Hello

Home is where the Heart is – a metaphor for using mindfulness, your intuition and feelings to evaluate what is the best action or situation, or what best serves you.  This is to say that mindfulness applied to feelings and emotions helps to guide your actions and plans.

I have discussed the usefulness of anger, frustration and irritation.  These emotions can be thought of as early warning systems to inform us that we are out of balance, caught in a survivor scenario or habit reaction pattern, or that someone has crossed one of our a boundaries – just like the alarm systems on our car or home.

When feeling these kind of feelings it’s useful to evaluate how you are out of sync and what you can shift in your perception or action to be in sync.

Maybe you have a misunderstanding with another person about your relationship or maybe you are agreeing to do something that takes you away from your best situation – like taking on too much or agreeing to be in a relationship that doesn’t serve you.

We tend to want to blame someone else for a negative situation; in some situations the other person is doing something that seems unfair or unreasonable, but what matters is how we respond.

Start from the perspective that you are responsible for your attitude and responses in the world.  From that perspective feeling negative or angry has something to do with you, too, not just a reaction to the other person but something out of sync in you.

How did you get into the angry-making situation?  How can you use figure/ground and paradigm shifting to help you see how you are co-creating the negative situation so that you can own that, and realign with your  best self.  It takes mindfulness.

The other side of this is when we feel joy or happiness, a feeling of connection or being in sync with our true nature – these feelings are also part of our internal guidance system.  They connect us with what brings us joy, and if we pay attention to that and do more from that joyous perspective, then we can find ourselves feeling a lot less of those negative feelings.

Now this is different from the feeling numb which some people call feeling good that comes with obsessive addiction.  This is misinterpreted as feeling good.

Feeling the rightness of something, that you are in sync in your life, is how you can have your heart guide you head – have your emotional guidance system guide your decision-making, planning, creating and living.

You’re using mindfulness to help you increase your awareness of the whole of your emotional response so that it can teach or guide you about yourself and your needs and where your center is.

From your center you can create the best possible situation, relationship, and parenting response.  Your center is that place where you can see both sides of an equation, see figure and ground and allow for a paradigm shift if necessary.  You are able to see your part in an argument or negative situation and take the mindful course which benefits the whole.

Carl Jung talked about this as synchronicity.  Steven Covey talks about it as the 90/10 principle that attitude affects/creates your life through your actions and reactions.  Joseph Campbell and Depak Chopra call it following your bliss.  Esther Hicks talks about is as the Law of Attraction.

And I think of it as mindfulness interaction to find your Path to Grace – your way to being fully responsive and aligned to your highest good – which results in an integrated spirit, mind, and body – living in your center.

If you can practice paying attention to how you feel and what brings you joy it can help to guide you in decision-making.  So using mindfulness in assessing what your Heart desires, helps to find your way Home (to your center).

From a spiritual perspective, Home is where the Heart is relates to a spiritual path of mindfulness, forgiveness and joyous connection.

When applied to parenting, you’re teaching and modeling compassion, understanding, accepting, and being with while guiding forward.  These actions as parents make it so that injuries may be avoided or healed from the inside out.

It allows for children to discover through their internal guidance system what is in their best interests.  Where they have talents and limitations and how to incorporate these in their actions and style of being in the world to create productive, happy lives.

Recognizing that how you respond may bring you away from Or closer to what you want is the key.  So that you may be in the flow and guide your life to where you want to be.

Whether you approach life as a thinker or a feeler, mindfulness applied to emotions leads to a balanced way of moving through your life when you let your emotions guide you to your center.

See you tomorrow.

Beth