This is seemingly the umpteenth time I'm raving about book club,
but I can't help it.

Book club is one of the best things that has happened in my adult life.

💜

Today, we had book club while midway through Anna Karenina.
And we discussed with fervour as we usually do;
but in addition, today, we found ourselves crying together.
Seriously, we cried together, haha, while sitting at Fish and Co;
because we had ventured down the path of discussing love once again,
and we shared painful, and profound things.
I marveled at it, and laughed at it. "Guys, what is this! Crying club? Haha!"

Alhamdulillah, how wonderful it is to have such a beautiful thing;
a place and a space to learn and share and connect deeply.

Learning to love someone on their terms
is a difficult but life-changing thing.
Your heart has to grow to be big enough for it;
to not feel like you will lose out if your love is not returned in kind
or when it will inconvenience you.
To keep learning to love yourself so you increase your capacity to do this;
recognising that the long-term sustenance of such endeavours
requires you being careful of how full or empty your cup is.

Fill your cup, so love can spill out of you.

💗

This is a proud moment for me, ahah;
Jordan Peterson was somebody that put me off at first,
with the anti-feminist clickbait titles of videos his fans made on YouTube.
(At one point, I even flagged his videos as NOT INTERESTED,
so that he doesn't pop up on my YouTube feed.)

But fast-forward certain irresistible videos later,
I have learnt to really respect this dude as an academic,
and in fact, I don't disagree with most of what he says, at all.

Jordan Peterson is a straight-talking, ruthless, thinker and clinical psychologist.

I see him as someone who is unwilling to compromise on his principles;

a trait I thoroughly respect in a person.

But because he had very clear objections against some things the liberals were proposing

within the structural framework of feminism and trans-gender politics, he became both the radical right's icon (sexist men simply latch on him as a saviour of sorts, *roll eyes, everyone*), and a demon against the radical left. And his real academic arguments are lost.

I'm proud, because I feel like I have successfully remained open-minded and now understood more because of it. I agree with his general stance for equal opportunity for all, but not necessarily equality of outcome for all (because he says that's something that approaches communism) -- which he claims today's feminism strives for, and he doesn't believe in that. I respect that -- and it's actually what Islam says about women, I think, more or less (we could delve deeper into this, but let's not right now). Where I feel Jordan Peterson fails with respect to his public persona is that he fails to appear empathic enough with women so that he comes across as anti-women, which as I've learnt, he isn't. And this is where I feel valid opponents of radical feminism fail in public discourse. If you wish to produce real valid arguments against certain elements in the pursuit of equality for women, do show empathy to the plight of women and don't ever make it seem that you'd rather women not have equality at all (and then let real sexists use you as a tool). Empathy and kindness are so important in the achievement of real-life gains. I suppose Peterson's aim isn't to influence the public per se, I don't know; I feel he'd say that he's basically an academic. But man, if you do want to make an effect and change in the world, isn't it always via the approach of love and not antagonism?

as if we needed more reason to love

Kim Nam Joon and all of BTS:

💜

Synchronicity or causality, I'm not sure which it is, 

but I've read and watched so much in relation to the theme of Loving Yourself now:

one of which is Jung (whose quotes have been littering my posts).

Jung knew and recognized the element of rascality in himself, and he knew it so strongly, so clearly, and in a way, so lovingly, that he would not condemn the thing in others, and therefore would not be led into those thoughts, feelings, or acts of violence towards others, which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat. This made Jung a very integrated character. In other words, he was a man who was thoroughly with himself. Having seen and accepted his own nature profoundly, he had a kind of unity and absence of conflict in his own nature. He was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty, without being ashamed of feeling this way. He understood that an integrated person is not simply the person who eliminates the sense of guilt or anxiety from his life, who is fearless or wooden or a sage of stone; he is a person who feels all these things but have not recrimination against himself for feeling them.

