You are being held in a ground of being of loving-kindness and the power that resides within you as you read these words: you are loved and capable of taking charge of your life at every moment.

Before anything is communicated to anyone in any environment, the audience, the individuals you want to communicate with must experience that they are valued by the speaker. Teachers who know they have something to learn from each of their students are far more effective. Corporate CEOs who truly value each employee are far more likely to develop a dedicated workforce. While the transference of information alone may be of interest to some people, most are far more likely to hear communication when there is an atmosphere of dignity and respect. People must experience that the speaker or, in this case, a writer, knows that they are incredibly powerful people with the capacity to make choices allowing them to take charge of their lives at any moment. Please know that is how I hold you.

As for the part about being-loved, it is important for me to share with you what I feel about our six and a half billion brothers and sisters. Ron Browning first introduced me to meditating in a loving way toward people. It began with those around me and then those I knew. Before long I could imagine holding our town in loving-kindness and then the state. There are a little over a million people in Maine and I could hold that after a while. Soon I began to hold a piece of New York City, where I was born, in my heart. And then more and more until I could hold seven million. Along the way, there were major hurdles. The country was a stretch. I had considerations about some people. People I knew I disagreed with, people to whom I knew I had done damage. I found it useful to hold an atlas so I could imagine the place where a billion people lived. No matter where you are, though I may not know your face, I have held you in my heart and you are loved. Before any communication it is important to hold the people involved in just that way. It means there can be no exceptions, not for Osama Bin Laden, not the 911 pilots, nor a person who has done damage in your life, nor for George Bush or Barack Obama.

Simple May Not Be Easy

The solution to every problem resides within the self.

“Each and every hour make up your mind…. to accomplish the matter presently at hand with genuine seriousness, loving care, independence and justice. Allow your mind freedom from all other considerations. This you can do if you perform every action in your life as if it were your last, putting aside all your wayward impulses and emotional resistance to the choices of reason, and all pretense, selfishness and discontent with what has been allotted to you. See how few are the things which a person needs to master in order to live a tranquil and godly existence. The gods ask nothing more of us.”

– Marcus Aurelius

The only question is access.

The one thing you will not be able to get directly from these pages or from any person is that you are loved and that it matters to someone that your life turns out, unless you let it in.

No person can love another into wellness.

If you believe there is no one that cares, it is not true. I do. Know that this love is selfish. As you come to know and experience your value and worth, you are much less likely to damage yourself or my children’s children.

At the very center of being, no matter what kind of life you have had or created, no matter how well hidden it may be or even if you don’t believe it is there.

Each of us wants to be able to express love.

Each of us wants to know we are loved and cared for by another.

We want to believe that our lives have had some purpose.

And we want to know that we are capable in every second of making choices that allow us to take charge of our lives.

We are living in a time when almost everyone is willing to tell us what to do and how to do it.

“It is because we have at the present moment everybody claiming the right of conscience without going through any discipline whatsoever that there is so much untruth being delivered to be a bewildered world.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

If we accept it, let it in and acknowledge that we are loved and begin to produce tangible results in our lives for a day, an hour, a morning, we are able to turn any situation around.

Landon Carter created a story call “The Rat and Cheese Story.” If you have a four foot by eight foot piece of plywood and put two foot high sides on it and a door at one end, then add four, one foot long, heavy, cardboard cylinders at one end and place cheese in the first tube and let a rat in, sooner rather than later, the rat will find the cheese. If for thirty days you put the cheese in the same tube, on the thirtieth day, the rat goes instantly to the first tube. On the thirty-first day you move the cheese to tube number three, the rat will go first to the first tube, perhaps be upset because the cheese has been moved, then proceed to find the cheese. The difference between rats and human beings is that human beings will go down the same tube with no cheese in it forever.

We have the capacity to end world hunger and persistent starvation.

Every time we don’t allow a person to help prepare, serve or clean up after a meal we provide we contribute to their feelings of being “helpless.”

We have the capacity to end violence in all of our societies.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

– William Morrow

We have the capacity to create inspired schools.

We have the capacity to end the cycle of violence that spawns child abuse, rape and incest.

Nothing will change unless each one of us changes.

I discovered in my life that I have the capacity to kill.

I have met those who have committed violent crimes who are capable of loving-kindness.

The capacity for all things resides within us.

The question is what gets watered on a day in and day out basis?

Failure only occurs when we declare it.

According to the Story of Creation, after God created Adam and Eve, the whole human race was begun with one cell (the combination of an egg and a sperm, creating a single cell).

Darwin believed that the original animal was the amoeba, a single celled creature.

Using either theory, we, you and I are literally related.

Does that mean that those who are in the direct line of Mahatma Gandhi will be pacifists and “saints?”

It does not.

Does that mean that everyone in the direct line of Adolf Hitler will be a mass murderer?

It does not.

It means that the capacity for everything resides within each of us.

The question is, in this second, the only one we have any guarantee of, what will you water, encourage and nurture in you, in others, your home, your company, your country?

Make for yourself a magical life!

This is the seventh installment of “What Every Person Can Do” (click here to read the previous installment), and is part of bringing the “What One Person Can Do” conversation to the written word. To appreciate it fully, experience yourself as loved absolutely and unconditionally, as well as capable of making choices that allow you to take charge of your own life.

By Bill Cumming