Love
Posted on April 8, 2008. Filed under: Love | Tags: Love |
This moving piece, currently in circulation on the Internet, proves that love is a lingua franca which does not need the spoken word
Michael and I did not know when the waiter put the plates on our table. We were sitting in a small restaurant, hidden from the busy Third Street, in New York City. Even the smell of a fresh serving of blintz did not interfere with our conversation. In fact, we let the blintz soak in the sour cream. We just enjoyed the conversation so much that we forgot to eat.
Our conversation was just so delightful, though we did not speak about important things. We were laughing and speaking about the movie which we had just watched the night before and arguing about the meaning of the morning’s literature seminar. He told me about his new-found maturity and step into adulthood, when he only responded if someone called him ‘Michael’ and pretended not to hear if they called him ‘Mikey’. Was that at the age 12 or 14? He did not remember, but he recalled his mother once cried and said that he had become a man too fast.
When we tasted the blueberry blintzes, I told him that my brother and I used to pick wild blueberries when visiting our cousins. I remembered I always finished my share before we went home and my aunt always warned me that I must be careful lest I have a stomach-ache. But, of course, no stomach-ache ever happened.
While our fun conversation continued, my eyes went across the room and stopped at the corner. An elderly couple was sitting there. The woman was wearing a flowery dress, the colour of which had faded over the years.
The top of the man’s head shined just like the boiled egg which he ate very slowly. The woman chewed her oatmeal very slowly too, seemingly with much effort.
But what made my mind think about about them was the silence around the two. The silence was so overpowering that it seemed like melancholy filled the corner completely. When our own conversation became a whisper, the silence of the old couple began to disturb me. How sad, I thought, if there is nothing to talk about at all? Were there any pages in each other’s life that they had not read? What if it happened to us?
Michael and I paid for our food and went on. When we passed the corner where the couple sat, my wallet fell. I stooped to pick it up, and stopped right there. For under the table, the old man was tenderly holding his wife’s hand. They were eating in silence while holding each other’s hand! I stood upright.
A feeling of utter delight filled my heart. Suddenly, I was touched to see the simple, yet very meaningful action reflecting the close relationship of the couple. And I felt special on being allowing to watch it.
The tender caress from the old man’s hand to his wife’s wrinkled and tired fingers, filled, not only what I though was an empty corner, but it filled my heart as well. I then realised that their silence was not the uncomfortable emptiness like what Michael and I used to have after the jokes we cracked on our first date. It was not that.
Their silence was pleasant and relaxing. It was the expression of the tender love which did not always need ‘the right words’ to express it.
They might have spent the hours like these so many times. Maybe this meal was no different from yesterday, but they enjoyed it in peace.
They accepted each other totally, with all their faults and follies. When Michael and I walked out of the restaurant, I thought maybe it was not bad at all if someday we shared something like the old couple. Maybe, it will become an expression of the tender and complete love we hope to share.
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Posted on April 5, 2008. Filed under: Love | Tags: Love |
Placing your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment, says Donna Thomson
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet,” said James Oppenheim. True happiness cannot be sought outside of yourself — not in your relationships with others, the groups you belong to, or in the things around you. Unless you can stand alone in your own shadow and feel happiness from within, true happiness may always elude you for external things come and go like the tide. The only constant in your life is you. Love you, admire you, value you and be happy to be you.
Why do we seek happiness from outside of ourselves? From His Holiness The Dalai Lama: “Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.”
So we learn from a young age to rely on others rather than on ourselves. If we rely on others for our food, shelter and other needs, why not happiness? Well happiness of course does come from many things and our social relationships and other external factors can bring us much joy, but many of us have not connected with ourselves as we have connected with others. The negative side is that placing all of your happiness in the hands of others will lead to a lot of pain and disappointment throughout your life.
No matter how much you love a partner, a child, or a friend, you cannot make your happiness conditional upon them. Why? Because you will have certain expectations of others and when those expectations aren’t met, you may feel hurt, betrayed, misunderstood, taken for granted, invalidated, confused and so on. Everyone is individual. We have each grown to develop our own sets of values, beliefs, attitudes and ways of looking at the world. Our views may not be exactly the same as our loved ones. However, we often expect those loved ones to know what we want from them.
