Beka’s Reviews > All About Love: New Visions > Status Update

"In the book a Heart As Wide As the World, Sharon Salzberg reminds us:
'The practice of generosity frees us from the sense of isolation that arises from clinging and attachment.'"

"In patriarchal society men who want to break with domination can best begin the practice of love by being giving, by being generous. This is why feminist thinkers extolled the virtues of male parenting. Working as caregivers to young children, many men are able to experience for the first time the joy that comes from service."

"Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learn behavior that helps maintain + support male domination, they act as though these differences are not value laden or political but are rather inherent + mystical."

"Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. We place them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds. This devaluation of our friendships creates an emptiness we may not see when we are devoting all our attention to finding someone to love romantically or giving all our attention to a chosen loved one."

"M. Scott Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals 'who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to "rejoice together, mourn together" and to "delight in each other and make others conditions our own."'"

"Living simply makes loving simple.
The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love.
It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community."

"To maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love."

"Greed is rightly considered a "deadly sin" because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good.

Greed violates the spirit of connectedness + community that is natural to human survival. It wipes out individual recognition of the needs + concerns of everyone, replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness."