檳榔嶼

- True giving is a thoroughly joyous thing to do. We experience happiness when we form the intention to give, in the actual act of giving, and in the recollection of the fact that we have given. Generosity is a celebration. When we give something to someone we feel connected to them, and our commitment to the path of peace and awareness deepens. - Sharon Salzberg
- Love allows us to enter paradise. Still, many of use wait outside the gates, unable to cross the threshold, unable to leave behind all the stuff we have accumulated that gets in the way of love.
  - Much of the despair young people feel about love comes from their belief that they are doing everything "right" or that they have done everything right and love is still not happening. Their efforts to love and be loved just produce stress, strife, and perpetual discontent.
- In my twenties and early thirties I was confident I knew what love was all about. Yet every time I "fell in love" I found myself in pain.
  - I can remember when I took the first man home. My sisters were shocked that he was "so much like Daddy" and "you've always hated Daddy"
  - After fifteen years with this partner, I realized not only how much he was like Dad, I also came face to face with my desperate longing to get the love from him I had not gotten from my father.
  - I wanted him to become both the loving dad and a loving partner, thereby offering me a space of healing.
  - In my fantasy, if he would just love me, give me all the care I had not gotten as a child, it would mend my broken spirit and I would be able to trust and love again.
  - Like many men, he wanted a woman to be "just like his mama" so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.
- Dan Kiley, <<The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up>>
  - Though they have reached adult age, they are unable to face adult feelings with responsibilities. Out of touch with their true emotions, afraid to depend on evern those closest to them, self-centered and narcissistic, they hide behind masks of normalcy while feeling empty and lonely inside.
- Whereas some people had often seen my older partner's silence as intimidating and threantening-  a sign of his "power" - my younger partner's silence was usually interpreted as a consequence of my dominance.
- Depsite their support of gender equality in the public sphere, privately, deep down, they still saw love as a woman's issue. To them, a relationship was about finding someone to take care of all their needs.
- In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking.
  - Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with "love", but in actuality their actions are often a covert way to hold power.
  - This is precisely why it is so difficult for women, and some men, to leave relationships where the central dynamic is a struggle for power.
  - The fact that this sadomasochistic power dynamic can and usually does coexist with affection, care, tenderness, and loyalty makes it easy for power-driven individuals to deny their agendas, even to themselves.
- Sadly, love will not prevail in any situation where one party, either female or male, wants to maintain control.
  - When someone has not known love it is difficult for him to trust that mutual satisfaction and growth can be the primary foundation in a coupling relationship.
  - Whatever happens, the outcome can be predicted. The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control
- Females are encouraged by patriarchal thinking to believe we should be loving, but this does not mean we are any more emotionally equipped to do the work of love than our male counterparts. Afraid of love, many of us focus more on finding a partner.
  - The widespread success of books encourage women to deceive and manipulate to get a partner, express the cynicism of our times.
  - These books validate the old-fashioned sexist notions of sexual difference and encourage women to believe that no relationship between a man and a woman can be based on mutual respect, openness, and caring.
  - They teach females how to use feminine wiles to play the game of power but they do not offer guidelines for how to love and be loved. (鼓勵女人用女人的小心機)
- Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism.
  - Learn behavior that helps maintain and support male domination.
  - In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation.
  - John Gray refers to this as "men entering their cave," and posits it as a given that a woman who disturbs her man when he wants isolation will be punished. He believes that it is female behavior that needs to change.
- Indeed, most adult females readily abandon their basic understanding of the ways one shows care and respect (important ingredients of love) to resocialize themselves so that they can unite with patriarchal partners (male or female) who know nothing about love or the basic rudiments of caregiving.
- Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. Then, then next step on love's path is communication.
  - Paul Tillich : "We cannot learn to communicate deeply until we learn to listen, to each other but also to ourselves and to God. Devotional silence is a powerful too, for the healing of a heart or the healing of a nation."
- When women communicate from a place of pain, it is often characterized as "nagging". Sometimes women hear repeatedly that their partners are "sick of listening to this shit". Both cases undermine self-esteem.
- Many men never want to feel helpless or vulnerable.
- Scott Peck : "Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship. Deep commitment does not guarantee the success of the relationship but does help more than any other factor to ensure it.... Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy."
- Living in a culture where we are encouraged to seek a quick release from any pain or discomfort has fostered a nation of individuals who are easily devastated by emotional pain, however relative.
  - Running from the pain, they never know the fullness of love's pleasure.
  - False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss.
- Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice.
  - A good number of men simply decide not to commit themselves because they cannot face dealing with the emotional pain of love and the conflict it engenders.
  - Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchoal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance.
  - It sets up a gendered arrangement in which men are more likely to get their emotional needs met while women will be deprived.
- Were women's emotional needs met, were mutuality the norm, male domination might lose its allure.
- Yet we often fear placing our emotional trust in caring individuals who may have been faithful friends all our lives.
- When we practice love, we want to give more. Selfishness is a central reason romantic relationships fail.
  - We live in an age of narcissism and many people have never learned or have forgotten how to listen to the needs of others. The truth is, if you want to make just one change in yourself that will improve your relationship - literally, overnight - it would be to put your partner's interest on an equal footing with you own.
- Generous sharing of all resources is one concrete way to express love. These resources can be time, attention, material objects, skills, money etc.
  - A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. Forgiveness opens us up and prepares us to receive love. It prepares the way for us to give wholeheartedly.
- Giving brings us into communion with everyone. 
  - In patriarchal society men who want to break with domination can best begin the practice of love by being giving, by being generous.
  - To heal the gender war rooted in struggles for power, women and men choose to make mutualitythe basis of their bond, ensuring that each person's growth matters and is nurtured.
  - Cultivating a generous heart, "the primary quality of an awakened mind", strengthens romantic bonds. Giving is the way we also learn how to receive.
  - A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. 
- Giving is healing to the spirit.