Love

 

What are the Buddha’s teachings on love?  Though we often think of love as a feeling, the Buddha taught that love is an ability: the ability to act in ways that are truly caring toward others and toward ourselves.  This is different from liking someone or being “in love” with someone.  We can love someone we have just met, or someone whose actions we don’t approve of, or who is not a member of our family or religion or political party or nation.  We can still care about their wellbeing, and do what we can to relieve their suffering because we care about it.  If someone is hungry, we can feed them. if they are anxious and agitated, we can calm them with our caring presence.

The Buddha also taught that central to love is the focus on understanding the person to whom we are offering love.  Thich Nhat Hanh says that “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.”

This really struck a chord in me.  I was wounded because my parents tried to love me but did not know how to love.  They didn’t understand me, and didn’t know how to listen deeply.  I was told I didn’t feel the way I did, shouldn’t have the feelings I had, that I was wrong to feel the way I did. I was given advice and lectured on what I should do.  This was their way of trying to care about and love me.  They were trying to keep me out of trouble and keep me from making mistakes. But there was no attempt at trying to understand me and this wounded me deeply. This felt dismissive, this felt like they did not know me at all and didn’t want to know me, and it wounded and hurt me badly.  It also increased my fear of really sharing what was going on inside me with anyone else and prevented me from doing so for a long time.

 

Sharing ourselves by putting audible words out into the world so another person can hear them—and we can hear them—has great power and can produce great insight and healing for the person who does it.  Hearing yourself say something out loud helps you to really understand what is going on inside of you.  When deep listening is present, you have the courage to say things you have never been able to tell anyone before, and there is a great relief of suffering in this.  This kind of listening is a great gift of love, and it can be learned.

 

The learning process starts with understanding what it means to listen deeply.  Often what we call listening is simply remaining silent while planning how best to be able to insert our own opinion as soon as the other person stops talking.  Deep listening is not like that.  To listen deeply means to listen without agenda, without trying to extract something for ourselves or change the other person in some way.  It is listening without needing to respond with something “wise or intelligent” to say, or thinking you need to “fix” whatever the other person’s “problem” is.  It is just being receptive and taking in the words being said, the tone, the emotions, and the body language of another person.  We listen deeply when we have the simple intention of understanding the other person.   How does this person see things, and how do they feel? 

If we do not listen deeply before speaking, we will be speaking only our own ideas and not really responding to what is present in the other person.  When this happens, the other person will not feel understood and their suffering will likely not be decreased. Thich Nhat Hanh says that ”Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love… If you don’t understand the roots of someone’s suffering, you can’t help.”  And to understand, we must learn how to truly listen.

In the beginning, most of us are not very good at deep listening, but it is a skill that we can learn.  Listening deeply is crucial because it is what enables us to know what words will be useful to say to someone, rather than speaking only from our own preconceived ideas and personal agendas.  With deep listening, our speech can come from a real understanding of someone else’s situation, perspective, and feelings and be much more likely to leave them feeling understood and connected.  To listen in this way is a real gift of healing.   Before we can speak in a way that is useful and kind, it is first necessary to understand the person we are speaking to.  This seems obvious, and yet we often forget it.

In many cases, another person does not need us to say anything at all in response.  Just our caring presence is enough.

Though we may not be very skilled at deep listening in the beginning, the good news is that we have numerous opportunities to practice deep listening every day in our ordinary interactions with other people.

In addition to understanding another through deep listening, the Buddha taught that we can increase our capacity to love by cultivating happiness in ourselves.  Thich Nhat Hanh goes so far as to say “The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself.” All of us have probably had the experience of being absolutely filled with joy, and during that time feeling love for everyone and everything.  And at the other end of the spectrum, we can probably remember times of extreme unhappiness when we hated everyone and everything.  Fortunately, there are practices that we can utilize to cultivate more happiness in ourselves.       

One of the best practices is reminding ourselves that, contrary to our usual habit, our unhappiness is not the result of our circumstances in life.  It is actually the result of a gap between what we want or expect, and what we actually have.  We can sometimes close up this gap by trying to get what we want, but almost always it makes more sense to practice examining whether our wants and expectations are at all realistic.  If I expect everyone to like me, I will be unhappy.  Should I respond by trying to get everyone to like me or should I change my expectation?  When we look at it deeply, we see that this is an easy choice!

In general, it is almost always what is going on in our minds that prevents us from being happy.  We put conditions on our happiness—“I’ll be happy when I get a better job”—and this blinds us to the happiness that is always available to us right now—like the sight of light dancing off the new spring leaves in a gentle breeze.  We can learn to take pleasure in the small things in life.  And when we are happy, we are open, relaxed, and patient, and better able to love.

Equally important in the cultivation of happiness is the practice of mindful ingestion—being mindful of what we take into our body and our consciousness.  This practice involves minimizing our exposure to toxic intakes such as too much political news, negative people, conversations, work environments, movies, music, and ceaseless complaining about everything.  This is a potentially very long list and useful!

Gratitude is the opposite of greed, and is another very powerful practice for cultivating happiness.  This can be done either as a formal sitting practice or as something you do intermittently throughout your day.  You can say silently to yourself “I am grateful for the gift of this day” or whatever other things comes to mind that you can be grateful for, saying the first half of the phrase on the in-breath, and the second half on the out-breath.  There are so many things to be grateful for:  blessings that you were born with or received, small acts of kindness or courage, your family or teachers or friends… Once you start you are likely to find the list to be endless. 

After using these practices consistently for a period of time they can become the new “default setting” for engaging life and are just the natural way that you do things now.  Love is our natural state, and our capacity to love is fueled by happiness—but it needs to be genuine happiness, not just acting as though we are happy, otherwise our ability to love will not grow and may even diminish.

And finally, we can remind ourselves that when love is present, there is no separation, there is no difference between you and another person. Thich Nhat Hanh puts it beautifully: “In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering. You can no longer say, ‘That’s your problem.’”

Nonseparation is a deep knowing that we can cultivate in ourselves.  We can practice reminding ourselves that on the deepest level we are the same.  We all want to be happy, we want to be safe, connected, love and be loved, and we don’t want to suffer.

Similarly, we can practice recognizing and silently acknowledging to ourselves that the very same emotions—the joy, sadness, anger, fear, or love--that are in you today were in me yesterday or will be in me tomorrow.  The same thoughts and emotions pass through all of us at different times. 

In sitting meditation and throughout the day we can practice saying silently to ourselves “Just as I wish to be happy, so-and-so wishes to be happy,” and the same for the wish to experience love, connection, or peace.  It can be very useful to say the first half of the phrase on the inbreath and the second half on the out-breath.

“You are part of the universe; you are made of [the stuff of] stars. When you look at your loved one, you see that he is also made of stars and carries eternity inside. Looking in this way, we naturally feel reverence.”  (Thich Nhat Hanh)

When we are happy it is easy to love.  When we listen deeply, we can understand another person and their suffering, and we can know they are the same as us.  And when we understand, love spontaneously arises. 

 

 

 

Note 1:  Quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh are taken from How to Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Penguin Random House, 2014.

Note 2:   My intention is to add new posts to the blog approximately every 2 to 3 weeks. If you would like to receive an e-mail notification each time a new blog post is made, please let me know and I will add you to the list of recipients. This notification will also include the title of the new post.  Some of the material that appears in this blog is copyrighted, but in keeping with the Buddha’s teaching that the dharma is not to be sold, the contents of this blog may be freely copied and given away, but not sold. 

            If you have questions, comments, or ideas for new Blog topics please contact Dale at ahimsaacres@gmail.com.