Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, writes in an essay on Great Love that “detached observers always ask what does she (or he) see in him (or her)? Such questions she writes “are best left in peace: great love is never justified. It’s like a little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on; what miracle produces those green leaves? But it does exist
…Author: Gilead Yeffett
→Couples and individual psychotherapist, working in:
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This is a fun and creative video describing what happens in our bodies during sex.
…In his book Political Ideals (1917, 2008), the British Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “It is not finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active”.
This makes me think of a vision for a good relationship – any relationship. It is not about reaching s Utopian state, problems and tensions will most likely arise, but about approaching each other creatively and with hope, beyond the stereotypical views we so easily develop on the people so close to us.
Gilead
…“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be”. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being”. John Joseph
…We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
E.E.
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“For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living”. Virginia Woolf
You have known your partner/ wife/ husband/ friends for a long time and they are who they are, always have been and always will be – chances of them changing are slim. Or, maybe they do change and we just do not notice.
We tend to see ourselves as more flexible and cable of change than
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In his most celebrated book, the Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran wrote on marriage:
“And let the winds of the heavens dance between you”. “Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This beautiful quote makes me think of how sometimes in couple therapy, in our attempt to help struggling couples, we focus on assigning tasks and work. Instead, learning to long for the depth of connection, we can make a paradigm shift from how can I get what I want to how can we get what
…In his essay “Of Vanity” the French philosopher, Montaigne, wrote “I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other”. Friendship, Montaigne believed, was the greatest pleasure available to us.
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In Antoine de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince there is a dialogue between the little prince and a fox, which for me describes beautifully how a relationship is cultivated. Here is an excerpt, no extra words needed.
The little prince was lying on the grass crying when the fox appeared.
“Good morning,” said the fox.
“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.
“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”
Please–tame me!” he
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