How To Love

by Thich Nhat Hanh

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.

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

When you know how to generate joy, it nourishes you and nourishes the other person. Your presence is an offering, like fresh air, or spring flowers, or the bright blue sky.

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.

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

True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself and for the other person.

You have to accept yourself as you are.

As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful.

Body and mind are not two separate entities. What happens in the body will have an effect on the mind and vice versa.

Spirituality is a practice that brings relief, communication, and transformation.

With a spiritual practice, you’re no longer afraid.

There are three kinds of intimacy: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

We want to be in harmony with someone. When an intimate relationship contains all three elements, then physical intimacy is more meaningful and can be very healthy and healing.

Sexual activity without love is called empty sex.

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.

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

To keep our commitment to our partner, and to weather the most difficult storms, we need strong roots.

A juniper tree has its roots planted deep in the heart of the earth. As a result it is solid and strong.

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

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.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.

Practice conscious breathing when things are going well with your partner, then it will be there for you when things get hard.

When your loved one is talking, practice listening deeply. Sometimes the other person will say something that surprises us, that is the opposite of the way we see things. Allow the other person to speak freely. