Love, the Verb
Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
—Hafiz
The Secret’s message is to let go of all blame, because it only destroys you, and to move forward with hope, love, compassion and kindness.
—Rhonda Byrne
The word love is both a noun and a verb. Love, the noun, is an emotion that we feel toward our self or another. Love, the verb, denotes action and describes a particular behavior that we offer to our self or to someone else. This chapter will focus on love, the verb.
We can demonstrate loving behavior toward our self in several different ways, including how we speak to our selves; how we take care of our emotions, our body, and our environment; how we interpret and respond to the actions of others and to a variety of daily situations.
Many years ago, I worked with a client, “Gretchen,” who was an extremely bright and caring person. She had dedicated her life to promoting issues of social justice and worked full-time for a well-respected, international nonprofit organization. She had a very responsible role, traveling the world and bringing issues of importance to light. She was greatly respected and loved by many, many people.
Because of her dedication to her work, she found herself, quite often, missing lunch and not taking bathroom breaks. We explored her upbringing and the messages she might have received that would cause her not to value her body and not listen to its needs. She came to realize that she believed the issues she was working on were more important than her body.
We looked at all the ways her body supported her work, enabling her to speak, write, travel and dialogue with people. Spending time in acknowledgement and appreciation of her body helped Gretchen change her viewpo