* What is real love…

 

        Life was never been easy for me since my childhood. I had to put up with many people’s faces, and took in humiliation as part of my growing up.

 

        What I am today is pretty much due to what I had to put up during my past struggling years. Everything happens for a reason, and the reason is always for me to grow to my best authentic self by showing me a noble path to a deeper meaning of living my life. That was what I came to realize when I was in the mid 30s. Somehow, I always find ‘real love’ fascinating me, because I was never experience love in my critical tender years. Real love seems to elude me always.

       

        Since then, I have been very mindful in my daily living to find the authentic meaning to real love. I knew how real love feels like deep within me, but somehow I could not verbalize it when someone will to ask me what real love is to me.

 

        I’ve come across many different interpretation and teaching of real love, ranging from Bible, sutra, Tao Te Ching, and many other books published by the guru, but none of them could really resonant my feeling of real love that I feel deep inside me.

 

        Lately, since I was diagnosed with Carcinoid tumor, so many good and challenging things happened to me and to the people around me. I knew there would be a great lesson for me to learn this time. However, what was it? I have no clue of it.

 

        Somehow, just few weeks ago, I came across an author’s name Mira Kirshenbaum in the internet talking about her book called “Everything happens for a reason – Finding the true meaning of the events in our lives. I went to the neighborhood library the next day to look for that book, found it but it was on loaned. I placed a reservation immediately and got the book a week later.

 

        Right from the start, I knew it is my destiny to read this book now; it is the right time for me to make that great connection with this book. True enough, on page 150, I found those words that truly reflect my feeling about what is the real love.

 

        Now I would like to share those words, the excerpt from Everything Happens for a Reason by Mira Kirshenbaum, with you here.

 

·        Real love is not just how you feel about your partner. It’s much more how your partner makes you feel about yourself.

 

·        Real love is not about losing yourself in your partner. It’s about becoming true to yourself with your partner.

 

·        Real love is not about how great your partner is. It’s about how great you can become alongside your partner.

 

·        Real love is not just about how much you love your partner. It’s about how your partner helps you love yourself.

 

·        Real love is not just about your partner finding room in his or her heart for you. It‘s about your partner finding room in his or her life for your energy, drive, ambition, passion, interests, and needs.

 

·        Real love is not just based on how good your partner is “deep down.” It’s based on how much you actually experience your partner’s goodness as you live your life together.

 

·        Real love is not based on how your partner makes you hungry to be with him or her. It’s based on how much your partner makes you feel at home when you are with each other.

 

·        Real love is not about the love you say you share. It’s about the life you really do share, fully, equally, deeply.

 

·        Real love is about treating your partner the way you’d want to be treated.

 

·        Real love is about falling in ‘like’.

 

        These signs of real love constitute a pretty high standard. Most of us fall short of this standard a lot of the time in our relationship. But some of us aren’t even close. Then something happens, and it turns out that the reason it did was to give us what we need to find real love like this.

 

        The result is that if you look at our lives as they actually are, there’s too often little real love in them, love that truly bring us close, love that makes us feel good about ourselves and bring out the best in us, love that’s based on truly liking and respecting the other person. No wonder we so often need to learn a lesson about love.

 

        “Love is richest, most genuine, and most long lasting when you focus on being yourself and doing everything you can to make it possible for the other person to be him- or herself” – Mira Kirshenbaum

 

* why we just can’t forget those feeling in the past…

           

        Why are we allowing things in the past to hurt us…?

 

            “I can forgive, but I can’t forget….”

 

            No matter how much efforts we put in to shelter out the adverse elements from affecting our life, we can never be sure to avoid occasional unexpected shower and thunderstorm that may just raining down on us when we are least expecting them – that’s life.

 

        Just when we beginning to feel love, to taste the fruit of success in our career, to enjoy life, or feel like we are the luckiest man/woman on earth, somehow we will soon find ourselves having to deal with recession, retrenchment, sickness, death, or having to overcome the loneliness of breaking up. Why is that so? Why does it has to be me? “It is a question most often filled with anguish, hurt, and blame.

 

            Psychotherapist and author Mira Kirshenbaum offer a unique insight and ten different and intriguing responses in her book ‘Everything Happens for a reason – Finding the True Meaning of the Events in Our Lives’. Kirshenbaum explains that nothing is random.

