The Mastery of Love Part 10 of 10: Healing and Freedom
March 27, 2009 by dr. lam · 24 Comments
How do we restore all of this emotional pain and wounding that resides within us? First, we have to stop believing me, Sam Lam. Second, you have to stop believing yourself. Third, you must stop believing everyone else. When we stop listening to our own lies and anyone around us, we can start to listen to our own hearts. When we come to that peace, we will begin to achieve happiness and freedom.
Let’s imagine one of the worst possible sins against us, rape. What if you were raped 10 years ago? If you continue to hold that anger against someone else, then it will lead to your continued suffering. If you say, “I cannot forgive that person” then you will not be free. You will continue to live in your own personal hell. The past is gone. If you forgive the other person, you are doing it for yourself. You are freeing yourself. Once you forgive yourself, you will forgive those around you. Once you have offered unmitigated forgiveness, you will begin to love again and to be free from your own dream of hell. Forgiveness will give you freedom from your own personal, emotional wounds that dwell so very deeply within you and me. We will be able to offer a voice of healing and by doing so we can create our own freedom from that hell in which we reside. Create your own dream today and create the dream for your life. Begin with forgiveness, starting with your own. Love yourself, and be free. That is the beginning of the mastery of love…a journey that I am on myself.
The Mastery of Love Part 9 of 10: Sex, The Biggest Demon in Hell
March 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 11 Comments
Ruiz’s treatment of the need for sex is nothing short of brilliant. We have bodily needs that must be fulfilled that include food, water, shelter, sleep, and sex. However, we grow up with a tremendous amount of puritanical ambivalence toward sexuality and related guilt. What Ruiz tries to do is to separate the mind from the body. He argues that sometimes when we eat, we still need more food even though our body is fully sated. Sometimes we need more clothing to purchase not because our body demands it but because our mind pushes us toward further acquisitions for the simple sake of it. Our mind and body are joined but separate. When we confuse the two, that is when we get into trouble. Our body may require sex but our mind doesn’t. Our mind needs love.
He uses an example of a married woman who encounters a handsome gentleman in the street and who starts to feel physically attracted to him. She then feels guilt about what she felt and then turns away. She sees him again, and her hormones rise exponentially. She then commits adultery with this man and feels a combination of exhilaration and self hatred. Although we cannot deny when our bodies feel attraction, we act on those desires when we would lead to our own destruction because our mind is not satisfied. We must separate bodily needs from the fragility of what our mind wants.
When we begin to realize that eating for the sake of eating only leads to obesity, and buying more and more clothing only leads to an insatiable desire for more clothing, then we realize the faults of the mind and not the body. We must attribute the failures in our mind and not the body. Our body wants what it wants but our mind is oftentimes the culprit for pushing us toward things that would lead to our own self destruction because we do not perceive it to be a problem in the mind.
To return to the last several days of blogs, when we begin to love ourselves unconditionally, we will be able to love those around us in a similar way and we will attract those individuals into our lives. Too often when we are on a pattern of self destruction like excessive drinking and eating, our mind (and not our body) wants to be around others with a similar predisposition. If we go to a bar, who are we going to find? Of course, people that like to drink. Then we start hanging out with those people who like to drink. What happens when we leave that self-abusive behavior? Our “friends” cannot understand us and we then feel alienated. We must then find new friends that vibrate at our new energy level. We must always be sensitive to what our body desires and what our mind tells us we desire.
The Mastery of Love Part 7 of 10: Self Love Vs. Selfishness
March 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 8 Comments
This is a big topic. At first glance, these two things seem to be precisely the same, when in fact they are polar opposites. When we love ourselves we will not act selfishly. When we hate ourselves, we will act out of fear and loathing and will respond to the world in a selfish way. Remember in last week’s blog, we talked about two courses that we can pursue in a relationship: the track of love and the track of fear.
When we love ourselves and are happy/content in our lives, we can radiate love to all those around us. Our magical kitchen we talked about yesterday is full, and we can make any dish that we want. However, when we live in a fearful state that we don’t have love, then we follow the track of fear. By doing so, we only see scarcity and we act out of fear that we will lose that precious relationship because we are needy. Alternatively, we may be just filled with emotional poison that we transmit to all of those around us like the emotional ping pong that we addressed last week. When we are filled with self poison, self loathing, and self hatred, we look at the person next to us with that same dread and we push their emotional buttons to release our own poison. We then have that other person release that poison back onto us, and matters escalate.
When you are accepting of yourself and when you reach a happy state even without reference to another person, you invite love in. As I talked in my leadership series, you must first work on yourself. You must lead yourself. You must love yourself, then others can love you. Or if you are a leader, then others will follow you. All of you who read my daily blog are on the same journey with me toward life fulfillment, enrichment, happiness, and peace. I am honored that you can work with me on our personal journey toward self love and away from selfishness.
The Mastery of Love Part 6 of 10: The Magical Kitchen
March 23, 2009 by dr. lam · 24 Comments
Imagine for a moment that you possess a magical kitchen. You can produce any food that you want any time in any amount without concern for cost or any other constraints. If you want a pizza of the finest quality, you can have one. If you want veal sweetbreads, then your wish is my command. Let’s say one day a stranger comes to your door and says to you, “I can make a pizza for you every day without your thinking. Just allow me to control you.” You would laugh and laugh very heartily, responding, “Sir, I can have anything I want in my kitchen including pizza so why should I assent to being controlled just for having your pizza every day?”
Let’s now imagine that you are starving for a few weeks with no food around you anywhere, and a stranger comes up to you with the same proposition. Perhaps you would respond with a more dire urgency to eat the pizza and be controlled since the choice at this point is rather obvious. Well, the moral of this story is that the kitchen is love and we can either have an abundance of it or a scarcity depending on how we perceive it. The love though is self-love. Once we begin to see that we have all the love in the world without regard to another individual then we can feel comfortable that we do not need to be in a serious state of starvation but that we can be free of a perception of starvation. Tomorrow we will talk more about what self love means.
The Mastery of Love Part 5 of 10: The Perfect Relationship
March 20, 2009 by dr. lam · 13 Comments
We truly want in life the perfect relationship but what does that mean? Let’s use the idea of our relationship with a pet dog. When we come home, the dog is happy to see us. We feed the dog, pet the dog, and treat the dog as a dog because it is a dog. We don’t ask the dog to meow because it is not a cat. If we wanted a horse, we would have gotten a horse. The dog for his part plays the part well. He knows how to bark, wag his tail, eat food, and be happy. Do we accept the dog as a dog or do we ask more of that animal?
Sometimes we just have to know what we want. Too often we don’t accept the other individual the way he or she is but demand certain changes or conditions before we want to offer that love. However, with our animals, we simply see that animal as a being in front of us that need not have certain conditions that we apply. If we don’t know what we want in a mate, then we won’t know how to find it or how to recognize it when we find it.
The simple truth is that when we encounter a love in front of us without preconditions, i.e., when we find someone who we feel is right for us from a spiritual, mental, physical, and at all levels without the need to change the other person then we have found the right love. When we start appending notions like, “Well, I really love this person BUT…” then perhaps we have not arrived there yet. Do we want a dog or a cat? If we know, then we can choose. If we don’t, then we cannot. If we want to change a dog into a cat, we can’t and we won’t.
What if you are with a cat and you want a dog? Well, that is a hard one. Only you will know the truth if you have made a mistake in your choice. I’m not advocating just throwing in the towel, but we need to be honest with ourselves and what we want so that we can make our choices during this short life and be happy.