Change Your Perspective of Love

Change Your Perspective of Love

We’re living in a world of conflicts and wars, but love still plays a pivotal role in our lives. Love involves our feelings and emotions; love gives us both happiness and pain. When the love is fulfilled, we feel happy; when the love is rejected or unfilled, we feel pain. 

In Christianity, love refers to the love of God and the love of one’s neighbors or even enemies. In Buddhism, love refers to an awakened state of mind; the word “Buddha” means “wake up.”

If you want to love others—no matter they deserve your love or not—you must love yourself first. .

Ironically enough, it‘s not easy to love yourself, let alone loving others, especially those you’re not particularly fond of.  

To love yourself is not as easy as you may think.

You may be judgmental: being hard on yourself, and feeling your inadequacy in spite of some success in your life. That is, your accomplishments to date may not be good enough for you, and therefore you want more.

You may have a pre-conditioned set of criteria for yourself, based on the self-image you have created for yourself, such as being too fat.

So, the first step is to change your perspectives of how you look at yourself or others. If there is anything you wish to change, then make the effort to change it. If you can’t, then accept what you cannot change. Self-acceptance is an important ingredient in the expression of love. If you cannot accept yourself, there is no way for you to accept others, let alone loving them.

To initiate any change, you must be mindful of why you need to change, and how to go about making the change. Mindfulness holds the key to discovering how you think and feel about yourself. 

Empty your mind of any pre-conditioned thinking or conventional mindset. For example, many of us are ingrained in our minds that the purpose of life is to enjoy—that has led to our quest for materialism. Another example, many of us have the belief that we all have inherited badness from the Fall of Adam, and therefore we may feel guilty for not being good enough, and thus leading to depression. 

All in all, to be able to love others, you need to love yourself first. To do just that, you need to empty your mind, and be mindful of the need to change your perspectives and to accept what you cannot change.

Be A Better and Happy You With Tao Wisdom: to find out how to have a loving and compassionate mind with Tao wisdom and live your life as if everything is a miracle.

Stephen Lau

Copyright © Stephen Lau