Yes!  As a life-long vegetarian, this is a holiday that I can sink my teeth into.  Strangely enough, Peaches (who is also a life-long vegetarian) doesn’t like vegetables.  Yeah, you heard me right, a vegetarian who doesn’t like vegetables.  She makes concessions for me; we eat a lot of salads.  Left to her own, I have a feeling that Peaches would mostly be a carb-etarian.  Today, however, is a day to eat your veggies.

Today is also World Jugglers Day.  Now, I know that this is really about people who juggle balls and bowling pins and chainsaws and such, but juggling really has other meanings.  Busy people all over the world know what it means to juggle responsibilities and relationships.  I’m beginning to come to an understanding that aligning one’s energies with joyful living is a real affective way to end social juggling.  In essence, settling into a life pattern of peace and learning to practice the law of allowing is akin to deciding that juggling is no way to live.  Alignment with peace, joy and harmony feels a lot like ease.  Living a joyful life takes a lot less concentration than juggling lots of contradictory energies.

I have some dear friends who are deeply in love with each other (like Peaches and I are.)  I don’t think Becky and Denise will mind me sharing their story.

Becky and Denise fell in love quickly.  They hadn’t been together very long before they began planning their future as a committed couple, living together as a family under a single roof.  Becky and I have a lot in common; we both have a deep seated commitment to living life as joyfully as possible.  When Denise first met Becky, she’d never met anyone so at peace, so calm, so still.  She was instantly hooked.

Denise is older than Becky.  She’s been in and out of a lot of relationships in her life, and for the most part she’s only been with chaotic, conflict-oriented people.  Becky is like a breath of fresh air to Denise. 

Denise has an ex-husband, a man that she was married to for a very long time, and that she’s been divorced from for quite a few years.  Denise and Pete were still friends when Denise met Becky. 

Pete is very conflict oriented, very angry, and he liked to use his ex-wife as a sounding board whenever he felt angry with someone (which is often.)  Denise and Pete had had this arrangement for a very long time, and Denise found comfort in it; after all, she’d known this man for most of her life, and together they raised a couple of children.  Pete’s brand of venting felt very familiar to Denise.  Listening to Pete’s complaints gave Denise a sense of continuity, kind of like, the world today is pretty much like the world yesterday, year after year, decade after decade, and that seemed to resemble stability.

Until Becky came along.  Suddenly, everything changed. 

Becky has met Pete.  She even likes him okay.  But she felt very uncomfortable with the affect that his constant complaining about others was having on Denise.  When Becky came home from work most days, Denise’s energy seemed somehow unsettled, her brain filled with concern for Pete; his anger towards co-workers, even towards strangers in the grocery store seemed to fill Denise with a maternal desire to help him somehow.  Denise worried about Pete’s many serious bodily ailments and the affect his constantly stressful thoughts must be having on his body.  And sometimes Becky would come home to find Denise in tears if Pete’s anger on that day happened to turned against her (also not uncommon.)

So Becky asked that Pete not call so much.  All hell broke loose.  Pete was angry, Denise was upset, even the kids that Pete and Denise raised (now adults) were angry.  Becky didn’t join the fight (as all of Denise’s former partners had), she simply stuck to her commitment to live joyfully.  She made it clear to Denise that she loves her dearly, but that she was not interested in having a socially intimate relationship with Pete’s anger.  And it was becoming difficult for Becky to see how she could have a relationship with Denise rather than with “Denise and Pete” who seemed inseparable.

For a while Denise was confused about all of this.  From her perspective, Pete seemed to feel threatened by Becky, as he turned all his anger on Becky.  What Denise couldn’t understand is what was so different about this relationship.  After all, whenever she was in relationships before, she and Pete and whoever she was dating at the time all seemed to get along.  Why was everything going wrong this time?

Denise couldn’t see that what was happening was that the unhappy, angry people in her life were beginning to vibrate out of her life as she was becoming more joy oriented.

Over time, I’ve helped Denise to see that what’s different about this relationship is that for the first time in her life, she’s committed herself to a joy-oriented person.  What Denise didn’t realize when she fell for Becky was that she had put herself into a position where she could no longer split her energy all over the emotional spectrum, juggling conflicting relationships and conflicting feelings.  Denise had chosen to align her energy with a partner who was not willing to compromise her commitment to living joyfully.  Becky’s commitment can be summed up this way, “I will consistently move towards anything (anyone) that increases my joy, and I will consistently move away from anything (anyone) that interferes with my joy.” 

Though it was an unpleasant choice to make, it was also an easy choice for Denise to make.  She didn’t even hesitate to choose the path of joy.  That choice cost Denise a lot of relationships (including her relationship with her children and her ex-husband), but she has never regretted taking the path that she took.  She’s never been happier.  She’s never felt better.  Life has never been smoother.  Somehow, through no effort on her part, life has ceased to be a juggling act, and more and more life keeps easing things into her path that increase and enhance her happiness.  Life with Becky gets better and better every day, and there doesn’t appear to be any limit to how good life can get for them. 

After a lifetime of juggling the good with the bad, some happy experiences with some unhappy, the pleasant people along with the unpleasant, Denise has discovered that simply choosing to consistently align her life energy with the upward emotions of joy, gratitude and love, has yielded to her an end to juggling and compromising. 

What Becky has taught Denise is the art of allowing, the art of giving up the fight, giving up resistance and simply allowing The Universe/God to provide all uplifting things so that life naturally and effortlessly becomes joyful.  What Denise taught Becky is the power of Love; it was Love alone that gave Denise the courage to risk everything she’d ever been or known and choose to believe in the alignment she witnessed in Becky.  And those of us who know and love them both are blessed by God with a beautiful example of just how good life can be.