Live, Love & Grow

Life is difficult.  

I guarantee you’ll never have a flawless life. On the bright side you may find your passion or travel the world. On the downside you may lose a friend or your job. But once you admit that life is difficult, that fact is no longer of great consequence. Once you accept responsibility, you can make better choices.

Accepting responsibility may not come straight away, but for those willing to take the time that’s necessary, they will find themselves cured.

Self-control is the essence of Peck’s brand of self-help. He says: “Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.” A person who has the ability to delay gratification has the key to psychological maturity, whereas impulsiveness is a mental habit that, in denying opportunities to experience pain, creates neuroses. Most large problems we have are the result of not facing up to earlier, smaller problems, of failing to be ‘dedicated to the truth’. The great mistake most people make is believing that problems will go away of their own accord. The take-away here is that sometimes the benefits of lying outweighs those of telling the truth, but we often drastically underestimate them.

Redefining Love.

I tend to think of love as effortless, the free fall of ‘falling in love’. While it may be mysterious, love is also effortful; love is a decision: ‘..the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does.’

The ecstatic state of being in love is in part a regression to infancy, a time when we felt our mother and ourselves to be one; we are back in communion with the world, and anything seems possible. Yet just as the baby comes to realize he or she is an individual, so the lover eventually returns to his or her self. At this point, Peck says, the work of ‘real’ love begins. Anyone can fall in love, but not everyone can decide to love. We may never control love’s onset, but we may – with discipline – remain in charge of our response. And once these ‘muscles’ of love have been used, they tend to stay, increasing our power to channel love in the most life-giving and appropriate way.

Grateful to the FS and Thank you so much, my facilitators, Nandini Aswani & Priyanka Chhabra

Regards,

Bhumika