How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials, #3)

by Thich Nhat Hanh

UNDERSTANDING IS THE NATURE OF LOVE 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.

RECOGNIZING TRUE LOVE True love gives us beauty, freshness, solidity, freedom, and peace. True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive. If we don’t feel this way when we feel love, then it’s not true love.

REVERENCE IS THE NATURE OF OUR LOVE There’s a tradition in Asia of treating your partner with the respect you would accord a guest. This is true even if you have been with your loved one for a long time. The other person always deserves your full respect. Reverence is the nature of our love.

The moment love stops growing, it begins to die. It’s like a tree; if a tree stops growing, it begins to die. We can learn how to feed our love and help it continue to grow.

Love is a living, breathing thing. There is no need to force it to grow in a particular direction. If we start by being easy and gentle with ourselves, we will find it is just there inside of us, solid and healing.

DISTRACTIONS Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.

True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In Sanskrit, these are, maitri, karuna, mudita, and upeksha.

If your love contains these elements, it will be healing and transforming, and it will have the element of holiness in it. True love has the power to heal and transform any situation and bring deep meaning to our lives.

When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is not yet love. Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature. You are part of the universe; you are made 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. True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself and for the other person.

Hugging meditation is a combination of East and West. According to the practice, you have to really hug the person you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms, not just for the sake of appearances, patting him on the back to pretend you are there, but 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.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into that person and she will be nourished and bloom like a flower.

Spirituality doesn’t mean a blind belief in a spiritual teaching. Spirituality is a practice that brings relief, communication, and transformation. Everyone needs a spiritual dimension in life. Without a spiritual dimension, it’s very challenging to be with the daily difficulties we all encounter. With a spiritual practice, you’re no longer afraid. Along with your physical body, you have a spiritual body. 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.

Sexual desire is not love. Sexual activity without love is called empty sex. If you satisfy your body but don’t satisfy your heart and your mind, are you satisfied? Do you feel whole and connected? When your body, heart, and mind are satisfied, sexual intimacy connects you more deeply with yourself and your partner.

The basis of loving someone else is to know yourself and to know what you need. I know a woman who suffered very much because she couldn’t say “no.” From the time she was young, whenever a man asked her for something, she felt she had to say “yes” even when she didn’t want to. 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.

SHARING THE SAME ASPIRATION In a relationship, when you and your partner share the same kind of aspiration, you become one, and you become an instrument of love and peace in the world. You begin as a community of two people, and then you can grow your community. In the practice center where I live, there are over a hundred of us. We have the same concerns, the same desires, and the same future. 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. That person may be our partner, our friend, our sibling, or our child. You can ask, “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.

LIBERATION FROM COMPLEXES Often we can’t love ourselves or others fully when we’re stuck in our own complexes. When you have an inferiority complex, you have low self-esteem, and this is a kind of sickness. High self-esteem is also a sickness, because you consider yourself to be above others and that causes suffering as well. Although equality is something good, it can also be a complex. 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. Real liberty is freedom from all these complexes.

A TRUE PARTNER We tend to wonder if we have enough to offer in a relationship. We’re thirsty for truth, goodness, compassion, spiritual beauty, so we go looking outside. Sometimes we think we’ve found a partner who embodies all that is good, beautiful, and true. After a time, we usually discover that we’ve had a wrong perception of that person, and we become disappointed. A true partner or friend is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you’ve been seeking.

JOY IS HEALING If a relationship can’t provide joy, then it’s not true love. If you keep making the other person cry all day, that’s not true love. Offer only the things that can make the other person happy. You should know the real needs of that person. Practice and learn how to generate a feeling of joy, a feeling of happiness with your in-breath, your out-breath, and your steps. If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment—whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day—can be a moment of joy.

Learn to nourish yourself and the other person with joy. Are you able to make the other person smile? Are you able to increase her confidence and enthusiasm? If you’re not able to do these small things for her, how can you say you love her? Sometimes a kind word is enough to help someone blossom like a flower.

As long as we’re rejecting ourselves and causing harm to our bodies and minds, there’s no point in talking about loving and accepting others. With mindfulness, we can recognize our habitual ways of thinking and the contents of our thoughts. Sometimes our thoughts run around in circles and we’re engulfed in distrust, pessimism, conflict, sorrow, or jealousy. This state of mind will naturally manifest in our words and actions and cause harm to us and to others. When we shed the light of mindfulness on our habitual thought patterns, we see them clearly. Recognizing our habits and smiling to them is the practice of appropriate mental attention, which helps us create new and more beneficial neural pathways.

LOVER AS HEALER The Sanskrit word karuna is often translated as “compassion.” Compassion means to “suffer with” another person, to share their suffering. Karuna is much more than that. It’s the capacity to remove and transform suffering, not just to share it. When you go to a doctor, it doesn’t help if she just shares your suffering. A doctor has to help heal the suffering. 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.

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.

Here are three sentences that may help. First: “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.” Memorize these sentences. Or write them on a small piece of paper, the size of a credit card, and put it in your wallet. Then when you’re angry, you can take it out, and you will know exactly what to do.