Learning All About Love
Relationships are an ongoing love lesson. Love includes several components according to bell hooks in her book All About Love: New Visions, such as “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” The typical origin environment of learning and practicing these components is childhood within familial relationships.
The reader accompanies bell on her self-exploratory journey, explaining her love journey through adolescence to adulthood, and part societal observatory, discussing aspects of community that could especially benefit from love particularly used as a verb instead of a noun.
However, many people do not have the opportunity to practice love in this way because they were adapting and learning to survive during childhood. Upon entering adulthood, many people are walking around with open wounds from childhood and finding they may have to unlearn what they have been taught is “love.”
This book opens access to exploring and experiencing the act of love and what happens when there is a lack thereof. Subcategories of love like emotional vocabulary, community, grief, healing, and spirituality are discussed and interconnections are demonstrated. Each of these subcategories is a part of life within relationships and at some point will be experienced. Practicing love in the context of action opens new pathways to healing, giving, and receiving this necessary component of being human.
“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
Learning, exploring, and discovering how to love yourself is vital to all your relationships. The most important relationship you have is with yourself, by extension this will improve relationships you share with others because you teach people how to love you. But first you have to learn how to love yourself.
“Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice.”
One of the levels of self-love is healing. Healing begins and proceeds internally through identifying what feelings are present due to past and current relationship experiences. The emotional work of healing is undoubtedly hard, which is why having supportive people and a nurturing environment helps with acts of forgiveness, compassion, and dealing with any sort of shame.
According to bell, “The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame. Often, our spirits have been broken again and again through rituals of disregard in which we were shamed by others or shamed ourselves. Shame breaks and weakens us, keeping us away from the wholeness healing offers. When we practice forgiveness, we let go of shame. Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy. It separates. Compassion and forgiveness reconnect us.”
Now, do not be deceived by the length of this book. Although it is only 237 pages, it is full of intense information that pensively provokes emotions. bell’s words are like a well-aged whiskey served neat that should be sipped and savored. There is no need to rush this reading experience; take it in, a little at a time, and let it seep into your heart and mind. Information like this shifts generations for the better. If you like to annotate your books, get your pens and highlighters ready because there are so many gems shared!
Brittany is a book lover with a continuously expanding To Be Read (TBR) List and her unofficial love language is good food! She lives in an Atlanta suburb with her husband and two daughters.