Along with the cherry and magnolia blossoms, and the jonquils and tulips heralding spring comes the time to prepare for the events and occasions celebrated in May and June: graduations, confirmations, and weddings, to cite a few.

I remember overhearing two women discussing an upcoming wedding in one of their families as I sat with my back to them; we were all having our nails painted for spring. One of the women asked the other about the bride’s grandmother who lived in Denver (the wedding was being celebrated in Maryland). The mother of the bride said offhandedly, “Oh, she can’t travel; she’s ninety-four” and they moved on to another topic.

It took all my strength not to turn around and say to them (though of course it was not my business, but I felt so sad that the aged grandmother would not be included in this significant family celebration.)

How simple it would have been to suggest to the grandmother that she write a blessing for her granddaughter, who was beginning a new stage in her life. Not only would the grandmother have felt included writing a blessing, but her granddaughter would likely remember the simple gesture long after her wedding, when her grandmother was gone.

I recently heard about a similar situation; in this case the bride’s mother was dying of cancer and hoping beyond hope that she would be alive for the wedding. But in case not, she prepared a blessing for her only daughter. She made it to the wedding, standing to read the blessing as part of the ceremony. It would not be a cliché to say that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

 “To write is to sow and reap at the same time.”
– Ruth Brin

A legacy blessing or a one-page legacy letter is more powerful than we think. It can deepen the bond among family members, link the past with the present and future, express gratitude for the special occasion, as well as honor those who can’t attend in person (we know that so well in this past year of COVID) but our sincere words of caring go a long way to keep us connected

Taking Action:

1. Make a list of family and friends celebrating some occasion this season.
2. Choose one to begin thinking about an appropriate blessing for him/her that takes into account the occasion and your favorite stories about them, preferably from a time when they were children or adolescents.
3. If you have a difficult time beginning, I suggest that you might write:  ”May you….” or “May God grant you …” (or whatever name you give the All-powerful Source of Being). You may find that beginning this way, you’ll find your pen racing across the page with ideas of what you hope and wish for them.
4. The blessing will likely take you no more than 3-5 minutes to write. Then you can go back and edit as much as you please. My ideas about editing include: reading the blessing aloud to yourself to see if it sounds like you and if it says what you mean to say. You may wish for a different word that you can’t think of – great use for a Thesaurus or a dictionary (both available online).
5. This is not an occasion to give instructions. They come out of our heads, while blessings come out of our hearts.
6. Once you have completed the draft, set it aside for a day or two. When you return to it with fresh eyes and ears, you may want to make further changes, add or subtract something. When you’re ready… I suggest buying a beautiful blank card and writing your blessing in your own hand. It will add to the treasure you are offering.
7. Take a look at your list (Number 1 above) and go on to the next…and enjoy how your heart feels as you write.

May your blessings link you to the celebrant and may you experience being blessed yourself as you create these beautiful gifts for those you love.
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com.

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As storytelling beings, we are captivated by stories, particularly those that are connected to us. Stories we write about our ancestors – their values, and their time in history – enable our children (and theirs) to transcend time and space, to discover or rediscover their history, deepen their roots and provide them with values that can influence their future.

Stories about ancestors can help us understand and experience compassion for those who came before us. Learning the lessons of history may help us not to repeat what went wrong and to admire and emulate what was right. Understanding the context of their lives, the decisions their time required, the trials that beset them, the opportunities they said yes or no to – all that and more can impact the values and behaviors of our children today and in the future.

It follows that if part of our life purpose (and responsibility) is to make an impact on future generations, then we will likely be more successful if we pass on values and love in the format of stories rather than lectures or lists of instructions. (I refer you to Dora K’s vivid memory of visiting her grandfather when she was three years old, and the value she learned on page 48 in Your Legacy Matters.)

