all about love
⁃Patriarchy stands in the way of love
⁃Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth
⁃Love is as love does. Love is an act of will. We don’t have to love. We choose to love.
⁃We can’t claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.
⁃Love and abuse cannot coexist.
⁃Too many of us cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.
⁃Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination.
⁃What we cannot imagine cannot come to being.
⁃It is impressed on their consciousness early on, then, that telling the truth will cause pain.
⁃And so they learn that lying is a way to avoid being hurt and hurting others.
⁃Among my siblings those who learned how to tell polite lies or say what grown-ups wanted to hear we always more popular and more rewarded than those of us who told the truth.
⁃Sometimes children are fascinated by lying because they see the power it gives them over adults.
⁃Males learn to lie as a way of obtaining power, and females not only do the same, but they also lie to pretend powerlessness.
⁃Many men confess that they lie because they can get away with it, their lies are forgiven.
⁃To understand why male lying is more excepted in our lives we have to understand the way in which power and privilege are accorded men simply because they are males within a patriarchal culture.
⁃To embrace patriarchy, they must actively surrender the longing to love.
⁃Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position.
⁃A commonly accepted assumption in a patriarchal culture is that love can be presented in a situation where one group or individual dominates another.
⁃Trust is the foundation to intimacy.
⁃When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place.
⁃When a man has decided to love manhood more than justice, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women.
⁃Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.
⁃Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.
⁃Negative thinking is absolutely disenabling.
⁃One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel.
⁃If we succeeded without confronting and changing shaky foundations of low self-esteem, rooted and contempt and hatred, we will falter along the way.
⁃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 do not become fully human until we give ourselves each other in love.
⁃Another source of spiritual growth is communion and fellowship with like-minded souls.
⁃While career and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.
⁃Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love“ that can cast out fear.
⁃As we love, fear necessarily leaves.
⁃Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for it just happens.
⁃It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.”
⁃But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love. (Pg 93)
⁃To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means.
⁃Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails.
⁃Jung’s inside, that if the wheel to power is paramount love will be lacking, is important to remember.
⁃When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. ⁃Isolation and loneliness are essential causes of depression and despair yet they are the outcome of life and a culture with things matter more than people.
⁃Materialism creates a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption
⁃Widespread addiction in both poor and fluent communities as linked to our psychotic last for material consumption.
⁃It keeps us unable to love.
⁃Fixating on wants and needs which consumerism encourages us to do, promotes a psychological state of endless craving.
⁃Addiction makes love impossible.
⁃Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified.
⁃No genuine love we have to invest time and commitment.
⁃Dreaming that love will save us, solve our problems or provide a steady states of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love which is to transform us.
⁃We are a nation that normalises dysfunction.
⁃In and through community lies the salvation of the world.
⁃Community is the coming together of a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to delight in each other and make other’s conditions our own.
⁃Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure.
⁃We placed them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds.
⁃Committed love relationships are far more likely to become codependent when we cut off all our ties with friends to give these bonds we consider primary our exclusive attention.
⁃Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love and we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us we are not diminished
⁃The more when our romantic loves the more we do not feel cold upon we can or sever ties with friends in order to strengthen ties with romantic partners.
⁃Love will not prevail in any situation where one party, either female or male, wants to maintain control.
⁃To know love, we must surrender our attachment to sexist thinking in whatever form it takes in our lives.
⁃To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love- admit ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means.
⁃Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives.
⁃When women communicate from a place of pain, it is often characterised as nagging.
⁃When we are committed to doing the work of love, we listen even when it hurts.
⁃To love somebody’s not just a strong feeling it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.
⁃We may meet a true love and that our lives may be transformed by such an encounter even when it does not lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, or even sustained contact.
⁃True love does not always lead to happily ever after, and even when it does, sustaining love still takes work.
⁃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. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purposes is to help both partners discover and realise their deepest potentials.
⁃Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life.
⁃Healthy families resolve conflict without coercion, shaming, or violence.
⁃In the functional family self-esteem is learned and there is a balance between autonomy and dependency.
⁃Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extent of one’s self love.
⁃Really, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
⁃The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our natural condition.
⁃Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.
⁃Peace is not found in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgement, prejudice, and resistance.
⁃If there was nothing else, reading would obviously be worth living for.