All About Love

“Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak” (xi).

“There are not many public discussions of love in our culture right now. Not the life affirming discourse of the sixties and seventies 'All you need is love' . . . nowadays the message is declared as meaningless love, it's irrelevance” (xvii).

“Young people are cynical about love” (xviii).

“Contemplating death has been a subject that leads me back to love” (xxii).

“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (5).

“Males and females who are violently humiliated and abused repeatedly, are likely to be dysfunctional and will be predisposed to abuse others violently” (23/24).

“I was raised in a world where children were taught to tell the truth . . . adults did not practice what they preached” (35).

“Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women, but that they must do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position” (40).

“We are socialized to wear a mask—to lie” (43).

“While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages connection” (46).

“To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others” (48).

“The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem" (55).

“Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well being” (57).

“Women feel the need to pretend they are self-loving, to assert confidence to the outside world, and as a consequence they feel psychologically conflicted and disengaged from their true being” (60).

“They may choose isolation and aloneness for fear of being unmasked” (60).

“Living purposely is the sixth element of self-esteem . . . creating goals, identifying the actions necessary to achieve them, making sure our behavior is in alignment with our goals (62).

“Self-love is the foundation for our loving practice” (67).

“Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself (68).

“When I speak of the spiritual, I refer to the recognition within everyone that there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces are beyond human desire or will alter circumstances and/or guide and direct us. I call these forces 'divine spirit'” (77).

“In understanding a spiritual life, we must make certain our path is connected with our heart” (80).

“Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination” (87).

“We do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love” (93).

“When we choose to love we choose against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other” (93).

“Patriarchy relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, on person is strong, the other is weak” (97).

“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous” (101).

“The fading away of greed and hatred is the foundation for liberation” (103)--Sharon Salzberg.

“Prior to the Vietnam War, a hopeful vision of justice and love had been evoked by the civil rights struggle, the feminist movement, and sexual liberation. By the late seventies, folks stopped talking about love, instead individuals turned to their private lives” (107).

“Greed was the order of the day. Mirroring the dominant capitalist culture” (110).

“The combination of lust for material wealth and the desire for immediate satisfaction are the signs that this materialism has become addictive” (113/114).

“The worship of money leads to a hardening of the heart” (120).

“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” (122).

“The world of domination is always a world without love” (123).

“Children are born into a world surrounded by the possibility of communities” (130).

“Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked over time to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin” (130).

“Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible” (130).

“I have felt especially devastated when friends who were single fell in love and simultaneously fell away from our friendship” (135).

“Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love” (135).

“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 a means of escape” (140).

“Love is a force as real as gravity” (155).

“ Getting in touch with the lovelessness within and letting that lovelessness speak its pain is one way to begin again on love's journey” (157).

“Through giving to each other we learn how to experience mutuality” (164).

“We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy of those we love” (165).

“To be capable of critically evaluating a partner we would need to be able to stand back and look critically at ourselves, at our needs, desires, and longings” (172).

“ Approaching romantic love from a foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance” (173).

“All relationships have ups and downs, true love thrives off the difficulties” (181).

“The essence of true love mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are” (183).

“As long as we are afraid to risk we cannot know love” (185).

“ Genuine love is a personal revolution” (188).

“Love makes us feel more alive” (191).

“Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving” (192).

“To live fully we need to let go of our fear of dying” (196).

“Since loving lets us go of so much fear, it also guides our grief” (200).

“Accepting death with love means we embrace the reality of the unexpected, of experiences over which we have no control. Love empowers us to surrender” (204).

“By learning to love we learn to accept change” (205).