“. . . . In life all our stories contain the stories of others  and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives, the histories of our families, or our homelands, or our beliefs.”
― Salman Rushdie, 2015 in The New Yorker

Contemporary communication techniques and platforms, the accessibility of travel (live and virtual) match our almost universal deep passion to connect to our history – to belong to our tribes and cultures ­- and to pass forward the values and sense of meaning in the stories of our ancestors. A spiritual concept accepted by all faith traditions is that each of us is a link in the chain of eternity. Future generations require understanding of the past for direction and we need children to ensure the survival of our memories and values.

Thanks to Michelle, a 2012 legacy writer, for sharing an excerpt of her poem expressing our connection “…throughout all of history…”

“I write to the souls who are yet to be, wondering how their lives will be touched by me…
My mind grasping to understand how our lives are but a single strand. Woven together in mystery, connected throughout all of history. Never to be left dangling alone but entwined together as one of God’s own…”

Action Steps:

1. Bring your tea or coffee cup and your favorite pen and paper to your story corner to write. Set your timer, reflecting and writing each time for no more than 15 minutes.

“…every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.” ― Raquel Cepeda

2. Name all the ancestors that you know (knew as a child).
3. Reflect on your favorite stories about them, preferably from a time when you were a child or adolescent.
4. Choose one and write that story in one paragraph.
5. Then write a paragraph about what you learned from this story (some value, some strength you admire, some understanding the story provides you about your ancestor – his/her life, times, challenges).
6. Repeat paragraphs 4 and 5 for as many ancestors as you want to remember, immortalize, and share with family members younger than you.
7. All of us will one day be ancestors; consider and write the stories that clarify the values that you will want to have told about you and remembered by future generations.
8. To turn your stories into legacy letters, refer to a four-paragraph template that roughly follows this format:

Context
Story
Learning
Blessing

May your ancestor stories link you to them  and to your children, and may all of you experience the belonging deepened by these connections,
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com.

The post Legacy: Linking The Past & Future Through Story appeared first on DrWeil.com.

A Chinese folk tale illustrates the relation of a blessing or a curse. One day a horse ran away from a man skilled in interpreting hidden meanings. When people tried to console him, he asked, “Why are you certain that this is a curse and not a blessing?” When his horse returned with a magnificent stallion following behind, his friends offered congratulations. But the man asked, “How can you be so certain that this not a curse?”

One day the man’s son rode the stallion, was thrown to the ground, and broke his hip. Everyone offered comfort at the misfortune that occurred. The man replied, “We shall see if this is such a curse.”

Sometime later, a band of marauding nomads invaded the region. All able-bodied men fought against the threat. The lame son was unable to join in the battle where many lives were lost. Thus, he was able to care for his father in his old age. And on and on and on it goes.

As we approach the year anniversary of being sheltered in place, with the possibility that most will be vaccinated by summer, and we’ll be freed, it’s an appropriate time to consider what the blessings and curses of the past year have been.

There have been many losses: of loved people, of contact with loved ones, of jobs and money, but there also have been blessings: of slowing down, learning yoga and meditation online, catching up on reading, learning to bake bread, to journal, and more.

Generations a hundred years from now will be curious about the 2020-2021 world pandemic, and we have the opportunity to write legacy letters telling them about our personal experiences, losses and learning in this unprecedented year.

Taking Action:

Following are some questions to inspire your musings and writing (all these prompts may not move you; please use others of your own).

• What losses have you had this year, and how have you experienced and expressed your grief?
• What are three important things you’ve learned about yourself during this year?
• How has your spiritual life been affected this year?
• What new skills have you developed this year?
• How have you amused yourself this year?
• What have you substituted for in-person physical contact beyond your pod?
• What new vocabulary have you used this year?
• How have masks and social distancing affected you?

May your legacy writing be a gift to the future and to yourself as we emerge from this most unusual year.

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com.

The post The Legacy Of Blessings & Curses appeared first on DrWeil.com.

We’re just a few days from Valentine’s Day, indeed a Hallmark holiday, but it provides us with an opportunity to focus on the importance of living our love, although we’ve had to create new ways of expressing our love during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We can’t hug our friends or our grandchildren, and for those of us who live alone and are well, that may be our greatest loss. Fortunately, we have technology to communicate our love, and time to write legacy letters of love to our beloveds.

