True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

by Thich Nhat Hanh

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.

To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.

mantra: “Dear one, I know that you are here, and it makes me very happy.” If you practice in this way, with a lot of concentration and mindfulness,

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 identify 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.1 And finally, the fifth is the river of consciousness.

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 you are the person who is calling, you should do the following—you can learn this little text, or to begin with, put it by your phone, because it can open the door to understanding and bring back harmony: “I am determined to practice deep listening. I am determined to practice loving speech.”