Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out. —Hafiz

The Secret’s message is to let go of all blame, because it only destroys you, and to move forward with hope, love, compassion and kindness. —Rhonda Byrne

The word love is both a noun and a verb. Love, the noun, is an emotion that we feel toward our self or another. Love, the verb, denotes action and describes a particular behavior that we offer to our self or to someone else. This chapter will focus on love, the verb.

We can demonstrate loving behavior toward our self in several different ways, including how we speak to our selves; how we take care of our emotions, our body, and our environment; how we interpret and respond to the actions of others and to a variety of daily situations.

Many years ago, I worked with a client, ―Gretchen,‖ who was an extremely bright and caring person. She had dedicated her life to promoting issues of social justice and worked full-time for a well-respected, international nonprofit organization. She had a very responsible role, traveling the world and bringing issues of importance to light. She was greatly respected and loved by many, many people.

Because of her dedication to her work,she found herself, quite often, missing lunch and not taking bathroom breaks. We explored her upbringing and the messages she might have received that would cause her not to value her body and not listen to its needs. She came to realize that she believed the issues she was working on were more important than her body.

We looked at all the ways her body supported her work, enabling herto speak, write, traveland dialogue with people. Spending time in acknowledgement and appreciation of her body helped Gretchen change her viewpoint and her belief that her body wasn’t as important as her work. She began to acknowledge that her body was actually essential to her work. She was then able to lovingly listen to her body’s needs when it asked her for nurturance and attention.

Changing our mind changes our behaviors. Here is a powerful demonstration of this truth. Dr. Bernie Siegel, a surgical oncologist who has written several wonderful books one of which is called Love, Medicine and Miracles, reported, ―I have collected 57 extremely well documented so-called cancer miracles. A cancer miracle is when a person didn’t die when they absolutely, positively were supposed to. At a certain particular moment in time they decided that the anger and the depression were probably not the best way to go, since they had such a little bit of time left, and so they went from that to being loving, caring, no longer angry, no longer depressed, and able to talk to the people they loved. These 57 people had the same pattern. They gave up, totally, their anger, and they gave up, totally, their depression, by specifically making a decision to do so. And at that point the tumors started to shrink.

It seems that these patients, who had been angry and depressed, were now faced with a greater challenge, surviving their cancer. Whatever beliefs they were holding that had caused their feelings of anger no longer mattered. Certainly, there was no evidence that these beliefs and feelings were saving them from anything but, in fact, were only blocking them from healing. They chose to no longer believe in what no longer served them—not by resisting those beliefs but by completely choosing and focusing on love.

It might be easier to choose love over any other beliefs, conscious or unconscious, when the stakes are as high as death, but the decision to choose love doesn’t require dire circumstances. We just need to keep our eye focused on the ―prize.‖

A Course in Miracles, the spiritual teaching in which is likened to the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, begins with the statement that the Course ―does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.‖ 17 All of our pain-inducing beliefs are the blocks to our awareness of love’s presence, the love that is who we are.

It is not such a big task to grasp this intellectually, but it is a much bigger task to know this truth deep within our hearts so that we can act from it naturally. The path you are now walking is leading you to experiencing this truth.

Patience is a part of faith. As long as you keep walking forward, you will gradually reach that knowingness within you that you are, always have been and always will be love

Over the years, I have developed an understanding that love is comprised of four basic aspects: 1) recognition, 2) compassionate understanding, 3) acceptance and 4) faith. Their opposites would be 1) denial, 2) judgment, 3) rejection and 4) distrust.

Here’s an example of how each of these aspects come together to create loving behavior. Imagine a three-year-old learning how to tie his shoelaces and having a frustrating time of it. If the parent approaches the child and says, ―Oh, give me that and let me tie it! You’re never going to get it!‖ We would hardly call that loving parental behavior. Now look at this next scenario in which the parent says: ―It’s okay, sweetie. You’re doing very well for such a little boy. Let me show you again, and I’m sure you’ll be able to do it soon. I know what a capable little boy you are.‖ In this example, the little boy is recognized (aspect #1), shown compassionate understanding for being young and a new learner (aspect #2), hears the parent express belief that the child will be able to learn (aspect #4). The whole interaction involves acceptance (aspect #3).

This loving parental behavior lets the little boy know he is loved and accepted and that his ability to learn is trusted. He comes away feeling hopeful, accepted and loved. This helps him develop a self-loving relationship in which he can offer to himself acceptance and faith in his own abilities.