When someone else’s actions don’t live up to your expectations you are let down. Often the other person won’t even realise they’ve done something to cause you pain because they don’t know your expectations unless you have explicitly shared them. Often we don’t even realise our own expectations until we feel someone has hurt or disappointed us. For example, you may unconsciously expect your partner to show their love in a particular way such as saying “I love you” regularly and when this doesn’t happen you start to wonder if they truly care for you. You may feel unacknowledged and unloved. However your partner may feel that they are showing their love through their actions. You have one belief while your partner has another. Is there a lack of love? No. While you let your feelings build into a stressful negative state within you, your partner would probably be very surprised to know you feel that way.
It’s unrealistic to expect another person to know what’s in your head — your values, beliefs and expectations. Thinking “Well they should know!” is not good enough, yet most of us would have thought this of someone else at some stage. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. They see you become sad, angry, unresponsive to them, or upset and don’t know what they’ve done, or if it’s even them who has made you unhappy. This leads to negative feelings from both sides and possibly arguments that could be avoided through open communication.
Rather than looking to others for your needs, begin by looking within yourself. When you feel a sense of disappointment in someone, use it as an opportunity to analyse your own expectations. The only person who should truly be able to disappoint you is yourself — when you are not being true to yourself in some way. You can take that disappointment and turn it into a positive — a pledge; an action that you can take to better yourself.
Analyse why you are disappointed or hurt. You may find your initial thoughts or statements begin with “Because he did” or “Because she didn’t”. Now look deeper to the true reason for your disappointment. Such statements will start with “Because i expected”, “Because i wanted” or “Because i thought he or she should”.
You truly only ever have control over yourself and realising this can save you a lot of pain. Of course you can be disappointed in others but you have no control over their actions and reactions. You can share the reasons for your disappointment but you cannot expect the other person or situation to change because the other person has free will.
When you realise that you are responsible for your thinking and expectations, you will start to see that you’ve placed much of your happiness in the hands of others. You can now take your power back by recognising that you have the choice to react to something either negatively or positively. By making your happiness conditional upon another person, you hand your power over to them. You feel a ‘victim’ whenever things don’t go as you want or expect. In doing this, you set yourself up for pain, but you can now turn this around and instead set yourself up for happiness.
The key is to not expect a particular outcome. What happens next is up to you. You can choose to wallow in negative feelings which may further damage a relationship, or you can try to place a positive spin on the situation. Perhaps you can find your happiness in the fact that you’ve done your part in dealing with the situation by getting your issue out into the open. Realise that it may not be an issue to the other person, but ideally you will work together to reach a compromise. You can also decide to be happy for the other person and the pain they show you because it helps you to grow. There are always choices and different ways of looking at the same thing.
It puts things into perspective when you resign yourself to the fact that people do make mistakes — they forget things, they don’t think properly, they don’t always consider how others may be affected by their actions, they can act selfishly at times, and so on. We are all humans and we are designed to make mistakes as they are our greatest opportunities to learn. As Horace Friess says, “All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.”
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Posted on April 3, 2008. Filed under: మనసులో మాట!, Culture, FACTS, family, life, Love, Thoughts | Tags: happiness, life |
No matter what you have been through, you can always get up and make changes, says Dawn Fields
Just think about this for a moment: How many times have you done something in your past that you were not too happy about? It could be anything.
Let’s say that you are an addicted person. You may be addicted to drugs, or alcohol or the wrong type of man. Perhaps you are addicted to stressful jobs that bring you little pay. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances may be. Hey, it doesn’t even have to be that harsh. Perhaps you have tried to start your own business or create something in your life where you could make a living doing something you are passionate about and it failed, so you gave up. It doesn’t really matter. But every time you turn around, you are falling victim to the same thing over and over again.
Hey, it happens. We all fall down. But the good thing about it is we get up. Just because you fell down doesn’t mean you have to stay down. Get up! Why are you still sitting there? We all make mistakes. But the great part about it is that God allows us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and move forward. Just because you fall down today, doesn’t mean that tomorrow you must remain down.
Ever slipped out in public and actually fell down? Jumped up real quick, didn’t you? The next thing you did was looked around and prayed that nobody saw you. Just as quickly as you bounced up from a real fall, you can bounce back from a figurative fall. One thing that I have noticed from speaking with a lot of people is that they understand that we fall down but never understood that we get up too.
No matter what the circumstances are in your life that might have tripped you up, no matter what you have been through, no matter what happened in your past, you can always get up and make changes, right now, that will forever banish or
make obsolete, the bad things that caused you to fall in the past. Don’t get me wrong…I hear some very legitimate sounding excuses as to why people feel that their life will forever be the way that it presently may be. I hear things like “I was molested when I was young.” “My mother abandoned me when I was two years old and left me because she was out chasing the pipe.” “I have an addiction. How can I possibly get a job that pays more than minimum wage.” “I don’t have an education. How can I ever expect to get a good job?”