It's hard to explain, but all these pieces I've learnt over the past year, about loving yourself, about integration (another buzzword this year Datin S and I concurred over!), about empathy, about gratitude, about true love, finally unlocked for me the whole thing about forgiveness and anger that I was so agonized about a year ago. I was so angry about a lot of things; and at umrah earlier this year, I was sobbing because I just couldn't find a way out from the anger and injustices that appeared so evident in my life and in the world. Then I remember writing about Nabi s.a.w., and how he had that quality of forgiving people huge and unimaginable wrongs, and how I marveled at that ability to be so magnanimous and loving, despite people not seemingly deserving of such love. How do you become such a font of love, such an entity that requires not love be poured into first for love to come pouring out? The kind of person who is kind without needing kindness in return; the kind of person who is calm and compassionate in the face of hurts and pomposity and all manner of degradation and devaluation.

It is this: it is a loving of oneself. That comes most easily with the realisation that at the very least God loves you (if no one else does). But however it is, as long as you love yourself, all of yourself in truth, even the horrid and ugly sides of you, and you truly accept the whole of you -- that you will then learn to be kind to others, love others, and be increasingly magnanimous to humanity, having realised that you, just like everyone else on earth, are both half-good, and half-bad. You will not then condemn anyone else, recognising that there's some possible element of that within you too; we are all the same, humans.

Who looks outside, dreams;
Who looks inside, awakens.

Carl Jung

Was feeling sad and disappointed earlier cause
I had to cancel on a trip I really wanted to go on. 😞

but insya Allah, some day. 💔

and then this wrapped up tonight for me;

yay Alhamdulillah! the only way to negate anger and unhappiness is love.

💚💜

I am counting on love.

I must really really remember this;
love for the sake of God,
love for the sake of God,
love for the sake of God.

Amin.

'the alarming possibility of being able'

-- Soren Kierkegaard

I've got a new favourite youtube channel now!

these videos are such bite-sized awesomeness:

Self-actualizers are very much defined by a life mission

We cannot change anything unless we can accept it. 
-- Carl Jung

I'm doing a lot of info-consumption (in other words, crazily reading multiple things concurrently, and being haphazard -- but hey! I defend this with my belief that there's a secret order to the chaos); then I'm doing bite-sized actions cause I can't manage too many things at once, I think. I've sort of decided to treat my self, my nafs, you know, like my pediatric clients -- have achievable goals, and then gradual scaffolding and positive reinforcement is the way! Then pray for divine guidance and long-term (more like life-long) project sustainability.


"... it is generally considered that emotions and feelings, in all of their diversity, are a natural expression of our relationship to life and that healthy or appropriate emotion is a desirable condition. This is not to say that all emotion are beneficial but that they are often a natural response to aspects of our life. In this respect, if I did not experience fear when in danger or grief at a time of loss or anger if I am being abused, this would probably be unhealthy. Many emotions are part of a natural play of our experience that are a necessary presence for health. With this view we might consider that unless we genuinely embrace our emotions fully, we cannot experience the richness and happiness life can bring. Equally, if we are unable to relate to the nuances of our feeling and emotional life, life will become arid and without real engagement and meaning. Our relationships will become mechanical and uncaring. What makes the emotions problematic is the excessive or overwhelming and unconscious dominance of emotions such as anger, aggression, jealousy, pride, desire, fear, and so on that then become potentially destructive and need to be brought into balance.

Within both the world of therapy and healing and Buddhist thinking, therefore, it could be said that it is not the emotions per se that are unhealthy but the way we respond or relate to them. When we do not relate to them openly and allow them to be as they are to move through us, we become bound up with them in an unhealthy way, and they become what we might call an affliction. When we go unconscious, become overwhelmed, or block and suppress an emotion, it becomes unhealthy. It can then dominate us and become destructive to both us and others. This means that we can begin to distinguish between emotion itself as a natural expression of our feeling life and the secondary contraction into an unhealthy relationship we may have with our emotions."

