bell hooks – mayah's site

if you would have asked me five years ago, i would have probably told you love is a feeling. you know love is there because you can feel it.

if you asked me today, i would have a much longer, complex response. hence, this post.

i want to start off with how i feel about love. i love love. i am learning how to love myself, how to love others and (most importantly) how to allow myself to receive love. to be honest, i had to make a choice- either to let the hardships i’ve encountered make me more or less open to love. with daily effort and intention, i am opening myself to receiving unconditional love from others. it’s a process.

okay so what is love?

bell hooks, in her novel All About Love, which you can find a free pdf of here (under resources), gives a defintion of love that when i read it, it literally changed my world.

so at this point, i was like alright, bet. love is an action. i have to do actionable things to love myself and others.

i started paying more attention to actions. (i eventually am now at the point, where i pay attention to how people’s actions make me feel and value that feeling as an indicator of what i should do next (most times LOL, it’s a process)).

i’m studying right now to be a yoga teacher, and as part of the training (as many courses do) we have spent a lot of time on yogic philosophy, much of which is rooted in eastern cultures (including religion). so we reviewed the 4 Aspects of True Love, which is given to us from Buddhism. (these are my summaries from my notes below)

maitri kindness: through being present and paying attention, learning how to love someone and doing it
karuna compassion: understanding the suffering of others and actively finding ways to alleviate their burdens (and actually alleviating them)
mudita joy: love is only love if it includes joy and brings happiness. with joy, love grows stronger.
upeksha freedom: includes external freedom, to have time/space, and internal freedom, space to be yoruself. practices must be implemented to create the sensation of freedom.

first, you must learn to love yourself like this. then others.

true love (which mind you, including familial and platonic relationships, as well as partnerships) requires action. it requires doing it right.

reading this, changed everything again. it was like i finally had a blueprint. i could combine the idea that love is an action and figure out in which ways i could be actionable.

this also made me think a lot about love languages. if you’re not familiar, gary chapman came up with this quiz, to see which of the five love languages you prefer: gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, or acts of service. i read recently online, that the best thing to do with these love languages, is to figure out WHEN and HOW to meet all of them. i may have scored highest for gifts (which i LOVE, to me they’re a representation of thought and action), but there are times when i need actions that fall under acts of service. learning how to support others in the way that they want to be supported, falls under karuna.

if i had to give you a short answer, love is a commitment to supportings oneself (first and foremost) and others. it takes time to learn how to love yourself. how i loved myself before quarantine looked a LOT different than during quarantine. i’m sure that as i grow older, it will change. my commitment to myself will stay the safe. checkins with myself will help me learn how to love myself the most.

as far as loving others, that changes as well. depending on where they are in life. i feel that checkins and honest discussions with your loved ones (may they be a family member, partner, friend, etc) about ways that you can be supportive are helping.

so what does this have to do with social justice? hate, which is the opposite of love, is hurtful. therefore the person that has received hate, has to heal. through loving yourself, you can find healing for you.

“love heals no matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love again, live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing in a new way, we go forward with the fresh insight- that the past can no longer hurt us. mindful remembering let’s us put the broken bits and pieces of our hearts together again that is the way healing begins.”- bell hooks

bell hooks, in her novel, talks a lot about creating a beloved community, where everyone is being loved by one another and giving love. this space is successful. this place, in my opinion, is the goal of social justice work. to create a space where everyones needs are met (also known as equity).

i’ll let you with one last quote, from bell hooks-

the moment we choose to love we begin to move against oppression, domination. the moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
bell hooks, in love as the practice of freedom.

love as the practice of freedom

i was told once by a reader that my life task/challenge is to learn how to forgive. i wasn’t surprised at all. i struggle with forgiving. it’s something that i had been working on before my chart was read, but after it was i have been focusing on it more.

earlier today i was thinking about toxic masculinity (thanks to Watch the Yard’s IG post) and how to dismantle it. i responded to the post (which is something i don’t normally do) explaining how toxic masculinity is a result of horizontal violence, specifically in the black community. paulo freire has written about oppression and horizontal violence is in his book pedagogy of the oppressed (10/10 recommend, it def changed my life). oppression according to freire is based on the desire to control. as a result, the oppressed embody some of the oppressors habits, leading to them wanting to control. this leads to toxic masculinity, in the context of the black community, because black men have very little they can control (due to institutional racism). so thus they try to control women and children, and other men. so what’s the key? what stops it? love. freire theorizes that the oppressed have to be the ones to free themselves- liberating themselves by recognizing the patterns of the oppressors they embody, as well as recognizing their own situation. the whole point is that if we understand the system, use our voices to talk about our experiences and educate, we can dismantle it. it’s a lot of work, but that’s a way to explain it simply.

so then i was thinking about love, and one of my favorite books, all about love, by bell hooks. in chapter 8, she talks about forgiveness. she explains that forgiveness is the act of truly understanding and allows the person who was hurt to turn from a victim to a co-creator in their own narrative. in the chapter she explains how she was hurt my people and took time to understand them, and forgave them. she even mentions how she’s encouraged others to do the same.

then my questions arise- well when does one truly know how to forgive? like how do you truly understand where someone is coming from? how do you maintain the space to allow someone to explain themselves? when is enough enough? how do you forgive and not let them back in?

mind you, i’ve done all of these things. it’s just that i feel like forgiveness is tricky. one thing i’ve learned from therapy is trauma rewires your brain. i know i struggle with identifying if the action was done to harm me or not, and it’s very hard for me to convince myself that people aren’t trying to hurt me. since i’ve had people who have, it’s not as easy for me to just say okay well they didn’t mean it.

i would love to get to that point where i don’t have a complete meltdown when something hurts my feelings. or when i don’t sit and cry for hours because i got a bad grade.

it’s hard for me to bounce back. and then when you factor in the concept of ego, and the idea that i don’t want to be hurt and am offended by someone hurting me, it gets even harder.

so what do i do? i meditate and do exercises to promote discernment (i.e. ego eradicator, receiving reiki treatments, healing sessions, yoga and a lot of praying). i ask for guidance and help.

i want to open my heart to forgive like bell hooks says. i want to be able to stand in spaces with those who have offended me and understand that their actions are a reflection of them and that they may actually not be personal. that’s the goal.

keep on trying to forgive. it may be hard but according to chapter 8, forgiveness allows love to exist. and we need love.

Tag Archives: bell hooks

what is love? it’s an action and a tool for healing and social justice