Statements on Love and Relationships
Material Developed By Dr. Richard Boyum(As taken from Sam Keens, To Love and Be Loved)
1. In the depths of our being in body, mind, and spirit we know we are created to love and be loved. Fulfilling this imperative and responding to this vocation is the central meaning of our life.
2. The decision to pay attention to someone is the first act of self-limitation, the first sacrifice, the first gift we give in the name of love.
3. Love ambles, power runs. We invented speed in a futile effort to outrun death. When we make love of any kind, we enter into a time-free zone and death must wait outside and watch the clock.
4. We continue to be racked by desire, even when our basic biological needs have been satisfied, and thus we are perpetual exiles, incomplete creatures. The bottom line is that human desire is not psychological but ontological - rooted in our very being and therefore, it is insatiable.
5. Desire is very confusing because vital attractions and fatal attractions begin the same way, with our being drawn to someone or something that we do not yet know.
6. Attraction is an invitation to great knowledge. Love may be blind at first sight, but when you look at it for the second time, which is respect, the mind begins to join the heart. Curiosity is foreplay. Love is not satisfied with the superficial information or a casual touch of the flesh. It desires to truly enter into the world of the beloved.
7. If you listen to your heart and the wisdom of your body, you will know when compassion calls you to wrap your arms around a grieving colleague, or embrace a friend for pure joy.
8. What is your sensuality quotient, your SQ - your style of touching? At what distance do you feel most comfortable with strangers, colleagues, friends, family or lovers?
9. It is because friendship contains the largest quantity of enjoyment, that it is the most stable and enduring of all modes of love.
10. The problem with resentment is that it backfires. Resentment is the poison we take in the hopes that it will kill the other guy.
11. Care is a stone thrown into a sea of suffering that sends ripples out in widening, concentric circles.
12. Imagine that a documentary filmmaker followed you around for a week and filmed your every act of caring. What would the film show you doing? Who falls inside your circle of care? Who falls outside your circle of care?
13. We are all bio-mythic, biosocial animals. Both our culture and our bodies help us define what love means to us.
14. In a true love story, the central characters are so entwined that objectivity is impossible. One measure of love is the degree to which the beloved escapes our categories, transcends our understanding, and evades our explanations.
15. With a lover we form a bi-autobiography. We are two, but we are one.
16. The eleventh commandment, thou shall not blame - forgiveness is an essential component of love.
17. The power of love is measured by how much we are changed by it.
18. Love is solitary communion being alone, together - and at times being together, alone.
19. Between lovers, sex is not a thing apart, but a part of whatever is happening.
20. Think of the Buddhist phrase Namaste, the God within me solutes the God within you. it allows us to find the goodness in the other.
21. It is the nature of love to rejoice in complexity. When we care for others, we release them from the pressure to conform to our notions of what they should do and be, and encourages them to follow their own vision - to follow the grain in their own wood. The power of this is that love initiates us into an expanding universe.