I Love You Made Easy and Why it Matters by Joshua Tera Cederquist

I Love You Made Easy and Why it Matters by Joshua Tera Cederquist

We had a guest come to our Mindfulness community at LinkedIn and they gifted us this book. It was an interesting topic about how we can acknowledge each other more openly and create an environment of Love and Joy.

“from my heart to yours, the sacred in me recognizes the sacred in you.” Most definitely an ‘I love you’ greeting. 

“The I Love You Challenge 1. Stand just inside the boundary of somebody’s personal space. (It works better if you don’t know the person). 2. Look them in the eyes for a good 15-30 seconds. See them and let them see you. Really be with them, without an agenda. Again, see them and let them see you. Say ‘I love you’.” 

“Notice whatever story you have around ‘I love you’: [It means too much, too little, I got my heart broken, what if they take it the wrong way, (s)he’s cute, I’m mortified, I don’t want to dilute or cheapen the meaning, I’m saving it for special occasions, etc.] Share these stories with one another. There are as many stories around ‘I love you’ as there are thoughts in our heads. Many of them don’t feel good! 4. Consider this context: ‘I love you’ means Nothing … and Everything. Repeat it: ‘I love you’ means Nothing…and Everything. 5. Share ‘I love you’ with the same person again. See if it has shifted. Share if there’s been a shift with one another. 6. From this space, share random acts of ‘I love you’ for seven days. Start and end every interaction with ‘I love you’ and see what happens:” 

“I have a project called ‘I Love You World’, where all 7.8 billion of us start each conversation with ‘I love you’ and go from there.” Her reply? “Oh—no more war.” My turn to get the chills and have tears in my eyes. How is it that she could make that immediate association: ‘I love you’ as greeting = no more war?” 

“It might be one of the reasons we love dogs so much, with their propensity towards unconditional love.[12] Dogs are highly social animals: solitude is torture to them. Their value and quality of life comes from a sense of belonging. They are part of a pack, a unit of the whole, and an individual finding their place within the whole. Dogs are a full-on display of love, unless they’re isolated and abused. Then their fear turns into aggression.” 

“Just by saying it out loud, by leading with it as you meet people, you create whole new worlds. When you start with ‘I love you’ as a baseline, imagine where you’ll go from there.” 

“Back to the narcissistic imbalance. How much energy do you waste in the course of the day worrying what others think about you? How many scenarios do you play and replay in your head, scenes looped over and over ad nauseum in the cinema of your mind? “If only I had done X, then I’d have Y.” The entire trajectory of your life pivoted on one decision you got horribly wrong, which is why your life is the unsatisfying mess it is.” 

“And you’re the only one in pain or suffering a loss of happiness, freedom, health and vitality.” 

“Then I remembered the tool ‘acknowledgment’. Human beings are horrible at acknowledging how great each other is. But as bad as we are acknowledging others, we’re even worse at acknowledging our own greatness.” 

“I acknowledged her. I let her know how much I appreciated her day-in day-out performance in a thankless role, and how I valued her leadership in our small but mighty team. I put myself in her shoes and apologized for being unsupportive. And I said, hey, I’m the I Love You Man. I am here in service of our greatest good and want nothing more than to be a maximum contribution to the team and to her. Her frustration melted; she felt seen and appreciated—all though acknowledgment.” 

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung 

“With this one practice, you have the ability to transform your life. When you are triggered, you are the problem. Full stop.” 

“If there’s one too many assholes in the room, it’s me.” 

“If I don’t acknowledge that everything that irritates me about him reflects what I don’t love about myself, I’m stuck in this downward spiral of monologue, generating nothing but my own misery. In this example, Donald Trump is the bear, blissfully unawares I’ve cast myself as the rabbit. And that’s the thing: the bear doesn’t give two shits about the rabbit. Once satisfied, it moves on and never gives you another thought.” 

“Friends, enemies, parents, ex-spouses, the kid who bullied you in fifth grade— never give your excruciating moment another thought. Sorry, you’re not that important to them. But your irritation with them, your righteous anger of being so wronged, so violated, it imprisons you, consumes you. If you let it, it will kill you.” 

“I love you (fill in the blank). Thank you for all the gifts.” You and only you are responsible for soiling your fur. There’s so much power in having the control, the ability to self-cleanse.” 

