Love feels like lightning that strikes through my body, and when I look at you I see myself with a glimpse of an eye.
I recommend Bell Hook’s book “All about Love”- to understand better what causes a polarised society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering in workplaces, relationships and personal life.
CLARITY: GIVE LOVE WORDS
Most psychologically and/or physically abused children have been taught by parenting adults that love can coexist with abuse. And in extreme cases that abuse is an expression of love. This faulty thinking often shapes our adult perceptions of love. So that just as we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we try to rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us. Years of therapy and critical reflection enabled me to accept that there is no stigma attached to acknowledging a lack of love in one’s primary relationships.
And if one’s goal is self-recovery, to be well in one’s soul, honestly and realistically confronting lovelessness is part of the healing process. A lack of sustained love does not mean the absence of care, affection, or pleasure. In fact, long-term romantic relationships, like the bonds in family, might be so full of care that it can be quite easy to overlook the ongoing emotional dysfunction.
JUSTICE: CHILDHOOD LOVE LESSONS
When asked how to love someone, we talk about giving hugs and kisses, being sweet and cuddly. The notion that love is about getting what one wants, whether it’s a hug or a new sweater or a trip to Disneyland, is a way of thinking about love that makes it difficult for children to acquire a deeper emotional understanding.
We like to imagine that most children will be born into homes where they will be loved. But love will not be present if grown-ups who parent do not know how to love. Although lots of children are raised in homes where they are given some degree of care, love may not be sustained or even present. Their testimony conveys worlds of childhood where love was lacking- where chaos, neglect, abuse and coercion reigned supreme.
Yet lovelessness is not a function of poverty or material lack. In homes where material privileges abound, children suffer emotional neglect and abuse. In order to cope with the pain of wounds inflicted in childhood, most of the men in Boyhood sought some form of therapeutic care.
It is absolutely crucial that parenting adults learn how to offer loving discipline. Setting boundaries and teaching children how to set boundaries for themselves prior to misbehavior is an essential part of loving parenting. When parents start out disciplining children by using punishment, this becomes the pattern children respond to.
Loving parents work hard to discipline without punishment. That does not mean that they never punish, only that they do punish, they choose punishments like time-outs or the taking away of privileges. They focus on teaching children how to be self-disciplined and how to take responsibility for their actions.
One of the simplest ways children learn discipline is by learning how to be orderly in daily life, to clean up any messes they make. Just teaching a child to take responsibility for placing toys in the appropriate place after playtime is one way to teach responsibility and self-discipline. And they can learn from this practical act how to cope with emotional mess.
HONESTY: BE TRUE TO LOVE
When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery- that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are. … This kind of unmasking- speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges- is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch deeply. – John Welwood
Women are often comfortable lying to men in order to manipulate them to give us things we feel we want or deserve. We may lie to bolster a male’s self esteem. These lies may take the form of pretending to feel emotions not being felt on a level of emotional vulnerability and neediness that are false. “When I longed to have a baby and my male partner at the time was not ready, I was stunned by the number of women who encouraged me to disregard his feelings, to go ahead without telling him. They felt it was fine to deny the right for the child to be desired by both female and male biological parents. It disturbed me that women I respected did not take the need for male parenting seriously or believe that it was as important for a man to want to parent as a woman.”
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection. Lerner points out that we do not usually “know the emotional costs of keeping a secret” until the truth is disclosed. Usually, secrecy involves lying. And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of trust.
Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love. It is impossible to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth when the core of one’s being and identity is shrouded in secrecy and lies. Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception. It is this truism that makes all acts of judicious withholding major moral dilemmas.
More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. Such a commitment is difficult when lying is deemed more acceptable than telling the truth. Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth. Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers.
In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers. Bombarded with cultural propaganda ready to instill in all of us the notion that lies are more important, that truth doesn’t matter, we are all potential victims. Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism. And lies strengthen the world of predatory advertising. Our passive acceptance of lies in public life, particularly via the mass media, upholds and perpetuates lying in our private lives.
To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. When an individual has always lied, he has no awareness that truth telling can take away this heavy burden.
When we hear another person’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project onto them our perceptions of who they are. It is harder to be manipulative. At times women find it difficult to hear what many men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.
COMMITMENT: LET LOVE BE LOVE IN ME
To live consciously we have to engage in critical reflection about the world we live in and know most intimately. Usually it is through reflection that individuals who have not accepted themselves make the choice to stop listening to negative voices, within and outside the self, that constantly reject and devalue them.
Affirmations work for anyone striving for self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others. That voice enjoys the indulgence of an endless negative critique. Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice. When we are positive we not only accept and affirm ourselves, we are able to affirm and accept others.
The more we accept ourselves, the better prepared we are to take responsibility in all areas of our lives. It does not mean that we deny the reality of institutionalized injustice. For example, racism, sexism, and homophobia all create barriers and concrete incidents of discrimination. Simply taking responsibility does not mean that we can prevent discriminatory acts from happening. But we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice. It means that in the face of barriers we still have capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being. Every day we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change.
Taking responsibility for consciously creating goals, identifying the actions necessary to achieve them, making sure our behavior is in alignment with our goals, and paying attention to the outcome of our actions so that we see whether they are leading us where we want to go.