Stop living in the past! We all fall down. But remember, “A Saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up.” Your past should be a reference point, not a residence. But so many of us continuously live in the past. We went out and bought a welcome mat and promptly placed it at the door of our past. We can’t break away from it. We wear it as some sort of badge of honour because we simply won’t let it go.
Just because you made a mistake or circumstances led you to do something that you now regret, doesn’t mean that for the rest of your life you will have to beat yourself up because of it. Doesn’t matter if you made two mistakes or three. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you made over a million mistakes in your life. What matters is today, right now.
You know the mistakes that you’ve made because you have that mistake as a reference point now and for the rest of your life. You weren’t born for sorrow. You weren’t born to be a doormat for others to wipe their feet on. You weren’t born to be used up and then disregarded. You were born to glorify God and live a happy and abundant life. And if you aren’t living that way, it’s simply because at some point, you fell down. But now is the time to get up and start living the life that you were born to live. And that is a life of purpose. That’s a life of happiness and abundance.
Now, you ask, “How do I get out of the past and get up?” Well, I would like to say, “it’s simple.” But that wouldn’t be the truth. There’s nothing simple about it. It’s a daily process that you must work on. You have to be committed to making changes in your life. You have to believe that God has a purpose for you. You will have to work on you. You will have to realise that what happened yesterday, is gone. You can never get that time back and, therefore, there is nothing you can do about it. But right in front of you is another minute or another hour or another day, week, month, year. Those things haven’t happened yet, so you can start to orchestrate your present so that your future will be more to your liking.
Start by telling yourself, over and over and over and over again, “My past has no bearing on who I am right this second. And, therefore, is not important. I am here to glorify God. I am God’s child and, therefore, worthy of greatness.” If you take this simple phrase and say it to yourself all day long, over and over again, you will soon start to notice changes in your life. All of a sudden, without even thinking about it, you will start to pack your old baggage from the past and move them to a closet that you will lock and throw away the key.
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Posted on April 1, 2008. Filed under: Love | Tags: Love, self |
Who comes first, you or your relationship? Although answering – the relationship – may sound honourable and based on a deep level of love and commitment, it’s an unhealthy and destructive way to live.
It is only when you can honour and love yourself first, that the relationship can be a truly loving one and not one based on need, dependency, fear, or insecurities.
When each partner comes to the relationship whole, the relationship becomes an enhancement of your life and not life itself.
Most of you have flown on an airplane. Have you ever wondered why they tell you to put your own mask on first, before you help your child? Seems kinda selfish, doesn’t it?
I mean, we’ve been taught that the ultimate in love is self sacrifice, right? Why do these airlines tell us to save ourselves first? There’s a practical reason they instruct you to do this. Think about it.
How can you help someone when you’re either unconscious or dead?
Love is similar to that air mask. You cant fully love another unless you love yourself FIRST. Strap that air mask on good and tight, and you can love an endless amount. If you don’t love yourself first, you have no love to give.
If you truly put yourself first in love, nurture yourself, honour what you want, and make your happiness the number one priority, you are better equipped to love others. Love deeper. We love others to the degree we love ourselves.
What Is Love? Throughout the history of man-kind, we as a world culture have made love out to be mysterious, complex, difficult, and undefinable.
Its the subject of endless poems and literary works. There is an enormous amount of material available out there about love, allot of it contradictory.
We’ve been given the impression that to define love is near to impossible. Maybe there’s a fear that if we define it, it would somehow be less powerful… less impactful… less exhilarating.
Maybe we like the mystery of it. But is it really that complicated? Perhaps the complications surrounding love come from all stuff we add on to this powerful emotion.
Lets drop all the baggage surrounding relationships and define what it is we are experiencing in the moment of love.
What do you feel when you love someone? If distilled down to its core components, what would those be? Yes, love is an emotion, a feeling, a wanting, and a being. We know it feels good, but what specific feelings, wantings, and beings are present when we feel love?
Here are the common denominators of love…
Acceptance is labelling someone as ‘okay’ and having no particular desire to change them. Who they are is perfectly fine with you.
You pose no condition on whether you will love them or not. This is call unconditional love. When your love is conditional, the moment they step outside your set of conditions, love evaporates.
Appreciation is one step beyond acceptance. Its when your focus is on what you like about another. We look at them and feel this sweeping appreciation for who they are, their joy, their insights, their humour, their companionship.
