The Tao Te Ching/The Tao of Love
May 23, 2010
Introduction
In order to understand the “Tao of Love”, one must
first understand the principles of “The Tao”. The
philosophy of the Tao comes from the book The
Tao Te Ching, (pronounced Dow Deh Jing),
commonly known as the “Book of the Way”, by Lao-
tzu. We know little about Lao-tzu except that he
was probably an older contemporary of Confucius
(551-479 B.C.E.) and may have held the position of
archive-keeper in one of the petty kingdoms of the
time. The Tao was written over 2,500 years ago.
All that we really have left of Lao-tzu is his book.
Guiding principles of the Tao:
- We are all connected to the Universe, and to
each other.
- “Go with the flow” – accept things as the
way they are, and the way they are supposed to be
(“hands-off”).
- Have humility.
- Do not focus on material wealth or what
others value.
- Have great compassion, even for “bad”
people – good people are meant to teach them.
- Be free from desire, then you will be at
peace.
- Act but don’t expect; act without rushing.
- In conflict, be fair and generous.
- Don’t compare or compete; care about other
people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
Don’t be elated by praise or discouraged by neglect.
- Don’t try to control – only master yourself –
all things change.
- Keep things in balance.
- Be patient.
- Keep things simple.
- The wise don’t need to prove their point;
those who need to prove their point aren’t wise.
- Give to others.
- Failure equals opportunity.
- Develop enough self-reliance to give up the
idea of self.
- Step back from your thoughts.
- If words equal actions then they are genuine.
- Erase the blackboard – be something new!
- See everyone as your equal.
- When you realize you made a mistake,
admit to it and correct it.
- Prevent trouble before it arises.
- See the larger picture.
- Change your future by changing your mind.
- We are not victims.
Ultimately, the Tao is about participating in society
according to the natural laws of the universe so
that we live in harmony with its processes and not
in confrontation with them.
The Tao of Love
Now that we have the guiding principles of the Tao
in our mind, let’s examine how they apply to love.
It has been said, “Life is like a parking garage: if
you go backward, you get severe tire damage.”
First we will discuss the problems, and then offer
solutions.
The “Problems”
Love is first about pain. Sounds promising, huh?
But it’s true. How can we know love without first
knowing pain? It is the pain itself that creates our
abilities to know love. For a lot of people (I’d say
most), being “in love” creates feelings of possible
loss, jealousy, anxiety, fears of abandonment.
These feelings of pain arise from feelings of lack of
self-worth, and we feel that it is better to know
the certainty of pain rather than the uncertainty of
the new. I know there are some of you who will
read this and say, “I don’t feel a lack of self-worth,
I am not jealous, I don’t worry” and that could be
true for you. But I think on some level most of us
experience these types of fears. The lack of self-
worth could simply mean that we don’t feel safe.
Perhaps this lack of feeling safe is a result of a
childhood experience or environment. Our job is to
break the patterns and create a new point of view
for ourselves and start fresh, free from self-
imposed oppression. We can and do create our
own reality that we can begin to accept
responsibility. By accepting responsibility, we
become free, for then no one can challenge our
security. What you feel you lack is already inside
of you and you need but to find the most
appropriate way to unlock your own secrets, your
own potential.
The Issues
The Connection
Except for with our children, we join the lives of
others in the midst of things. In the process of
interacting with others, we pass on some of our
own selves. Because of our feelings of insecurity,
we tend to want to control the world and others in
our attempt to feel safe.
Love is About Trust
Trust is about feeling safe about ourselves in
relation to tomorrow. Trusting means letting go of
the control that we have deceived ourselves into
thinking we have.
Personal Faith
It is only because most of us lack faith that having
faith is so important. True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way. It can’t be
gained by interfering. “The intellectual brain can
only dominate awareness by affixing itself to
something definite and bounded.” With the Tao,
however, it is the very nature of the process that
demands there be no such concrete guidelines.
Making a deliberate choice to let go of a rational
thought process seems a contradiction in terms.
How can we consciously choose not to think?
We must learn, consciously, to suspend our need
to have rational answers for everything. Rational
answers will come, of their own course and in their
own time, when we have opened ourselves up to
alternate ways of thinking.
How Can We Develop Faith?
