Smiling is how our soul spontaneously shines out like sunbeams. Practice Shine Mentality and smile a lot. Actually if you have positive thoughts in your mind and positive feelings in you heart you will smile way more easily and often.

Since I was a little girl, I have always smiled a lot. I mean I had a hard childhood when my father passed away and my mom grieved for him but for some reason have always been a happy type of person. Sincere smiling for me has always been a spontaneous thing. Many times I smile for no particular reason at people I encounter or walk by with. I just feel good inside most of the time and just smile.

I understand that people can be uncomfortable with strangers smiling at them because of personal or cultural reasons, but most people I encounter have the ability to smile back. Some times people can be wary if you smile at them. A few times when I’ve smiled at people in passing, some people glare back for some closed-hearted or closed-minded reason. On rare occasions, 3 times only in my life, I have encountered people who were outright rude when I smiled at them. But I understand that this type of reaction comes from fearful ego-based beliefs about the world that causes people to react negatively to smiling strangers.

Both responses to smiling have taught me to see the world with more compassion and understand how pakikipagkapwa, sacred interconnection, is a beautiful thing if more people come to know it, as it is the true state of our souls.

Now flipping back to the goodness of smiles, I was quite taken in by a little girl’s smile one day. A few years back, I and Ken were spending a special weekend in an Austin, TX hotel to celebrate our wedding anniversary and when we drove to a stop at the corner we waited as a family of tourists took the crosswalk. We patiently watched them finish and at the back a little girl with long brown hair suddenly looked up and just smiled at us. It was dazzling. I was quiet struck by how her bright, spontaneous sincere smile felt like sunshine basking us in warmth. Her inner light just poured out for that brief instant. I’ll never forget how beautiful and sweet it was. And that is a moment of beauty and eternity for me that revealed to me how a drop of God’s divinity truly exists within all of us. People can close it off and live in pain and fear all to easily, but an innocent child can still just live in God’s light and share it. Shine mentality is just a way of remembering the spark of God within us.

Talking about smiling sunbeams of light and Shine Mentality with you I am excited to  announce that I’m developing another blog column called LifeLightLove. If you haven’t noticed, the above featured quote graphic I created has LifeLightLove.com, in the lower right hand corner because I have a new column, with that URL and name, coming soon. In the meantime just read my old post on Shine Mentality and you can see my fun pins at my Light board at pinterest.

Something that has enhanced the experience of Pakikipagkapwa, sacred interconnection, for me is saying Mabuhay (pronunciation: muhBU-hai ), the Philippine, or more specifically Tagalog, saying, and how it just doesn’t mean “may you have long life” anymore because it now has come to have a fuller and a renewed meaning.

Mabuhay has also come to mean to me “LifeLightLove to you, all you do and all you love.”

This is because in my life’s journey I learned the following:

• that the ancient sanskrit/hindu greeting of Namaste means “the Divine Light within me sees, honors and greets the Divine Light in you.”
• that buhay the Philippine word for “life” when broken down to it’s syllables has the root of “HA” which means breath, wind or spirit. Being that the Philippines is also a pacific island, it is not suprising that in Hawaii, HA also means spirit or divine, thus the word “Aloha” is also a greeting that has the hidden, deeper meaning of “God is in you” or “spirit is in you.”
• that in meditation, the breath is the central point of focusing one’s mind. And that breathing in is not just the process of taking in oxygen into the body but it is also the taking in of Prana or life force into your auric body and energy field.
• that Prana is not just life force, but it is also Light and Divine Energy.

And so when I say “Mabuhay” I want the fuller meaning to come through. I now say “Mabuhay” as a blessing and a wish for the best for every person I say it to, and as a wish for all beings on Earth to be connected to Life, Light and Divine Love.

I share this in my email signature and in this way, I have taught non-Filipinos the beauty of Philippine people. I also want it to connect my fellow Filipinos to the divine beauty that our ancestors knew and connected at a deep level. That will be one of the purposes of LifeLightLove.com site when it is finally up.

And so I leave you with…

Mabuhay—LifeLightLove to you, all you do and all you love.