How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials, #3)

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.

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.

This reminds me talking about how much we missed cuddling

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.

Everyone knows that blaming and arguing never help; but we forget.

Other people’s actions are the result of their own pain and not the result of any intention to hurt you.

We think we need someone else to lean on, to take refuge in, and to diminish our suffering. We want to be the object of another person’s attention and contemplation. We want someone who will look at us and embrace our feeling of emptiness and suffering with his energy of mindfulness. Soon we become addicted to that kind of energy; we think that without that attention, we can’t live. It helps us feel less empty and helps us forget the block of suffering inside. When we ourselves can’t generate the energy to take care of ourselves, we think we need the energy of someone else. We focus on the need and the lack rather than generating the energy of mindfulness, concentration, and insight that can heal our suffering and help the other person as well.

If you don’t reconcile with yourself, happiness with another person is impossible.

Even if the person with whom you need to reconcile is very far away, you can still do the work of reconciliation now. What is important is to reconcile within your own heart and mind. If reconciliation is done within, that is enough. Because the effect of that reconciliation will be felt everywhere later on. Even if the person you want to reconcile with refuses to respond, or even if she’s already dead, reconciliation is still possible. 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.

Every one of us is trying to find our true home. Some of us are still searching. Our true home is inside, but it’s also in our loved ones around us. 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.” So, for example, if a man is asked, “Where is your wife?” he might say, “My home is now at the post office.” If a guest said to the woman, “That meal was delicious; who cooked it?” she might answer, “My home prepared the meal,” meaning “My husband cooked the dinner.”

Once you know how to come home to yourself, then you can open your home to other people, because you have something to offer. The other person has to do exactly the same thing if they are to have something to offer you. Otherwise, they will have nothing to share but their loneliness, sickness, and suffering. This can’t help heal you at all. The other person has to heal themselves and get warm inside, so that they will

When our bodies are very close, we feel it will relieve this loneliness. But if we don’t share our aspirations and what’s in our hearts, then even if we live together or have children together, we can still feel very alone.

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self.

One of the greatest gifts we can offer people is to embody nonattachment and nonfear.

For true love to be there, you need to feel complete in yourself, not needing something from outside.

Don’t say, “Love, compassion, joy, and equanimity are the way that saints love, so since I’m not a saint, I can’t possibly love that way.” The Buddha was a human being, and he practiced as we do. At first, love can be tainted with attachment, possessiveness, and the desire to control. But with the practice of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, we can transform these hindrances and have a love that is spacious, all-encompassing, and marvelous.

You are not a victim of illusion because you know that you’re not perfect. And when another person criticizes you, you can also say, “You are partly right.”

May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not be indifferent.