True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart by Thích Nhất Hạnh (trans. by Sherab Chödzin Kohn).
Title: True Love: A Practice of Awakening the Heart.
Author: Thích Nhất Hạnh (translated by Sherab Chödzin Kohn).
Genre: Non-fiction, Zen buddhism, how to.
Country: Vietnam.
Language: Vietnamese.
Publication Date: 1997.
Summary: Love might not be what we think it is. We all seek the happiness that comes from loving and being loved, yet we often find ourselves dissatisfied in our relationships and unable to grasp the cause. The author shows the way to overcome our recurrent obstacles to love-by learning to be mindful, open, and present with ourselves and others. This guide to loving also introduces the four key aspects of love described in the Buddhist tradition-loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and freedom-and describes many simple and direct ways in which we can practice authentic love in our everyday lives.
My rating: 9/10.
My review:
♥ According to Buddhism, there are four elements of true love.
The first is maitri, which can be translated as loving-kindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer.
Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha. If a husband, for example, does not understand his wife's deepest troubles, her deepest aspirations, if he does not understand her suffering, he will not be able to love her in the right way. Without understanding, love is an impossible thing.
What must we do in order to understand a person? We must have time; we must practice looking deeply into this person. We must be there, attentive; we must observe, we must look deeply. And the fruit of this looking deeply is called understanding. Love is a true thing if it is made up of a substance called understanding.
The second element of true love is compassion, karuna. This is not only the desire to ease the pain of another person, but the ability to do so. You must practice deep looking in order to gain a good understanding of the nature of the suffering of this person, in order to be able to help him or her to change. Knowledge and understanding are always at the root of the practice. The practice of understanding is the practice of meditation. To meditate is to look deeply into the heart of things.
The third element of true love is joy, mudita. If there is no joy in love, it is not true love. If you are suffering all the time, if you cry all the time, and if you make the person you love cry, this is not really love-it is even the opposite. If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love.
The fourth element is upeksha, equanimity or freedom. In true love, you attain freedom. When you love, you bring freedom to the person you love. If the opposite is true, it is not true love. You just love in such a way that the person you love feels free, not only outside but also inside. "Dear one, do you have enough space in your heart and all around you?" This is an intelligent question for testing out whether your love is something real.
♥ To love, in the context of Buddhism, is above all to be there. But being there is not an easy thing. Some training is necessary, some practice. If you are not there, how can you love? Being there is very much an art, the art of meditation, because meditating is bringing your true presence to the here and now. The question that arises is: Do you have time to love?
♥ So I would propose a very simple practice to you, the practice of mindful breathing: "Breathing-I know that I am breathing in; breathing-I know that I am breathing out." If you do that with a little concentration, then you will be able to really be there, because in our daily life our mind and our body are rarely together. Our body might be there, but out mind is somewhere else. Maybe you are lost in regrets about the past, maybe in worries about the future, or else you are preoccupied with your plans, with anger or with jealousy. And so your mind is not really there with your body.
Between the mind and the body, there is something that can serve as a bridge. The moment you begin to practice mindful breathing, your body and your mind begin to come together with one another. It takes only ten to twenty seconds to accomplish this miracle called oneness of body and mind. With mindful breathing, you can bring body and mind together in the present moment, and every one of us can do it, even a child.
♥ So I am going to present to you a very effective mantra, not in Sanskrit or Tibetan, but in English: "Dear one, I am here for you." Perhaps this evening you will try for a few minutes to practice mindful breathing in order to bring your body and mind together. You will approach the person you love and with this mindfulness, with this concentration, you will look into his or her eyes, and you will begin to utter this formula: "Dear one, I am really here for you." You must say that with your body and with your mind at the same time, and then you will see the transformation.
Do you have enough time to love? Can you make sure that in your everyday life you have a little time to love? We do not have much time together; we are too busy.
♥ We must bring about a revolution in our way of living our everyday lives, because our happiness, our lives, are within ourselves.
