Shared Cookie

Several weeks ago I woke up with these words; shared cookie principal. What on earth could that mean and why was it just hanging around in my head constantly popping up like some annoying Internet ad? I had written almost an entire blog post on what I thought this was supposed to mean but ended up scraping it because it just didn't feel right.I mean whoever thinks you can actually share a cookie has never actually SHARED a cookie! If it's a cookie like a soft oatmeal cookie (with raisins, of course) and you have no real sense of how to cut a circle in half or use your teeth to "share" someone gets a less than true half and likely it's soggy If the same cookie is hard, then someone for sure gets less than half and in some cases, no one gets any except the sidewalk which is now enjoying the cookie carnage.  If it's a cookie like an Oreo, you can separate the two halves, but who gets the cream filling?  I just had no idea what that was supposed to mean.... Until this morning when I had an aha moment about what the next blog post was to be. Hence the name change to  A Shared Cookie.

Here's the cookie I want to share with you today........if I told you to think of a flower your mind would produce a plethora of mental images of a variety of flowers. Perhaps images such as:

 But what if you looked a flower without saying or thinking  what it is....looking at it void of any "description".  At first your mind would tell you something like: 'this is a flower, you dope', and you'd immediately start having an internal dialogue about how it is a flower, will always be a flower and why bother staring at the flower. But if you still you mind with the one technique I've learned and that is to ask yourself "am I still breathing" and then focus your entire attention on the answer and ALL that encompasses it, you can then focus your attention on the entity in front of you. That living being we call a flower, is in fact raw energy in the form of a flower. It is the same raw energy you and I are made of and once you see that living entity as part of you, you begin to realize that you are are just as beautiful, resilient, majestic, pure as the flower.

I can tell you when I first did this exercise (both the am I breathing and the flower) I felt a little awkward, a little scared but at the same time excited. All those times I heard or said "We are all one"...looking at the flower without description finally brought the true power and magnitude to fruition. Not only did I learn (and still continue) how to quite my mind from talking me to death, but I am able to see things in both their uniqueness and their sameness. Every flower is both the same as the others on the plant but each flower has it's own uniqueness. The red might be deeper in the middle or lighter, the yellow of the center might be a green/yellow or could have hues of brown. It's still a flower, still and azalea with the same azalea energy as the rest but it has some unique quality about it. Just like you and me. I look like "me" and you still look like "you" but we are very much the same raw energy and pure love.

So I challenge you to looking at a "flower" just as I described above and then look at yourself in the mirror and marvel at that face just as you marveled at the flower. Don't "describe" yourself just LOOK at the beauty, the magic, the pure energy and love that you already and always have been. Marvel at the real you.