Photo credit: ashley rose, / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

L-O-V-E. It’s the four letter word that can heal you. One of our favorite spiritual thinkers, Marianne Williamson, has a great quote: “We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present.” Her powerful teachings and summation of the unique spiritual text, A Course in Miracles, can apply to the lives of everyone, regardless of their spiritual beliefs. We at Duct Tape and Bubble Gum are non-denominational spiritualists; we’ve taken a little bit of this and a little bit of that (from a variety of traditions) and have patched it together to achieve our love and faith in this life. We have developed an understanding that most spiritual, religious and self help traditions usually find some common ground on some basic tenets, and one of those is L-O-V-E…especially love as expressed through kindness to others. As we all can easily forget: Two is the basic unit of survival for our species, so even if you’re the greatest, grumpiest misanthrope on earth, in an evolutionary sense, you’re gonna have to find a way to get along with at least one person. We take for granted the daily interdependence, faith and unspoken appreciation we have for complete strangers. The very fact that you can read this “blog post” is entirely dependent on thousands of interpersonal connections (within the tech industry and beyond) that made it possible. We L-O-V-E the internet!

Love thy neighbor. Bible.

Truly do I Love the Love of Good. Quran. 

Where Love is, no room is too small. Talmud.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by Love; this is the eternal rule. Buddha.

A thought of hatred, must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of Love. Baha’i.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

And so how can your love heal Y-O-U?

Yeah, we know, around this place (planet earth) most of us are in it for themselves, so love has to be sold like any other product. What’s in it for me? You’re here (on earth), so we know that you’ve been alone, you’ve been afraid, you’ve been sad, you’ve been ignored; even with a perfect life, this has happened at least once. You’ve experienced suffering because two things have happened: 1) you have forgotten to love yourself (no we don’t mean narcissism) and therefore you feel unlovable, so 2) you’ve forgotten how to truly love others. In your anger about being unlovable you have judged someone else and have projected your own insecurity onto them. This gets us back into our ongoing dialog about Meatbag Syndrome: Judgment is what separates me from other people. And now you are back on the infinite hamster wheel of aloneness: You Don’t Love Me The Way I Want You To, So I Won’t Love You (but inside I can’t figure out why I’m alone and depressed in life). You’re pushing others away with your judgment of them…the answer is: Stop it and return to love.