by Scarlett Lewis, Chief Movement Officer, Choose Love Movement
Note: Educators, please show this image to your students before watching the video below. We’re going to be discussing the physics of the ripple effect as well as reflection in the video. This will help kids be able to visualize what Scarlett is talking about when she asks them to close their eyes and do a short meditation and visualization with her.
Our theme for the 10th Annual Choose Love Awareness Month is the power of the ripple effect. This week we’re focusing on courage, the first character value in the formula for Choosing Love. Every thought we think, and action we take, has a consequence, or a ripple effect. If we think negative thoughts, this ripples into our feelings, actions, and interactions. If we think kind, loving and positive thoughts, we feel better, and that ripples out into how we behave and show up as well.
Let’s do an exercise together. I’m going to ask you to think about a yellow duck like this in a moment. Think about a perfectly still pond. The surface of the water is smooth as glass. Think about love, caring, and kindness, and how these feel.
Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold it, and out through your mouth. This helps us come to the present moment, here, together with one another, and to center our thoughts on love.
Now, in your mind, picture yourself throwing a little yellow rubber duck into the middle of the pond, and think about what happens? Do you see ripples forming a circle and moving out from around the duck?
We can create invisible ripples of love by thinking loving and kind thoughts. These thoughts then determine how we feel, and then become our loving actions. Watch in your mind how the love continues to ripple out and keeps widening, multiplying, and moving outward. The ripples keep going and going and going!
When they land on something, they come back to you, and then keep going out from the person receiving the love to others. That’s a lot of love you just created in your mind! And it feels so good! All that we give out, comes back to us. We get to choose what we give, and receive. Wow, that’s powerful. This is what happens when we thoughtfully respond with love!
We are all capable of creating a ripple effect of love through thoughts, feelings and positive actions that can impact many people. This takes courage.
We might be busy doing something else. We might be tired, lonely, or angry, and may not feel like being a helper. We might not be in the mood to help. We may not think others deserve your kindness. We might not feel good enough about ourselves to show our true nature, which in everyone, is love.
This is precisely when it takes courage, to step outside of all of that, our negative thoughts and feelings that we all sometimes have, to do something that helps someone in need. It can be something simple, a smile, a nod of the head saying ‘I see you,’ or a note. This alone can help and heal us too.
The ripple of any action that we take, positive, or negative, comes back to us, and multiplies. Physics explains how the ripple effect multiplies and helps us, and so many others. Physics is the study of motion and how things move. The theory in physics we’re talking about is called reflection.
When we start a ripple effect of loving kindness, and it reaches the other person, reflection happens that keeps it going. The ripple doesn’t stop, it gets absorbed by the person receiving the ripple of loving kindness, and then it bounces off them, comes back to us, and also heads off to another person!
In addition to making us feel good, the ripple goes off in another direction from the person that received your loving kindness. Remember the duck and the ripples extending all around the duck, in every direction! So the person that received your ripple of love, then sends a ripple of love back to you, and then on to the next person, and so on, and so on.
Feel good neurochemicals are released in our brain when we do an act of kindness. Here’s the extraordinary thing about the ripple effect, when another person sees us doing something loving and kind, these same feel good neurochemical are released in their brains as well including:
- Oxytocin, the love hormone that helps us connect with one another,
- Serotonin, our body’s natural mood stabilizer, and
- Dopamine which makes us feel good.
These feel good neurochemicals make them want to do an act of kindness as well. So it’s like that duck in the middle of the pond, we create our own ripple effect through thoughts, feelings, and acts of kindness.
This means that one kind act can result in many other acts of kindness. The cool thing is when that happens, each act of loving kindness also creates a ripple effect and there’s no end to the ripple effect when we have the courage to Choose Love™!
#ChooseLove
#Courage
