If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
Interpretation
To receive love from others, one must first learn to love themselves.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-love as a prerequisite for receiving love from others. Shams Tabrizi suggests that our treatment of ourselves influences how others treat us; when we fully accept and nurture ourselves, we become more resilient to negativity and open to the positive experiences and love that life has to offer.
In practice
During a self-improvement workshop about building self-esteem.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexplicably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remained closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.
If you are insulted, if you are accused, if they gossip about you, don't say anything bad. Don't be the one who sees the shame, be the one who corrects it.
Be sure that someday you'll praise and thank God for your unanswered prayers that once you had wept for them.
Remove all the walls and curtains so you can get closer and purely love. Have principles but do not use them to exclude or to judge the others. Stay far from idols, specially from those you made from your own principles. Have a powerful faith, but do not play the powerful.
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.
There are lovers content with longing. Iβm not one of them.
Love is cheering and sharing and compassion and giving and receiving. Love is an action thing more than a word thing, that brings comfort or joy or relief to anyone or anything.
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
But I can tell - let truth be told - That love will change in growing old; Though day by day is nought to see, So delicate his motions be.
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