-- Feeling Wisdom, by Rob Preece

Alhamdulillah, I'm suddenly finding myself able to understand a lot of these stuff properly and deeply; I know that that whole excerpt would likely mean nothing to most people who read it (as it would have had to me, not very long ago as well), especially because the bigger idea is better understood from the book as a whole rather than just those bits. I'm finally understanding properly, I think, the concept of emptying your self -- something discussed in most ancient traditions, including Sufi Islam; concepts about ego and the nafs and the personality. About emotions and what they mean to the self, and what their purpose is, perhaps. I'm still learning though, and feel ravenous for this stuff.

I was not twenty when I bought Carl Jung's text, The Boundaries of the Soul, and now I think I'm actually finally ready to read what's in it. I don't think I could put two and two together at all when I first read it as a teenager. Now it's sitting on the ledge of my bed.


Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah!

And Astaghfirllah for all my past sins.
Blessings from God are always unfathomable.
Faith is trust when we cannot guarantee the outcome for ourselves.
(in fact, we actually never can guarantee anything for ourselves, can we?
we can't even guarantee tomorrow.
it's all self-illusion, thinking that we can.)
Choose faith to overcome the anxiety of living,
and not let the fear of life drive you to this self-illusion
i.e. doing things because it's safe rather than right, or true.

omg I love this kid!

I used to say that if I had a girl,

I wanted her to be like Nina the adorable and brilliant little Japanese girl

(whose videos are gone from the internet ever since she entered primary school);

but if I had a boy,

I want him like William!

This boy is so adorable, my goodness.

I was talking to the principal at one of my preschool centers earlier this evening, and we were discussing one of the boys on my caseload: how adorable, sociable, and cheerful a child he is in school, how I'm discharging him from therapy because he does not need it, and then... we have his parent complaining about how he's basically a terror to have at home; throwing tantrums apparently, slamming doors, and fighting his mum who attempts to cane him. The principal and I looked at each other, and before we said it, we knew we were on the same page: it's not the child, is it.

I'm quite sure of this: if you were to ask any experienced or perceptive educator, they will tell you that many of the supposed emotional, behavioural, learning, or academic problems that children encounter are not about them, but the repercussions of living with parents and families who are emotionally volatile at the very least, or completely damaging at the worst. Seriously. The longer I work in this field, the more I see not just the developmental trajectory of children, but the nature of humanity.

So many things happen below the apparent physical surface of our realities, but we don't consider them, strangely enough. People don't seem to consider them, much less think deeply about them. But their effects manifest eventually into our physical realities -- then we wonder, why? why is he like this? why does my child behave this way? Even for myself, as I've harped on in recent posts, I'm realising how much I've been very much shaped by my early childhood experiences, and how hard it is to reverse deeply-wired patterns put in place by the environment I grew up in, that I know I need to shed. Lucky for us, neuroscience has proven our brains remain plastic all the way to our deaths. It's like God's promise eh, that we still have a chance till our last breaths, to change our habits, our thoughts and opinions, and our emotional responses, to achieve some higher destiny maybe. We can totally rewire the way we think, if we put in the effort, if we choose it. But until each individual does that, takes control of his own life trajectory, most of us are products of our environment. As children, we have no capacity to fight this, and we are inevitably moulded by our milieu; and as a professional working with children, it is so painful to watch this happen and have no power to change it beyond what little nudges we can give to parents, in whose hands new lives appear so precariously held.




I see things so starkly now, ever since my recent epiphany about love (thank you Jin, for singing what is likely to remain my theme song of the year, Epiphany). Every single individual is born with a need to love and be loved in return, and if you just keep that in mind while you interact with all humans, you simply cannot go wrong. When I step into the classroom to see my kids and their friends, this human need for love is so clear; I love children for this purity that they have before life layers them with the masks they live behind--

Children will fight for your affection and get upset about not being attended to. When I call one child by name, the next child will immediately pipe up, "Do you know my name?" and the next one after that asks the same, and the next one after that. In the end I can have eleven children asking me if I know their names, haha, adorbs. You look at one boy and not the other, and you immediately get an upset response, "What about me!". These children make it clear on their faces, by their words, and by their actions, how much they want to be loved, how much they want to be seen.

