I have chosen my mother as the recipient of "the blessing." My mother and I have not always enjoyed the best of relationships, and I feel the various elements of "the blessing" are relevant to our relationship. I want to enhance our relationship and gain new awareness of my mother and myself in the process. I used the various steps and saw results, and I will explain the results step-by-step. I did see a difference in our relationship after I used the steps to bless my mother, and I saw a difference in my mother, too, which showed me the true power of the blessing in everyday life.

             The Meaningful Touch. This step was difficult for me because my family has never been very "touchy feely," and so hugging is not something we do very often. I wanted to hug my mother to show her that I care about her, but hugging made us both uncomfortable. So, I told her that I was working on a "school project" and that I needed to hug her every time I saw her to record our feelings. Mom was very uncomfortable at first, but as the weeks progressed, she got used to our hugging when we first saw each other, and she even began to initiate it after a while. After we became used to hugging, I also noticed that she was more open to physical touching with other people in the family, too. In fact, she even told my aunt that I "taught her to hug," and then she hugged my aunt! It was gratifying, and also a little humbling, because I realized if I had reached out to her sooner then we both would have learned about meaningful touch much sooner.

             A Spoken Message. This step was difficult, too because it took me quite a while to decide just what I wanted to say to my mother, and how I wanted to say it. While using the "school project" excuse worked for the meaningful touch, I thought that using the same excuse might be a little suspicious of my motives or whatever. If we haven't been touchers in my family, we haven't really been talkers either.