Is there enough silence in our life to see life as a blessing? To see ourselves as a blessing? Is there enough space in our lives to see life with loving awareness?
All creation, including ourselves, were brought forth from a world of the invisible by some ‘primal kindness’. To have been born out of nothingness is a blessing and nothing short of love! The only right response to such love is to reciprocate the blessing through gestures of kindness, love and gratitude. Such a response is a wholehearted Smile On Life response as a mother would smile on her newborn child. As the mother beholds her child with loving awareness, she smiles on the blessing of her child with love and gratitude. As she smiles on her child the mirror neurons on the child begin to fire and the child smiles back on her mother with love. Both mother and child are drawn into a space that is filled with love. Both become engaged in nothing but loving awareness of the moment.
Many studies have shown the many positive physiological and psychology effects that smiling has on people, along with the positive impact of adopting an attitude of gratitude into one’s life. The practice to Smile On any part of life includes these positive effects but it also incorporates the creation of more space in our lives to engage in gazing on any part of life with loving awareness. Not just awareness but an awareness laced with love. It calls for us to pause, place our attention on our heart and intentionally align our being to that depth of living that matters most. It causes us to see with the eyes of the heart leaving behind our thoughts, judgments and beliefs and only engage in beholding that which is before us with love.
To Smile On Life is to loving behold that part of life that is before us. In beholding life with loving awareness, we reciprocate the blessing of our life by bringing blessing to life.
Smile On Life is a way of love calling us to: empty our minds of thoughts and judgements; to open our hearts to see life with the eyes of heart; and, with loving awareness behold life before us.
In the poem “The Secret Sits” written by Robert Frost he leaves the reader to discover what he is referring to when he writes the ‘Secret’.
The Secret Sits
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
The ‘Secret’ may refer to the heart where it knows where peace and love is to be found. It is here that we can see clearly and can respond to life in a way that is real. It is here that we feel connected to life, discover that we are blessed and that we can offer blessing to the world simply by gazing on life with loving awareness.
The poet W.B. Yeats writes while sitting coffee shop.
“I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness
That I was blessed and could bless.”
Smile On Life awakens us to the blessing of life and brings us, even it be for a moment, to a place where love is real, a place we live out what every human being is called to be, love. A place where our real happiness lies.