How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials, #3)

by Thich Nhat Hanh

When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.

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.

True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive.

True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

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.

Compassion is the capacity to understand the suffering in oneself and in the other person.

Understanding suffering brings compassion and relief. You can transform your own suffering and help transform the suffering of the other person with the practice of mindfulness and looking deeply.

equanimity. We can also call it inclusiveness or nondiscrimination. In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering.

Love without trust is not yet love. Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself.

“Dear friend, your flower needs some water.”

breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, she is so precious to me.”

The practices of breathing, walking, concentration, and understanding can help you greatly in dealing with your emotions, in listening to and embracing your suffering, and in helping you to recognize and embrace the suffering of another person. If we have this capacity, then we can develop a real and lasting spiritual intimacy with ourselves and with others.

Loving someone doesn’t mean saying “yes” to whatever the other person wants. The basis of loving someone else is to know yourself and to know what you need.

It’s important that loving another person doesn’t take priority over listening to yourself and knowing what you need.

The roots of a lasting relationship are mindfulness, deep listening and loving speech, and a strong community to support you.

There is no longer a place for jealousy, because we are all faithful to the same aspiration. We share everything, but we still have our freedom intact. Love is not a kind of prison. True love gives us a lot of space.

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.

“Dear one, do you think that I understand you enough? Please tell me your difficulties, your suffering, and your deepest wishes.” Then the other person has an opportunity to open their heart.

Conscious breathing helps us develop the ability to stop at that crucial moment, to keep ourselves from saying or doing something we regret later.

Allow the other person to speak freely. Don’t cut your loved one off or criticize their words.

they say something that’s incorrect, that’s based on a wrong perception, we can give them a little information later on to help them correct their thinking. But right now, we just listen.

When you say, “I’m as good as he is,” you still think you have a separate self. When you compare two selves to each other, suffering will result.

A true partner or friend is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you’ve been seeking.

When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you don’t understand the roots of his suffering, you can’t help, just as a doctor can’t help heal your illness if she doesn’t know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved one’s suffering in order to help bring relief.

“Love” is a beautiful word, and we have to restore its meaning. When we say, “I love hamburgers,” we spoil the word. We have to make the effort to heal words by using them properly and carefully. True love includes a sense of responsibility and accepting the other person as she is, with all her strengths and weaknesses. If you only like the best things in a person, that is not love. You have to accept her weaknesses and bring your patience, understanding, and energy to help her transform. This kind of love brings protection and safety.

It’s not healthy to keep anger inside for too long.

“My dear, I am suffering, I am angry, and I want you to know it.” The second is: “I am doing my best.” This means you are practicing mindful breathing and walking, and you are refraining from doing or saying anything out of anger. The third is: “Please help me.”

PRIDE Often, our pride stands in the way of our asking for help. In true love there is no place for pride. To love each other means to trust each other. If you don’t tell the person you love of your suffering, it means you don’t love this person enough to trust her. You have to realize that this person is the best person to help you. We need to be able to get help from the person we love.

REDISCOVERING APPRECIATION When a loved one is suffering a lot, he or she doesn’t have enough energy to embrace you and help you to suffer less. So it’s natural that you become disappointed. You think that the other person’s presence is no longer helpful to you. You may even wonder if you love this person anymore. If you’re patient and you practice taking care of yourself and the other person, you may have a chance to discover that the elements of goodness and beauty in the person you love are still there. Taking care of yourself, you can support your loved one and reestablish the joy in your relationship.

Reconciliation means to work it out within yourself so that peace can be restored. Reconcile with yourself for the sake of the world, for the sake of all living beings. Your peace and serenity are crucial for all of us.

STARTING A FAMILY Before having a child, it would be wonderful if people would take a year to look deeply into themselves, to practice loving speech and deep listening, and to learn the other practices that will help them enjoy themselves and their children more.

To love is, first of all, to accept ourselves as we actually are. The first practice of love is to know oneself. The Pali word metta means “loving kindness.” When we practice Metta Meditation, we see the conditions that have caused us to be the way we are; this makes it easy for us to accept ourselves, including our suffering and our happiness.

If we take good care of ourselves, we help everyone. We stop being a source of suffering to the world, and we become a reservoir of joy and freshness.

If you can learn from your mistakes, then you have already transformed garbage into flowers.

I think of our behavior in terms of being more or less skillful rather than in terms of good and bad.

GOODWILL IS NOT ENOUGH Your good intentions are not enough; you have to be artful.

Walking, eating, breathing, talking, and working are all opportunities to practice creating happiness inside you and around you. Mindful living is an art, and each of us has to train to be an artist.

When you’re in a loving relationship, you and the other person can be a true home for each other. In Vietnamese, the nickname for a person’s life partner is “my home.”

If you and your partner both want to do things to relieve the suffering in this world, then your love for each other is connected to your love for others, and it expands exponentially to cover the whole world.

there are four kinds of food that we consume every day. They are: edible food (what we put in our mouths to nourish our bodies), sensory food (what we smell, hear, taste, feel, and touch), volition (the motivation and intention that fuels us), and consciousness (this includes our individual consciousness, the collective consciousness, and our environment).

If we consume toxic magazine articles, movies, or video games, they will feed our craving, our anger, and our fear. If we set aside time each day to be in a peaceful environment, to walk in nature, or even just to look at a flower or the sky, then that beauty will penetrate us and feed our love and our joy.

If you’re motivated by compassion and love, your volition will give you the energy and direction to grow and become even more loving and compassionate. However, if your desire is to possess or to win at all costs, this kind of volition is toxic and will not help your love to grow.

Our individual consciousness is influenced by the collective consciousness of our environment. We absorb and reflect what is around us. If we live in a place where people are angry and violent, then eventually we’ll become like them. If we live in a family or community where there’s a culture of being understanding and compassionate with each other, we’ll naturally be more peaceful and loving.

I propose that they set up a regularly structured time of deep listening to help them stay happy together. Deep listening is, most of all, the practice of being present for our loved one. We have to be truly present for the person we love.