Plant A Tree! Kindness Kickoff with Orly February 8th 2021

Hey guys, Orly Waba here, founder of LifeVest Inside, and I want to thank each and every one of you for deciding to kick off your week with me on the Weekly Kindness Kickoff with Orly, coming at you at the beginning of every week, where I do reading from my book, Kindness Boomerang, How to Save the World and Yourself Through 365 Daily Acts. Then I give you, myself, and all of us out there an exciting kindness challenge based on the reading. Before I get to the reading for today, a couple of announcements. Number one, tomorrow on Tuesday, February 9th, okay, at 11 a.m. New York time, so you'll have to figure it out based on your time zone, we have our first monthly dance party. So I've been sharing about this in a couple of the past Kindness Kickoffs that we've been doing. Basically, once a month, we're going to join together as a group on Zoom to dance, really, to dance and have a great time. Each month, there's going to be a new dance, a new dance style, and the idea is really to connect with one another. We know that happiness, when you're dancing, you're actually releasing tremendous amount of endorphins, and it really brings people together as a community. And after we go through the dance, so if you haven't signed up, you can still actually learn the dance, by the way, go to danceforkindness.com. On the homepage, right underneath the banner, you'll see the dance there, so you can learn them. But don't worry if you didn't have enough time, you'll be able to do it with us tomorrow. That's one thing. Number two is after we go through the dance, we're all going to come together, and we're going to give out between one to three acts of kindness that we're going to engage in as a group on Zoom. Each of us are going to be able to go and do it directly from our computer, and then we're going to come back and we're going to discuss what it was like. So it's going to be really fun. Make sure that you tune in, that you check it out. We'd love to have you. If you miss this coming month, if you miss tomorrow's, there'll be another one next month just so that you know. Okay. The next thing that I want to tell you about, some of you've seen the awesome video collaborations that we've been putting out since the onset of COVID. And this next one that we're working on still gathering clips is something that's super just near and dear to my heart. A tribute to our elders, a video collaboration where we're respecting our elders and we're honoring the lessons that we've learned from those that are the wisest in our lives. Some of the people are sharing about those that they may have lost. Some are sharing those that are still here. It's really simple. All you need, this is such an easy act of kindness. It's 10 to 15 seconds. That's it. The link will be right here in the description of the video. And all you need to do is click it. When you get there, it explains to you what the tribute to our elders is about and how to leave a message. You're basically sharing your name, where you're from, who the elder is in your life that has taught you something valuable, that one-liner that they're known for saying. And then you can expand on that. Something like between 10 to 20 seconds. You could submit your video directly on the link and it gets sent to me. And then we're going to be putting together a video collaboration. We have a new one coming out. We released one last week of Who's Your Life Fest. And we have a new one coming out in about a week from now. So I'd love you guys to get involved. It's so much fun and it's really, really easy. Before I move on again to this, I want to talk about last week's kindness kickoff. So last week's kindness kickoff was about creating a birthday message. I was telling you guys about a platform called VidHug. And happened to be that right after I made the video, I got a message from my sister-in-law and she said, Orly, this Thursday is dad's 70th birthday and we want you to make the video. Generally, I'm always with my family back home in Brooklyn, but I'm currently now living in Jerusalem and I'm the one that always makes the family videos. Always, like that's who they turn to. And I was like, Oh my goodness, it's only a couple of days. How am I going to do this? I said, Okay, I just actually gave this act to everybody. I got to do this myself. So I created a VidHug. We had about 55 videos submitted and I ended up putting it together. It was incredible. It was a 45 minute video that I got to share with them digitally while I was here and they were all gathered in New York. And I can't tell you how much it meant to my dad. I could see the expression on his face and also how much it meant to the family. Sharing these wonderful messages. We shouldn't have to wait for someone to no longer be around to share a message of positivity that we've learned from them. So I personally loved engaging in last week's act of kindness. I'm excited to engage in this week's, which I'll share with you in a moment. But on that same note, you have the ability to share a valuable lesson that you've learned from someone in your life through the tribute to our elders video. So I want to encourage you. I know sometimes it's uncomfortable to get in front of a video. Trust me. Okay. I know like, it seems like I'm making videos all the time, but there's always that, always that, uh, I don't know, that excitement, that anxiety, that, that nervousness, trust me. I myself feel that nervousness all the time. So I want to encourage you to do it. It's going to be so much fun and I'd love for you to be a part of it. All right. Getting to this week's, uh, kindness kickoff, our act, and it's coming to us from February 11th. And when I was flipping through the pages to see, okay, well, which one are we going to talk about this week? I don't know. I stopped on this one. I really loved it. Um, even more about the act than the reflection, even more than the act, but I really do love the act and I've already started doing a little bit of research so I can engage in it. So here we go. And the act goes as follows, plant a tree, whether you physically plant the seed or make a donation, you can rest assured knowing that you have added more beauty and life to the world. And the quote by Socrates wisdom begins in wonder and the reflection nature speaks to us in more ways than one, empowering us simply by living its message. I've always found myself fascinated by trees. They make me wonder, give me hope. Even with the force of gravity weighing down upon them, they grow, strengthen and build in spite of the pressure to not rise above, to not reach. The tree continues to overcome. A tree is uninterested in the word impossible, recognizing that its greatest power comes from the inside out. It may appear weak and nimble to the onlooker, but deep beneath the surface, it grows, it strengthens, it builds preparing itself for the unexpected day when it will emerge and rise above all those who bet against it, who questioned its endurance. I really love this act. And I just started, by the way, to engage in this act. It's very simple. I'm not saying you have to go and physically plant a tree. Obviously, if you could do that, that's pretty cool. I would love to do that. That's a pretty cool thing to do. But if you go online and you just type into Google, you know, donate to