself or to others. She is my role model and my standard I hold myself against. This taught me that these qualities have nothing at all to do with what is going on around us in our lives. Later on when I got into the film industry and began to meet very wealthy people I saw almost the other end of the scale. Here people with so much money and things and opportunities were often so miserly with themselves and others and worried all the time that they would not have enough! Why? Now as a Life Coach I often work with people around money issues and one thing that is again made clear to me is that how much money you have has zero relevance to your level of feeling abundant.

In everything I have read about abundance there is the imagery of flowing water. The word abundance comes from a Latin root abundo meaning “to move in waves, undulate, flow.”  From ab (‘of, by, from’) + undō (‘surge, swell, fluctuate’). For me abundance is inextricably tied to the natural cycles of giving and receiving. Look at the seasons in terms of abundance. Spring and summer are so full and autumn and winter are so barren and yet all are crucial and reliant on the other. Without giving you cannot have receiving – literally if someone doesn’t give you something, you cannot receive something. Even physical money – a currency is flowing through a society like a river. We get dollar bills and then we hand them on.

How we balance our own flow of money is something we can experiment with. Having savings is not at odds with this and I would say is a responsible thing to do so we are ready for unforeseen expenses. For me what is more interesting than the outward specifics is the internal stance and experience of abundance. How does it relate to our feelings of worthiness? How does it relate to trust? Trust in ourselves, life and our spiritual beliefs.  I believe that how we treat ourselves sets the tone for how we are treated by life and by others.

“The sage never tries to store things up. The more he does for others, the more he has.

The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.”

– Lao Tzu

The key to abundance is generosity. The modern English word generosity derives from the Latin word generōsus, which means “of noble birth.” The Latin stem gener– is the declensional stem of genus, meaning “kin, clan, race, stock” with the root Indo–European meaning of gen being “to beget.” It is the same root that gave us gentile, genealogy, and genius. Perhaps there is a force in the word generosity – one that begets, or results in a state of abundance.

“The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving.”              – Albert Einstein

Abundance it seems then is the inner state. Maybe in the same way that the saints across time told us it is attachment to worldly things that cause unhappiness rather than the things themselves, maybe it is the feeling of the inner flow that causes an attitude of abundance, the experience of abundance where the actual amount of cash in your bank account has no relevance. I also think the abundance experience depends on how closely you feel the need to follow society’s prescription for you. What constitutes ‘abundance’ for you? Enough food to eat, or millions of dollars? There also has to be some tie to being present. If you focus on the present you are not reacting to the past nor are you worrying about the future. There is trust in the present moment. Trust has a role in abundance as you do not assume you have control over what will come to you and what will be taken from you.

“Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being”             – William James

Being generous to yourself and others evokes abundance. There is the flowing nature of giving and receiving that fuels abundance and our part seems to be generosity as our action. Then there is our inner experience of abundance or poverty. Do we believe that we have enough? How do we get that attitude that the woman in India has? Her feelings of abundance, contentedness and generosity were not dictated by what she owned. How do I maintain generosity when I don’t know how I am going to pay the rent? How do I avoid the trap of comparing myself to others and coming up short?

“Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.”

– Kahlil Gibran

2010 sounds like it is still somewhere in the future – in a sci-fi movie somewhere.  This is what time is like – it sneaks up on you and it waits for nobody!

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” – Buddha

 I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, I prefer to decide to do things when I decide to do them – not just once a year. But I did adopt a wonderful idea from a friend and choose a couple of themes or intentions for this year. 2010 is the year of Intimacy and Abundance for me. I like this open-endedness as it allows that outcome to be much bigger and more creative than I might be able to manifest on my own. My friend chose Loving and Luxurious. Mmmmmm. So delicious!

“Stop thinking and talking about it and there is nothing

that you will not be able to know” – Zen paradigm

So, what is Intimacy?

