Love Ignites Peace is love's call to action, enabling you to progress beyond the limitations that have kept you from living in peace. As you walk the parallel path of loving yourself and loving others, self-awareness is the key that opens the door to your ability to achieve that. It also unlocks other doors, like compassion and empathy, in the process, so you can offer love as an action to everyone you meet.

These six actions are DIY hacks that help you make incremental changes in offering love (action) to yourself and others. As you work with them and rework them, they become a habit for you to lean into when you feel not-love creeping back into your mind and emotions. When you offer yourself and others these loving actions, you create compassion and kindness. You stand in empathy's shoes and give yourself and others grace for why they behaved the way they did. Becoming love is an infinitely patient process, so don't judge how long it takes you to master Love's six actions. It took me 15 years, but time is irrelevant; what is important is that you are journeying back to love's unlimited goodness. Your journey to embodying Love Ignites Peace has its own timeline, with no judgment in the process. Giving yourself this kind of perspective is a big act of self-kindness, which is love in action.

I wish Love's six actions were like going through a car wash where you came out cleansed and dirt-free with just one wash, but they are mini workshops that have to be visited and revisited until you've mastered them. When you feel like you still haven't overcome the limitations keeping you from loving yourself, come back to them and meditate on their wisdom. When someone triggers you, come back to them. When you feel angry and filled with blame, come back to them. They are tributaries of insight that will eventually flow into love's one big river. Action denotes movement, and returning to love requires a shift in perspective.

Love as an action first starts in your heart as your desire to heal what has kept you limited. In order for that to happen, love as an action becomes an intellectual process, an unraveling of your mind (self-beliefs), so that you can install a more expanded perspective called wisdom. At some point in the process, after love (action) has mastered your mind, it will master your heart so you can truly feel love for yourself and for our collective human community. When your heart has mastered your mind, Love's six actions become your lifestyle.

Love’s 6 Actions – Love of Self

1) Understand your story;

2) Discern instead of judge;

3) Allow yourself to learn through your experiences;

4) Forgive because you understand;

5) Accept yourself;

6) Respect yourself and your unique journey;

Understanding grows self-awareness and compassion. Discernment eliminates judgment's shame and blame by helping you get to the root of your disempowering beliefs. Allowing permits you to grow in wisdom from your life's experience and helps you embrace life's flow. Forgiveness promotes freedom. Acceptance teaches you to love yourself exactly as you are, no matter where you are in the process. Respect promotes your sovereign use of boundaries and feelings of reverence for your resilience.

Love's 6 Actions can create more love as an action in your life. They outline an internal code of conduct for you. When you practice Love's 6 Actions, you become more self-aware of what has kept you from loving yourself. They help you identify what needs healing and bring you to those insights with compassion and empathy for what constructed your own glass ceiling. They give you the space and time, as much time as you need, to discover your true, authentic self. Without directly asking "Who am I?", they give you the leeway to grow into that answer.

Love's 6 Actions - Love of Self builds the foundation for you to solve your problems from a new consciousness (wisdom) and live in life's unlimited freedom of joy and success. Love begins with your most important relationship, the one with yourself. And then, like a field of wildflowers, it spreads and shares its beauty with everyone that passes by. Love is your innate power, and Love Ignites Peace is the inner GPS that keeps routing you back to Love's 6 Actions.

Love’s 6 Actions – Love of Others

1) Understand every person has a story;

2) Discern instead of judge;

3) Allow every person to learn from their own experiences;

4) Forgive because you understand;

5) Accept every person as they are;

6) Respect every person and their unique journey;

Understanding that every person has a story and that their story has influenced their self-beliefs, which determine their behavior, stretches wide your arms of compassion. It stretches them far enough even to embrace the people that challenge you the most. Discerning why a person behaves the way they do disarms judgment's anger. Allowing empowers you to step back and know that this person has signed up for their own set of unique experiences to grow and learn from. Forgiveness frees you from holding onto their limited and unhealthy baggage as your own. Acceptance releases your need to control the other person. Respect installs boundaries that keep you from rescuing, saving, or changing that person.

Love as an action brings out the best in you and encourages you to see the best in another person. When we give our attention to a person's goodness, the energy that created all of the negative feelings and emotions loses its power. If we keep treating each other with the old consciousness of self-righteousness and divisiveness, nothing will change. Those behaviors will continue to generate reactions that match them in self-awareness. Just as Love's 6 Actions - Love of Self provides love's internal code of conduct for interacting with yourself, Love's 6 Actions - Love of Others provides love's external code of conduct for interacting with others.

Love's 6 Actions neutralize negative narratives and the need to be right by encouraging thoughtful responses. They disempower conflict and promote peaceful interactions. They seek the reasons for the actions, thus deactivating blame's explosive arsenal. Unconditional love has seemed unattainable to many, but act by act, Love's 6 Actions can help build a solid path to accomplishing what has previously seemed impossible.

Love's 6 Actions, when you offer them to others, build your empathy muscles. What the other person has experienced in their life, in some small or big way, connects with your experiences. Things happened to you that made you feel happy or sad. That is the same for every person in our collective human community. We've all felt the pain and hurt of not-so-nice words and actions, and we can empathize with how that has felt. Empathy helps you understand the damage a person's not-love experiences have had on how they believe about themselves because, though you've had different experiences, you too have had experiences that affect how you believe about yourself.

Love's 6 Actions, when offered to self and to others, are behaviors that generate more love. And when more love is offered, more loving behaviors result. We have to be the trendsetters and take the path less followed until that path becomes a major thoroughfare for more people. The early adopters literally pave the way for others to get on board. Someone has to have the courage and the desire to create this new consciousness to create a better reality for our world. Why not you?