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.