Maya Angelou wrote: “Love is so much larger than anything I can conceive. It may be the element that keeps the stars in the firmament.” And Oprah, said, “I know this for sure: Love is.” Mother Teresa reminded us, “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”

Love is complex, multi-dimensional, and multi-leveled: conditional and unconditional, physical, romantic, built with compassion, friendship. There’s self-love, love for other people and species, love of nature and the earth, and spiritual love: of God.

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
– Dalai Lama

Believing his powerful thought, we realize that “love” is a verb, an action. During COVID-19, while we spend endless hours at home, we can’t express our love directly by service (though we can send money to food shelves). We know we love, but often believe that others know it without our expressing it.

Feeling gratitude & not expressing it is like wrapping a present & not giving it.
– William Arthur Ward

 What better way to love now than to express it on paper? An almost forgotten art, writing in our own hand to communicate and preserve our love, is what legacy writing is all about. Writing our love is tangible, can be preserved, read and reread, and nurtures our loved ones.

An early filled with love Valentine’s Day to all!

Taking Action:

1. Reflect in your journal or your meditation about love as you see it, and experience it in your personal relationships, in your community, and in the larger world. Spend no more than 15-20 minutes a day for as many days as it is a fruitful exploration for you.
2. Make a list of the people, communities, and things you love.
3. Choose one person from your list and write a love letter to her/him. Focus on what delights you about them, and share a specific time or
4. story when you felt your love strongly. Express your honest recognition of their lovableness, your authentic appreciation and caring for her/him.
5. Especially if you are writing for a specific occasion in her/his life, be sure to conclude your letter with a blessing that expresses your love at this time, and your hopes for them as they move into this new chapter in their lives.
6. Return to your journal and write for five minutes about your experience as you wrote about love. (I call this writing “Personal Reflections” or “process notes” and it is often rich with insight and “aha” moments for the writer.
7. Mail or give this “legacy love-letter” at the appropriate time. If for Valentine’s Day perhaps with an accompaniment of chocolate.
8. Steps 3-4 can be repeated at any time during the year. Expressing love as part of your legacy when received to mark a significant occasion (a graduation, confirmation, beginning a new job, a new relationship, a special birthday, or an accomplishment) will be especially treasured.

May your written words be filled with love, and may they bless all those who read and treasure them,
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com.

The post Legacy: Love Is All We Need appeared first on DrWeil.com.

As we’re just past the longest night and the shortest day of 2020, we begin the new year, 2021. It’s a perfect time to focus light on some basic principles of legacy and the practice of writing legacy letters.

The format of a letter was first used by “ethical will writers” in ancient times. The obligation as well as the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others by sharing learning and wisdom is similar to the ancient, though modern-day legacy writers spread light to loved ones and future generations by writing about many subjects and occasions.

We differentiate legacy writing from storytelling in its basic purpose: to communicate and preserve values, blessings, and love for future generations.

Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
― Brené Brown

Before we write, a few words about context. Preparing to write a legacy letter, you may sit alone at your desk, at your computer, be cozied in a rocker with afghan and cup of tea. You may have at hand your favorite pen or a freshly sharpened #2 pencil with its eraser. You may have lit a candle and turned on your favorite music. This is your personal context.

Include in your preparation your awareness that we don’t live in a vacuum, that we live in a particular time, and place. As our family history shaped us, we are also shaped by the context of the time in which we live. I’ll suggest two that might find their way into your legacy letters now. Both can be seen in relation to darkness and light.

First, and perhaps simply, it’s January, when each day since the winter solstice is a little longer. In a Washington Post article, Judith Levine explained: “The midwinter holidays originated in pagan rites to seduce the sun back from the under-world.” Today, as in pagan times, we yearn as individuals and culturally for more light in a dark time. It’s no wonder we light candles as part of our holiday rituals, and try to push back the darkness by decorating the outdoors with a profusion of holiday lights!

