Name: Simon Talks All About Love
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T11:17:56.000Z
Duration: 28 min 52 s
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Gerund

Hello everyone and welcome to this month's episode of Simon's book club where every month we'll be reading and discussing fascinating books on psychology well-being neuroscience and

Consciousness and by every month you and I both know that that is very highly optimistic

I haven't done one of these videos in six months

Finally been able to set up a system for myself and being creative one that works and I've got a better understanding of how

Which is resulting in me getting a bit of my groove back now during my last video on my trip to France

Like that really felt good for me and I think that I'm in a space to get back to creating videos about the ideas that I find really transformative and I

Hope that you find them interesting as well

So this month's book is a bit of a departure from the rest of the books that I've covered so far

I'm talking about bell hooks is all about love

Which isn't very sciencey and lacks a lot of the scientific rigor that the other books possess but it really felt like the right book to read for February back when I started reading this book for a

Second time because it was winter back then

And it was the month of love and it kind of marked the one-year anniversary of a major challenge that I've undertaken

The first time I read this book was in February of 2021 when I was still reeling from my divorce

While in my marriage, I actually thought I knew a thing or two about love and I thought of myself as a good husband

Truly truly did but it turns out that I was very

F***ing wrong about that. The reviews are in and they don't look good zero out of ten would not recommend

So I found myself in a profound sense of self-doubt

Which led me to question everything that I previously took for granted all of this

Uncertainty pointed to me that I might just be

Fundamentally broken in some way and better off on an island by myself where I wouldn't be hurtful to anyone

So that was the stage of my life where I found this book and I felt a very deep

Connection with bell hooks and what she was saying, even though we have very different cultures and upbringings

I really found myself relating with the author in other ways since she too was in a very long

Relationship that ended and left her feeling very confused about love and relationships afterwards

Which I'm sure is a common experience one that some of you might be able to relate to as well

I I know you do I've read some of the messages you sent and

Reading about how you've been able to heal and how the author was able to heal as well provided me with hope in my own possible healing I

Felt very encouraged by bell hooks not closing herself off to love as I've seen in some of the divorce men that I know instead she went all-in on love and threw herself in to learning about love and

As a result of her dedication to the art of loving she's written one of the most famous books about love of all time

Even childish Gambino like mentions her in a song to practice the art of loving

We have first to choose love to admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving

Amen to that and I found that very inspiring and so I soaked this book up

Mmm, I ate up all of those ideas. Mm-hmm. I read it. I digested it and I came back for seconds and

Thirds totally love this book bell hooks writes about where she learned unhealthy ideas of love from her family of origin and from the

Culture that she grew up in and she really with great focus and very clear writing

She undoes a lot of the messaging that she grew up with a lot of the messaging that was part of my beliefs

About love as well because after all where did my beliefs about love and relationships come from?

It's not something that's built into us from birth

We don't have behaviors of romantic relationships coded into our DNA right up there with how to build proteins

There's no sequence that dictates how I should communicate with a romantic partner. No, no, not at all

I was taught these ideas from somewhere so where and

How and do those ideas actually serve me?

Didn't their bad form. So let me look into other forms. This book offered me a new form a

Framework with which I felt that I could learn how to love well with ideas that are more studied ideas that make more sense

Ideas that are in line with my goals of living a life of compassion

At the same time it provided me with many ideas with which I could deeply examine and question all of the ways in which I've experienced love both romantically and

Amongst my friends and family with really well-worded quotes that I could repeat to myself. Really. I love her writing style and more than that hooks offers some guidelines that I could follow and really challenging prompts for self-reflection that I could take with me and journal about for weeks and weeks and

Weeks and weeks and weeks and more than that bell hooks inspired me on this new path of love

That I was determined to follow so some people take up new

Exercise routines after a divorce or some people took up bread-making over the pandemic. Maybe

Maybe you did too. I took up a different challenge and I took it very seriously

How could I live with love as my core ethic

I really wanted to learn and with that how would my actions and relationships be different from before?

Step one take on a very breathy namaste voice. No. No, that's not the first step, but it helps

I went to the bibliography at the back of the book and read some of the books that hooks refers to often

The most profound one being from art of loving which is also a very famous book about love. So check it out

It's really great stuff in that book from asks us to take loving very seriously and to treat love with the same focus and

Dedication that an artist does with their art or as a professional athlete does with their sport and

Then to see how their worldview changes when that happens take love

Seriously make an art out of it. If LeBron James is training for basketball all the time. How can I spend my time?

training in love and after all that training just kind of like how a musician who has been making music for a decade will

Interact with the world differently and get more out of their daily experience so that they hear music

Hiding in the rustling of the leaves or the tweeting of birds or in the rumble of train tracks

The more that you are in your craft the more you kind of see it everywhere around you

I found this a very curious challenge since I can say from my experience of being someone who's been making YouTube videos since 2008

Well over a decade now that when I'm experiencing a special moment, I think about it

Cinematically, how would I frame this on camera and what lens would work for me here?

and what soundtrack fits the mood and so I figure that if I approached love with that same drive and

Focus that I put towards video making and I committed myself

Towards putting effort in my craft of loving that I would see the world differently

Through this new lens of love as well. So what does that training look like?

I threw myself into the project and I approach it from very many different angles. I

Started with a lot of self-compassion work through an eight-week course on self-compassion

Which I highly recommend and I'll share the link in the info box below

Check it out and by continuing the practices that I learned from those classes afterwards and carrying them on into today

I also really got into the works of Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer who are really on the forefront of self-compassion research

It's not just all woo-woo that I'm talking about. I'm trying to read stuff backed by science and peer-reviewed research

I also got a lot deeper into Buddhism and I developed a regular practice of meta meditation

Which is also known as loving kindness meditation Sharon Salzberg is really inspiring in this field. And so was the Dalai Lama

I also look more into the bodhisattva text and I memorized some passages that I could repeat to myself regularly

I also read a whole bunch about attachment theory

Particularly in the works of Amir Levine who I think has the most accessible and popular book on the subject

I know a lot of people who know that book

And so I got a lot deeper into it and I also read some of the other research papers on attachment theory and I worked on understanding my own patterns of both anxious and

Avoidant attachment and in trying to develop more patterns for a secure attachment style. Oh, yeah nerdy

I also took a class at University of Toronto on the psychology of relationships

And I learned a lot about the most up-to-date theories and the research on relationships. It's a really cool class

I also got a bit more granular and I focus a lot of my time in reading about how

Emotions are made and what chemicals our bodies feel when we're in love in what situations those chemicals get released

Which seems kind of unromantic. I I know I know but love feels like something