Our attempts to control the world come from
thinking that this security comes from an outside
source that we must control. The faith needed is a
faith that everything will turn out right. What we
need means what we need for our growth and
development. Having faith means we will not be
afraid of the new. Fear leads to further attempts
to control others in order to abate our feelings of
fear. We all lack vision because since our
beginnings, we have chosen simply to accept what
those who came before us have believed. Struggle
is an integral part of the process. If we look for
evil, we will find it. What we each do is to first
decide what the world is all about and then only
secondarily seek reinforcement of that decision in
the real world. We decide what the world is like
based on our background. We must find a way to
break the cycle of perception-breeds-reality by
breaking the perception, not the reality. The great
trick of life is to learn what the process is all
about. It is to understand how we get from seeing
only misery and suffering to finding learning and
wisdom from its lessons. We must learn faith that
we are all one, that we are all part of the same
planet. Faith is required for us to know that our
fear is only about fear.
Balance, Harmony, and Change
The goal for our lives is to achieve a balance, a
harmony, both within ourselves and in turn with
nature and the natural processes that are ongoing
in the world.
Attempting to fight the process of change involves
struggles to make steady that which is inherently
unsteady. The ability to see our lives from the
inside, from the subjective, the feeling, and the
participating perspective, while at the same time
also being an outside, objective observer, may be
the most important aspect of learning what trust
and ultimately peace are truly all about. It is the
belief in the presence of something significantly
larger than ourselves that gives us that strength.
It is necessary at times to feel almost like a sieve,
touching the matters that pass through our lives
but not attaching to them, for if we begin to feel
as though the events were in themselves the
things that matter, we would lose the benefits of
the ability to let go.
Certainty in life is hardly ever possible and yet we
spend virtually all of our time seeking the feeling
of security we believe it brings. We can never work
our way out of a problem by using the very same
thinking that got us into the problem in the first
place. When we feel insecure, rather than open
ourselves up to new ideas to escape from that
feeling, we in fact regress and turn inward and
backward toward more of the same. So we go on,
with all of our pain, with all of our fear, because it
is at least knowable. Within any crisis lies the
opportunity for change.
Letting Go
Our destinies, while caught up inexorably with
theirs, are still separate and apart. We can, each
of us, enjoy our own levels of personal growth
without feeling the need to restrict and contain the
other’s. We really have no choice, for in the end,
the natural processes will prevail no matter what
we do.
Love
True love does not hold but releases and gives
freedom to another. True love cannot be
complicated by rules, by control, by restrictions.
By allowing ourselves to be loved by another, we
must in the process be free of all ego. It is only
when we learn to let go of ourselves and our need
to be loved that we can find love. Many of us go
through life having a number of relationships in
which we think we are experiencing love, but it
turns out what we really are feeling is not love at
all but need. It is need born from lack of love
when we were children, which need we carry with
us all of our lives unless we are able to free
ourselves of it – all that grasping, all that clawing,
all that holding on, all that pain. That is all we
know. Our frames of reference are limited by the
remembrances of our past and our fears of the
future.
Fear is Not Love
If we cling, if we grasp, we will destroy. We fear
that losing the relationship would mean loss of
ourselves. When we cling, it is out of a sense that
if we let go, somehow we will lose a part of us.
And that generally is so because we are not
complete without the other. We need the other to
make us whole so that if the other leaves, we are
in fact incomplete. So we hold on, trying to keep
the other from doing or thinking anything that we
feel will jeopardize the relationship and us. And
the more we try to make that other ours, the more
the other struggles to be free. And the more the
other struggles to be free, the more we tighten our
grasp. And neither of us knows what is going on
until it is over. If, when we were children, we felt
that our parents did not think we were worth
loving, we simply carry that perspective into our
later lives. It becomes self-fulfilling, for we find
reasons to fail in love. When we expect something
out of our relationship with another, then we will
surely be disappointed, for loving means having no
expectations. When we want the other to be a
certain way, to fulfill certain of our expectations,
and he or she does not, love turns to
disappointment in us. To know that whatever
comes of the relationship and this particular
partner we will still be us is freeing.
Loving is Different From Being Loved
Allowing ourselves to be loved by another requires
us to be completely out of control and vulnerable.
Only when we have tried to control and when we
have been unsuccessful and that has resulted in
deep hurt can we even begin the process of
learning from the hurt. It is ironic that the process
of letting go and giving up control is also the
process of taking on personal responsibility for
ourselves. We are, by doing so, saying to
ourselves that we, not something out there, not
something over which we feel we have control, is
determining our destinies. We are making the
decision. We cannot let the other be free if we
ourselves are in chains.
