Once upon a time, on the edge of a small planet on one of the outer arms of the great Milky Way, a tiny band of hearts gathered to celebrate the wedding of two of their own, the binding of their hands together for the completion of their journey.
Everyone laughed and danced and feasted. And toward sunset, they gathered at the edge of a lake, fastened their well-wishes to paper lanterns and set them sailing into the sky:
May your life together be filled with love and joy.
May you have smooth sailing.
May friendship be your guiding star.
May you share beautiful dreams and bring them to fruition.
May you grow through all your struggles and your love shine ever more brightly for having weathered life’s disappointments and storms.
May each day sparkle with your laughter, and each night bring you the comfort of each other’s arms.
And when the celebration was done, and the celebrants had gone their various ways, a great moon rose, full of light and blessing. And it took onto itself all the well-wishes and sent them shimmering across the waters as they rose, ever higher, to the heart of the Yes. And the Yes, welcoming yet another expression of its love, acknowledged the pledges and wishes as its own.
Auntie Mae knew everything about flowers. When the little girl visited her, she would tell her their names and what kinds of light made them happy. Sometimes, when they strolled through Auntie Mae’s colorful garden she would talk to the flowers, asking them how they liked last night’s rain and if they had heard that oriel singing this morning.
One day when the little girl stopped by to visit Auntie Mae, she found her sitting on her front porch steps doing a fluttery kind of dance with her fingers. When she got closer, the little girl stopped in her tracks, her eyes wide open. A dozen buzzing bees were flying in and out between Auntie Mae’s fingers.
“Auntie Mae! What are you doing! Aren’t you afraid of those bees?”
“Oh, no!” Auntie Mae laughed. “They’re my friends, and I’m dancing with them. C’mon; they won’t hurt you. See? I put dabs of honey on my fingers to invite them and then they come and play.” She let the little girl watch the dance for a couple of minutes, then she shooed the bees away, telling them that was all for today. She went inside to wash her hands while the little girl sat on the steps. Then the two of them strolled through the garden.
When they came to the big-leafed plant in the shady corner, the little girl pointed to its trumpet-shaped flowers. “What are those called, Auntie Mae?” she asked.
“Most people call them ‘hostas.’ But that’s not their true name. Their true name is a secret. Shall I tell it to you?”
“Oh, yes! Please tell me, Auntie Mae.”
“They are fairy hats,” Auntie Mae said in a quiet, confidential sounding voice. “When the moon is sailing high in the sky and all the children are asleep, fairies come and take them from their stems to wear as hats while they dance their fairy dances in the starlight. When the dances are through, they hang them back on their stems and the dew comes to clean them.”
“How do you know that, Auntie Mae?” the little girl asked. “Have you ever seen them?”
“Only once,” said Auntie Mae, “a long, long time ago. But oh, what a beautiful sight!
“The bees tell me they see them dancing all the time, right around midnight. Maybe some night we can sneak out together and sit very quietly under that tree. The bees say that they dance around that circle of clover over there.
“If we do sneak out, though, and if you see them, you must promise never to tell anyone until you are at least eighty years old. And even then, you may tell only one little girl. Do you think you could do that? Could you keep the secret?”
And of course the little girl crossed her heart and promised. And that night, the two of them snuck out of their beds and sat in the moonlight under the great old tree watching fairies dance.
Some time ago, I received an invitation to participate in an unusual study. Its purpose was to determine the impact of a simple five-minute daily practice on participants’ fears and their experience of well-being.
Because one of the designers of the study was a former mentor and instructor of mine, Ann-Marie McKelvey, whom I like very much and trust deeply, and because I only had to invest five minutes a day for two weeks, I agreed. Who can’t clear five minutes in their day?
The practice is called “The Three Treasures Practice,” by the way, because it draws on the disciplines of loving-kindness meditation, EMDR (a therapy technique for reducing the effects of trauma), and the findings of positive psychology.
My immediate response to the practice, after did my first session, was, “Wow! That was easy – and do I feel great!” But it was only after the first full week of doing my daily sessions that I began to see the incredible power of the practice.
Before beginning it, we participants took a brief survey that had us identify one of our biggest fears and to rate it, and the negative feelings that went with it, on a scale of 1-10. I rated my fear at a 5. But my feelings of grief and sadness over it scored a 9. To my surprise, by the end of the first week, all my scores dropped dramatically. I was looking at the situation from an altogether different perspective.
By the end of the second week, my fear and the sadness and grief were hardly at play at all in my life. I felt free from my concerns and saw clearly that if the situation I had feared did materialize, I would be able to deal with it , minute by minute, as it unfolded. I thought about the old adage that most of what we worry about never happens. And even when it does, it rarely takes any of the forms we imagined. All my apprehensions had done nothing but waste time I could have spent enjoying life in the present.
I ‘knew’ all of that about worry before I began the practice. But I worried anyway, and was deeply attached to my concerns. What you know in theory is far from the things you learn from experience. The Practice simply melted my worries away. Life became lovelier and more vibrant again. Day by day, I was effortlessly moving into a broader, easier world.
