There is a gate to your heart that exists. You are the keeper of the gate. You have the ability to open and close it, to guard it, and to lock it closed if necessary. You hold the key.

I was on a walk this evening and it felt like my friend was with me, helping me see a bigger picture and I want to share what I learned. It was very healing. When connecting with people, authenticity is so important. Trust, faith in others, love are wonderful elements we can share with one another. I understand now about keeping the gate wide open and why. When you keep your gate to your heart open you expose yourself to all the elements that come your way. Keeping the gate open allows in happiness, hurt, love, peace, anger, hope, all of it. When you close that gate and lock it you close out all elements both the good and the bad. The key is to keep yourself open in order to allow in the good and to accept and understand and learn from the bad. A closed heart learns and experiences nothing.

Use your acceptance skills to know the negative might find you and learn to navigate through it. Use your capacity to feel hope to know the right thing will come to fruition for you. Use happiness to reel in those that gravitate towards happiness as well. And go have fun with those wonderful people that enhance your life.

Being open and honest with yourself and others is key. Be authentically truthful. Both for better or for worse- tell them. Your friends, your husband, your wife, your family, your boyfriend or girlfriend, parents and siblings….tell them exactly what is in your heart. Share with those that return love to you. Live in reciprocity. Give back and add to the lives that touch you. Sometimes you will find yourself in the middle of a painful relationship with someone who doesn’t know how to reciprocate. Life is a river, and sometimes you have to learn how to untie that person from you own boat and move in a different direction.  Know when those people are in your space for too long and bless the education of it and set them free. Release the bitterness and inhale acceptance. Not everyone is in our path to enhance our lives. Some people are there to teach us something. When we do this we allow for the gate of our hearts to remain open to receive all that is positive. It is the yin and yang in life. It is one massive learning experience and keeping your heart open allows for learning, acceptance, understanding, and loving in its purest, most wonderful form. But it is the law of the universe that the negative elements will be there as well. It is how we balance that aspect that decides whether we keep the gate open or we close it. I love the basic elementals of love, hope, and kindness, and reciprocity.

This journal is for those that give and take, love and share, and add so much to Jackson and my life. I hope I fill that space in your heart as full as you do mine. xoxo