Happiness Comes from Freeing Ourselves of Fear
We truly can create our own reality, a reality that
can be negative or positive. It takes a lot of
growing to feel good enough about ourselves to
allow the other to be as free as we would like to
be ourselves. It takes a great deal of personal
strength to give the other the freedom to do
whatever that other wants to do without feeling
threatened by freedom. To give the other the room
to grow, to experience things that may not be to
our liking and that may even cause the relationship
to change, takes a very positive feeling about
ourselves.
Solutions
How Do We Change?
It is up to each of us to fill our well according to
our own lives. It requires us to be our faith even
in the face of “real world” daily stuff that gets in
the way.
• Examine your pain. The pain is the original
pain from childhood. Talk to yourself. Talk to this
child, say how much you love this child, say he or
she is safe. Take care of the child.
• It is vitally important that we become more
accepting of ourselves. Our search for perfection is
merely our trying to right the perceived
inadequacies we feel we have, and those depend
on our perspective from childhood. But the more
we search for perfection, the more we build into
our current perceptions the basis for continued self-
deprecation.
• Examine your fears concretely. What is it
that you really think will happen to you if you let
go and break a pattern or two? Will you die or fall
off the Earth? Make a list of what you fear and
what you fear will happen to you. Seeing those
fears, speaking about them, writing them down,
forces you to get concrete about your fear and may
help you to see them as irrational in many
instances. In this process of exploration, try being
alone more. Many of us fear being with ourselves
and yet it is difficult to grow when we are
surrounded by people, events, things that easily
distract us.
• Examine your patterns.
• We tend to repeat our behavior because to
do so is a form of control. We believe that if we
do not venture too far from what we know, no
matter how boring, hurtful, and painful it is, at
least we know what to expect. If we grew up
believing we were not worthy, we fall into
relationships that prove that to us over and over
again.
• Do whatever you do differently from the way
you did it yesterday. Act as if you believed. One
way to break this repetitive system is to act as if
you felt good about yourself. You have the total
and complete ability to be free, and in the process
of being free to free yourself of the burdens of your
past. After all, they have absolutely no relevance
to your today, so just act as if you were strong and
confident. Pretend. What happens is that if you
do let go and act as if you were self-assured, the
other person reacts accordingly. So then you are
reinforced and get the courage to try it again.
• Try small changes at first. Make a list of
what you would like to be and feel, given the total
freedom to be just that way. Make it concrete.
Start with changes that are achievable so that you
get “wins” right from the beginning.
• See the larger picture. When you want
something and it is not happening the way you
want it to happen, it is the universe telling you to
back off and let go. What will happen will happen.
• Examine your contributions. Feeling
connected to the planet will give you a feeling of
personal responsibility for your conduct and is
empowering. We can change ourselves by doing
for others since in doing so, we take ourselves out
of our egocentric condition.
• Meditate and do affirmations. We must
learn to feel the presence of the universe, of God
(or perhaps this just means your higher self if you
are atheist or agnostic), inside each of us in order
to feel connected. We can feel it only when we get
quiet and be with ourselves alone.
-- Doing affirmations,
-- telling yourself repeatedly that you are safe,
-- that you are a good person,
-- that you deserve abundance in the world,
-- that you are worthy of love, may, over time,
become part of your belief system.
• We do create our own reality. Positive,
affirming statements to ourselves help us create
that reality.
• Find some alternative philosophy to follow,
Learn about astrology or Eastern religions or
anything else that opens you up to other ideas
that you have not allowed in.
• Do what you love to do. If you dread
Mondays through Fridays, you will not be open to
relationships with others during that time or even
on the weekends. We will be miserable and take it
out on others. I know this is easier said than
done. But one can make an effort to find
employment that is less painful than a job that you
detest. Remember, if we do not dream, then we
die.
Conclusion
“Nothing will change until we change, for we are
the somethings that must change.”
We can change our future by changing our minds.
Because we fear freedom in our individual lives, we
must restrict freedom for those whom we would
love, lest the freedom they have be seen as a
threat to our freedom. Without the promise of
immediate results, we refuse to try anything. If
our perspectives are toward self-love, there is
nothing to fear.
I know a lot of these solutions are difficult to
implement. Some I have, some I haven’t. But the
road to growth is in the attempt. I don’t know
about you, but I really identified with the issues
and problems identified from the concept of the
Tao of Love, and hope you did too. I wish you well
on your road to a happier self.
