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Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exis...
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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.
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.
And we urged men to be true to themselves, to express themselves. Then when men began to share their thoughts and feelings, some women could not cope. They wanted the old lies and pretenses to be back in place.
In the seventies, a popular Sylvia greeting card showed a woman seated in front of a fortune-teller gazing into a crystal ball. The caption on the front of the card read: “He never talks about his feelings.” On the inside the response was: “Next year at 2:00 P.M. men will start talking about their feelings. And at 2:05 women all over America will be sorry.”
The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.
To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.
Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship. Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy. – M. SCOTT PECK
We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy.
The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.
Nathaniel Branden’s lengthy work Six Pillars of Self-Esteem highlights important dimensions of self-esteem, “the practice of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully and the practice of personal integrity.”
“I’m breaking with old patterns and moving forward with my life.”
Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others.
Once we begin to replace negative thinking with positive thinking, it becomes utterly clear that, far from being realistic, negative thinking is absolutely disenabling.
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 i...
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IT IS NO accident that “living purposely” is the sixth element of self-esteem.
According to Branden it entails 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 do not grow up learning that the work we choose to do will have a major impact on our capacity to be self-loving.
Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence. Yet most workers cannot do the work they love.
We find that satisfaction by giving any job total commitment.
do. Marsha Sinetar writes about this concept in her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow
Whenever possible, it is best to seek work we love and to avoid work we hate.
Jobs depress the spirit. Rather than enhancing self-esteem, work is perceived as a drag, a negative necessity. Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves.
Creating domestic bliss is especially useful for individuals living alone who are just learning to be self-loving.
Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice.
One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.
a lover, however, I am moved by the sight of my Beloved. Where He is, I want to be. What He suffers, I want to share. Who He is, I want to be: crucified for love. —SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
“the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.” He contends: “Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.”
In the biblical book of John, a passage reminds us that “anyone who does not know love is still in death.” All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.
AWAKENING TO LOVE can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. Culturally, all spheres of American life—politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, intimate relations—should and could have as their foundation a love ethic.
Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement.
The need for instant gratification is a component of greed. This same politics of greed is at play when folks seek love. They often want fulfillment immediately. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified.
To know genuine love we have to invest time and commitment.
Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.
In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort.
More often than not they do not want to do the work t...
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when it comes to matters of the heart we are encouraged to treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and then discard and dispose of at will, with the one criteria being whether or not individualistic desires are satisfied.
Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic.
They turn to mass media for answers. Increasingly, the mass media is the primary vehicle for the promotion and affirmation of greed; there is little information offered about the establishment and maintenance of meaningful relationships. If the will to accumulate is not already present in the television watcher or the moviegoer, it will be implanted by images that bombard the psyche with the message that consuming with others, not connection, should be our goal.
Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival.
Healthy narcissism (the self-acceptance, self-worth, that is the cornerstone of self-love) is replaced by a pathological narcissism (wherein only the self matters) that justifies any action that enables the satisfying of desires.
The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed.
“There is so much injustice in America, and such a conspiracy not to discuss it; and so much suffering, and so much deflection lest we notice.
“The backlash against welfare in America today is not really a backlash against welfare abuse, so much as it is a backlash against compassion in the public sphere.
We are among the richest nation on earth, yet we spend a trivial amount on our poor compared to that spent by every other Western industrialized nation. One fifth of America’s children live in poverty. Half of our African-American children live in poverty.
We are the only industrialized Western nation that does not have universal health care.”
Brainwashed to believe that they can only be secure if they have more than the next person, they accumulate and still feel insecure because there is always someone who has accumulated more.
WE ARE ALL witnessing the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, between the haves and the have-nots. Those with class privilege live in neighborhoods where affluence and abundance are made explicit and are celebrated.