Most people are concerned about living purposefully when it comes to choosing the work we do. Unfortunately, many workers feel they have very little freedom of choice when it comes to work. Most people do not grow up learning that the work we choose to do will have a major impact on our capacity to be self-loving.
Work occupies much of our time. Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence. But we can all enhance our capacity to live purposely by learning how to experience satisfaction in whatever work we do. We find that satisfaction by giving any job total commitment. Doing a job well, even if we do not enjoy what we are doing, means that we leave it with a feeling of well-being, our self-esteem intact. That self-esteem aids us when we go in search of a job that can be more fulfilling.
Throughout my life I have endeavored to not only do work I enjoy but to work with individuals I respect, like or love. When I first declared my desire to work in a loving environment, friends acted as thought I had truly lost my mind. To them, love and work did not go together. But I was convinced that I would work better in a work environment shaped by an ethic of love.
Today, as the Buddhist concept of “right livelihood” is more widely understood, more people embrace the belief that work that enhances our spiritual well-being strengthens our capacity to love. And when we work with love we create a loving working environment. Whenever I enter an office, I can immediately sense by the overall atmosphere and mood whether the workers like what they do.
Whenever we interact with others, the love we give and receive is always necessarily conditional. Although it is not impossible, it is very difficult and rare for us to be able to extend unconditional love to others, largely because we cannot exercise control over the behavior of someone else and we cannot predict or utterly control our responses to their actions.
We can, however, exercise control over our own actions. We can give ourselves the unconditional love that is the grounding for sustained acceptance and affirmation. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.
MUTUALITY: THE HEART OF LOVE
True giving is a thoroughly joyous thing to do. We experience happiness when we form the intention to give, in the actual act of giving, and in the recollection of the fact that we have given. Generosity is a celebration. When we give something to someone we feel connected to them, and our commitment to the path of peace and awareness deepens. – Sharon Salzberg
One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we dream about receiving from others. Enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition. Just by speaking to a stranger, acknowledging their presence on the planet, we make a connection.
Every day we all have an opportunity to practice the lessons learned in the community. Being kind and courteous connects us to one another. Unlike other movements for social change that require joining organizations and attending meetings, we can begin the process of making community whenever we are.
Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with “love”, but in actuality their actions are often a covert way to hold power. Like their male counterparts, they enter relationships speaking the words of love even as their actions indicate that maintaining power and control is their primary agenda. This does not mean that care and affection are not present: they are. This is precisely why it is so difficult for women, and some men, to leave relationships where the central dynamic is a struggle for power. The fact that this sadomasochistic power dynamic can and usually does coexist with affection, care, tenderness, and loyalty makes it easy for power-driven individuals to deny their agendas, even to themselves. Their positive actions give hope that love will prevail.
Sadly, love will not prevail in any situation where one party, either female or male, wants to maintain control.
To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love-admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means. We want to give more. Selfishness, a refusal to give acceptance to another, is a central reason romantic relationships fail. We live in an age of narcissism and many people have never learned or have forgotten how to listen to the needs of others. The truth is, if you want to make just one change in yourself that will improve your relationship- literally, overnight- it would be to put your partner’s interest on an equal footing with your own.”
In “A Heart As Wide As the World”, Sharon Salzberg reminds us: “The practice of generosity frees us from the sense of isolation that arises from clinging and attachment.” Cultivating a generous heart, which is, as Salzberg writes, “the primary quality of an awakened mind,” strengthens romantic bonds. Giving is the way we also learn how to receive.
When we love by intention and will, by showing care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, our love satisfies. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love doesn’t exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
True love is different from the love that is rooted in basic care, goodwill, and just plain old everyday attraction. Book “Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship”, by John Welwood describes a useful distinction between this type of attraction which he calls “heart connection”, and another type “soul connection”. A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on a deeper level. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. A soul connection opens up a further dimension- seeing and loving them for who they could be. Making a heart connection with someone is usually not a difficult process.
Deepak Chopra urges us to remember that everything love is meant to do is possible: “We all must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity, and that being upheld in love every day, every hour, every minute is not a fantasy. You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.”
LOVE PANDEMIC
Throughout our lives we meet lots of people with whom we feel that special click that could take us on the path of love. But this click is not the same as a soul connection. Often, a deeper bonding with another person, a soul connection, happens whether we will it to be so or not.
The essence of true love is mutual recognition- two individuals seeing each other as they really are, without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him or her to achieve their goals of self-unfoldment- which we may see better than they do.
When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform.
To love fully and deeply puts us at risk. When we love we are changed utterly. Merton asserts: “Love affects more than our thinking and our behavior toward those we love. It transforms our entire life. Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you.”
The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in society because we often wrongly believe that tournament and anguish are our “natural” condition. This assumption seems to be affirmed by the ongoing tragedy that prevails in modern society. In a world anguished by rampant destruction, fear prevails. When we love, we no longer allow our hearts to be held captive by fear. The desire to be powerful is rooted in the intensity of fear. Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need for love.
Understanding all the ways fear stands in the way of our knowing love challenges us. Fearful that believing in love’s truths and letting them guide our lives will lead to further betrayal, we hold back from love when our hearts are full of longing. Love helps us face betrayal without losing heart, and to overcome lovelessness choose love, and listen what truly speaks to your heart.
In photo: Max and I in our natural habitat at the Garbicz festival in Poland.