Pity is not just an interpersonal problem. We need to do more than adjust the way we treat each other in everyday situations when hard things happen or suffering is present, moving from a passive stance of witness that says, "poor you," to an active stance of will that commits to your relief as everyone's uplifting. In the collective, the way that pity continues to snake through social systems of care requires radical rethinking and redoing. Among many who are addressing this issue, Larry Ward is making a unique space to bridge compassion work and social justice in order to root out pity. He is working to make a truly more compassionate world. I love this person.
"Everybody is not having the same experience of America." — Larry Ward
Pity is not just an interpersonal problem. We need to do more than adjust the way we treat each other in everyday situations when hard things happen or suffering is present, moving from a passive stance of witness that says, "poor you," to an active stance of will that commits to your relief as everyone's uplifting. In the collective, the way that pity continues to snake through social systems of care requires radical rethinking and redoing. Among many who are addressing this issue, Larry Ward is making a unique space to bridge compassion work and social justice in order to root out pity. He is working to make a truly more compassionate world. I love this person.
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Thirteenth-century poet, scholar, theologian, and mystic, Rumi grappled with love in the form of words like no other. And yet, perhaps to grapple with love, to grapple with loving above selfish affection, is simply what we do and who we are at the most basic level, words or not.
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. ♡ Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise. ♡ Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues. ♡ Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ♡ Love will find its way through all languages on its own. ♡ Sunlight fell upon the wall; the wall received a borrowed splendor. Why set your heart on a piece of earth, O simple one? Seek out the source which shines forever. ♡ There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger. ♡ However much I might try to expound or explain Love, when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations . . . Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers. ♡ Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away. ♡ Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting.
"How can you love if you are not here?" — Thích Nhất Hạnh
Deeply loving Thích Nhất Hạnh's approach to the Buddhist practice of universal love and metta, or loving kindness, one of four interactive Brahma-viharas. In this podcast recording, I notice that when I allow myself to reside in the slow methodical pace of Thích Nhất Hạnh's own process and unfolding I am already changing the way I am. Though it is his definition of true love, as a first act, that has my heart open and awake and, yes, yielding to the present.
I've been following the work of Barbara Fredrickson since her book Love 2.0 came out in 2013. I wanted to know this woman who was studying love in a research lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where almost four decades before my parents had lived in married student housing and had tried to understand romantic love together — young, struggling, confused. Five states and many relationships later, now on the opposite side of the country grappling with my identity as polyamorous, my own heart is called home to my birth place to keep learning from this person who might have been a very different therapist for my parents from the man who they went to see all those years ago.
Barbara Fredrickson, without ever having met you, you have had a huge impact on my love life. |
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