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
― Leonard Cohen

But the darkness of 2020 was greater than the calendar. It was the year of the pandemic, when COVID-19 affected the globe as well as every aspect of our individual and family lives. We are living in the darkness of a global health crisis, a local, national, and global economic crisis, and for all of us the darkness of an unknown future. There is a ray of light, like a candle in the night, with the successful development of vaccines that could light the globe in 2021.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
– Edith Wharton

Action Steps:

1. Consider writing a January legacy letter, an opportunity to dispel the dark with the radiant light of your being for someone(s) you love.
2. Tell your loved ones the story of your personal experience and learning in 2020, and your hope for the light of 2021. . . (How different in intent from the usual annual letter recounting the year’s activities, or a listing of New Year’s resolutions).
3. Then bless them with light to illumine their way with hope for the future. (You might even accompany your letter with a beautiful candle!)
4. Share the context of the past year to record and preserve this most unusual year for generations a hundred years from now.
5. Write “process notes” directly after writing a legacy letter. Process writing, the mental counterpart of your heart-filled letter, adds light and clarity to your learning. Process notes (reflective writing) is a gift you give yourself.

May your legacy writing be a prayer and a gift to those you love this January and may your letters light up their lives and be cherished always.
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

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From the dictionary: the practice of taking an active role in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress: expressing oneself is an essential form of self-care.

We’re all aware of the basics of physical self-care: getting enough sleep, eating well, and doing regular exercise. But even these simple things can be difficult to maintain during this pandemic. For example, have there been days when you failed to brush your teeth or hair, didn’t shower or get dressed, and padded around all day in your slippers? I answer yes to all those, and my feelings and spirit have suffered.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
– Anne Lamott

What we’ll explore in order to leave a legacy of values is self-care of our souls (our deepest, truest selves), especially fragile during these stressful times and connected to our physical self-care.

The dictionary suggests that “self-care is the practice of taking an active role (the key word here is active) in protecting one’s own well-being and happiness, in particular during periods of stress: expressing oneself is an essential form of self-care.”

Two phrases in the definition are clues for our exploration of self-care. The first is “Protecting one’s own well-being.” I know from experience that the earlier I get dressed and ready for the day, though I may never leave home, nor get further from my bed than to the computer, can make all the difference in protecting my well-being. We’re all familiar with the wisdom of airplane attendants: “put on your own mask before helping another.” The lesson seems to be that we must take responsibility for ourselves. Although loving exchanges with people dear to us can raise our spirits in the moment, in the long term we have to know (or learn) what protects our well-being and take responsibility to discipline ourselves to act.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

– Audre Lorde

Self-care is how you take your power back.
– Delia Lalah

 Rabbis of old suggested that we speak 100 blessings every day. One early spring day (soon after I learned that) I was  driving along an empty highway accompanied only by the dirty grey slush edging the road, when I noticed a large flock of birds flying overhead, returning en masse to Minnesota for the spring and summer seasons. I was so filled with gratitude, I said aloud, alone in my car, “Baruch atah Adonai ‘birdies’” and then laughed aloud in pure joy. I didn’t need to know the words of the blessing: feeling grateful and expressing it aloud, though only to myself, was my self-care and blessing in that moment.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.
– Brené Brown

Taking Action:

Considering what you do to take care of the more elusive parts of yourself will be useful in your personal self-care, and also provide wisdom to impart in a legacy letter to those needing a boost in these perilous times.

Here are some questions to prompt your musings and writing (you may have others of your own, and all these questions may not move you).

• How do you care for your feelings of anxiety and fear for yourself and those you love in this pandemic?
• How do you take care of your need for laughter and humor?
• How do you care for the needs of your mind, your intellect?
• How do you take care of your soul that awaits your attention?
• How do you take care of your need to be nurtured by nature?
• How do you take care of your need to touch others, be touched by others, have social interaction, get the hugs you need?
• How do you honor your need to grieve the losses of this time?
• How do you allow and acknowledge your sadness about the losses of this year of the pandemic without succumbing?
• How do you address your need to be creative? To create things  of beauty and meaning for yourself and/or others?