“No one can hurt me. That’s my job.” Taking radical responsibility for all of it. There’s a lot of power in that statement—if there is suffering in my life, then I am the root. By acknowledging that fact, I regain my lost power and know that, as Byron Katie says “suffering is optional.” 

“We treat ‘I love you’ as if it’s the scarcest substance in the Universe. Truth is, it’s the most plentiful. Every religion, every culture holds this truth to be self-evident. Love is, the alpha and omega, everything.” 

“Newly-gained freedom around sharing ‘I love you’ achieves one thing only: it triggers remembrance in us of a long-lost State of Grace. By opening the tap on ‘I love you’ beyond a trickle, its flow reminds us that love is limitless. It is the glue that holds everything together.” 

“They get a glimpse into the abundance of self-love, which is fleeting to them; they experience lack consciousness around self-love. Simply by saying ‘I love you’ they gain access to limitless ‘I love me’. That is surely a win-win proposition.” 

“And we really don’t care. We’d much rather enjoy our creature comforts than question for one minute our choices and make behavioral changes. Melting of the polar icecaps and permafrost, and rising greenhouse gases resulting in shrinking land on the coasts where humans tend to mass and disruption of the delicate interplay of the natural world. But we want our internal combustion cars, our plastics, our electronic conveniences, disposable everything.” 

“In a world where everybody starts every conversation with ‘I love you’ and goes from there, where No Separation (non-duality) is a natural state of being, we get that our community is the entire human race. Not as an intellectual construct, but as a core feeling.” 

“More than a decade ago, I chose to support businesses in achieving this standard of responsibility and accountability. Yvon Chouinard paved the way with these guidelines: Lead an examined life. Clean up your own act. Do our penance. Support civil democracy. Influence other companies. He founded 1% for the Planet, an annual membership (tithe) for businesses and individuals. Chouinard says: “It became not so much charity as a self-imposed ‘earth tax’ for living on the planet, using up resources, and being part of the problem.” 

“… it is obvious that lovability is the only metric of success that really matters. If your customers love you, they will not only remain fiercely loyal but become your most powerful marketing asset. Lovability is the greatest predictor of business success.”

“… we decided to start tracking the instances when a customer told us they loved us. A pattern emerged. For example, in 2015 nearly 800 people told us they loved us, an increase of nearly 450 percent over 2014. That number correlated almost perfectly to our 2014 – 2015 growth rate.” Even Big Money has noticed and is making sharp changes in direction that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Black Rock, the world’s largest asset management firm, with more than $7 trillion under investment, is putting climate change and responsibility front and center. In January 2020, they joined the Climate Action 100+, representing 370 global investors totaling $41 trillion in assets.[38] They are pressing corporate giants to disclose CO2 emissions and to comply with the Paris climate agreement.” 

“Knowing that your heirs might not be as responsible with your fortune as you are, dynastic planning is a way of structuring one’s legacy to last for centuries. Except how does that reconcile with “there’s no business to be done on a dead planet?” This trend of giving now ‘until the safe is empty’ is a meaningful way for the ultra-rich to take responsibility for, and honor, the soul of their money and ensure that future generations will exist to benefit from their largesse.” 

“After the book’s publication, he went on a 50-day, ten-country tour sponsored by the United Nations. Of the experience of traveling to conflict zones and impoverished nations, he said: “These people aren’t like me. They are me in different circumstances. The size of dreams are the same everywhere. It’s the available resources that differ.” 

“Williams’ mission statement for the project states: “In a year where there is so much turmoil in the world, from social conflict to climate change, we need moments to stop and celebrate happiness. Protecting our planet is fundamental to the pursuit of human happiness and that is why we have chosen to support Live Earth’s movement to raise a billion voices for climate action. We believe that happiness can change the world.” 

“On the 75th anniversary of his father’s birth, Ziggy Marley said: “The majority of people are good people, are peaceful people. But we’re just not loud, we’re just not on the TV, we’re not in the news — it’s just the people making war in the news.”[51] I believe this—that we are good, peaceful people—with every ounce of my being. And as Brandon Stanton said of people he met in his travels to conflict zones, people that on the surface with whom he shared very little in common,” 

“These people aren’t like me. They are me in different circumstances.” 

“—When you feel a sense of Other over there, take responsibility for all of it and acknowledge the greatness standing there, right in front of you.” 

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj

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