Millstine Wendy - Five good minutes with the one you love: 100 mindful practices to deepen & renew your love everyday

Would you like to try a new approach to love?

What if your partner (or other loved one) joined you?

Love is such a complex subject, with so many faces. So much has been written and said about it already. What would a new approach be like?

Consider the following:

I love you. These are words everyone wants to hear, and yet these same words, curiously, come more easily sometimes than others.

What does I love you look like in action?

How do these words feel inside youdeep inside your body, your heart, and your life?

I love you. These words change and take on richer meaning when relationships grow over time, as awareness builds on affection, and patience and generosity toward ones beloved emerge in actions, both large and small.

Have you ever wished that you could know love more deeply? Renew love more easily and sweetly? Explore the landscape of relationship with your loved one more completely?

I love you. Speaking these words to another can point both of you toward something great and mysterious about being human and being alive. Would you like to explore that mystery more intentionally every day of your life?

The answers to these (and other) questions about love in your life might be closer than you think. Finding answers and wisdom about love that is true for you might require only that you pay a closer and more kindhearted attention to yourself and to your loved ones in the moments and spaces of daily living.

What if all it takes to enhance your capacity to loveand to nourish and protect all that is good, beautiful, and healthy in yourself, in those you love, and in the worldbegins with paying attention, on purpose, in a kind and nonjudging way, right now, in this moment? In this and our other books, we refer to such a way of paying attention as being mindful. The awareness that arises from paying attention in a kind and nonjudging way is called mindfulness.

In our three previous books, Five Good Minutes, Five Good Minutes in the Evening, and Five Good Minutes at Work, we offered easy, mindfulness-based practices that can be done in just five minutes of clock time, and yet hold the potential to be radically transforming.

The power of these practices is that they invite you to step back from the rush and momentum of busyness, inattention, and habit energy (the familiar and often unconscious ways of thinking, feeling, and inhabiting your body) and explore the power of being present (being mindful). From that base of presence through mindfulness, you are invited to set a clear intention and then to act wholeheartedly in specific, easy-to-follow practices organized around distinct themes for each book.

Presence, intention, and wholehearted actionthese are the keys to your five good minutes. They are the vehicle for transforming five minutes of simple clock time into something radically alive, new, and filled with possibility.

In our earlier books, we focused the practices on themes related to daytime activity, evening hours, and work situations. We invited readers to be curious, to have fun, and to explore the possibilities that arise from acting consciously, with intention, in the present moment. The practices we offered ranged from whimsical to reflective to physically engaging.

In this book, we invite you to explore the power of presence, intention, and wholeheartedness through five-minute practices directed at your most important relationshipsexplicitly, toward those you love. You may want to invite your partner and other loved ones to share some of these practices with you. Any of them can be done by anyone, and a number of them are designed to be shared.

Applied to important relationships, the five-good-minutes approach offers even the busiest people a precious opportunity for personal enrichment, a wiser relationship to their inner life, and a stronger bond with those they love.

The organizing themes for this book are: Opening Your Heart, which is about growing self-awareness, warmheartedness, and compassion; Wise Love, which deals with practices for nourishing, enriching, and protecting your relationship; Love in Action, which is about facing everyday difficulties and challenges and building the practical skills needed in healthy relationships; and finally, Cherishing Life.

The final theme, Cherishing Life, acknowledges that one is continually in relationship to all things, and that by noticing and gently exploring this broader context for love, the depth of feeling for any single person or creature actually grows.