♥ To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other. If you love someone and you continue to ignore his or her presence, this is not true love.
..To attain this goal, it is also necessary to practice oneness of body and mind. ..then you approach this person, you look at him or her mindfully, with a smile, and you begin to say the second mantra: "Dear one, I know that you are here, and it makes me very happy."
..Whatever you do mindfully is meditation. When you touch a flower, you can touch it with your fingers, but better yet, you can touch it mindfully, with your full awareness. "Breathing in-I know that the flower is there; breathing out-I smile at the flower." While you are practicing in this way, you are really there and at the same time, the flower is really there. If you are not really there, nothing is there. The sunset is something marvelous and so is the full moon, but since you are not really there, the sunset is not for you. From time to time, I let myself look at the full moon; I take a deep breath in and a deep breath out, and I practice: "I know you are there, and I am very glad about it." I practice that with the full moon, with the cherry blossoms... We are surrounded by miracles, but we have to recognize them; otherwise there is no life.
The Buddha told us this: "The past is no longer there, the future is not here yet; there is only one moment in which life is available and that is the present moment." To meditate is to bring body and mind back to the present moment so that you do not miss your appointment with life.
♥ The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life.
In Buddhism, the energy that helps us to touch life deeply is called smrti, the energy of mindfulness. Everyone possesses a seed (bija) of this energy. If we practice mindful breathing, we can generate this energy.
♥ Therefore it is easy for you to notice when the person you love is suffering. At such a time you go to him or her, with your body and mind unified, with concentration, and you utter the third mantra: "Dear one, I know that you are suffering, that is why I am here for you." Because when we are suffering, we have a strong need for the presence of the person we love. If we are suffering and the man or woman we love ignores us, then we suffer more. So what we can do-right away-is to manifest our true presence to the beloved person and say the mantra with all our mindfulness: "Dear one, I now that you are suffering, that is why I am here for you." Even before you actually do something to help, the person you love is relieved. Your presence is a miracle, your understanding of his or her pain is a miracle, and you are able to offer this aspect of your love immediately.
♥ According to the teaching of the Buddha, in true love there is no place for pride. If you are suffering, every time you are suffering you must go to the person in question and ask for his or her help. That is true love. Do not let pride keep you apart. If you think your love for this person is true love, you must overcome your pride; you must always go to him or her. That is why I have invented this mantra for you. Practice so as to bring about oneness of your body and mind before going to the person to say the fourth mantra: "Dear one, I am suffering, please help." This is very simple, but very hard to do.
I would like to tell you a story from my country. A young man went off to war, leaving his pregnant wife behind. Two years later, he was able to return home, and the young woman went with their young son to meet her husband. They cried together out of joy. In Vietnam, in our tradition, when an event of this kind takes place, it has to be announced to the ancestors. So the young father asked his wife to go to the market to buy the things that are needed for the offering that is placed on the altar to the ancestors. Such an altar is found in every house. Each morning we burn a stick of incense to our ancestors on this altar, and in this way we make a connection with them. Burning this incense, adorning the altar with photographs of our ancestors, and dusting the shrine off are very important gestures. These are moments in which we come in contact with our ancestors. There are people living in the world who are completely uprooted because they do not practice such a turning toward their ancestors.
So the young wife went off to the market. During this time, the young father was trying to convince his child to call him Daddy. The little boy refused: "Mister, you're not my daddy. My daddy is somebody else. He visits us every night and my mommy talks to him every night, and very often she cries with him. And every time my mommy sits down, he sits down too. Every time she lies down, he lies down too." After he heard these words, the young father's happiness entirely evaporated. His heart turned into a block of ice. He felt hurt, deeply humiliated, and that is why, when his wife came home, he would no longer look at her or speak a word to her. He ignored her. The woman herself began to suffer; she felt humiliated, hurt. When the offering was placed on the altar, the young father burned the incense, recited the prayers to the ancestors, and did the four traditional prostrations. Then he picked the mat up instead of leaving it there for his wife so she could do the four prostrations in her turn. In his mind he thought that she was not qualified to present herself before the ancestors, and she was humiliated by this.
