LOVE ANGELES

Kute Blackson: Love Now Music (Video)

Source: Kute Blackson 

Love is My Religion (Video)

Love Generation

Source: Intent - Today marks the end of the National Human Trafficking Awareness Month  that President Obama declared on the 11th January.

Intent's call for content this week has been centered around the theme of Love: how to think, act and speak with more Love.

Who doesn't know that this weekend is a time to express love in a way we might otherwise not.

Even science, for tonight, is all about Love: I'm writing this in between breaks from a work project where neuroscience have 100 people have gathered to talk about the role of oxtytocin as a neurotransmitter in the experience of love. 

My favorite part of the evening so far has been to hear a neuroscientist who started off talking about the effect ecstasty has on the neurotransmitter seratonin in the simulation of love - put the neurochemistry aside and say that to really love another person we have to first know how to love ourselves.

People have  been listening enraptured. Asking questions about what love is. How love works.

Even neuroscientists are  holding chocolate hearts covered with jellies. Thinking of people they're going home to, or would like to be going home to. Smiling.

I'm happy that this campaign to raise awareness on human trafficking is ending here. Like this - in Love.

Sometimes this month as I learned about the victims of trafficking, it felt hard to know for sure what I wholly believed to be a meaningful response from me as a single individual in the face of  what felt like a pathology that's spread all over the world.

It's been hard at times to keep reading, to keep learning, keep hearing more stories:

The children who were exchanged by adults as slaves in domestic households, or chained to factory floors for their labour; thirteen year old American girls living with 32 year old American men who are sold for sex to other men; adult victims - individuals and groups - who find themselves sold by other adults to work as drugs traffickers, gun traffickers; who are forced to sell their bodies for sex, or to work in factories or growing fields that do not pay them enough to eat, or a place to sleep.

As well as the victims, I got to thinking about the perpetrators of this violence.

And the more I've thought of them, the more I think I that Love is the answer. The only answer.

And what I have to do - what we have to do - is be the Love generation.

Traffickers are not dropped in to our communities isolated and independent from the fabric of society - they are part of our families, our communities - tragically, they are our fathers and sons and brothers and our husbands. Sometimes they are even our mothers, and sisters.

At the most fundamental level what makes a person able to traffic another is a breakdown in love. In the state of Love, I think our every impulse is to honor, cherish, protect and support. It's only in its absence that damaging, coercive, manipulative, exploitative, and ultimately pathological behaviors can exist.

If some members of our families - and all human traffickers  are born in to families - have grown in to adults who are have lost their connection to love to the extent that they can can starve, beat, sell, and imprison others, then I think we ought to look at ourselves as much as we look at them.

I think the tragedy is not just theirs - it's all of ours.

And I keep thinking the first thing we can do as individuals to play a part in healing this type of tragedy is to each make a commitment to avoid at all costs repeating it in another generation: a commitment to meeting all people with love at all times - to complete non violence in all thought, action and speech.

We can be the love generation.

The sensation of love is the most powerful, potent, healing experience we have as humans.

In the presence of Love,  no person can harm another.

Being in love is being in reverence. You revere the people that you love. And you feel when you are loved that you are revered.

Both states make you aware of your responsibility to others and to yourself: to protect, to honour, to support not just your Beloved, not just yourself, but all Life.

This is Love.

I like that National Human Awareness Trafficking Month is ending today when people all over the world will be remembering Love.

Because living from a place of Love is choosing to Be The Change.

Click here to watch the Be the Love Generation Music Video!