If you’re looking to increase your capacity for love, Kagiso Msimango recommends parenting.
Growing your heart. After seven years as a personal development coach, I have learned that it is true that all actions are motivated by either love or fear. I’ve also learned that love leads to better quality choices. Now when in comes to increasing one’s capacity to love, I recommend motherhood. I don’t necessary mean the love you have for your child that makes you willing that charge a herd of stampeding buffalo, but that too.
ANDs & ORs My daughter declares, regularly, that she hates me. I am mean. She wishes she had another mother. Apparently if I loved her, I would let her watch TV for hours, permit her to subsist exclusively on “delicious” food and acknowledge the absurdity of bedtime. I love her, AND I refuse to feed her McDonalds despite her insistence that I either love her OR I refuse to feed her McDonalds. Just because someone does not love you the way you want them to, it does not mean they don’t love you. A lot of adults could benefit from this realisation. I was brought up by my grandparents, in a huge house on a big sprawling plot with a stunning garden full of flowers and fruit to pick, trees to climb and pets to harass. My parents, meanwhile, were tenants in someone’s backyard. I grew up resentful; convinced they’d left me with my grandparents because they didn’t want parenting interfering with their lifestyle.
[one_half padding=”10px 20px 10px 0px”]Having my own child helped me see what tons of therapy couldn’t. My parents made that very touch choice for me. They loved me AND they chose not to live with me. It has been gratifying to be free of all that anger and resentment, and finally have in its place an appreciation of the depth of my parents’ love. IMMORTALITY Before parenthood the idea of getting too old repelled me, primarily because of its lack of aesthetic appeal. Now I want to live long enough to cuddle my grandkids. Love for my future descendants has me caring about the condition of the world they will be living in. In a sense this love has made immortal, as it’s extended my caring into a future I won’t live.[/one_half] [one_half_last padding=”10px 0px 10px 20px”] OMNIPRESENCE Elizabeth Stone observed; “to have a child…is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Your child constantly and steadily develops an independent life that is increasingly out of your control. This makes it hard to confine your concern to the boundaries of the cocoon you’ve successfully constructed around yourself. How do allow your child to live fully and freely and not have a complete meltdown? You extend your care and compassion to all, and hope they universe returns the favour. You love the danger out of life. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, before motherhood, my heart was two sizes too small.[/one_half_last]
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