 

        Even having found some meaning to those things that has happened in our lives, and learnt something profound out of it, but are we able to drive those hurtful sour feeling out of our mind? Well, my take is most probably not that easy.

 

        Martin Luther King once said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that; hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that’. This is the secret that I have learnt from Martin Luther King sometime ago when I was in search of the answer myself during the darkest moment of my life.

 

        It is written in simple English that everyone can easily understand; but it is also the most profound secret for us to unleash the power within to drive out those anguish and hurtful feeling resided deep inside our soul.

 

        In another word, negative action cannot drive out negative feeling, only positive action will.

 

        When we have to face challenges in our live such as disappointment, separation, departure, rejection, humiliation, or lost of our valued possessions, the blames and hatre will not help to drive out those negative feelings inside us, only the positive actions will.

 

        So what are the examples of the positive actions?

 

        Positive action means doing things, which we passionately love with our heart and soul. With our heart and soul means, we will go in-depth into studying and understanding every detail about the thing that we do, and not just doing it for the sake of doing. Do it as if we are doing our PhD thesis paper, if possible go on to share our new discovery with others, that will multiply our power and yield much greater effects in driving out those negative feelings.

 

        The activities below will produce a mighty force in helping us to drive out those negative feeling resided deep inside us.

 

·        Pursuing our dream hobbies or things that we always wanted to do but no time to do in the past.

·        Involving in the volunteer work to help people or nature whom or which are in need of our times, skills and experiences.

·        Exercising to make ourselves feels good and looks good.

·        Picking up new skills to lighten up our soul, like Zhineng qigong, yoga, meditation, or even a religion.

·        Learning to love ourselves more, and feel good for ourselves from within.

 

        The list here is not necessarily finite, for those of you who are passionately love your job, and prefer to put your heart and soul into it, can also yield the same effect.

 

        Besides having the food for our soul, we also need to eat well, having enough rest and sleep, and be sure that we keep our body hydrate at all time. This is the time where our body are subjected to tremendous amount of strains, hence we can’t just focus on our mind, but also to take care and make sure our physical body is in the pink of health. Healthy body, healthy mind and soul are inseparable. One can affect the other easily.

 

        Last of all, if situation allow, go for a good sensual massage or a good love making session to lighten up our mind and soul with good orgasm. But it must be a good and guilt free experience, if not it will generate more harm than good.

 

        Finally, do not lay blame on anyone for the things that has happened to us. Not ourselves nor others. No one is at fault for what has happened, though we may feel responsible for it (that is normal), but it does not necessarily mean that we have to find someone to put the blame on to ease our sense of responsibility. If we do that, we will unknowingly being sucked into the deepest end of the black hole, to a point where we might not be able to recover easily.

 

        Most of the time we cannot control what has happened around us, but we can control what we going to do or feel after it has happened to us, and that is what determines our success and happiness in life.

 

* Stand up for yourself…

 

Excerpt from today Straits Times, “Stand up for yourself” by David Goldwich.

 

·        Studies show that only 5 to 20% of the population is assertive.

·        Nearly all top managers are assertive.

·        Assertiveness is the ability to stand up for yourself without stepping on anyone else’s toe. It means communicating your interests in a manner that is clear, direct, specific and considerate.

·        It is the “golden mean” between passive and aggressive.

·        If you cannot stand up for yourself, you are passive.

·        If you can stand up for yourself but disregard the rights and feelings of others, you may be aggressive.

·        Assertiveness is not just a personality trait – it is a skill that can be learnt.

·        Most people who take assertive training are passive.

·        Passive people may have unsatisfactory and unbalance relationships, without the give and take of healthy interpersonal relationships.

·        Passive people may regret their lack of assertiveness and resent others. They may also suffer from low self-esteem and depression.

·        Assertive people have positive self-esteem. They enjoy fulfilling relationships based on open communication and mutual respect. They take responsibility for their feelings, statements and action. Assertive people stand up for themselves, exercising their rights while recognizing the fights and opinions of others.

·        3 skill sets that assertive people use:

a.    The ability to say no.

b.    The ability to ask.

c.     The ability to craft assertive messages.