After musing and writing about the questions that pertain to you, turn your musings and personal wisdom into a legacy letter for someone(s) you love.

May your self-care practices lighten and enlighten you in these times, and may they nourish those you love,
Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

The post Self-Care As Legacy appeared first on DrWeil.com.

While I was searching for a meaningful topic for the October, 2020 Legacy Tips & Tools, I knew I’d found it when I read Kate Murphy in The NY Times. On September 1, 2020 she wrote, “We humans are an exquisitely social species, thriving in good company and suffering in isolation. More than anything else, our intimate relationships, or lack thereof, shape and define our lives.”

After sheltering-in-place for more than six months to avoid contracting or communicating COVID-19 to our loved ones, we know Murphy’s words to be true deep within ourselves even if we’ve not spoken the words aloud.

In my studies about veterans and “moral injuries” I read Sebastian Junger. In his book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging he discussed a theory of Charles Fritz’s from his book: Disasters and Mental Health.

Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, Fritz proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. “As people come together to face an existential threat, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.” Surely the 2020 pandemic counts as a disaster that creates a “community of sufferers,” although we’ve been unable to come together in person yet to ‘experience an immensely reassuring connection to others’ – to experience the ‘social utopia that is enormously gratifying and therapeutic.’ But we know it to be true as we know experientially the opposite, the loss of community, that the pandemic has wrought.

On the other hand, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” and we’ve been highly creative to experience community through technology (think of what these months would have been like without being ‘with others’ on Zoom), sharing “air hugs” and making phone calls to combat loneliness.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that are alive not for ourselves but for one another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own. The question, therefore, is not ‘How can we make community?’ but, ‘How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?’
– Henri Nouwen

Taking Action:

1. Take time to reflect on the difference between ‘tribe’ and tribalism (which has polarized our country even before COVID) and love. Philosopher, Micah Goodman, in a recent podcast suggests that the opposite of community is tribalism. He defines tribalism as individuals united in shared hate, while community is united by love.

“…aim to build community, to transcend boundaries, to love differences, and to marvel in similarities.”
– Brain Pickings 2020

2. Muse and write for 15-30 minutes, about your personal need for community (as clarified by losing it to the COVID pandemic). Delve deep to find words to express your personal feelings about community and how you feel about its loss.

We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.
– Cicero

3. After you’ve written for yourself, consider writing a legacy letter to future generations, sharing your learning during the pandemic about the meaning of community and humans’ need for love. Remember to close your legacy letter with a blessing that comes from your depth of understanding about community.

May this uncertain time increase your understanding of our need for community, and for love. May a new understanding about balancing self-actualization and commitment to community be a gift to you from this pandemic, and to those who come after you.
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

The post The Legacy Of Community appeared first on DrWeil.com.

 We know after sheltering-in-place for months to avoid COVID-19 that our lives have been changed perhaps forever. We hear mostly about what’s broken, what’s difficult, and depressing. But there is another perspective of this reality to consider.

In 2003 I wrote The Legacy Workbook for the Busy Woman, where in Chapter 2 “Embracing Our Everyday Selves” I introduced the Greek goddess Hestia, Zeus’ sister. She was the goddess of hearth, home, and temple. Her symbol was sacred fire, source of light, warmth, and safety. Fire, not only essential in homemaking and mothering, also represented spirit, the light of internal meaning.

By demeaning “women’s work” in the 19th and 20th centuries, in order to compete to be “just like men,” women lost something valuable. COVID offers us the opportunity to do a rebalance, reclaiming a lost part of ourselves. Is it any wonder that grocery stores ran out of yeast this spring? Women had returned to their kitchens baking bread as their grandmothers once did.

My neighbor, a fast moving and rising manager in a major corporation, has been working at home since March. She hopes the change is permanent. Slowed by the virus, she’s had time to plant and weed her garden, time to read daily to her 3 year old son, Gio, time to hang washed bedding in the sun, bake cookies, and call her Mom. Intermittently during the workday she returns to her compute to attend a daily Zoom meetings with her co-workers. What she described was that COVID had given her the opportunity to rebalance her priorities … rediscover that her home and family are not afterthoughts, but a most important part of her identity and values.

