Day 7: Review and Plan

Take a few minutes to review your fifth week. Write about your accomplishments and what you need to work on. Did you:

• Brainstorm some goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for your future in the areas of your relationships, your family, your friends, and your community, and ways you want to be of service?

• List a just a few (2-4) specific Love Goals for this next month?

• Set intentions to follow through with each of your priorities for the week?

• Open the door to bodhichitta (your completely open heart and mind) with a 5-minute Love Meditation?

• Start a new Love Journal and make notes in it, each day, of conversations and interactions you had the previous day, your general frame of mind with the world, and about the people you will see and conversations you may have in the day to come?

• Write about your growing edge - where you most need to focus your attention when it comes to love?

• Brainstorm some goals for extending kindness to the world; for creating and nurturing your community; small generous acts you might do this week; and a list of bigger actions you could take someday to help your community and your world in the days or months ahead; and some goals for equanimity - and add them to your Month Map or your Inspiration Page?

• Try out the 'Zen Pause" practice to internalize equanimity?

Next week schedule in 3-steps: 

1. Thursday - Adjust your Priority Grid for the month: Check off what you have completed, add new items you have thought of, and move anything down lower that no longer fits.

2. Friday - Block in your schedule for the next week: Add events and blocks of time for your priority categories (such as an hour for committee work on Tuesday and Thursday).

3. Saturday - Fill in the details: Schedule a daily time for all of your daily priorities, like exercising; choose days and times for the one-day tasks like sending that birthday card; and schedule in the chunks of those big task-driven projects.

 

Evaluate your Ducks in a Row: If situations are constantly moving you away from your priorities and you feel dissatisfied and out of balance, make a note about why that is. Also, make a note of which of your priorities are getting left out of your life. 

Summary

Love is the key to happiness and success in all areas of your life. Love is not a belief or feeling; it's a practice, a set of habits learned over a lifetime, a way of being. 

Your first Love Habit step was to set an intention to open your heart, move toward a flexible way of thinking and feeling, release fear and a need for security, and embrace the possibility of love.

Your second is to cultivate communities that meet your needs to grow into a better person. 

And your third step is to practice and cultivate the habits of love: Kindness, generosity, equanimity (and others that we will talk more about later). Keeping a Love Journal will aid your inner dialogue and introspection, and help you to see habits and patterns in relationships, and realize where you need to grow.

Going forward, you will:

• Incorporate love, community, and service into your priorities and intentions and continue to improve your Love Habits - every week, for the rest of your life.

• Use your Love Journal - daily, for as long as it seems useful, and for at least one month a year going forward. 

Week 6 Needs:

• Your journal notebook
• Your Love Journal
• Plain paper (for 3 Mini-Maps)