It’s been a long time now since I first learned The Three Treasures Practice, and my understanding of its beauty and power has only deepened in that time.
My own experience with the practice has been so profound that I wanted to share it with you. And I’m delighted to say that the developers of the practice and of the study have given all the participants full permission to share it.
So consider this a happy invitation to try it yourself. Make a commitment to give it a full two-week try. Start by writing down what you biggest fear is and rate its intensity from 1-10, where 10 is complete, abject fear, and 0 is no worry. Then think about the feelings that accompany your fear. Does it make you feel any of these emotions: Loss? Anxiety? Grief? Sadness? Anger? Loneliness? Which ones? Rate the intensity of those, too, so you can see the changes in your life at the end of the first week and at the end of the second.
Remember that the practice is designed not only to ease your fears, but to heighten your sense of well-being as well .
Before I share the instructions for the practice itself, here’s a worthwhile little exercise to do first, a kind of warm-up session. For me, it was quite interesting.
All you have to do is jot down the following feelings and rate each of them from 1-10 as you’re feeling them right now: Joy, Peace, Openness, Love, Connection, Kindness, Trust, and Happiness.
You don’t have to do that part. But if you do, it will give you a way to evaluate how the practice is working for you.
Now here are the actual instructions for the practice, as given to those of us who engaged in the study:
Instructions for The Three Treasures Practice
Sit comfortably in a quiet environment. Take deep inhales and deep exhales as you settle.
Cross your arms over your chest and place your hands on alternate shoulders. [Right hand on left shoulder; left hand on right shoulder.]
In a determined way, gently and slowly tap each shoulder one at a time. Tap so that it is loud enough to hear. This is called the EMDR Butterfly Hug.
Keep doing the Butterfly Hug as you say the following phrases to yourself in rhythm with your taps, silently or out loud, Repeat them until your five minutes are up.
May I now be filled with loving kindness
May I now be safe and protected
May I now be resilient in mind and body
May I now live with ease and joy
The Loving-Kindness Meditation is an ancient tradition that goes back thousands of years. Although the phrases may differ from culture to culture, the basic principle is to alleviate suffering. Please use the positive Loving-Kindness phrases above for the next 14 days along with the Butterfly Hug for five consecutive minutes each day.
If you have trouble remembering the words, please print them on a card to look at during you initial repetitions until you know them by heart.
Should you find yourself becoming drowsy, please stand up to do the practice until the five minutes have transpired.
That’s it!
I would love to know what your experience with this easy and, in my view, powerful exercise is. Think about taking five minutes a day to try it for two weeks and if you do, let me know what your experience with it is. What have you got to lose?
Wishing you a week of increasing contentment and peace.
There’s a certain grace to things, a certain rhythm of the Yes that pulses through all nature. It rides in the vast unseen spaces of the molecules and atoms, in their grand, endless flickering and flow. It creates and precedes them. It gives rise to the appearance and disappearance, to the inbreath and the exhalation of all that is and could be.
Seeing it, we call it beauty. Feeling it, we call it peace. Hearing its song, we call it love. And so it is, and more.
Subtly, August beings the transformation. This is her whole task, this ushering of summer past its midpoint toward the days of fall.
At the edges of the fields and along the roadsides, she scatters the late summer flowers. She deepens the green of the trees and dusts them, ever so lightly, with a thin russet glow. She cools the nights, and bathes the morning with fogs. She ripens the crops in the fields.
A new scent fills her air and, tasting it, the earth’s creatures stir, as if waking from a long dream, as if they are sensing some familiar, ancient turning.
When the flicker of orange caught my eye, I gasped. A butterfly! It’s only the third that I’ve seen here this summer. Maybe it wasn’t a butterfly at all, but an Angel of Hope with sky on its wings Delighted at the thought, I whispered, “Thank you, amber angel. May you fly long. May you thrive.”
You simply leave me speechless. All I can do is stare, my mouth agape in wonder, my breath tasting of awe. Unasked, you appear, sprung from mere ground, and opening your petals to the morning sun, astound me.
Summer pulls August over the horizon, its greens lush and steamy beneath liquid skies that smell of coming rain. But a white sun still blazes above igniting the meadow’s deep weeds, making the shade trees into gods under whose spreading arms rabbits take refuge and nibble the sweet summer grass
It was one of those summer days that the geese tucked into their memory stores to recount to one another on long, winter nights. They would remind each other how they sat on the lawn and ate their fill of the bugs that crawled between the blades of grass. On those cold, dark nights, they would remind each other of the wonderful smell of the newly mown grass and luscious white clover.
Normally, the humans filled the park. But they disappeared in the rain as if it would melt them and rain had fallen all morning long and threatened to return. So the geese had the place to themselves. And they sat on the earth amidst the waves of grass and preened themselves, and slept and dreamed, wrapped in the green luscious smell of it all, breathing it into their hearts to hold for the days when the grass slept beneath a blanket of soft, sparkling snow.