After the ceremony, he didn't stay at the house to eat but went to the village and spent the day in a bar. He tried to forget his suffering by drinking alcohol, and he did not come back to the house until very late at night. The following day, it was the same thing, and this went on for several days in a row. The young woman could not take it anymore. Her suffering was so great that in the end she threw herself in the river and drowned.
When the young father heard this news, he returned to the house, and that night he was the one who went to get the lamp and lit it. Suddenly the child cried out: "Mister, Mister, it's my daddy, he's come back!" And he pointed to the shadow of his father on the wall. "You know, Mister, my father comes every night. Mommy talks to him and sometimes she cries; and every time she sits down my daddy sits down too." In reality, this woman had been alone in the house too much and every night she had talked to her shadow: "My dear one, you are so far away from me. How can I raise my child all by myself?...You must come back home soon." She would cry, and of course every time she sat down, the shadow would also sit down. Now the husband's false perception was no longer there, but it was too late-his wife was already dead.
A misperception is something that can destroy an entire family. The Buddha told us a number of times that we are subject to misperceptions in our everyday life. Therefore we have to pay close attention to our perceptions. There are people who hang on to their misperceptions for ten or twenty years, and during this time they continue to suffer and make other people suffer.
Why did the young father not want to talk this thing over with his wife? Because pride got in between them. If he had asked his wife: "Who is this person who came every night? Our child told me about him. I am suffering so much, my darling, you have to help me. Explain to me who this person is." If he had done that, his wife would have had a chance to explain, and the drama could have been avoided. However, it was not only his fault, but that of his young wife as well. She could have come to him and asked him the reason for his change in attitude: "Husband, why don't you look at me anymore, why don't you talk to me? Have I done something awful that I deserve such treatment? I am suffering so much, dear husband, you have to help me."
♥ In Buddhism we talk about a bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara, the one who has the ability to listen and to understand the suffering of others. If we evoke his name, it is in order to learn to listen.
In everyday life, deep listening, attentive listening, is a meditation. If you know the practice of mindful breathing, if you wish to maintain calm and living compassion within you, then deep listening will be possible.
Through the practice of walking meditation, through sitting meditation, through mindful breathing, we can cultivate calm, we can cultivate awareness, and we can cultivate compassion-and that way we will be able to sit there and listen to the other. The other suffers as long as he is in need of someone to listen to him; and you-you are the person who can do it. If someone has to have recourse to a psychotherapist, it is because no one in his house can listen. A psychotherapist should be able to sit there and really listen, but I know therapists who have suffered too much and do not truly have the ability to listen to their clients.
♥ There are pacifists who can write protest letters of great condemnation but who are incapable of writing a love letter. You have to write in such a way that the other person is receptive toward reading; you have to speak in such a way that the other person is receptive toward listening. If you do not, it is not worth the trouble to write or to speak. To write in such a way is to practice meditation.
♥ Meditation is the practice of looking deeply into the nature of your suffering and your joy. Through the energy of mindfulness, through concentration, looking deeply into the nature of our suffering makes it possible for us to see the deep causes of that suffering. If you can keep mindfulness and concentration alive, then looking deeply will reveal to you the true nature of your pain. And freedom will arise as a result of your sustaining a deep vision into the nature of your pain. Solidity, freedom, calm, and joy are the fruits of meditation.
♥ The Buddha said this: "The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself." If you are not able to take care of yourself, if you are not able to accept yourself, how could you accept another person and how could you love him or her?
