Valentines Day Cards are so fun!

Valentines Day is quickly approaching so we must get on to making them! I have pulled together papers, ribbon, stickers, cards, card stock, envelopes, pens, doilies, heart punch, and fairy pictures for this years Valentines. First I saw this idea to make rings out of chocolate kisses and pipe cleaners. We tried this and it was so hard to wrap the pipe cleaners around the kiss. Eve struggled with it for a minute and said it is too hard. I tired it too and it was very hard after the 10th one or so I got a hang of it. I made them for her class and a huge one for her teacher. She loves chocolate!

So as I got ready to make the cards my daughter had another idea. She is going to teach a Valentine card craft class to all the children but actually it was only me. So she gets out her white board and red pen to write down all the things we are going to do. She had me making Valentines for her friends. She made some too. They had to say happy Valentines Day for the girls and for the boys Have a pumped up Valentines Day.





















Then I made some of my own. It was great fun! To top all this off we had planned to make cupcakes for her schools dance as well. She was excited and made it into a cooking class. She put on her apron and went to work. Mixing the batter. It was a box cake because it was for the school. So easy peasy. She mixed the white cake and after pouring into the heart shaped cups, I squeezed the chocolate filling in the middle. She topped them off with more batter.
After all we turned out to have a great time and came up with some great cards.

Happy Valentines Day!

Go into your Heart!

"We must now switch the gears out of the fear-based mental state that we have been taught to believe in, and move into Heart Centered living. For this transformation to take place, one must learn to meditate, "go into your Heart" and access the inner wisdom of the Universe. It is the only way, it is THE WAY. As each one of us begins this quiet revolution of living from the Heart, we will begin to see it reflected in our lives and in our World. This is how each one of us will create change in the world, create Peace, create Harmony and Balance, and in this way, will we all create the New World Paradigm of Heaven on Earth."
Check out the article here!

Heart

So our Heart has so much to do with how we live our lives. If we forget ourselves and cherish others we will see a transformation of our world. This is a great article on the heart - "Neurophysicists have been astonished to discover that the Heart is more an organ of intelligence, than (merely) the bodies' main pumping station. More than half of the Heart is actually composed of neurons of the very same nature as those that make up the cerebral system. Joseph Chilton-Pearce, author of The Biology of Transcendence, calls it "the major biological apparatus within us and the seat of our greatest intelligence."

Hearts of Februrary

Heart found in the trunk of a tree!

This is definitely one of my favorite months out of the year. Mostly because I love Hearts! I Love Love and giving Love and receiving Love. I wish everyone would celebrate Love every day! If we all Loved more we would have a peaceful life. Love is a treasure.

Giving Love is a wonderful meditation. By meditating on wishing Love we receive immeasurable benefits in this life. Here is some great benefits of wishing Love taken from the book Modern Buddhism. "(1) By meditating on wishing love for just one moment we accumulate greater merit than we would giving food three times every day to all those hungry in the world, (2) we will receive great loving kindness from others, (3) we will be protected in various ways by others, (4) we will be mentally happy all the time, (5) we will be physically healthy all the time, (6) we will not be harmed by weapons, poison, and other harmful conditions, (7) we will obtain all necessary conditions without effort, and (8) we will be born in a superior heaven of a Buddha Land." Now those are some great reasons to give Love! So, how do we have a kind heart to want to give Love? First we know that we want happiness in our life. In order for us to be happy we must change our minds. Ordinarily we are thinking of ourselves all the time. This causes all of our problems. We don't care about others. But where did we get everything we own today? From others. All the roads, cars, buildings, theater, stores and so on are from the kindness of others. Even the food we eat and the money we have comes from others. Without our boss or family we would not have money. So every living being is so kind to us. Giving us many things we need. We in turn should return their kindness and wish them happiness. Also we are one and others are countless. Why be so concerned for ourselves all the time when there are millions of others out there who are feeling exactly the same way we feel. Others are important. Take your hand for instance, if someone said to you- you have a choice to chop off all your fingers or just one, you will choose just one. Because the others are so important. If we stop thinking about ourselves all the time and think of others all our problems will be solved. Here is the meditation taken also from Modern Buddhism, " Training in Wishing Love- With the understanding and belief that the happiness and freedom of each and every living being are far more important than our own, we generate wishing love for all living beings, thinking: It would be so wonderful if all living beings attained the pure and everlasting happiness of enlightenment! May they attain this happiness. I myself will work for this aim. We remain single pointedly on this precious mind of wishing love for all living beings for as long as possible. We repeat this meditation as much as possible until we spontaneously wish that each and every living being may experience the happiness of enlightenment." If everyone in the world did this meditation every day we would have world peace and everlasting happiness would pervade the entire world. Love! Lets all think of giving Love every day!
You can get the free ebook of Modern Buddhism written by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso my Spiritual Guide here emodernbudhism. It explains the entire Buddhist path to enlightenment. You can download it to your computer, phone or ipod. So cool! What Love Geshe-la has for all of us to give us a free book that has everything you need to change your mind.

Here are some heart rings I made!

I made about five of these and could not figure out how to make them again.

This one has a cool purple stone.

This one an old fashioned rose painted bead.

Here is a flower bead.

Love, lOve, loVe....all you need is LOVE!

This one is a blue beautifully cut stone.