I mentioned in my last article that I would explain more about the power of love in this issue.
If you stop and think about all the expressions related to love, you begin to get the idea: Kill 'em with kindness; Love is blind; Love thine enemies; Love thy neighbor as thyself; Love is the essence of the Torah, all the rest is commentary; and, Emmet Fox's beautiful statement:

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem.

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake; a sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.

Now let me go to the words of anthropologist Ashley Montagu to see how he feels about the power of love:

• Love is most needed by the human organism from the moment of birth. Love is reciprocal in its effects. It is unconditional, supportive, firm, and involves another and communicates that involvement.
  
  
• Love is creative, enlarges our capacities, tender, joyful, fearless, and allows us to treat life as an art.
  
  
• Love as an attitude and as a form of behavior is adaptively the best and most efficient of all adjustive processes in enabling the human being to adapt him or herself to his or her environment.

A study of Harvard students revealed that of those who described their parents as loving, while in college, approximately one-fourth had suffered a significant illness by mid-life, whereas of those who said their parents were not loving almost 100 percent had suffered a major illness.

Who comes to be massaged? Ask your clients to describe their parents and see. What leads us to care for ourselves and have self worth and esteem?

The love allows us to see ourselves as the beautiful people we are. It is blind to faults and is not only about loving perfection. It sees our beauty and forgives and forgets our human weaknesses.

Love is something enemies can't handle and are desperately seeking. So it obliterates them when we love our enemies. I have watched families and individuals saved by the ability to love those who were attacking and abusing them.

Now, think about love thy neighbor as thyself.

Don't let anyone tell you that you are not worth loving. Too often, authorities destroy us because of their needs and desires and we lose our ability to love ourselves and then lose our lives because of it.

Most addictions are a search for the feelings only love can give you. Love is not an artificial high and cannot be matched by any drugs or spirits. It is the creator's gift and has led to life as we know it. Read some of Alice Miller's books on the subject.

One day I came into the kitchen and my wife had six cups lined up with the handles broken off (because of how I put them in the dishwasher). She asked me to put them out in the recycling bin. I refused and demonstrated how I could still drink from a cup with no handle. I could see where that was going to lead our marriage, so I took the cups and hid them in our vacation home.

When we went on vacation, I knew I was in trouble when she opened the kitchen cabinet, so I went jogging early that morning (that means I ran away from home). On the way, I saw a cup with a broken handle lying in the road. In 20 years, this is the first and only time it happened. I picked up the cup that I knew God had placed there. When I turned it over, there was a picture of two chubby elephants hugging each other and saying, ?I love you just the way you are.? I brought it home and I and the broken cups are all still a part of the family.

That is the message from our Creator and if we as therapists, parents, and human beings continue to love each other then we will change individuals and the world. Because when you are loved, you can love yourself, stop being self destructive, and care for and about the beautiful creation you are.

I know from my experience as a child, parent, and physician, what that love can do. I had a call, one day, asking for Kevorkian's phone number from someone who is very much alive and loved today but was not as a child.

Remember, you can reparent the unloved and become their Chosen Dad (CD) or Chosen Mother (CM). So go out and get your new degree, but don't forget about yourself and your family. The real test is loving those you live with and when you find that difficult, you can always fall back on amnesia.

The truth is we were told to love not like thine enemies because there are some people and actions you just can't like. So remember to kill those things, with kindness.

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Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., a New Haven surgeon, is author of Prescriptions for Living; Love, Medicine and Miracles; and other books.