Sources:
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
The Tao of Love, Ivan Hoffman
May 23, 2010
Introduction
In order to understand the “Tao of Love”, one must
first understand the principles of “The Tao”. The
philosophy of the Tao comes from the book The
Tao Te Ching, (pronounced Dow Deh Jing),
commonly known as the “Book of the Way”, by Lao-
tzu. We know little about Lao-tzu except that he
was probably an older contemporary of Confucius
(551-479 B.C.E.) and may have held the position of
archive-keeper in one of the petty kingdoms of the
time. The Tao was written over 2,500 years ago.
All that we really have left of Lao-tzu is his book.
Guiding principles of the Tao:
- We are all connected to the Universe, and to
each other.
- “Go with the flow” – accept things as the
way they are, and the way they are supposed to be
(“hands-off”).
- Have humility.
- Do not focus on material wealth or what
others value.
- Have great compassion, even for “bad”
people – good people are meant to teach them.
- Be free from desire, then you will be at
peace.
- Act but don’t expect; act without rushing.
- In conflict, be fair and generous.
- Don’t compare or compete; care about other
people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
Don’t be elated by praise or discouraged by neglect.
- Don’t try to control – only master yourself –
all things change.
- Keep things in balance.
- Be patient.
- Keep things simple.
- The wise don’t need to prove their point;
those who need to prove their point aren’t wise.
- Give to others.
- Failure equals opportunity.
- Develop enough self-reliance to give up the
idea of self.
- Step back from your thoughts.
- If words equal actions then they are genuine.
- Erase the blackboard – be something new!
- See everyone as your equal.
- When you realize you made a mistake,
admit to it and correct it.
- Prevent trouble before it arises.
- See the larger picture.
- Change your future by changing your mind.
- We are not victims.
Ultimately, the Tao is about participating in society
according to the natural laws of the universe so
that we live in harmony with its processes and not
in confrontation with them.
The Tao of Love
Now that we have the guiding principles of the Tao
in our mind, let’s examine how they apply to love.
It has been said, “Life is like a parking garage: if
you go backward, you get severe tire damage.”
First we will discuss the problems, and then offer
solutions.
The “Problems”
Love is first about pain. Sounds promising, huh?
But it’s true. How can we know love without first
knowing pain? It is the pain itself that creates our
abilities to know love. For a lot of people (I’d say
most), being “in love” creates feelings of possible
loss, jealousy, anxiety, fears of abandonment.
These feelings of pain arise from feelings of lack of
self-worth, and we feel that it is better to know
the certainty of pain rather than the uncertainty of
the new. I know there are some of you who will
read this and say, “I don’t feel a lack of self-worth,
I am not jealous, I don’t worry” and that could be
true for you. But I think on some level most of us
experience these types of fears. The lack of self-
worth could simply mean that we don’t feel safe.
Perhaps this lack of feeling safe is a result of a
childhood experience or environment. Our job is to
break the patterns and create a new point of view
for ourselves and start fresh, free from self-
imposed oppression. We can and do create our
own reality that we can begin to accept
responsibility. By accepting responsibility, we
become free, for then no one can challenge our
security. What you feel you lack is already inside
of you and you need but to find the most
appropriate way to unlock your own secrets, your
own potential.
The Issues
The Connection
Except for with our children, we join the lives of
others in the midst of things. In the process of
interacting with others, we pass on some of our
own selves. Because of our feelings of insecurity,
we tend to want to control the world and others in
our attempt to feel safe.
Love is About Trust
Trust is about feeling safe about ourselves in
relation to tomorrow. Trusting means letting go of
the control that we have deceived ourselves into
thinking we have.
Personal Faith
It is only because most of us lack faith that having
faith is so important. True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way. It can’t be
gained by interfering. “The intellectual brain can
only dominate awareness by affixing itself to
something definite and bounded.” With the Tao,
however, it is the very nature of the process that
demands there be no such concrete guidelines.
Making a deliberate choice to let go of a rational
thought process seems a contradiction in terms.
How can we consciously choose not to think?
We must learn, consciously, to suspend our need
to have rational answers for everything. Rational
answers will come, of their own course and in their
own time, when we have opened ourselves up to
alternate ways of thinking.
How Can We Develop Faith?
