Sunday 1 June 2014

A Force called Love - resentment



“You don’t have to go to school to be mature, to recognize the difference between the touch of violence and the touch of love. Grab someone with violence and you immediately reinforce the evil within them, while you yourself are in danger of being injected by their evil and their violence. But grab hold of someone because you care enough to be physical with them, and you introduce something new: the salvation of love. Your love-force gets inside and goes to war with the bad spirit; soon the battle is won and they feel better, even grateful. 

But when you "correct" your children with resentment, then resentment only reinforces what is wrong in the child. The wrong—your wrong—gets in, but correction stays out. The same kind of thing often occurs with students. They may be eager to learn at first, but an impatient teacher can easily ruin all of that. The student reacts defensively to the hostility of the teacher, which keeps knowledge out and lets errant behavior in. 


The "authority" in most cases is responsible for making kids worse while apparently trying to make them better. If power and authority were your secret motive, you would never be out of work, simply because you would be creating problems to solve by means of the very process of "solving" them.

So it is very important to be patient when attempting to correct other people. You must be forceful enough to drive the point home, but without resentment. The force I speak of is love, a deep, abiding caring, backed by the absolute certainty of the good you are doing and the knowledge of what is right. Remember, you can’t be like that when you are upset and angry too! Meditate on this fact before you go to war with the error in others.

Let the Truth, firmly spoken, do its work. You must not put effort or energy behind it. You
 will know that you are doing it right when you don’t have frustration and don’t feel guilty afterward. 
When you stand as a loving correction, a different energy is engaged. Love gets through the old defenses. It has the effect of awakening your child to see that you are right in what you say and in what you are. It speaks love instead of hate, so he can accept that correction of love.

The problem in this world lies with wrong authority. People are hurt by all kinds of wrong authorities. However, it is good for them to recognize and respond to a good authority because it reverses the effect of responding to the bad one. 

I remember people giving me good advice which I never took in my early years. Looking back, I realize that if those people who gave those words of advice had spoken with love, it would have jolted me to realize what I needed to realize then. I would not have made so many errors.” 

 - Roy Masters - Proper Discipline


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