Today is Day 89 of the Art Apple A Day Retrospective – for information on the project click here.

Day Eighty Nine – December 28, 2010

Looking back 10 years ago today…

I am a perennial optimist but I’m also a realist. Can those coexist? The optimist in me wants to love the weeds as well as the flowers but the realist in me wants to clear the garden of the weeds so that the flowers may flourish. What’s a girl to do? My newest approach is to send love to God’s creation as I rip them out of the soil! It seems to work for me – blessing and sending love to everything and everyone. This is a work in progress – it’s often very difficult.

This last year in my struggles to manage all that 2020 has brought into our world, I stumbled upon Ho’oponopono.

Ho’oponopono is an ancient Hawaiian practice that combines love, forgiveness, repentance, and gratitude in four powerful phrases. You send love and ask for forgiveness to things and people who have brought us pain.

The words have become a bit of a personal mantra for me when pain (either physical or emotional) enter. The practice of being present helps me first in recognizing the state of pain has started and then repeating the Ho’oponopono until I move past the intensity. It is as follows:

I’m sorry.

Please forgive me.

I love you.

Thank you.

Do you believe in our oneness and collective spirit? It’s a powerful way to look at the world, much better than seeing us all as separate!

This practice has been the most powerful for me in sending this thought/energy to someone who has hurt me and people I love. I don’t want the anger in me any longer so I decided to attempt this when these powerful negative feelings came up. Shifting to this approach is optimism at its most extreme! lol But, guess what, it feels so much better and my body recognizes the difference.

The realist in me can use this approach for yanking out weeds – I’m sorry, please forgive me (for ripping you out of the soil) I love you (in a creation sense). Thank you.

Find the way to turn pain and difficult people into lessons. The little weeds and mean people can then be transmuted! Oh how I love to transmute things… if only I could transmute a weed into a flower! But those life “weeds” exist to teach us so much.

To see my original Day 89 post ~ A Weed Is But An Unloved Flower ~ from 10 years ago click here or on the image above.

And the story will continue tomorrow…

Side Note: Do you see all the apples in today’s Apple Art? How many can you find?