01/01/2026
Starting the New Year with Love! Happy New Year!
Jackie's January Message ~ "Growing Up Love"
Recently, a coworker and I got caught in a silly argument about whose picture was right for the garden of our health food store. She loves nature and wanted the garden to become a nature preserve for birds and butterflies. This is definitely a worthwhile definition. I love beauty in any form, but especially the beauty of flowers. And a beautiful flower garden is also a worthwhile definition. And the two definitions lived together well until her nature preserve plants died and looked ugly. I wanted to pull up the “ugly” plants, but she wanted to keep them for nature to feed on. The discussion got pretty heated.
For a few minutes, we both forgot that there was room in our “garden” for more than one loved energy. Thankfully, we both know to breathe through those feelings and get to the unity of our hearts. We did that and were able to create a plan that includes elements from each of our pictures.
All too often, we fall into the false belief that sharing a quality we love without our mental picture holding it in place will weaken it. This false belief causes us to hoard the energy instead of sharing it. Hoarding of a quality separates it from the unity of love that feeds it. A singularly owned quality becomes selfish ego food. Heart food can only be kept alive by joining it with the heart food of others.
Of course, it is easy to share love’s qualities when both people agree on the outcome. But for a quality of yours to expand beyond your singular picture of how it needs to exist in the world, it must be brought into a bigger, unified picture. That is often difficult because we frequently identify who we are with our mental picture of a quality rather than with the energy. This false identity can make expanding our picture of love threatening.
The secret is to breathe through the threatening feelings and make room in your heart for their quality of love and yours to become a family. Since growing a quality of love requires sharing, neither fighting for your rightness nor giving in to theirs is an answer.
Growing love is sort of like having your child leave home. You have to trust that they will be strong enough to become part of their new life without losing sight of who they are. The same is true for the facets of love that make up your many heart qualities. You have to trust they are strong enough to join and not be lost.
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Growing love is sort of like having your child leave home. You have to trust that they will be strong enough...