“Our life’s mission may very well be hidden in the simple routine the we have come to devalue . . .There is holiness and meaning in even the most mundane tasks.”
– Rabbi Naomi Levy

Re-owning devalued characteristics of ourselves, becoming more of ourselves and experiencing ourselves as multi-dimensional, perhaps more whole, is one of the potential gifts of this pivotal time. Becoming our authentic selves is a lifelong task, formed like basalt cooling gradually after blasting out of the fires of a violent volcano (“COVID”) and transforming what was into what is. As our past forms the present, as our history and values mature, and as the contextual pressures of our environment reshape us even further, sheltering-in-place may be the modern woman’s best gift from COVID.

“Home is where my dignity is.”
– Irshad Manji

Taking Action:

1. Make a two-part list: on one side of a piece of paper, list domestic activities you enjoy (for example hanging laundry in the sun); on the other side, list domestic activities you dislike, find boring or lacking in meaning (for example, turning the family’s socks right side out). Or instead perhaps differentiate by listing “the ordinary domestic things you love” and “the ordinary domestic things you don’t love, but would dearly miss should your life be at risk.”

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.”
– Helen Keller

2. Muse and write for 15-30 minutes, your purpose to explore your domestic preferences, passions, gifts and talents. Something you took for granted or thought meaningless may awaken new interest or old memories. Recall your mother’s and grandmothers’ domestic and creative talents, and attitudes. Then muse about what domestic activities you particularly value and want to be part of your future daily life.

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.”
– Florida Scott-Maxwell

3. After you’ve written for yourself, consider writing a legacy letter to women of younger and future generations about your personal domestic values and your sense of how the domestic has been in times past and continues now to have the possibility of spiritual meaning for our culture.

“The spiritual journey is the soul’s life commingling with ordinary life.”
– Christina Baldwin

“May the Greek goddess, Hestia, and COVID-19 be sources of blessing for you. May a new freedom of attitude and action be a gift to you in this pivotal time, and to the women who come after you.”
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient. Rachael can be found at rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

The post The Legacy Of Hearth And Home appeared first on DrWeil.com.

Do you remember being a child of four or five wondering about the puffy white clouds floating in a perfect blue sky as you lay in the sweet-smelling grass? Or your wonder as you freed a minutes old butterfly newly born from its chrysalis? Or your wonder the first time you rode a two–wheeler or paddled a canoe or heard a symphony live? Those moments of awe and curiosity, the wonders of life that we experienced as young children, seem uncapturable today.

Yet ‘wonder’ is a gift and a legacy available to everyone that we can pass on to those who will come after us. We just need to reawaken it in ourselves, nourish it with our attention, and experience it (and share it).  Certified Legacy Facilitators have been meeting on Zoom since May to document our responses to the twin pandemics we’ve been exposed to. In July I invited them to write about WONDER, both a noun and a verb, with complex meanings: the first relates to curiosity: “wondering why or how.” The second refers to “awe and amazement.”

As I began my writing I found myself wondering at the power of John Lewis’ life and the awe I felt about him; but I also found myself curious about how he’d maintained his dignity, strength, and love when for fifty years he’d been spat upon, beaten, and imprisoned. I further wondered if I would’ve had his strength given his circumstances.

Thinking about his circumstances, I wondered how I would have related to what Jews experienced during the Holocaust. Would I have had the courage and dignity to go on when I’d lost my name, my family, my spiritual community, and experienced the brutality of humiliation, beatings, starvation, and worse?

John Lewis’ answer was love. He wrote: “Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. . . .”

But I admitted in my wondering that I didn’t believe I’d ever have the largesse to love humanity as John Lewis and Holocaust survivors did . . .. My wondering grew bigger than simple curiosity; it related to what my life and its purpose is. It’s not a new question, but what felt new was honestly letting myself look inside, taking off my masks.

