Our word "bless" comes from the Indo-European root bhel, meaning to thrive or to bloom; which in its various journeys through the Latin and the Germanic also gives us the words blossom, blade (as in a blade of grass – bladen, the fruit of the earth), flower and flourish. It is about the natural abundance and affirmation of life. When we bless something, we offer our desire and support that it flower and flourish; we consciously affirm and support the flowering of life in each person, and in each moment, into its fullest expression. We align with the innate abundance of being. As humans, we are consciously capable of that.

We bless in our honesty, in our vulnerability, in our dedication to our own spiritual and emotional growth and healing; and in our genuine presence and support with and for others. We bless by noticing, and taking responsibility, when we get trapped in all the patterns of fixation, separation, and reactive negativity that are natural to the ego. And then to persist as love despite all evidence to the contrary. Thus the "blessing way" is a path of discernment and tenderness – with regards to our own emotional life and with regards to all of life's situations. It is the path of awakening presence, compassion and wisdom that is our full human flowering. It is also what the Buddhists call bodhicitta, which means awakened heart or awakened mind. And it is the essence of the bodhisattva path, it is what Jesus taught.

When we look at our own lives, we can see how we are a part of the natural flow and abundance of life, and of the desire of life to come to its own fruition. But we may also see how many of our primary experiences, and our way of processing those experiences, has led to certain self-imposed shut-downs. The innate flourishing, or "Yes" of life within us, is confined by an accumulation of chronic "No's," defensive or self-protecting patterns that result in restricting our perceptions and our ability to affirm life, or to affirm self. It is an understandable, but unfortunate, denial of blessing – both the receiving of it and the offering of it. This chronic, and sometimes subtle, restriction of our life energy determines much of our physical imbalances as well as our psychological ills. And, of course, it affects the historical behavior of our species, our relationship to each other and to the planet.

It is a natural evolutionary consequence of our need for survival that we tend to give dominion to our negative interpretations of reality – what could go wrong; what is going wrong – over our more positive impressions. But it is also a necessity of this next more conscious stage of our evolution that we learn to recognize and take responsibility for our chronic and largely unconscious patterns of negativity – which reinforce chronic restrictions on the natural energetic flow of life within and around us. We must learn to exercise our capacity to bless. This is essential now not only to our own well-being, but also to the welfare of our families and communities, the welfare of our collective humanity, and the welfare of our entire ecology.