Our attempts to control the world come from
thinking that this security comes from an outside
source that we must control. The faith needed is a
faith that everything will turn out right. What we
need means what we need for our growth and
development. Having faith means we will not be
afraid of the new. Fear leads to further attempts
to control others in order to abate our feelings of
fear. We all lack vision because since our
beginnings, we have chosen simply to accept what
those who came before us have believed. Struggle
is an integral part of the process. If we look for
evil, we will find it. What we each do is to first
decide what the world is all about and then only
secondarily seek reinforcement of that decision in
the real world. We decide what the world is like
based on our background. We must find a way to
break the cycle of perception-breeds-reality by
breaking the perception, not the reality. The great
trick of life is to learn what the process is all
about. It is to understand how we get from seeing
only misery and suffering to finding learning and
wisdom from its lessons. We must learn faith that
we are all one, that we are all part of the same
planet. Faith is required for us to know that our
fear is only about fear.
Balance, Harmony, and Change
The goal for our lives is to achieve a balance, a
harmony, both within ourselves and in turn with
nature and the natural processes that are ongoing
in the world.
Attempting to fight the process of change involves
struggles to make steady that which is inherently
unsteady. The ability to see our lives from the
inside, from the subjective, the feeling, and the
participating perspective, while at the same time
also being an outside, objective observer, may be
the most important aspect of learning what trust
and ultimately peace are truly all about. It is the
belief in the presence of something significantly
larger than ourselves that gives us that strength.
It is necessary at times to feel almost like a sieve,
touching the matters that pass through our lives
but not attaching to them, for if we begin to feel
as though the events were in themselves the
things that matter, we would lose the benefits of
the ability to let go.
Certainty in life is hardly ever possible and yet we
spend virtually all of our time seeking the feeling
of security we believe it brings. We can never work
our way out of a problem by using the very same
thinking that got us into the problem in the first
place. When we feel insecure, rather than open
ourselves up to new ideas to escape from that
feeling, we in fact regress and turn inward and
backward toward more of the same. So we go on,
with all of our pain, with all of our fear, because it
is at least knowable. Within any crisis lies the
opportunity for change.
Letting Go
Our destinies, while caught up inexorably with
theirs, are still separate and apart. We can, each
of us, enjoy our own levels of personal growth
without feeling the need to restrict and contain the
other’s. We really have no choice, for in the end,
the natural processes will prevail no matter what
we do.
Love
True love does not hold but releases and gives
freedom to another. True love cannot be
complicated by rules, by control, by restrictions.
By allowing ourselves to be loved by another, we
must in the process be free of all ego. It is only
when we learn to let go of ourselves and our need
to be loved that we can find love. Many of us go
through life having a number of relationships in
which we think we are experiencing love, but it
turns out what we really are feeling is not love at
all but need. It is need born from lack of love
when we were children, which need we carry with
us all of our lives unless we are able to free
ourselves of it – all that grasping, all that clawing,
all that holding on, all that pain. That is all we
know. Our frames of reference are limited by the
remembrances of our past and our fears of the
future.
Fear is Not Love
If we cling, if we grasp, we will destroy. We fear
that losing the relationship would mean loss of
ourselves. When we cling, it is out of a sense that
if we let go, somehow we will lose a part of us.
And that generally is so because we are not
complete without the other. We need the other to
make us whole so that if the other leaves, we are
in fact incomplete. So we hold on, trying to keep
the other from doing or thinking anything that we
feel will jeopardize the relationship and us. And
the more we try to make that other ours, the more
the other struggles to be free. And the more the
other struggles to be free, the more we tighten our
grasp. And neither of us knows what is going on
until it is over. If, when we were children, we felt
that our parents did not think we were worth
loving, we simply carry that perspective into our
later lives. It becomes self-fulfilling, for we find
reasons to fail in love. When we expect something
out of our relationship with another, then we will
surely be disappointed, for loving means having no
expectations. When we want the other to be a
certain way, to fulfill certain of our expectations,
and he or she does not, love turns to
disappointment in us. To know that whatever
comes of the relationship and this particular
partner we will still be us is freeing.
Loving is Different From Being Loved
Allowing ourselves to be loved by another requires
us to be completely out of control and vulnerable.
Only when we have tried to control and when we
have been unsuccessful and that has resulted in
deep hurt can we even begin the process of
learning from the hurt. It is ironic that the process
of letting go and giving up control is also the
process of taking on personal responsibility for
ourselves. We are, by doing so, saying to
ourselves that we, not something out there, not
something over which we feel we have control, is
determining our destinies. We are making the
decision. We cannot let the other be free if we
ourselves are in chains.