 

My reflections…

 

       Assertiveness is the state of balanced between the passiveness and aggressiveness. There is no right or wrong in the balancing scale, dependant upon the situation that we are in.

 

        Balance does not necessarily mean equal amount on both side of the scale. We need a lot more cotton to balance with a piece of small solid rock. Hence discretion is the key to success.

 

        Some of us being assertive and get promoted, some of us being assertive and get into trouble.

 

            The secret lies in the alignment of our values to those of our bosses’ and the corporate one. The alignment of the moon and the sun will determine the consequences between ‘appreciation’ and ‘insubordination’.

 

        Hence, we need to constantly reflect upon ourselves, to find out and update our own true values as we journey along our life through the ups and downs. Being ourselves is also means being assertive to our values. If being assertive to our own values is conflicting with our friends’ or our bosses’ values, then it is time for us to move on without them.

 

        Success does not measure by our job title, position, salary or the power that we have. It is measured by our ability to contribute to our nation, our company, the people, friends and the environment around us, without losing our soul.

* Can we accept the differences between men and women, and go on to enjoy sex…?

 

        “He wants sex to feel loved; she needs to feel loved to feel like having sex…” this phrase is not new to most of us; however, can we accept the differences between the men and the women, and go on to enjoy sex as a gift from nature?

 

        Sex is the process that leads to reproduction; reproduction is the primary purpose of all living things to maintain the ultimate eco balance of our mother earth.

 

        The nature has made men and women in such a way that we will not only attract each other sexually, and also to make sure that our off-springs are well taken care of until the point that they are able to survive by themselves.

 

        With these requirements in mind, Nature has made men and women differently, and blessed us (men and women) with different competencies and gifts to perform different roles in sustaining our human kind.

 

        We should not compete and complain about one another, we should learn to work together, accept and enjoy our differences. After all making love (not raw sex) is exclusively only to mankind.

 

        Well I do understand that most people today will not accept certain behaviors if they do not understand why… hence I would like to share with you an interesting article published on Sunday Time, March 8, 2009, by Chua Mui Hoong, called “The joy of sex talk”.       

 

·        Oxytocin makes women feel bonded, secure, loved, making them more inclined to feel sexual. In other words, they are in the mood when they feel loved.

 

·        Men’s social attachment however is influenced by vasopressin, a hormone that boosts a man’s energy, attention and aggression.

 

·        Sex releases vast amounts of vasopressin in males, triggering pleasure centre in the brain, and strengthening attachment to the female engaged in the activities. In other words, sex makes him feel more loving.

 

·        Studies of prairie voles show that sex releases oxytocin and vasopressin in males. Oxytocin makes him recognize and feel bonded to one particular female (and not just any female he has sex with).  Knock off that gene and the creature forgets not only who its partner is, but also who its friends are.

 

·        Oxytocin and vasopressin both activate the pleasure chemical dopamine, which sets off a positive feedback loop – whereby more coupling with one particular partner releases more of the hormones, which activate the brain’s pleasure centre – bonding the pair strongly for life.

 

·        Men’s sex centres are 3 times the size of women’s. When men have sex, they feel bonded and relaxed – the way women do when they talk to their friends.

 

·        Women should just see sex with their husbands as similar to a good heart-to-heart talk with their girlfriends. As a (male) form of communication.

 

·        Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone that also acts as  neurotransmitter in the brain.

 

·        Oxytocin is best known for its roles in female reproduction: it is released in large amounts after distension of the cervix and vagina during labor, and after stimulation of the nipples, facilitating birth and breastfeeding, respectively. Recent studies have begun to investigate oxytocin’s role in various behaviors, including social recognition, bonding, anxiety, trust, and maternal behaviors.

 

 

        Finally I would like to fore warn you that due to the evolution of mankind, there is a new equation that you might not aware of, that is:

 

·        Sex is not the same as making love.

·        Having sex will not necessarily lead to orgasm or child-birth.

·        With no orgasm or child-birth, our body may not produce the necessary chemicals to make us feel good and healthy.

 

        The experiment was so far conducted by using animals, and animals do not make love, they just have sex. The fact of our women today, majority of them have experienced very little or no orgasm at all during sexual intercourse. Hence do not ask ourselves the question of why I have sex every other day, but I do not feel the effects as what the research had indicated.