♥ Each of us is a king who reigns over a very vast territory that has five rivers. The first river is our body, which we do not know well enough. The second is the river of sensations. Each sensation is a drop of water in this river. There are pleasant sensations, others that are unpleasant, and neutral sensations. To meditate is to sit down on the bank of the river of sensations and identity each sensation as it arises. The third is the river of perceptions, which it is necessary to observe. You must look deeply into their nature in order to understand. The fourth is the river of mental formations, of which there are fifty-one. And finally, the fifth is the river of consciousness.
♥ Caring for yourself, reestablishing peace in yourself, is the basic condition for helping someone else. So that the other can stop being a bomb, a source of pain for ourselves and others, you really have to help him to defuse the bomb. To be able to provide help, we have to have a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion in ourselves. This is what we get from mindfulness in everyday life, because mindfulness is not something that is only done in a meditation hall; it is also done in the kitchen, in the garden, when we are on the telephone, when we are driving a car, when we are doing the dishes.
♥ When we practice deep looking directed toward the heart of reality, we receive help, we receive understanding, we receive the wisdom that makes us free. If there is a deep pain within you, meditate.
Meditating is not trying to run away, trying to ignore the presence of the pain, but on the contrary, it is looking at it face-to-face. You have to practice deep looking directed toward the nature of this pain, because Buddhists, we are joy, but we are also pain; we are understanding, but we are also ignorance. Meditating is not transforming oneself into a battlefield where one side is fighting another, where good fights against evil. This is not Buddhist meditation. Buddhist meditation is based on the principle of nonduality. This means that if we are mindfulness, if we are love, we are also ignorance, we are also suffering, and there is no reason to suppress anything at all.
♥ It is the same thing with meditation. When you have pain within you, the first thing to do is to bring the energy of mindfulness to embrace the pain. "I know that you are there, little anger, my old friend. Breathe-I am taking care of you now."
♥ The next time you are angry, practice doing walking meditation in a natural setting, for example. You breathe and you concentrate solely on breathing: "Breathing in-I know that I am breathing in; breathing out-I know that I am breathing out." After a minute or two, you practice this way: "Breathing in-I know that I am angry; breathing out-I know that the anger is still in me." Ten minutes later, you will feel better. It is a sure thing, on condition that the energy of mindfulness is really there; and if you keep it up, concentration-and not only concentration but also deep looking-will also be there. You will be able to look deeply at the true nature of your anger. This discovery, this understanding, this wisdom, will liberate you from your pain.
♥ We are afraid of old age, and we are also afraid of death. "It is my nature to die; I know that no one can escape death."
Buddha taught us this, knowing that we carry all the seeds of fear buried deep within us. But we do not want this fear to manifest, because it hurts, and so we repress it. We try to repress our suffering and we invite other energies into our "living room" to fill it up so that the negative energies will not be able to make their appearance there.
A lot of the time we turn on the television, we read novels, we make phone calls-just to keep pain from making its appearance in our "living room." We practice the politics of subversion, we carry out a kind of boycott toward the negative seeds within us, and after a certain amount of time of doing this we create a situation of bad circulation. You know that when the blood is not circulating well in our body, we experience pains-headaches, for example. So then we try getting massages or taking medicines, because good circulation is essential for our health. The same thing is true with regard to our consciousness. If we practice the politics of repression and suppression, then we create a situation of bad circulation for our mental formations, such as fear, anger, despair, suffering. And because things are not circulating properly in our conscious kind, then the symptoms of mental illness appear: depression and stress.
We should not adopt this boycott policy. On the contrary we should open our door so that our suffering can come out. We are afraid of doing that, but Buddhism teaches us that we should not be afraid, because we have available to us an energy that should help us to care for our pain-the energy of mindfulness.
♥ That is why the Buddha taught us to invite fear into our mindful consciousness and care for it every day.
There is no battle between good and evil, positive and negative; there is only the care given by the big brother to the little brother. In Buddhist meditation, we observe, we act in a nondualistic fashion, and thus the waste materials of the conscious mind can always be transformed into flowers of compassion, love, and peace. Our consciousness is a living thing, something organic in nature. There are always waste materials and flowers in us. The gardener who is familiar with organic gardening is constantly on the alert to save the waste materials because he knows how to transform them into compost and then transform that compost into flowers and vegetables. So be grateful for your pains, be grateful for suffering-you will need them.
