lara simmons

        "Patience. Understanding. A cup of hot tea...." --From Day 1 of " 28 Days of LOVE " So begins MY definition of LOVE on the first page of my latest book, 28 Days of LOVE . As we head towards Valentine's Day, many of us may be thinking more about LOVE than usual. How to express it. How to find it. Maybe even how to define it. If you are thinking about LOVE this week now is the perfect time to buy 28 Days of LOVE . Whether you have twenty-eight days, or only 28 minutes, my new book will help you explore - and find - your own definition of LOVE. Full of photographs of "found" hearts, inspirational quotations, as well as exercises and meditations designed to bring more LOVE into your life, this is the perfect book for February explorations. Starting TODAY, 28 Days of LOVE is available in electronic format from the Blurb website for just $4.99. Just follow this link to purchase a copy. May you find all the LOVE your heart can handle this V...

28 DAYS OF LOVE By Lara Simmons It's been a long time - a L-O-N-G time - since I wrote anything on this blog. One thing I have been working on is this book: 28 Days of LOVE.  It started out as a passion project, something to work on when my "real" writing wasn't going very well. I could nip on over to Blurb and while away a bit of time on this little side project.  After publishing WRITE YOUR LIFE , however, I started to take this "little side project" a bit more seriously and to see how maybe it could become something in its own right. And now it is.  I think it is the perfect book to give as a gift to someone you LOVE this Christmas. On every page there is a new way to practice LOVE, to think about LOVE, or to LOVE the people in your life. I hope that it will encourage you, inspire you, and fill you with LOVE.  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! LOVE is all you need! Click on the book cover above to order.

Join me on Instagram ( fridgeoracle ) this month, where I will be posting daily reminders of LOVE. Like this one: "LOVE is contagious." --My take on a Sandra Cisneros quote, "Anger is contagious."

"There is a special combination that seems to be perfect for this, which is love plus the combination of thanks and appreciation reflected in the English word gratitude. Just one of these is not enough. Love needs to be based in gratitude, and gratitude needs to be based in love . These two words together create the most important vibration." -- Masaru Emoto Today I am thankful for: 1) A walk in the sunshine after DAYS of rain. 2) Nutella-stuffed brown butter + sea salt chocolate chip cookies   3) Watching our dog crawl awkwardly over all other family members on the couch to get to me. (Sometimes it's just nice to know you're someone's favorite :)

  "In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you love? How deeply did you learn to let go?" --Buddha Day 28. Here we are at the end of our month-long focus on love and I find myself with two weeks' worth of quotes still to go. A lot has been written about love. A LOT. And yet, it eludes many of us in one form or another. Some of us have romantic love, but not self-love. Some have self-love, but have yet to find their life partner. Others have the love of many friends, but long for the love of a family. Some of us could use more of all of the above. Whatever your situation, I hope that 28 Days of Love has helped you to deepen, grow and expand the love in your life. Before I call it good, I would like to share with you a few favorites among those quotes that didn't make it onto the blog before now. (Links to old posts, where available, are included.) "Kindness is love in action." --The Universe, to me, while wr...

"I love you. I don't know you, but I love you." --Lydia at Unity of Burbank The Universe is always giving us opportunities to learn and to grow and to "walk our talk," which is why it should have come to no surprise that this month has been full of opportunities for me to love when that was not my first instinct. Last Sunday at church for instance. As I approached the pews there was a woman standing in the aisle waiting for someone to join her before she sat down. I chose one of three or four empty pews nearby and sat down. When her friend had joined her, she slid into the aisle right next to me and sat down. "Ugh. Doesn't she know the empty bus seat rule ?" I thought to myself. It got worse a few seconds later when I realized she had a cold. Ah-choo! She was sneezing and sucking on cough drops and smelled like menthol from - I assume - some vapor rub. And I was off. Oh, great. Now I'm going to have to shake her hand and t...

