Hello,
and thank you for dropping by today! We hope
that your day has
been a very special one so far and that you're able
to make it one of your
best days ever. Make it a great one--it is up
to you!
One of the most amazing things about your body
is that the instructions for assembling it, from
random protein molecules you can find around the
house, are coded into every one of your
trillion-plus cells. They are spelled out
in the elegant double helix of your DNA, which
will preserve your physical identity throughout
life, even as it continuously replaces all the
actual particles that comprise you and makes
sure that you change dramatically from infancy
through puberty and all the way to old
age. Though environmental factors can
alter the structure of your body, your basic
physiological identity is permanently and
indelibly integrated into your fundamental
being.
I happen to believe that the same thing is true
of your life--or, to put it more romantically,
your destiny. I think we're all born with
a set of preferred activities and talents, but
more than that, with an inexplicable inner
knowledge of the things we are meant to do and
be, the changes we are meant to do and be, the
changes we are meant to make in the world.
Obviously, there's no way to get scientific
evidence of this, but I have observed it so
often in clients, and felt it so often in
myself, that it simply makes more sense for me
to believe than to doubt.
I don't
know what part of us stores the code for our
right lives--maybe some corner of the brain,
maybe the figurative heart, maybe that
indefinable phantasm called the soul--but I do
know how the code is relayed to our conscious
minds, enabling us to make choices in keeping
with our purpose. It happens through the
medium of the sensation we call desire.
The knowledge of your destiny is available to
you, well before it actually happens, as a
message streaming continuously from your heart
to your brain, written in the language of
longing. This part is meant to help you
access and interpret the yearning that is always
leading you toward your right life.
Banished Desire
Menu Item #3 requires that, each day, you
identify, articulate, and explore at least one
thing you really want. Sounds easy enough,
doesn't it? Birds do it, bees do it, even
educated fleas do it--hell, even completely uneducated
fleas do it. Any sentient being knows when
it wants to eat, mate, run, sleep, or fight--any
sentient being, that is, except most members of
the human race. We are the only beings in
creation who systematically eradicate the
knowledge of our own desires.
The uniquely human ability to think abstractly
and hypothesize about the future is probably to
blame. At some point in all our
lives--usually early on--we learn from a
combination of observation, advice, and painful
experience that wanting is an appallingly
dangerous activity. Even as small
children, we watch our elders shrink from their
desires, and make mental notes to follow their
example. When we don't get everything we
want, the sting of unmet need conditions us
against hoping again. If we dare voice a
dream, we're liable to hear a litany of reasons
we can't or shouldn't dream it. By the
time we're adolescents, many of us have replaced
the awareness of our own desires with
meditations on the topic "Why I shouldn't
want what I want." Crushing rebukes
reverberate through our brains every time we
feel a desire coming on: "I'll never
get what I want, so thinking about it would just
frustrate me." "Desire is wicked, and
I'm bad for feeling it." "If I
never want anything, I'll never be
disappointed." "Wanting what I
want is pure selfishness."
We repeat these claims to ourselves, over and
over, because we think this will allow us to
avoid pain--the pain of being rebuked by others,
of failure, of humiliation, of loss. One
of my friends calls this self-imposed pessimism
"inoculating yourself against
disappointment." This is a fabulous
idea, except that it doesn't work.
Injecting yourself with the fruits of failure
doesn't keep you well, it just makes you
sick. It will stop you from doing anything
that might make your dreams come true, and if
something good happens to you anyway, it will
keep you from enjoying or appreciating your good
fortune.
Ironically, we banish most utterly those desires
that are most crucial to our happiness.
Did you ever notice how many award-winning
children's books and films focus on someone who
adopts a wild animal, then has to chase it away
so that it can live normally with its own
kind? The climactic scene always seems
to involve the tear-drenched pet owner
screaming and shaking firearms at the beloved
deer or bear or snail or whatever it is, trying
to make the confounded creature run away and
mistrust humans for the rest of its life.
I think that this is such a popular theme in
juvenile literature because it is an archetype
of the way growing humans learn to force away
their desires. To handle what we think are
the grim realities of life, we master the art of
breaking our own hearts, then hardening what
remains the way we'd put a rigid cast on a
broken ankle. The more we love what we
think we cannot have, the more cruelly we force
it away.
This is why most of the time I spend with
clients isn't devoted to helping them get what
they want. That little issue is
insignificant compared with the daunting task of
helping them identify what they
want. To do this, they must reexamine
their deeply internalized belief that wanting is
selfish or hopeless--in fact, those who don't
know or respect their own wants have no
foundation from which to offer generosity and
compassion to others. I can't count the
number of hours I've spent looking into the
hollow eyes of people who are outwardly very
successful, but for whom the spark of genuine
desire has been either hidden or
extinguished. Their resistance to becoming
aware of their own wants--one of the very things
that allows them to succeed in all sorts of
difficult endeavors--has become so complete that
it blocks access to a sense of purpose,
excitement, motivation, even hope. I can
tell you from extensive observation that
refusing to feel desire is the only thing more
painful than failing to get what you want, and
that learning not to yearn, far from preventing
disappointment, ultimately guarantees it.