When someone says they are ‘in love’ with another, they mean their appreciation is so enormous for this person that it consumes their every thought.
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Posted on March 31, 2008. Filed under: life, Love, Personal, Thoughts | Tags: life, Love, self |
At a seminar I presented, a woman named Georgia reported that she had been married to a man who was emotionally absent. After long and frustrating attempts to infuse life into her ailing marriage, Georgia felt she needed to leave.“I told my husband I wanted a divorce, but he refused to give it to me,” she recounted. “So I decided that even if he didn’t love me, I would love me. I decided that I would give myself the love and kindness I had been seeking from him. So every day I wrote myself a long love letter telling myself how beautiful, wonderful, and desirable I am.”
“Then one day my husband found one of these letters. Since it was unsigned, he assumed it was from another man. He came to me waving the letter in his hand and told me, I cant compete with this you can have your divorce!”
Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us. All events and experiences in our field of awareness represent the out picturing of a feeling, belief, or attitude we are holding.
Thus we can use every event as a barometer of where we are on our path. “We think in secret and it comes to pass; environment is but a looking glass.”
This universal Law of Attraction means that we ‘hire’ everyone in our play to act out the script we have written. This is why we experience repetitious patterns in relationship, work, or health; different actors are showing up to play out the same role.
Eventually we recognise that it cannot be an accident that the same type of people keep doing the same things; it is we who have drawn them according to the signals we are radioing to central casting.
The good news about the Law of Attraction is that the moment we change our mind, heart, or attitude, the outer world must reflect it, often immediately.
In Georgia’s case, she was holding an unconscious attitude that she was unlovable and did not deserve a husband who was present and attentive.
As soon she grew beyond that limiting belief, released her husband from the onus of her emptiness, and gave herself the love she sought, he had no choice but to match it or leave. I have every reason to expect that Georgia’s next relationship was a vast improvement.
We can save ourselves all kinds of pain, and escape the struggle of endless manipulation, by determining what we would like to receive from other people, and then giving it to ourselves.
This all-important shift can be difficult in a world where we are daily bombarded with the notion that we are empty and needy, and everything we want and need is ‘out there’.
Out there in a romantic partner; a hit record; a new car; a more prestigious job; a better house. The funny thing about getting things from out there is that if you did not know you were whole before you got the thing, you will not become whole when you get it; in fact you will feel even more empty and confused. As Buddha asked, “If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?”
Cool Runnings is a delightful (based on true) story of a group of young Jamaican men who decide they will enter the bobsled competition in the winter Olympics. The team faces and overcomes tremendous odds to make it to the competition.
The night before the big race, one of the team members confides to the coach that he will feel like a failure if he returns home without a medal. The coach has some good advice for this fellow: “If you do not know that you are good enough without the medal, you will not be good enough with the medal.”
All of us truly want to be in love, for love is our natural state literally who we are. The question is not, “Should we love?” but “Where will we find the love we desire?”
If we decide that another person is the source of our love, we set ourself up for a roller coaster ride of heady ecstasy followed by painful frustration. Sometimes our partner will do things that make us feel loved, and sometimes he or she will do things that make us feel unloved.
But as long as anything she or he does can make us feel one way or another, we have set ourselves up for a fall; we have given our power away in a most unkind (to ourselves) way, and we become little more than a yo-yo on the string of life.
There is another way to love, far more magnificent, real, and rewarding. This way finds the source of our love, power, and life within us. This way teaches that our purpose is not to import love, but to express it.
Instead of being a love seeker, we become a love finder. We do not wait for love we generate it. Then we get to bask in the warmth of our own beauty any time we choose, potentially all the time.
DH Lawrence elucidated this principle most eloquently:
Those who go searching for love only find their own lovelessness. But the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to search for it.
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Posted on March 29, 2008. Filed under: Culture, life, Love, Thoughts | Tags: life, Love, self |
Love yourself… being both the ‘lovee’ and the ‘lover’, one doesn’t have to guess what loved ones want, says Deepak Chopra .The new focus these days is to ‘love ourselves’. We are moving away from the old ‘martyr’ ethic of suffer and sacrifice yourself for others, to one of realising that if we are to love humanity as a whole, we must first love humanity in a unit of one — our own self.
Now, I’ve been working on this ‘loving myself’ lesson for many years… and I’d been thinking that I had succeeded. That I finally loved myself. And then, on reflection, I realised that I had only touched the surface. I started looking at what loving someone really meant, and when I applied those definitions to myself, saw that I was missing the mark, in many ways.