"She truly loved herself and therefore had no reason to hate anyone else." --The Universe to me in an old blog post , reprinted below. December 17, 2010 "Emanate love to all in your sphere without distinction or prejudice."  --Sunyata Satchitananda from the website www.mythiclove.net I went to a Holiday concert this week that a friend of mine and her children were performing in. It was a lovely performance; the director was enthusiastic, the songs were uplifting and everyone seemed to be having a great time. There was one woman in the choir who particularly stood out for me. She was standing in the back, not doing anything special, but as she sang she just radiated love. I watched her closely throughout the whole concert, trying to figure out her secret. I studied her face to try and see what was different. Physically, there was nothing special about her face. It was more attractive then some, less attractive than others, but...

"Love really is all around." -- From the opening scene of Love Actually Have you ever had one of those days when love really is all around? For me it was Saturday. All day, everywhere I looked, the Universe was sending me reminders to love, love, love. At my yoga class I parked my mat in the first row (which I never do) and there in the floor was a little heart formed from the whorls and swirls of the wood. As I came inside the house after class, I stopped at our Little Free Library and there, staring out at me, was a small hardback volume of a book entitled How to Love . And later, when I sat down to relax with a cup of tea, I picked up a coffee table book we have had for years ( Monet: Water Lilies ) and came across this quote, "Everyone discusses [my art] and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love." (Claude Monet) This strikes me as a profound statement about life as well as art. It is...

"Love begins with yourself. The moment you accept what you are, you awaken your capacity to [give and to] receive love."   --Amrit Desai Kind of like all forgiveness is self-forgiveness , all love is self-love. If we don't love ourselves, how can we love others? After my first ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat , I came home and wrote these three rules on my fridge: Three Rules for Life 1) Be kind to yourself 2) Do not harm others 3) Purify your mind According to Vipassana teacher SN Goenka, being kind to yourself comes first because if you are not kind to yourself, you cannot be truly kind to others. You can try to be kind to others and you can pretend to be kind to others, but you cannot be truly kind to others if you are feeling angry, dissatisfied or stressed out. I think about this a lot when I am feeling tense or annoyed or angry. I try and ask myself: How can I be kind to myself? Which is kind of like asking: How can I love myself? So, ho...

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken." CS Lewis My heart was broken tonight by seven kids with a basketball. I am the assistant coach of my son's basketball team and the head coach (my dad) was out of town which meant I was in the hot seat.  Let me interject here, in the interest of full disclosure, that I have never coached anything before and only played basketball in a very casually organized way on a club team in England. England! Where basketball is like cricket is to us. Most people have heard of it, but no one really knows the rules and certainly not the fundamentals. Because the kids are just finishing up mid-winter break and many families are out of town,  I knew we were going to be down a few players.  Earlier this afternoon I got an offer from a boy one grade above our league to sub for us tonight. I was torn - if we had this player we would have a much better chance of...

Me, looking foolish "I must learn to love the fool in me - the one who feels too much, talks to much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool." ~ Theodore I. Rubin, M.D. The other day while swimming laps I made a complete and utter fool of myself. The pool was crowded that day, there were four people in my lane alone and our rhythm was totally off. As soon as one swimmer let someone go ahead of them, that person would switch to breast stroke and be holding everyone else up. Then someone else would drop out for a few minutes to adjust the timing and another swimmer would drop their kick board and start sprinting. It was a mess and a very frustrating way to get my e...

"Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo." -- Cheryl Strayed from her book Tiny Beautiful Things I love this idea, that love is our essential nutrient. It implies that, like vitamins, we can do something about increasing our intake. We don't just wait around for the Universe to send food from the sky like in Cloudy, with a chance of Meatballs , we go out and get what our bodies need. And our bodies tell us, in the form of cravings, what nutrients it needs. So do our hearts if we listen. What does your heart need today? What essential nutrients are missing? Maybe some quiet alone time? Maybe a night out with your sweetie? Maybe a massage or other body work? Maybe some chocolate??? Whatever love you need, whether you need to give it or receive it, make the time to do it today. It's essential.