Adults pretend they don't. When I do believe, we grown-ups very, very much, still do. Instead, adults have internally and privately learnt (we don't share this taboo information with each other) that we get love from people by being beautiful, or being successful, or being obedient and good, or being of service, or many other ways (dysfunctional or not), depending on the main message we get from our parents or caregivers (should they fail to convey to us we are loved just as we are). And when people fail to be any of the things they each think make them lovable to people, they believe they become unlovable -- and all sorts of problems ensue, the least of which I feel is depression. People who keep having to need this assurance that they are loved by others, can never truly love in return -- because you very easily mistake validation for love. How can you love well when you think you need to be rich or beautiful, say? Does it make sense: I'm sorry, I can't love you because I'm ugly. or I'm sorry, I can't love you, cause I have no money. or the other extreme, I'm so smart, beautiful, and rich, how can you not love me? And some other people stop fighting for love all together, and think they don't need it.

Use the mother-child relationship as an analogy; if there's an easy reference for true love, it's between a mother and child. Would a mother only feed and nurture her child if the child was beautiful? Would a mother only choose to call her child her own if he was healthy, perfect, and good? No, a mother loves the child no matter who or how he or she is. The fact that the child has been granted life makes him worthy of love. But see, most of us did not grow up knowing that fact; and from childhood onwards, we each try and figure out how to get this love we so crave.

I feel like all of this might be the point of life; to learn that the love that we're all searching here on the human plane will never be enough, because we're out to find the Real Love. And when we finally do learn to love God and love ourselves for having been granted life from God, do we learn to truly love others.

All of that made a very, very painful lesson for me to learn;
and now I'm trying to learn to love properly, insya Allah.

Rasulullah s.a.w. told us, 

"You will not enter paradise until you have faith, 

and you will not have faith until you love one another."

---

Epiphany totally merits multiple postings on my blog.

I am in love with this song,

and in relation to the above:

This part!

I want to love them in this world...

Shining me, the precious soul of mine,

I finally realised so I love me.

On many occasions during the early part of the monsoon in the Himalayas, I watched with fascination the emergence of clouds in the clear sky. From the clarity of blue sky a small wisp of white cloud would suddenly appear. In a short while it would grow into a small, fluffy white cloud. If the conditions were right, over time it would gradually swell into a massive, billowing gray cloud full of power and energy that flashed and rumbled. Eventually the dark center of this mass would deposit its contents upon the land below, and following that, I could see its heart collapse. Once the power of the cloud had been dissipated, it would slowly evaporate away until once again all that remained was a small wisp drifting in the vast blue space.

This fascinates me as a metaphor because the emergence of a storm cloud in the early days of the monsoon is so reminiscent of the emergence of strong emotions. What may begin as the wisp of a subtle feeling not yet noticed as anything significant grows into a stronger feeling that starts to draw our attention. Eventually, if the conditions are right, this can become a powerful emotional surge that has the capacity to overwhelm and dominate us as we lose control, driven by its need to express something to dissipate its energy. This may lead us to shower someone with abuse or to burst into tears. Once the core of the emotion has dissipated, the release can enable us to gradually calm down. The remaining feelings can still reverberate around our energy for some time, until eventually they settle back into the ground of our everyday feeling life.

-- Feeling Wisdom, by Rob Preece

I still haven't found a good time frame to blog proper,

but I keep coming across interesting nuggets that need to be recorded here anyway.

This video tried to dismiss all ancient religious thoughts on love though,

when come on, we've always had those mystical aphorisms by Rumi, say.

The ancients and true sages always knew this stuff.

Love said to me,
there is nothing that is not me.
- Rumi