Pretty Please With Sugar On Top

This evening I am wondering if you have heard recently any hard to hear complaints from anyone in your life? Has anyone said something that appears to judge or blame you or someone else? Do you feel like withdrawing from the relationship or perhaps become defensive in thought or word? Well, me too. When this happens I try to step back and take a couple of deep breaths so that I can connect to live through understanding universal needs, of how heart and hope and justice is striving to get through in all our conversations. Then I try these two things:

1. Place myself in their shoes. What might they be feeling and needing. Breath with this a while and connect to the energy of these needs without telling stories about whether the person "should" have these needs or whether they are demanding something of you or the world or not.

2. Hear in their words "please." In their howling and growling they are really shouting out with their hearts, "please, someone, anyone, help me." Or perhaps, "fix it!" or "mend my life!" Breath with this for a while and imagine them saying please, pretty please, with sugar on top. Their words and body language might not have suggested this compassionate language to you, and might never. You don't have control over them. You can only change yourself. So take a few moments, a few hours, even a life time and hear the please in others, in yourself, and in the world. It is a cry for you to connect to the beauty of the needs. And out of that connection might just come the turn of heart in yourself and others to have all the needs of others valued and on the table. Once you get everyone at that table, there will be plenty of pretty please with sugar on top to feed the world with a wonderful dessert of compassion, just deserts for all life. Maybe you won’t get what you want, but the sweet sorrow will feed your heart.

For the hope not of a sweet tooth, but a sugary please,
(let us not bite, but delight),
LoraKim