plant a tree, you can do that very simply from online. You know, the cool thing was just the other day, so I was walking, I'm trying to take these daily walks, you know, to get out there and not just be by a computer all day. And as I was going on my daily walk, and I was looking at, it was gorgeous. The weather was just really, really beautiful. And I was looking at these amazing trees, just amazing, beautiful. And then the smell that they give off, just incredible. And I remember as a kid, we actually did this in elementary school. We were asked to plant a tree. And we actually asked to plant a tree here in Israel, which is really cool, because now that's where I'm living. And I was looking at the trees, and I'm like, isn't it crazy? You know, I know when I was a kid, right? I, you know, I donated to plant a tree. Who knows which of the trees could be the tree that I actually donated to plant. But what's beautiful about a tree is the concept of this little, little tiny seed, little tiny seed that you put in the ground, and you're putting water on it. But the thing is, the real growth of the tree happens before you even see it emerge. It's happening beneath the surface. The greatest growth that we can do is our inner growth, which really is, I think, the biggest lesson of COVID, is that we were all forced to stop the busy work, the outside busy work. And we were forced to be quiet within ourselves, to stop just being able to escape to doing this or the other thing. And having to really look at ourselves in the mirror, and do this inner work, the work of the heart. And as I say frequently, the work of the heart is the hardest work of all. But this is a lesson that we learned from something as simple as a seed. It's embedding its roots into the ground. You don't even see it, but it's doing it little by little, so that it has the ability to then push forward against the force of gravity. I take something, I drop it, boom, it's going to fall. Gravity, we understand that. A tree is doing the exact opposite thing. It's coming from the ground, and it's just completely jetting up out of the earth. It's really something for us to think about, that it's the focus on the inner, on the inside work. So I want to offer you just an opportunity to engage in this in two ways. Number one, go out there and plant a tree. I'm going to do it after I get off, after I create this kickoff. I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to click to plant a tree, to donate to plant a tree. It's a really simple thing that you can do. And even if you can't do that, even if you gather seeds, or you're able to get even a small plant, it doesn't have to be a tree, okay, but to plant something. Because by simply observing something so beautiful and simple in nature that happens on its own, it's not something man-made. It happens on its own. We can learn a tremendous amount about ourselves, and about our growth, and our ability to overcome the tremendous amount of struggles, and the tremendous amount of pressures that are being pushed on us, that gravity. I know that some of us are experiencing a lot of hard times right now. Maybe you're experiencing a tough time right now, today, or maybe your family's experiencing it, or maybe you have, who knows. It's being able, it's not about not having hard experiences, okay. Life isn't about escaping the hard experiences. Actually, the hard experiences are part of life. They are what help us grow, but it's being able to emerge out of them. And it's not necessarily so easy, but those struggles help to strengthen us, help to strengthen our wings. You know, the best example that I could give, you know, this is a story that you may very well have heard, right, the story of the caterpillar, right. The caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and there's a story about a little boy, and he sees this beautiful little caterpillar, and little by little, he starts seeing that the caterpillar is coming and starting to emerge from its cocoon, and he sees it like struggling to get out, and struggling to push out, and he feels so bad for it. He has mercy for it. He feels really, really bad. So what does he do? He starts helping it by taking the peel off of the cover, so that it would be easier, he's thinking, for the caterpillar to emerge and become this butterfly. I'm going to help it. I'm going to, I'm going to take off the pressures. I'm going to take off that force of gravity. I'm going to let it just be able to, you know, completely blossom. And what happens? So the caterpillar, butterfly, finally comes out of the cocoon, flaps its wings a couple times, and then it falls to the ground, and it dies. I know it seems very sad, but if we think about it, yes, this boy thought he's helping it, right. It's going, it's suffering, it's going through so much pain. I just want to help it. I just, I want to take away its burden. I want to take away its pain. But the truth of the matter is, is that the caterpillar needed that in order to emerge as a butterfly that was strong, had strong wings to be able to fly as high as possible. Because by going through, by working out its muscles to bust out of that cocoon, it was generating this energy and muscles that it would need eventually to actually fly and flap its wings. But because this boy helped it, it didn't have the opportunity to go through that. I know it's not easy, the struggles that we're facing, and the hardships that we're facing. I know that. But we have to be able to hold on. We have to be able to recognize that sometimes the hardships and the pains in our life, they're there to push us, to push us to tap into something in ourselves that maybe we would never have been able to tap into. And I know that sometimes it feels like, gosh, why can't anybody just remove these burdens from me? But they're there for a reason. I know you may not see them. I know. And I'm not telling you, wow, you should be so excited about your burdens. I'm not saying that. You're not going to see it right away. You're not going to see it today. Maybe you won't see it tomorrow. Maybe you won't see it a year from now. But eventually you'll be able to see how it was really that, and as I say often, it's that when we're at our lowest points, we are also at our highest potential. And we get to make that choice of what we're going to do with that. So I want to encourage you guys to get out there, plant a tree, or donate to plant a tree, recognizing what that tree represents, what that little seed represents, and recognizing that it is a greatest representation of you yourself, that we can push forward all of the adversity and hardships that come our way. I want to thank you guys so much for joining me on the Weekly Kindness Kickoff. If you know somebody that needs this message right now, share this with them, let them know about it. And guys, don't forget to subscribe to our channel, check out our collaborative videos, join on for the party, the dance party tomorrow. It's going to be incredible. I'd love to meet you guys face to face. That would also be super incredible. And take part in the tribute to our elders. If you have any questions, if you want to reach out me for any which reason, you can always email me, I will always respond, orly at lifevestinside.com. Thank you guys so much. And remember, it's kindness that keeps the world afloat. Love you all.