We
have some
inspiring and motivational books that may interest you. Our main way of supporting this site is
through the sale of books, either physical copies
or digital copies for your Amazon Kindle (including the
online reader). All of the money that we earn
through them comes back to the site
in one way or another. Just click on the picture
to the left to visit our page of books, both fiction and
non-fiction!
I’m overwhelmed at the pleasure of being introduced
by someone who knows how to pronounce my name. I
love to talk about my name because it’s one of those
beautiful Italian names that has every letter in the
alphabet. It’s spelled B-u-s-c-a-g-l-i-a, and
it’s pronounced like everything. The best thing, I
think, that has ever happened with it in terms of
introductions was when I was making a long distance
telephone call. The line was busy and the operator
said she’d call me back as soon as the line was
free. When she called back, I picked up the phone
and she said, "Would you please tell Dr. Box Car that
his telephone call is ready?" I said,
"Could that be Buscaglia?" She said,
"Sir, it could be damned near anything."
Today I’m here to talk to you about love and I call this
"Love in the Classroom." You’re really very
brave to allow me to come here and talk about love in the
classroom. Usually I’m asked to disguise it or at
least add something. You know, "Love, comma, As
A Behavior Modifier." Then it sounds very scientific
and it doesn’t frighten anybody. It’s the same
way that, when I teach my love class on campus, all the
faculty members giggle and poke me as I walk down the
campus and say, "Hey, don’t you have a lab on
Saturday?" I assure them that I don’t.
I’d like to give you a little background about how I got
started with this idea of love in the classroom.
About five years ago I was interviewed by our Dean at the
School of Education. He’s a very official man,
sitting behind a great big desk. I had just left the
job as Director of Special Education in a large school
district in California, having decided that I just
wasn’t an administrator, I was a teacher and that I
wanted to get back to the classroom. I sat down and
he said, "Buscaglia, what do you want to be doing in
five years?" I immediately, without hesitation,
said, "I’d like to be teaching a class in
love." There was a pause, a silence, just like
you are doing right now. Then he cleared his throat
and said, "And what else?"
Two years later I was teaching such a class.
I had twenty students. I now have 200 students with
a waiting list of 600. The last time we opened the
class, it was full within the first twenty minutes of the
registration period. It shows you what kind of
enthusiasm and excitement there is for a class in love.
It always amazes me the every time the Educational
Policy’s Commission meets to decide the goals of
American education, the first goal is always
self-realization or self-actualization. But I have
yet to find a class from elementary school right on up
through graduate school on, for instance, "Who am I?,
1A;" or, "What Am I Here For?, 1A;" or
"What Is My Responsibility to Man, 1A;" or, if
you will, "Love, 1A." As far as I know, we are
the only school in the country, and possibly the world,
which has a listing called, "Love, 1A,"
and I am the only professor crazy enough to teach it.
I don’t teach this class. I learn in it. We
get together on a great big rug and sit down and rap for
two hours. It usually goes on into the night but we
get involved for at least the formal two hours and share
our knowledge, the thesis being that love is
learned. Psychologists, sociologists, and
anthropologists have told us for years that love is
learned. It isn’t something that just happens
spontaneously. I think we believe it is, and
that’s why we have so many hang-ups when it comes to
human relationships. Yet, who teaches us how to
love? For one, the society in which we live, and
that certainly varies. Our parents have taught us
how to love. They are our first teachers, but they
aren’t always the best teachers. We may expect our
parents to be perfect. Children always grow up
expecting their parents to be perfect and then are very
disappointed and disillusioned and really angered
when they find out that these poor human beings are not.
Maybe the point of arriving at adulthood is facing these
two people, this man and this woman, and seeing them as
ordinary human beings like ourselves, with hang-ups, with
misconceptions, with tenderness, with joy, with sorrow,
and with tears, accepting that they are just human
beings. And the big thing is that if we have
learned love from these people and from this society, we
can unlearn it and relearn it; therefore, there is
tremendous hope.
There is tremendous hope for all of us, but somewhere
along the line you’ve got to learn to love. I
think many of these things are inside of us, and nothing
that I’m going to say to you is going to be startlingly
new. What you are going to find is that somebody is
going to have nerve enough to stand up and say it, and
maybe, therefore, release it in you so you can say,
"That’s the way I feel, too, and is it so wrong to
feel this way?"
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
I
am often accused of being childish. I prefer to interpret that as
child-like.
I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things.
I
tend to
exaggerate and
fantasize and embellish. I still listen to
instinctual
urges. I play with leaves.
I skip down the street and
run against the
wind. I never water my garden
without soaking
myself. It has been
after such times of joy that I have
achieved my
greatest creativity
and produced my best work.
I was eating breakfast at a
restaurant recently when I was forced to listen to another man
doing business--rather loudly--on his cell phone. I was
forced. I had no choice but to listen, for the man didn't
give me any choice at all. It was very unpleasant listening
to his stressful call while I was trying to relax and start my day
in a positive way. I wanted to go up to him and tell him
that since none of the other diners went to his office to eat
their breakfast, it really was unfair of him to do his business in
a place where they were trying to eat breakfast.