"Love what IS." --The Universe (inspired by the work of Byron Katie ) We are experiencing some technical difficulties with our internet today so this is what I am practicing - loving what is. And that includes Mercury in retrograde .  This is one of those practices that feels essential, like if I could master it, I would have mastered everything else almost automatically.  If I were loving what is I would be living in the moment, I would be forgiving in the moment, I would be working towards peace and spreading love and so on.... So I invite you to love what is today, even if that includes some technological snafus! (This also works well on other homo sapiens :) [Thanks for this post goes to my sister, Jennifer Alhasa , who introduced me to the work of Byron Katie and who is always there for me with a reminder to Love what IS!]

  "What is not love is always fear and nothing else." -- A Course in Miracles I have been thinking a lot about fear as I explore the topic of love. So much of what stands in the way of love is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment, fear of intimacy, fear of joy. We have been taught - in so many ways - to fear love that we can be paralyzed in the face of it. In the face of expressing it: telling someone how we feel, asking someone out, or even letting someone we are in relationship with know how important they are to us and in the face of receiving it: allowing someone to do something for us, graciously accepting a gift, or feeling worthy of the relationship that we really want. If you believe, as I do, that all fear is at its core a fear of death, you can see why we are all so afraid of love. If we believe that the lack of love leads to death, that makes the stakes pretty high and many of us would rather circumnavigate this fear rather than face it, hopin...

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them." --Thomas Merton UPDATE TO THIS POST: Sunday night my husband and I had a bit of a fight and Monday night we had a great talk about it. What I realized during our talk was that our fight was exactly because I was not doing the above. I was asking him to be more like me. To think like me, to act like me, to have preferences about travel and family time that were just like me. I was trying to twist him to fit my own image and it was NOT working. No matter how much I tried to argue him into being like me he just couldn't do it. Because he's not me. I think we finally came to that realization by the end of our talk on Monday and it was both enlightening and a bit scary. In order to truly love him, I have to let go of my delusions about who he is, some of which I really quite l...

"Love is to will the good of the other FOR the other." --Father Jim Coyne  I heard this quote at a wedding I went to last year, in the Priest's remarks to the couple, and I thought it was brilliant. I wonder how many married couples share this kind of love? It is so easy when you get married to let the good of the whole over shadow the good of the individual and to lose yourselves in the relationship and in the family. I know this happened to me for far too many years, and I am only beginning to see how willing the good of my husband is good for me and how willing my own good is good for all of us. I think we could all use a little more freedom in our love relationships - freedom to be who we are, freedom to be who we used to be, freedom to be who we want to be - and this seems like a good place to start.

"...[T]here is a word for that, it's love. I'm in love with her. Okay? If you're looking for the word that means caring about someone beyond all rationality and wanting them to have everything they want no matter how much it destroys you, it's love. And when you love someone you just...you...you don't stop. Ever. Even when people roll their eyes or call you crazy. Even then. Especially then. You just... you don't give up. Because if I could give up, if I could just take the whole world's advice and, and, move on and find someone else, that wouldn't be love. That would be some other disposable thing that is not worth fighting for. But that is not what this is." --Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother , Season 9 Episode 17 As you know, I am a big fan of How I Met Your Mother, not in the least because it acknowledges The Universe and its mysterious ways , but it also contains more than its fair share of quotable moments , usually thanks to th...

"Love implies generosity, care, not to hurt another, not to make them feel guilty, to be generous, courteous, and behave in such a manner that your words and thoughts are born of compassion." -- Krishnamurti

"Patience. Understanding. A hot cup of tea. A salt water bath. The wing (what we call it when I crawl in underneath my husband's arm and snuggle up next to him). Passionate kisses. An ache in my heart. Chocolate. Dark chocolate. Dark chocolate caramels from Trader Joe's. Kindness in the face of my anger. Receiving exactly what I need without having to ask. A heart-felt card. A good book. A sappy movie. Twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. My son's smile. My son's hair. My son's energy. The way my son smells. The sun on my skin. Writing, when it's going well. Helping someone in need. Right now." --My answer to the question, "What is love?" Love is squirrelly, isn't it? I don't know about you, but I am having a much harder time with love than I did with forgiveness . Forgiveness seemed pretty straight-forward to me. Feel wronged (or that you have wronged someone), write a Forgiveness Letter , Let It Go, Repeat. Love has been t...