A Course in Love & Healing 
 
Lesson 28

Lessons of Love

By Dr.Scott Peck & Shannon Peck 
Co-Founders,TheLoveCenter

What are the biggest lessons of love that you have learned in your life? This is the question we asked at a recent Saturday night "Soul Gathering" in our community.   

It become very obvious that we had all learned our biggest love lessons through great trials, suffering, and expansion. Everyone had grown much stronger in their love awakenings and the love "bar" was set a whole lot higher. Here are the top four lessons shared: 

Lesson 1: Love yourself. 

One of the biggest lessons for everyone was how hard it is to love ourselves. By not loving ourselves, we allow others to treat us with unkindness, harshness, abuse, and inequality. Each person spoke of the great relief and higher happiness that has come from finally recognizing, accepting, and honoring one's own inner beauty, worth, and value. Those present had come alive in life by getting in touch with their inner passion & living that passion more openly and authentically as their free, true selves!  

Lesson 2: Forgive yourself.

As we all looked out over the sea of our past love mistakes, we recognized the immense need for self-forgiveness. It is so tempting to keep rehearsing the thought, "How could I have been so stupid or allowed that to happen to me?" But our hearts need to move higher in love. Our love mistakes were made out of love ignorance, not deliberate stupidity. The agony and suffering of love ignorance taught valuable lessons. Now it is time to move higher. And the first step towards a new love life at a higher level is to forgive. Forgive, forgive, forgive.   

Lesson 3: Listen to your intuition.

We asked a question of the group: "How many of you that were previously married knew that the marriage was a mistake during the first week?" About 80% knew! Yet most of us stayed in those marriages for years and years.  What lesson did we learn? We should have listened to our intuition! Intuition is really the quiet voice of your highest self which senses truth. Everyone in the group had come to give far more weight to intuition in guiding their love lives. 

Lesson 4: Equality is imperative!

Another huge lesson of love is the devastating results of a relationship anchored in inequality. Just about everyone in the group had struggled with great effort to rise out of  relationships of subordination. The pain of inequality is almost immeasurable. It rips apart our soul identity. Love with equality is imperative. No one in the group was now willing to accept less. The lesson had been learned - the hard way. We acknowledged the lesson that happiness is unattainable without equality. So what does equality look like in a loving relationship?

·  Each partner can count on being respected, valued, and adored -without judgment.

·  One partner is not more important than the other partner.

·  Each partner's needs receive equal care.

·  Each partner is equally loved and listened to.

·  Each partner's dreams are equally cherished.

·  Each partner is equally empowered.

·  Each partner can count on being loved unconditionally.

Lesson 5: Set higher love standards starting with true friendship.

Without exception, our love sufferings led us all to the door of higher love standards. We recognized that our biggest love lesson is that we could have avoided the years of suffering had we known what we presently know. We acknowledged that now is the time to learn about love, not through suffering, but through awakening and enlightenment. And the place to start living our higher love lessons, we agreed, was right at the start as new people arrive in our love lives. Establishing new relationships in friendship right from the start line rather than instant romanticizing. Let the friendship unfold. Test it for equality. Test it for listening. Listen to your intuition. Keep forgiving yourself. Love your self. This is the love you deserve. Welcome to the heart of Love!