Hi Everyone!!

I would like to welcome you to 2010. What a wild number! Just looking at it is cool.

This year I invite you to honor, to worship, all that is sacred to you. Take time to create peace points in your life. This allows one to feel love, and more importantly, the opportunity to take responsibility for loving yourself.

Personally I think it’s important to always remember the dictum “You can’t give what you don’t have.” When we rely on others to be the source of our love, we ultimately expect them to create our own safety and security in life. In so doing, we develop co-dependent relationships in which we are all medicated by the other and neither learns to become healthy, self reliant individuals.

In short, we never grow up. Every bird must learn to fly and feed itself or it will die, regardless of how beautiful its plumage may be. Every flower must learn to find the sun, hold the rain, while taking root and cultivating loving, sharing relationships with all the little beings in nature that are symbiotic with it. Every salmon must learn to swim upstream, and if they don’t, many whales, bears, and eagles go hungry, as they are equally dependent upon Mother Nature’s gifts of sharing.

Osho says playfulness is a measure of intelligence. All my work with people over the last 25 years has shown this to be true over and over. I’ve seen that people who hurt themselves while playing and want to get back to playing heal very quickly and they follow directions. Those that hurt from not taking responsibility for their own freedom, heal very slowly, if at all. They are trapped because to heal means to go back to a life of serving the needs of others and often healing means no one to touch you, no one to hear you, no one to care for you. The disconnection from your therapist, your friend, or your healer in this regard can be so scary for somebody who has not yet learned to love and care for themselves. It’s as scary as it would be for a child who had become separated from its parents in a large crowd.

2010 is a great year to learn healthy independence, a great year to give yourself permission to play; a great year to honor yourself with peace points, be they your morning coffee, tea, sacred smoke, meditation, tai chi, or sharing love with your plant and animal friends. As the world moves faster and faster with advancing communication technologies, people often without realizing it, take on more and more relationships with other persons, places, and things. Each relationship requires an energetic investment or output, yet think of the countless hours spent reading and deleting junk emails, reading or even tossing junk mail. Think of all the times your emotional stability was challenged last year because you allowed yourself to become so involve with things external to yourself that your love battery ran down. Naturally we begin to show jaded emotions and create separation in relationships so we can survive the environment that we’ve created. Sadly, many of us in this position find ourselves in pain because we’re unintentionally separating from people, places, and things we love in order to love ourselves. It needn’t be that way. I am fully aware that we cannot give for another what we cannot give for ourselves, and sadly it is almost impossible to authentically wish for another what we cannot give for ourselves.

So for 2010, I will make the following recommendations for myself so that I may learn, love, and grow more; so that I may reach my potential as an individual, an individual capable of loving and caring for the whole of life which to me is living love. If in any way these recommendations I here make to myself are in parallel with recommendations that you would like to make to yourself, I invite you to join me in 2010 in my continued process of healing, learning, and loving myself fully enough that life is a great joy, something worth doing again.

First, I will honor myself with regular, high quality meals and clean water.

Second, I will make my exercise time sacred, an offering of worship, an honoring of the fact that I am a temple of the divine and that great spirit can get no closer to me than I can get to myself.

Third, I will honor and respect the beautiful, delicate relationships in nature, knowing full well that those very relationships are essential to both my survival and the survival of nature herself and her beauty.

Fourth, I will not engage socially or professionally when in truth I need to be quiet and/or alone.

Fifth, I will take responsibility for my own inner peace and good will. I will give myself empathy and compassion when I’ve made mistakes and will seek to be conscious enough not to make the same mistakes again.

Sixth, in 2010 I will be more open and honest in sharing my love and wisdom with any and all who ask for my help, while always being aware of the point at which my love could potentially become a band aid for the other. I seek to offer love as a means of helping others learn to love and become healthfully independent.

Seventh, in 2010 I will remember to be constantly aware that people lose their lives completely unexpectedly, every minute of every day. With that awareness, I seek to honor life so fully that, should for any reason my life come to an end, I will pass through the gate leaving ego perception to arrive at cosmic consciousness fully awake and happy to watch the seeds of love I’ve planted in the earthly garden growing, sprouting, flowering, and sharing love everywhere. I will live in love so fully that should I leave the body-mind to become one again, I will not need to return to hug, hold, guide, and support those I did not love openly and honestly out of my own fear. Instead I will have created a heart connection adequately to convey my love and consciousness from any reality that I may visit to this one that has served the flowering of my own awareness of the truth of myself so well.

I wish all of you, your family, your pets, your gardens, and your dreams optimal growth, peace, and play in 2010. It is my dream that all live so fully that death has no hold on us. For once one has become aware of the fact that they can create life out of love; there is nothing for death to hold on to. Let us all learn to create love and life together, and in so doing, things like fear of 2012 have no grasp on us. For one learns in due time that the past and future spring from the present, the now. So as Ram Das so beautifully says, “Be here now.” Life is not lived yesterday or tomorrow. For the past is an import, and the future is an export from the seed of now. May we all leave the garden a little more beautiful than when we came.

Happy 2010!

I send you my love and my chi for I know that in nature, in truth, in love, we are one. May Great Spirit be ever present with you.

Aho!

It is done, it is done, it is done.

Peace be with you.

Paul Chek