Arising from the Latin intima meaning ‘inner’ or ‘innermost’, intimacy is something that is worth digging into.   Sex is not what true intimacy is about. Being intimate is about revealing your true self to another person and being seen. It is about being vulnerable and trusting. The Dalai Lama talks about a new model for intimacy in The Art of Happiness; as an attempt to achieve intimacy in our daily lives “based on a willingness to open ourselves to many others, to family, friends, and even strangers, forming genuine and deep bonds based on our common humanity.” (Page 84)

In the west we believe that having true intimacy is only possible from having a soul mate or life partner that we share everything with and in which we invest all our hopes for truly being seen. If you have seen the movie in cinemas right now with the wish-he-was-mine George Clooney called Up in the Air then you are freshly reminded that all hopes for each of us of true happiness lays solely with getting married and having children – this fact is expressed numerously and illustrated by our tragic hero. While I do not advocate being homeless and travelling compulsively as a route to intimacy, I equally do not think that ticking boxes of spouse and children is such a guaranteed or necessary route to that either. As the Dalai Lama shares of his experience as a monk of being able to be intimate in sharing himself with anyone, this is what we as co-active coaches learn during our training – that it is possible, in fact easy! To experience intimacy with everyone! The shift is not in who we are or are not in relationship with, but within ourselves. What Co-Activity (see www.TheCoaches.com) has taught me and so many others is how to reveal myself more to another human being.

“Surely, there is a window between heart and heart.” – Rumi

 Intimacy is something that is ‘taught’ to us by our parents in our relationships with them from birth.  Many of us enlist the services of a therapist in order to heal what turn out to be dysfunctional patterns of intimacy (too much, too little) that have been handed down to us from generations of self-destructive, self-protective and isolating learned behaviors. It is a curse of being a parent, especially a mother, that a tiny ‘wrong’ move (aka not being perfect!) leaves a scar on the infants psyche that grows to be huge as that infant becomes an adult. (See The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller) Therapists help us clean out the crap and try relating in a new way.

There is a cliché living in New York City in which you can feel so desperately alone amongst 8 million fellow New Yorkers all living at close quarters. Why? Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink, as the saying goes. One of my theories about NYC is that when you live here you need to be able to create your own cocoon with boundaries so that you can survive the overwhelm of people, noise, activity. This cocoon can be mis-read as stand-offish or unavailable. In fact you can spot a tourist and it is joked about as being a red-flag to a bull/mugger if you are giving eye contact or smiling or (shock, horror) talking to random strangers. So you learn to avoid eyes, put on your ipod and read a book or stare at the nothingness. It is to me kind of the equivalent of having a fence around your yard or curtains on your windows. It is kind of a joke now to my friends that I am a sort of freak-magnet as I can’t quite master this shut-down. I chat to the homeless people and guaranteed wherever I am in the world, random strangers come up to me to ask for directions. This is crazy as I am the last person they should ask as I barely know my way around my own neighborhood! I do think coming from New Zealand where we are more likely to assume someone is friend before we assume that they are foe is why I am like that. And I do believe that because – while I do not put myself in danger – I do always assume that most people are just like me in their basic desire to be friendly then that is what I get in return. It is like Cesar Milan with his dog whispering – the attitude you come to another being with has a huge impact on how they react to you. If this is so obviously true with the dogs he works with, it is also true between humans.

“Do not seek perfection in a changing world. Instead, perfect your love.”

– Seng T’san, 6th Century Zen poet

 The symptom of not experiencing intimacy is loneliness. Hands up who never feels lonely? Apparently the Dalai Lama never feels lonely. Never. For me loneliness has always been an interesting thing to think about. It is something of course I have felt at times and I have talked to friends about and clients and like other things, there really seems to be no clear ‘rule’ for what ‘makes’ us lonely or what will guarantee us never being lonely again. Except for the ability to experience true intimacy on a regular basis. If we believe the Clooney movie – which ironically is so pertinent to Clooney’s own solitary life – then once we find Mr/Mrs Right and have some kids we will never again be lonely. This is quite obviously a falsehood. I speak to friends and clients who are in great relationships who still feel desperately alone at times. It seems that the Dalai Lama is able to connect to others on that deep, heart connection level easily. This is the intimacy that I am cultivating for myself this year.

Next time I will explore Abundance. ….