After my writing I felt neither happy nor pleased with myself, but cleaner, more honest, less naïve. The surprise and wonder I experienced as I wrote honestly for myself was worth the unmasking I did, and now I will turn my curiosity and awe, my wonder, into a legacy letter for my grandchildren and theirs.

Taking Action:

1. Take some time to muse about the wonder you experienced as a child. Allow yourself to visit your world today opening to wonder, though it may be of an entirely different nature than you experienced back then.
2. Reflect on these thoughts: The National Book Award winner, Ta-Nehisi Coates, wrote, “I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations.” And Fr. Richard Rohr wrote: “…our thoughts and actions become more mature…only when we begin to question our own viewing ‘platform.’”
3. Consider your own experience of wondering, perhaps a gift of being sheltered-in-place without our usual diversions and distractions of this unique moment.
4. Write to those you love about your experience, values, and feelings. Document your experience of wonder, then and now. Close your letter with a blessing of love.

May we all be enriched by wonder, its memory and the wonders all around us today, and may we grow by writing honestly for ourselves and those who will follow us, and may our wonder help build a world of love for everyone,

– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient Rachael Freed rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

The post The Legacy Of Wonder appeared first on DrWeil.com.

Living alone as I have for the past 22 years takes on new meaning as the weeks of sheltering-in-place crawl on. I’m a natural extrovert and over my lifetime have sought family and communities to nourish my soul and feel whole. Now I observe that my needing, hungering for, and appreciating community seems universal.

It didn’t take long for my family and communities to become adept (all ages) at using technology to gather. My home Al-Anon group meets weekly over Zoom. Our extended family and friends gathered on Zoom to celebrate Passover. My synagogue has been providing services and classes on Zoom for over a month, each rabbi leading from home. Service and social communities are connecting with technology. (I wish I’d had the foresight to buy Zoom stock in January).

Intuiting the need, I initiated three small communities this month: Being known as “the book granny” I invited my now older teen grandkids to participate in a reading group, providing them structure twice a week, the opportunity to see and catch up with cousins, and I get to read to them as I did when they were younger. Second, while organizing some pictures, I came across a century old photo of my maternal grandparents and their first three children. Deciding to share it with my remaining six cousins (ages 60s to 90s), I emailed it to them with an invitation to start an email community sharing how each of us is dealing with the pandemic. Enthusiastically received, we have now included our children, making the community inter-generational, and are planning a Zoom get together (some of us have not seen others since we were children!)

The third community just began; I invited all the certified legacy facilitators whom I’ve trained over the last decade to come together on Zoom to share ourselves and our work in legacy writing. My hope is that the work of this small professional community will be enriched beyond the personal gifts we’ll share and that we’ll plan to meet again.

I’ve also been reading about the importance of community, and I’ve received several prayers and poems, some of which are here as space permits before we write ourselves as legacy writers:

“The earliest and most basic definition of community – of tribe – would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word….”
– Sebastian Junger

”. . . . disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, class [and other] differences are temporarily erased ….”
– Charles Fritz

“. . . we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is.”
– W.S. Merwin

Taking Action:

1. Consider the importance of community in your life – in what ways it nourishes you and provides you with a sense of. belonging and caring.
2. Reflect on ways you’ve participated in community life – giving and taking, focusing on others’ and your needs – ways you plan to foster community in our pandemic and post-pandemic world.
3. Translate your reflections, thoughts, and feelings into a legacy letter for someone(s) in a younger generation with the goal of awakening their awareness of the power and need for community.

“May you bless communities with your love and action, and may you be blessed in return as you actively participate in community.”
– Rachael Freed

Rachael Freed, LICSW, senior fellow, Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, University of Minnesota, is the author of Your Legacy Matters, Women’s Lives, Women’s Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs & Blessings to Future Generations and Heartmates: A Guide for the Partner and Family of the Heart Patient Rachael Freed rachael@life-legacies.com and www.life-legacies.com

The post The Legacy Of Building Community In A Pandemic appeared first on DrWeil.com.