What gift can you give yourself today? Among the best gifts you can give is to be fully aware of your thoughts and feelings. When you are awake and aware, you can choose how to respond to what is happening around you with grace, instead of reacting to others with sloppy words, impatience or temper. To react or respond: this is the key to inner freedom. 
 
We all have the power to choose our words and actions. What an intoxicating gift! Let us stop, look, and listen before we do anything, ensuring peace of mind and harmonious relations with others.

​©2025, Janice L. Lundy

One way you can to begin to live the core value of peace and kindness to all is to begin with yourself, specifically, by noticing your internal dialogue. How do you speak to yourself? Do you berate, judge or ridicule yourself? In truth, how you speak to yourself is either an act of self-care or an act of hostility. 
 
Speaking unkindly in this way sets us up to carry it forward by speaking carelessly to others. We perpetuate our inner hurt out into the world and others then suffer. 
 
Today, begin to speak to yourself as kindly as you would your own precious child. 

​©2024, Janice L. Lundy

The older we get the more we may realize that not much in life matters if we don't have love. Love of family and friends. Love of work and creative expression. Love of the Earth and her bounty. Love of growth and the opportunity to be all that we can be. But in order to receive this love, we must have an open heart. We must be able to fully give love, too.
 
Today let us re-dedicate ourselves to living with wide-open hearts as best we can; to not shut down or close off to others; to not judge or discriminate or neglect. Let us extend ourselves to others as best we can. Let us live with unconditional friendliness toward all beings, both animal and human. Let us we be kind.
 
This is a life worth living, one rooted in love.

©2023, Janice L. Lundy
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