Happiness Comes from Freeing Ourselves of Fear
We truly can create our own reality, a reality that
can be negative or positive. It takes a lot of
growing to feel good enough about ourselves to
allow the other to be as free as we would like to
be ourselves. It takes a great deal of personal
strength to give the other the freedom to do
whatever that other wants to do without feeling
threatened by freedom. To give the other the room
to grow, to experience things that may not be to
our liking and that may even cause the relationship
to change, takes a very positive feeling about
ourselves.
Solutions
How Do We Change?
It is up to each of us to fill our well according to
our own lives. It requires us to be our faith even
in the face of “real world” daily stuff that gets in
the way.
• Examine your pain. The pain is the original
pain from childhood. Talk to yourself. Talk to this
child, say how much you love this child, say he or
she is safe. Take care of the child.
• It is vitally important that we become more
accepting of ourselves. Our search for perfection is
merely our trying to right the perceived
inadequacies we feel we have, and those depend
on our perspective from childhood. But the more
we search for perfection, the more we build into
our current perceptions the basis for continued self-
deprecation.
• Examine your fears concretely. What is it
that you really think will happen to you if you let
go and break a pattern or two? Will you die or fall
off the Earth? Make a list of what you fear and
what you fear will happen to you. Seeing those
fears, speaking about them, writing them down,
forces you to get concrete about your fear and may
help you to see them as irrational in many
instances. In this process of exploration, try being
alone more. Many of us fear being with ourselves
and yet it is difficult to grow when we are
surrounded by people, events, things that easily
distract us.
• Examine your patterns.
• We tend to repeat our behavior because to
do so is a form of control. We believe that if we
do not venture too far from what we know, no
matter how boring, hurtful, and painful it is, at
least we know what to expect. If we grew up
believing we were not worthy, we fall into
relationships that prove that to us over and over
again.
• Do whatever you do differently from the way
you did it yesterday. Act as if you believed. One
way to break this repetitive system is to act as if
you felt good about yourself. You have the total
and complete ability to be free, and in the process
of being free to free yourself of the burdens of your
past. After all, they have absolutely no relevance
to your today, so just act as if you were strong and
confident. Pretend. What happens is that if you
do let go and act as if you were self-assured, the
other person reacts accordingly. So then you are
reinforced and get the courage to try it again.
• Try small changes at first. Make a list of
what you would like to be and feel, given the total
freedom to be just that way. Make it concrete.
Start with changes that are achievable so that you
get “wins” right from the beginning.
• See the larger picture. When you want
something and it is not happening the way you
want it to happen, it is the universe telling you to
back off and let go. What will happen will happen.
• Examine your contributions. Feeling
connected to the planet will give you a feeling of
personal responsibility for your conduct and is
empowering. We can change ourselves by doing
for others since in doing so, we take ourselves out
of our egocentric condition.
• Meditate and do affirmations. We must
learn to feel the presence of the universe, of God
(or perhaps this just means your higher self if you
are atheist or agnostic), inside each of us in order
to feel connected. We can feel it only when we get
quiet and be with ourselves alone.
-- Doing affirmations,
-- telling yourself repeatedly that you are safe,
-- that you are a good person,
-- that you deserve abundance in the world,
-- that you are worthy of love, may, over time,
become part of your belief system.
• We do create our own reality. Positive,
affirming statements to ourselves help us create
that reality.
• Find some alternative philosophy to follow,
Learn about astrology or Eastern religions or
anything else that opens you up to other ideas
that you have not allowed in.
• Do what you love to do. If you dread
Mondays through Fridays, you will not be open to
relationships with others during that time or even
on the weekends. We will be miserable and take it
out on others. I know this is easier said than
done. But one can make an effort to find
employment that is less painful than a job that you
detest. Remember, if we do not dream, then we
die.
Conclusion
“Nothing will change until we change, for we are
the somethings that must change.”
We can change our future by changing our minds.
Because we fear freedom in our individual lives, we
must restrict freedom for those whom we would
love, lest the freedom they have be seen as a
threat to our freedom. Without the promise of
immediate results, we refuse to try anything. If
our perspectives are toward self-love, there is
nothing to fear.
I know a lot of these solutions are difficult to
implement. Some I have, some I haven’t. But the
road to growth is in the attempt. I don’t know
about you, but I really identified with the issues
and problems identified from the concept of the
Tao of Love, and hope you did too. I wish you well
on your road to a happier self.
Sources:
The Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
The Tao of Love, Ivan Hoffman
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