Notes - All about Love
A better definition of love: love is an act of will - there is both intention and action and it is a choice - the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth.
"Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth."
Being neglected or receiving too many material things, both lead to the same problem: you learn to think of love mostly in the context of reward and punishment, in relation to the feeling good and bad. It leads to a conditional view of love rather than being unconditionally loved and secure.
If I'm neglected I need to do something to earn attention = can lead to low self-worth, people-pleasing and anxiety in relationships.
Love as a transaction = leads to thinking love must always feel good or it's not real.
Note: how to recover from it as an adult:
recognize the pattern
re-frame your beliefs about love: love is presence, acceptance and connection - even when things are hard. I don't need to earn love with perfection of possession.
seek safe relationships - because healing requires a corrective experience
work on your inner child
We often learn as kids that love can coexist with abuse or neglect: “he loves me but can be mean sometimes, he loves me but slaps me if i don't obey, he loves me but beats me when he is drunk”. Based on the definition of love above, love can't coexist with abuse or neglect.
Loving parents have to work hard to discipline without punishment: teaching children to be self-disciplined and to take responsibilities for their actions (ex: teach them to put away toys after playing; if they become violent, give them a soft ball to throw outside instead; no TV in the evening if you don't do homework first; you got bad grades, how can I help you be more focused and learn better?).
We live in a society where people lie more than before. Most of our lies are to avoid conflict or to spare someone's feelings.
Children learn rapidly that telling the truth will cause pain, so they learn to lie (ex: to avoid punishment, to not disappoint parents).
From the moment little boys are taught they should not cry or express being hurt, their feelings of loneliness or pain, that they must be tough, they are in fact learning how to mask true feelings.
"There is no love if there is a will to power, to control" - Carl Jung
Lying is one of the most powerful form of control, especially for men over women now that they have gained financial independence and have a more equal role in society.
Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason why many of us will never know love.
Note: to be loved for who you are, you must show who you are. Otherwise, you will always feel deep loneliness "they only love me because they don't know the real me, they would not love the real me".
When we can see ourselves as we truly are and can accept ourselves, then we can build the necessary foundation for self-love.
When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge and responsibility, we can learn to extend these to ourselves and learn self-love.
Giving ourselves self-love provides our inner being with the opportunity to receive the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.
Give to yourself the kind of love you dream of receiving from others.
Spirituality is important to many but it struggles to find a place in our materialistic world. It is because we are spiritually empty that we try to fill up on consumerism.
Martin Luther King preaches love and loves as a means of spiritual fulfillment.
Awakening to love can only happen as we let go of our obsession with power and domination over others.
A love ethic: showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity and the will to cooperate.
In a world without love, the passion to connect is replaced with the passion to possess. The good life is no longer in community and connection but in accumulation and giving in to the materialistic desire.
The real power of love is to transform us. It is not a way to save us, to solve all our problems or keep us in a state of bliss. No. Love doesn't work like a drug by giving us an immediate and sustained high, even though many people wish it would work like a drug. They want to do nothing for it but to receive passively the good feelings. In patriarchal culture especially, men feel entitled to love and do not want to do the work that love requires.
Greed is one of the biggest problem in our society and one of the biggest obstacle to love: you resist it by living simply.
Note: this book insists a lot on the importance of community, which is also very present in the book “Lost connections” by Johann Hari.
Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone: but knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as means to escape loneliness.
Note: loneliness is painful but solitude is peaceful:
loneliness is feeling isolated, unseen, emotionally distant, even when others are around.
solitude is the chosen presence with oneself, a connection to yourself.
There is not a special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.
Many men were raised in homes where fathers were not present. They were happy when feminist thinkers told them that they did not need to become macho men. But the only alternative to not grow into a macho man was to not become a man at all, to remain a boy. By remaining a boy they did not need to cut the too-tight bonds with their mothers. And they could just find a woman that care for them the same way their mother had and with unconditional love.
We don't fall in love. Love is a decision, it's a judgment, it's a promise, it's an act of will.
The intensity of sexual intimacy does not serve as a catalyst for respect, care, trust, understanding and commitment. Sex is not a catalyst for love.
True love doesn't always lead to happily ever after. Even when it does, sustaining love still takes work.
We are constantly attracted to people (we like their style, the way they think, talk, the way they look) whom we know that, given a chance, we could love on a heartbeat. This type of love are "heart connections" and are distinct from "soul connections" (John Welwood). While a heart connection lets us appreciate people just as they are, a soul connection opens up further: seeing and loving them for who they could be and for who we could become under their influence.
Usually we put our best self, or even a false self, to seem more appealing to the person we want to attract. But at some point the mask falls and disappointment comes. We feel the once loved one is in fact a stranger to us. We showed what we wanted to show and saw what we wanted to see. True love is different. It's being in touch with each other's core identity.
To live fully we need to let go of our fear of dying. That fear can only be addressed by the love of living. Loving makes it possible for us to change our worship of death to a celebration of life instead.
When we love every day, we don't need the eminent threat of sure death to be true to ourselves.
Understanding that death is always with us can serve as the reminder that the time to do what we feel called to do is always now and not in some distant future.
We find our true selves by living in the present (Buddhist).
All religious traditions acknowledge that there is comfort in reaching for the sacred through words, whether prayers, chants, mantras or incantations.
Love does not lead to an end to difficulties but it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.