♥ The same is true of our mental formations, which include flowers like faith, hope, understanding, and love; but there is also waste material like fear and pain. The flower is on its way to becoming refuse, but the refuse is also on its way to becoming a flower. This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. If a person does not know what hunger is, he or she will never know the joy of eating every day. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness. So do not say that you do not want to know anything about pain or about suffering, that you only want to know about happiness-that would be an impossible thing.
♥ Mindfulness is the practice that consists in bringing the body and the mind back to the present moment and every time we practice that, we come to life again.
If we take a look around us, we see people who are living like dead people. Albert Camus says that there are thousands of people moving about around us carrying their own corpses. Thanks to the practice of mindfulness, we come to life again immediately. Being alive is being in the present moment, in the here and now, and that is possible through mindful breathing. In Buddhist meditation, we practice resurrection every moment: "Breathe, you are alive." The Holy Spirit is is present with out mindful breath: "Give us this day our daily bread." This is the very practice of living in the present moment, this day. We must not lose ourselves either in the past or in the future; and the only moment in which we can touch life is the present moment.
♥ In our community, every time we hear a bell, we stop-we strop our thinking, we stop our conversation, we stop our work; and we begin breathing-an inbreath, then an outbreath-and it is the same thing whether it is the telephone ringing or the clock chiming. In this way we have lots of opportunities to return to ourselves, to our true home, here and now, to touch peace. And what we are stopping, in order to be able to be alive, is our thinking. When you contemplate the full moon, if you are thinking then the full moon is not there and you are not there either. This is because thinking prevents us from living deeply in the present moment in our everyday life. When you are drinking water, drink water, drink only water. That is meditation. You must not drink other things, such as your worries, your plans-wandering around in the realm of your thoughts. Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply. I think, therefore I am really not there.
♥ Many of my students who practice telephone meditation have reported back that since they began, not only have things with them personally gone better but their dealings have, too. This is because they have become much nicer. At Plum Village, we established the practice of telephone meditation more than ten years ago, and at the beginning we had certain difficulties. When the phone rang, since everybody loved the practice of mindful breathing, nobody wanted to go answer it. If you telephone Plum Village, you will know that you have a big opportunity to practice mindful breathing.
♥ And when you take the person you love in your arms, you must practice deeply. "Breathing in-I know that he is alive in my arms; breathing out-I am very glad about it." Three times like that, and you are really there, and the other person is really there too. It is a very pleasant practice, which brings you back to the present moment. Meditating is using the energy of mindfulness so that life will be there as a reality; and amid the agitations of everyday life, Buddhist meditation can be practiced very well.
♥ Because we need your calm, your compassion, your understanding. So we should be mindful as individuals but also as a community, as a family, as a nation.
♥ Fear is born from our ignorance, from our concepts regarding life, death, being, and nonbeing. If we are able to get rid of all these concepts by touching the reality within ourselves, then nonfear will be there and the greatest relief will become possible. For the Buddhist it is necessary to transcend the notions of birth and death, because those notions do not apply to reality. This is equally true with regard to the notions of being and nonbeing. For the Buddhist, to be or not to be is not really the question. The true question is whether we have enough concentration, enough mindfulness, enough practice to touch the foundation of being that is nirvana.
That is why we should do what we have to do to make this meditation of looking deeply a matter of everyday life-when we are eating, when we are drinking, when we are sleeping-and one day we will be able to touch the ultimate reality that is in us. Nirvana is not something that we should search for, because we are nirvana, just as the wave is already water. The wave does not have to search for water, because water is the very substance of the wave. Living deeply makes it possible to touch nirvana, our ultimate reality, the world of no-birth and no-death, and all our fear will be taken away because of this direct knowledge of our true nature.