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How can one get the love to flow?
Islam - over and over I've heard it associated with hatred. There are book titles like Because They Hate.
I want to move over to something else. Love.
When I look around, I see a lot more anger, apathy, boredom, meanness that I see love. And no one right around me is Muslim.
As for myself, it's easy to feel enthusiasm, interest. It's easy for me to work at things.
And I'm certainly familiar with anger - the family emotion, one could say. My parents would try and try to avoid it. But it kept coming out. And I kept wanting no more anger. But there it was once again, my own anger.
Love. My cats seem to ooze it, much of the time, curled up together. Dogs feel love - I've felt their love.
Love ... To live, feeling love.
Contentment. Joy. Euphoria. Frustration. Disappointment. Rage. Amusement. Bewilderment. Pleasure. Boredom. Stuckness.
So many emotions. But love?
I know so many women my age who, like me, have had their share of relationships. Maybe one long one. Maybe a series. Maybe a marriage or 2. Maybe live-together relationships. But whatever it's been, something really hasn't worked. The love hasn't flowed, at least not in the long run.
I never thought it would be this way. As a teenager I read novels like Jane Eyre and Gone with the Wind.
So I'm all for working against Islamic encroachments, against things that block flourishing, block freedom of speech, block safety to question openly and live freely.
I'm also for taking on the things within me that have kept parts of life rather off limits from me - from many of us.
I had half-created a teleseminar series on opening to loving, when the idea of the interview series with counter-jihad people came to mind.
Why did I go with that one? I care tremendously about what's been happening in the West - the political correctness, the giving away of so much that has barely been created. I've always been for human rights. Islam so clearly is against many of them. I knew that what was happening with Islam worldwide was perhaps the hugest issue I would ever face. It felt - and feels - vital to do what I can.
I knew a few people, had been to hear a few speakers.
I still care - and still will do more. Much more, if I can keep figuring out things that reach people.
Still, there may have been another reason for focussing on personal journeys into the difficult truths about Islam and the West, rather than on difficult personal journeys into good loving.
The world of rights and wrongs, of social injustices, of a worldwide threat - that was something that I, in many ways, knew better. Or at any rate, I felt more at ease in it. I had an idea about a few of the people I felt like inviting.
I felt more lost in the other world, the world of opening to love - though one of my PhD areas is psychology, though I've read so much, listened to so much, and tried so many different things. Actually, if I think about it a bit more, I had a lot more knowledge of this area than about counter-jihad.
I had even even mapped out what I would cover - the exercises, the ideas, the strategies, the development.
In this area too, I knew a few people I wanted to invite, to be part of the project.
Anyway, I'm coming back to it now.
Islam, as based on the Islamic religious texts - I'm against it because I know it can't give people a chance to have our love flow, to have lives that suit us. So many restrictions. So much shaming and fear, rage and cutting off from empathy instead of developing it.
But even with no Islam around, how can I reach the love that has just emerged now and then in my life? It isn't Islam that has held me back - or any traditional religion - or political correctness.
I have to go back to things deep within me, many of them inherited from my parents - parents who wanted to do the best for me, wanted to be the best parents in the world - but there was so much in them that did not flourish.
I've gone a long way on this journey into loving. But there's a lot further to go.
If you want to hear more, you can read (and listen to) the opening chapters of Buried Love: Confessions of a Love Not Junkie.
If the love project interests you, you can let me know. I will be doing a teleseminar series on that as well in the new year.
I'll let all of you know about it. And as with all I offer, it's yours to say yes to, or no to.
All the best, to all of us.
Elsa
December 5, 2012
previous entry next
To go from this blog journal
on loving well
to Buried Love,
Confessions of Love-Not Junkie
click here.
To go from this diary blog on wanting
to know
how to love
yourself,
to the beginning of Buried Love,
click here.
It should be so easy:
good loving, loving well, good happy love.
Instead heart ache and anger
are easier for most of us.
How to love yourself and have good love?
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