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Love is the most powerful emotion. And I don’t mean this in a cheesy way at all. There are only two emotions a human can feel: Love (joy, passion, love, great energy, happiness…) and Fear (anxiety, stress, doubts, envy, jealousy, pain…). And every single one of your life choices, of your thoughts, actions, feelings, words and reactions will reveal whether you are in a place of fear or love.
The sad part is that humans are more often in a place of fear than they are in a place of love. In order for most people to be in a place of love, they need to feel safe. Safe to be who they are without being judged, safe to trust they won’t get hurt or taken advantage of, and the list goes on and on. That means most of the time, people raise barriers between them and other people or situations, and 20% of the time they are in a place of Love, authenticity and magic. Can you imagine that? Being in a state of sheer happiness only 20% of the time for the rest of your life? You can’t put conditions on how things, events, people, situations need to be, in order for you to be in a place of Love. (Trust me, I’ve learned this one the hard way). You have to desperately seek to be in that place all the time, no matter what happens in life.
I think two of the hardest but essential things in this world are:
- To find oneself: who you are underneath that social mask you’ve been wearing for so long you lost your identity in it and began believing you really were who you pretended to be socially; who you truly are without the weight of cultural traditions, people’s opinion and society standards on your shoulders, who you are once you completely remove the barrier of fear in your life; figuring out what sets your soul on fire, what makes you happy and gives you
butterflies in your stomach, live life with energy and passion and pursue it with all your heart. - To be brave enough to fully embrace your real, unique, different, amazing, flamboyant, maybe awkward, but a hundred percent authentic self every single day of your life, with every single person you meet, without being affected one bit by whether they will like you or not. Because that is the thing. Interpersonal relationships is the reason why we’re unhappy most of the time. Someone does or says something to you that either triggers an insecurity you have, opens up a wound, or is simply mean and your day is ruined and so is your mood. Not everyone will like you and people deal with their own insecurities as well. So the way they act or respond to you has nothing to do with you and everything to do with who they are and what they’re going through behind closed doors.
It is our duty to seek Love within ourselves and to find ever lasting peace of mind. This is a very complex topic that I am so passionate about. I have found many crucial answers and much healing in the list of books I will present to you below.
The following books have deeply helped me understand myself, life and people: what are the barriers to our happiness? Why do we cause our own unhappiness? How do our thoughts shape our experience of life? These books are so powerful, they have helped me through dark phases in my life and to this day, when I don’t feel down, I go back to these books and read excerpts I have highlighted.
Here they are:
Four great quotes from the book:
” Intense presence is needed when certain situations trigger a reaction with a strong emotional charge, such as when your self-image is threatened, a challenge comes into your life that triggers fear, things “go wrong”, or an emotional complex from the past is brought up. In those instances, the tendency is for you to become “unconscious” The reaction or emotion takes you over – you “become” it. You act it out. You justify, make wrong, attack, defend… except that isn’t you, it’s the reactive pattern, the mind in it habitual survival mode.”
” One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind cannot find a solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is an intrinsic part of the problem. You will not be free from that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.”
“Love, joy and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no opposite? This is because they arise from beyond the mind. Emotions, on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good without bad. So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy, is th usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within? The very thing that gives you pleasure today, will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn to its opposite at the flick of a switch? Many “love” relationships after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between “love” and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn to pain.”
“Suffering is resistance to what is.”
2. The Untethered Soul – Michael A. Singer
Four great quotes from the book:
“You simply realize that defining what you need in order to stay open(-hearted) actually ends up limiting you. If you make lists of how the world must be for you to open, you have limited your openness to this conditions. Better be open no matter what. (…) Do not let anything be so important that you’re you’re willing to close your heart over it.”
“Unfinished mental and emotional energy patterns are getting stored and reactivated.”
“If you have a lot of fear, you won’t like change. You’ll try to create a world around you that is predictable, controllable, and definable. You’ll try to create a world that doesn’t stimulate your fears. Fear doesn’t want to feel itself; it’s actually afraid of itself. So you utilize the mind in an attempt to manipulate life for the purpose of not feeling fear. People don’t understand that fear is a thing. It’s just another object in the universe that you are capable of experiencing. You can do one of two things with fear: you can recognize that you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it. Because people don’t deal with fear objectively, they don’t understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it? They go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay.”
“If you are defining creation based upon the most messed up part of your being, what do you expect creation to look like? It’s going to look like a frightful mess. As you grow spiritually, you will realize that your attempts to protect yourself from your problems actually create more problems. If you try to arrange people, places, and things so they don’t disturb you, it will begin to feel like life is against you. You’ll feel like life is a struggle and that every day is heavy because you have to control and fight with everything.”
3. The Seat Of The Soul – Gary Zukav
Four great quotes from the book:
“Emotions reflect intentions. Therefore, awareness of emotions leads to awareness of intentions. Every discrepancy between a conscious intention and the emotions that accompany it points directly to a splintered aspect of the self that requires healing. If, for example your intention to advance in your work causes sorrow instead of satisfaction, following the sorrow will lead you to unconscious intentions.”
“The reactions of the personality (your reactions, in a nutshell) to the experiences that it has created create more karma. Reactions express intentions. They determine the experiences that will be created next.”
“What you intend is what you become. If you intend to take as much from life and others as you can, if your thoughts are of taking instead of giving, you create a reality that reflects your intentions. You draw to yourself souls of like frequency, and together you create a taking reality. Your experiences then reflect your own orientation, and validate it. You see the people around you as personalities who take, rather than personalities who give. You do not trust them and they do not trust you.”
“The splintered personality is not content. The contentment that it feels in one moment is replaced by anger or fear or envy in the next moment as conflicting aspects of itself struggle with each other. Your responses to the struggles between the conflicting aspects of yourself determine the way that you will evolve, consciously unconsciously, through the experience of negative karma or positive, through fear and doubt or through wisdom. Your struggles themselves do not create karma or determine the way that you will evolve, only your response to them.”
4. A Return To Love – Marianne Williamson
Four great quotes from the book:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
“It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.”
“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.”
“There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.”