So how do we define love? What does it mean to love someone? When we love someone we desire their happiness. Do I desire my own happiness? Well, of course… at least on a ‘first reaction’ basis. I obviously don’t desire my unhappiness.
But do I follow up on it? It is one thing to say that one loves someone and desires their happiness, but when we have to make choices that prove us truthful or not, do we pass the test? If we truly desired our happiness, would we remain at jobs that deaden our sense of life? Would we stay in situations that are harmful to us and lead us into depression? Would we refuse to give ourselves the nurturing and love that we need?
Are we willing to set ourselves free from our own restrictions and patterns and limitations? Are we willing to step away from the safety of our present, to go forward to the unknown which may hold our abundant happiness?
Are we afraid of what we will lose if we take the risk to step out of our cocoon of safety, of our daily routines that feel save and familiar? Are willing to set ourselves free, or are we afraid? Do we desire our happiness enough to be willing to take great risks for it? To follow our bliss, to reach for our dream, simply because it holds promise of happiness? Or are we holding back for fear of losing something that we know is only a portion of happiness, not the whole manifestation of it… How much are we willing to love ourselves? When we say we want happiness for ourselves, are we willing to walk our talk?
When we love someone we give them the best we can. Okay, so if I love myself, why do I not give myself the best food, the best attention, the kindest care? Why do I put my work first, my deadlines, my bills, my spouse, my obligations, my whatevers… If I loved myself, I would be willing to lay aside other considerations to give myself these things that would be of benefit to me — take time for a walk, a massage, a good meal, a chat with a friend, whatever… Am I really giving myself the best I have, or am I simply settling for leftovers? Whatever time is left after my busy day is for me. Is that love?
When we love someone, we accept their foibles, their errors, their imperfections, just as we celebrate their being in our life. Do we celebrate our ‘being’? Do we appreciate ourselves even though we are not ‘perfect’? Are we willing to overlook and even laugh at our own foibles and imperfections? Are we willing to say ‘no problem’ when we commit an error? I must say that upon self-examination, I found that I had a long way to go before I could truly say that I loved myself.
Perhaps, an easier goal would be to simply take it one day and one action at a time. Rather than set such an abstract goal as ‘I will love myself completely’, it would be better if we set more concrete goals. Perhaps we need to make our goals more action-oriented.
First, ask yourself how you could show yourself that you love yourself. Imagine you were in a relationship with yourself (which of course you are), what would this dream lover (you) give you to show that he/she loved you? Would it be flowers? Would it be a gift of a massage? Perhaps tickets to hear a favourite band, or play, or movie… Perhaps, a day off in the middle of the week every now and then. Perhaps a weekend away from the phones and any ‘obligations’… perhaps….
What would this dream lover give you? Prepare a meal for you? Well, then order some food from your favourite restaurant to be delivered… Bring you flowers? Stop and pick some up. Give you a massage?
Whatever your “dream lover” would bring you, give it to yourself… However you would see love translated into actions, take those actions for your own self. Learn to treat yourself lovingly.
Rather than having a elusive goal of loving yourself, someday, after you’ve worked out all your ‘stuff’, just start taking action now. There a methodology called ‘acting as if’. OK, well act ‘as if’ you loved yourself unconditionally, even if you don’t.
So rather than wonder and worry about whether you love yourself, and whether or not you’ll ever be able to do so, act as if. Start treating yourself the way you would treat someone you are totally and unconditionally in love with.
If you don’t know how that would be, just act as if. Start one step at a time. One day at a time. One action at a time.
Start right now. If you were the person you love the most in the whole world, right this minute, what you want to give to that person. What would that person want to receive. You do have an advantage here. Being both the ‘lovee’ and the ‘lover’ you don’t have to guess as to what your loved one would want… You already know… Did you forget to look within and ask?
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Posted on January 22, 2008. Filed under: Art, Culture, FACTS, family, Food, Friends, humor, life, Love, Thoughts |
Man discovered weapons, invented hunting.
Woman discovered hunting, invented furs.
Man discovered colors, invented painting.
Woman discovered painting, invented make-up .
Man discovered speech, invented conversation.
Woman discovered conversation, invented gossip .
Man discovered agriculture, invented food.
Woman discovered food, invented diet.
Man discovered friendship, invented love.
Woman discovered love, invented marriage .
Man discovered trade, invented money.
Woman discovered money, man has never recovered!!!!!!!
Chakradhar
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