Possibly more upsetting than actually having to listen to half of
his conversation, though, was the fact that this man obviously had
no respect at all for the rights and needs of the other people in
the restaurant. To him, all that mattered was what he wanted
to do, and the other people there didn't ever enter into his
thoughts as to whether the time and the place was appropriate for
what he was doing. And yes, other patrons were upset and
annoyed, but there really was nothing they could do.
I never want to be that kind of person.
I want my first thought when I'm making decisions about what I'm
going to do to be, "How will this affect other
people?" And it doesn't matter if I'm considering the
people around me at the moment or the people who will be affected
later in some way. The important thing is that I contribute
to the world and the people around me in positive ways because
there's a great, great need for positive influences in this world.
Let us be
kinder to one another.
Aldous
Huxley's last words
My wife and I
were walking to the store yesterday when we saw a
man throw a cigarette butt to the ground. He
was sitting on a bench, only a few feet from an
outdoor ash tray, yet he chose to litter. A
few hours later, I saw a woman smoking
outdoors. She reached down into a large
planter with her cigarette and extinguished it, then
she wrapped the extinguished butt in a tissue and
put it into her pocket. It was nice to see
that she did care about what happened to her litter,
and that she wasn't willing to leave her litter on
the street for someone else to have to deal with.
I grew up in a family with several smokers.
All through my childhood, I was exposed to cigarette
smoke in spite of the fact that it had been proved
that the smoke was dangerous to me. In such a
case, the fact that I had a right to clean air was
almost secondary--I had a physiological need
for clean air. Yet the people who made the
decision over and over to smoke in places where
non-smokers also had to be simply disregarded my
rights and my needs.
We need clean and healthy environments in which to
live. A dirty, littered place isn't a positive
part of anyone's life. We may get used to it,
but it never makes us feel good; it never helps us
to appreciate life. Sometimes, it can even be
quite detrimental to our attempts to live full and
happy lives. If an environment isn't clean, it
can even host diseases that can make us sick or even
kill us in extreme circumstance.
When I decide not to litter, I'm also deciding to
respect the rights of other human beings to an
environment that is clean and healthy. I'm
saving my locality money by not forcing someone else
to clean up after me. In other words, I'm
contributing in a positive way to the world simply
by choosing what I'm not going to do.
The worst
sin towards our fellow creatures
is not to hate them, but to be indifferent
to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
Many
people--especially young people--seem to have a hard
time understanding other people's right to
quiet. My wife and I worked as camp hosts at a
small campground for one summer, and we were only a
bit surprised to see just how many people were
willing to stay up very late at night talking and
laughing around the campfire, even though they were
literally surrounded by the darkened tents of other
people who were trying to sleep. I can
understand the positive feeling of companionship and
enjoying other people's companies, but if we want to
respect the rights of others, then it's important
that we recognize that there's a time and a place
for everything. My wife and I had to spend a
lot of time reminding people that quiet hours had
started at ten because people simply weren't willing
to respect those hours. They wanted to do what
they wanted to do, and all of the other people who
were affected by their actions simply didn't matter
to them.
Many people know that the law of Karma eventually
will cause some sort of return to the folks who
don't respect the rights of others, but it's a shame
that we even have to think of such a thing. It
would be great if everyone were to think about the
rights of others when they're deciding which actions
to take in their own lives. If I do something
that has awful results in the lives of others, I can
be sure that life will return my action to me in
some way. But what would life be like if our
understanding of Karma were to be limited to the
positive returns that life would provide because we
only shared positive thoughts, words, and actions
with our fellow humans and the other living beings
on this planet?
It is the
individual who is not interested in his or
her fellow people who
has
the greatest difficulties in
life and and provides
the greatest injury to others.
It is
from among such
individuals that all human failures spring.
Alfred Adler
We should not,
of course, make decision about what we do and do not
do simply because of what we think we'll get
back. Our decisions should be made based on
whether what we're doing is respecting the rights
and needs of others. Life, after all, is a
cooperative effort, and the better we treat our
fellow human beings, the more we respect them and
their rights, the more positive and loving and
compassionate is this world going to be. It's
a very simple principal that's important for all of
us to realize if we're going to give to the world in
positive ways.
It's
not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong;
not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich;
not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned;
and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us
integrity.
Francis Bacon
There is no one lonelier or
more unhappy than a person who does not know the pure joy of
creating a life for himself or herself. To be human is not
merely to stand erect and manifest intelligence or
knowledge. To be human in the full sense of the word is to
lead a creative life.
The struggle to create new life from within is a truly wonderful
thing. There is found the brilliant wisdom that guides and
directs the workings of reason, the light of insight that
penetrates the farthest reaches of the universe, the undaunted
will to see justice done that meets and challenges all the
assaults of evil, the spirit of unbounded care that embraces all
who suffer. When these are fused with that energy of
compassion that pours forth from the deepest sources of cosmic
life, an ecstatic rhythm arises to color the lives of all
people.
It is
not time or opportunity that is to determine
intimacy;—it is disposition
alone. Seven years would be
insufficient to make some people acquainted
with each
other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
Jane Austen
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
™
