May’s heart-centered practice of presence is Wholeness.

One of my core heart-centered practices (it’s in my new book, Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life, is witnessing. This is the process of learning to pay more attention to your thought patterns and all the actions and reactions they produce — without judging yourself or others.

Lately I’ve been witnessing certain things:

• I sometimes have a much bigger physical or emotional reaction to something or someone than my mind is telling me I need to have.

• I have a habit of avoiding certain kinds of interactions, situations, tasks, practices — and those avoidance patterns are often similar.

• Fear can be both extreme and subtle — but it’s the subtle forms of fear’s suggestions that take the deepest root. . .and are the hardest to spot.

• A lifetime of justifying certain behaviors and beliefs does NOT make those behaviors and beliefs okay for me or anyone.

• The things we sweep under our mental or spiritual rugs need to get cleaned out — or pretty soon we start tripping on what’s under that rug every single day . . .and if we don’t pay attention pretty soon it takes over the whole house.

• We all live as if the choices we make have no consequences, when in fact every single choice we make has consequences. Every single choice.