All quotes from
bell's book
Men theorize about love, but women are more often love's
practitioners. Most men feel that they
receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often
feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving
it.
Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded
by its failure.
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's
spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are
hurtful and abusive.
Care is a dimension of love, but simply giving care does not mean we
are loving.
To embrace patriarchy, they must actively surrender the longing to
love.
While privacy strengthens all our bonds, secrecy weakens and damages
connection. ... We do not usually "know the emotional costs of keeping a
secret" until the truth is disclosed.
Usually, secrecy involves lying.
And lying is always the setting for potential betrayal and violation of
trust.
Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire,
strengthens the marketplace economy.
Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.
To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others.
When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care,
respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these
qualities or, if they are already a part of who we are, we can learn to extend
them to ourselves.
The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low
self-esteem.
Living consciously means we think critically about ourselves and the
world we live in.
Work that enhances our spiritual well-being strengthens our capacity
to love.
When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act
of self-love, it nurtures our growth.
A commitment to a spiritual life requires us to do more than read a
good book or go on a restful retreat. It requires conscious practice a
willingness to unite the way we think with the way we act.
Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with
power and domination.
Living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including
encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.
The choice to love is a choice to connect.
The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.
Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly
gratified. To know genuine love we have
to invest time and commitment.
When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential
bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of
us turn our backs on love.
When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization
becomes acceptable.
When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's
spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming
responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same.
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted
upon by forces outside our control.
Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in
nurturance as a "natural", inherent quality rather than a learned
approach to caregiving. Much fancy
footwork takes place to make it seem that new age mystical evocations of yin
and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same
old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.
To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love -- admit
to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what
that means.
Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of
self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to
actualize love.
When we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to
being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully
self-actualized.
Love empowers us to surrender.
Prayer provides a space where talking cures.
To know compassion fully is to engage in a process of forgiveness
and recognition that enables us to release all the baggage we carry that serves
as a barrier to healing.
Judging others increases our alienation.
When we judge we are less able to forgive.
Estrangement from the realm of the senses is a direct product of
overindulgence, of acquiring too much.
This is why living simply is a crucial part of healing. As we begin to simplify, to let the clutter
go, whether it is the clutter of desire or the actual material clutter and
incessant busyness that fills every space, we recover our capacity to be
sensual.
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.
Woundedness is not a cause for shame, it is necessary for spiritual
growth and awakening.
All individuals who are genuinely seeking well-being within a
healing context realize that it is important to that process not to make being
a victim a stance of pride or allocation from which to simply blame others.
Everything terrible is really something helpless that wants help
from us.
Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps us face betrayal without losing
heart.
