The First Four Beatitudes
My family and I have returned from the Holy Land Tour & Beyond: A Tribute to Wayne Dyer. Five hundred of us were on board the Celebrity Silhouette.
We visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, The River Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Ephesus, the last home of Mother Mary, and a few more places besides. It was a truly life-transforming voyage organized beautifully by Ibis Kaba, her Life Journeys team and Hay House.
One highlight, among many, was our visit to the mountain where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount. Sister Mary Rose, from the Church of the Beatitudes, granted special permission for us to hold an open-air lecture on the Mount. Continue Reading
Practices For Greater Abundance And Happiness
I’m grateful to have given several talks over the last few months on Life Loves You, the book I co-wrote with Louise Hay, because it has helped me to deepen my own inquiry.
In the postscript to Life Loves You, I wrote,
“This book is nearly finished, but it feels like the inquiry has just begun. Each of us has a self-image, an ego that we hope is loveable, but our egos are full of holes. These holes hide buried fears and doubts, and they cast a shadow on the world as we see it. Life loves you asks us to dig deep, to excavate the ground of our being, where our true nature lives. Here is our buried treasure. Here is where we meet our Unconditioned Self. This is the Self that life loves.” Continue Reading
1. Is this love or fear?
The basic fear “I am not loveable” is the primary cause of all suffering. When you identify with this fear, it causes many tears to fall. The fear is not true, but if you believe it, you will turn away from yourself. Feeling unloveable causes you to reject your eternal loveliness. Instead, you put on an act that takes the place of your true self in the hope that this will trick people into loving you. However, because you have rejected yourself, you are afraid that everyone else will reject you, too, especially when they get to know the truth about you.
When you believe “I am not loveable,” it causes you to contract inside, to defend yourself, and to behave in unloving ways that add to your pain. You also experience pain when fear appears to triumph over love: for example, when it looks like love is not present, that love changes, that love is being withheld, that love is not enough, and that love dies. In deep pain, the fear is that love has forsaken you. In other words, love has rejected you, too. This is your private hell. The temptation here is to reject love. However, when you stop loving, it hurts you even more. Only by loving can you begin to face the fear, heal the pain, and walk out of hell.
Continue Reading
This Universal Emotion Is Surprisingly Absent from University Psych Lectures
There were no lectures on love when I studied psychology. Things are changing now, but love is still the road less traveled in universities and colleges in the Western world.
My classes were interesting but not enlightening. We studied a self with no soul and a mind with no heart, and the body of our work was full of disease and anxiety. There was no joy.
Love was absent.
A lecture on something called Interpersonal Attraction Theory flirted with love, but only a little.
No one addressed love directly, not even Carl Jung, who wrote about everything. Continue Reading
Find Out What is Really Causing the Pain
“If you could teach your children only one lesson about love, what would it be?” I was asked this question in a recent interview I gave on the radio. It’s a great question. It really made me think. How would you answer it? There are many answers I could have given, but I was asked to give just one. What came to my mind was a mantra I learned from my great friend, psychologist Chuck Spezzano. I teach about this mantra in every Loveability program. The mantra is: If it hurts, it isn’t love.
I first came across Chuck Spezzano’s work in the summer of 1998. A friend of mine gave me a book that Chuck had self-published. It was called If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love. The title got my attention. Continue Reading
My family and I have returned from the Holy Land Tour & Beyond: A Tribute to Wayne Dyer. Five hundred of us were on board the Celebrity Silhouette.
The first time I considered the idea that love is real was the night my father died. My mum, David, and I left the hospital at around 9 p.m. We went back to Mum’s house. We stayed up for a while. We didn’t eat dinner. We weren’t hungry. Death does not feel real. I couldn’t comprehend how my father wasn’t here anymore.