Self & Soul - B e i n g human in business and society

View Original

LOVE MANIFESTO - Why and How?

Self & Soul

Here you can listen to why and how the Love manifesto was created and its 15 points (in Swedish).

Just before summer 2019 I sat with my computer on my knees. It was during a time when I had taken a pause from my busy working life. In this chapter of my life, I rested and still remained active and open, networking and engaging in meaningful conversations with good people. I patiently waited for signs of the next step in my professional working life to show up. In no time at all, a love manifesto came to me.

The manifesto was born through love and distress in equal parts. Many times distress might also be an expression of love, if we have the strength to transition the insights that comes from it to life long learning. That our outer climate crisis is dependent on the fact that we have an inner climate crisis and vice versa. Therefore the manifesto contains both constructive and self - critical parts. It is a manifesto for humans born out of love and in my and your life, you find dark as well as bright sides. The question is what we do with ourselves and others having that insight. There is a source of strength and energy to pour from, after all. We need to talk more about love in the Swedish country. Below at the bottom of this page you find a definition of love and another profound quote I lean towards. In the public and professional arena we live with a fat, blind spot despite all the prosperity and individual freedom Sweden has in so many areas or more probably because of them.

Since the summer of 2019 I have been writing articles, connected to the manifesto. I have been writing for my own sake. For both the professional and private facets of myself. Because I feel I need to tell the story about my own experiences both about love and what it is to be a human being. Most probably it is the same thing. Parting from now I take that knowledge with me and no longer wish to separate it from my professional being. I want to take responsibility for it with compassion for myself and others.

The first five articles were created during the autumn of 2019, three months before the Corona pandemy took the world by storm. The articles, as it turns out, are my first contributions to what each human being has to train themselves to fuel up with, be in and act upon now, post Covid - 19, in the middle of a brutal war in Ukraine and beyond - for an inner climate and an outer one in harmony. For a planet that the human being does not plan to escape from and leave with high fever, impaired lung capacity and difficulties to breath, taste and smell, head ache, an eternal fatigue and a self - chosen (social) mental distancing, body and soul, people and all living creatures, people and nature. The parallells with the diseases of the planet are evident.

Beloved human being, stop chasing life out of yourself and planet earth. In your superstition that everything else on the planet is subordinated you, you make yourself smaller and weaker, more empty and more hollow. The articles are written out of my own human experiences of what it is to be employed, group member, manager and leader primarily in the private but also in NGOs and to some extent in the public sector. The manifesto and the articles might be updated. It is, as I said, an exploration on narrow paths for all of us. Good reading.

/With Love by Kristina Herngren


(KÄRLEKSMANIFEST - In Swedish)

LOVE MANIFESTO

  1. I am loved

  2. I am good the way I am

  3. I find knowledge from within

  4. I live out love to others

  5. I let my own light shine

  6. I am an hypocrite and work my way beyond guilt and shame

  7. I explore friendship with my own inner judge

  8. I live in paradoxes and complexity and honestly have no clue

  9. I take responsibility and lead myself where I walk and talk

  10. I can and want to reconcile with myself and others

  11. I am both a soul and a human being, so chill, relax

  12. All is well.

Love: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

— Definition of love by Erich Fromm, German-American social psychologist 1900-1980

“And I’m not talking about rainbow and unicorn love. I’m talking about learning how to stay fueled by a gritty, dangerous, wild-eyed, radical, change-the-world kinda love when disdain, judgment, and contempt are so much easier and when fear is seducing me into staying quiet.”

— Brené Brown, research professor, University of Houston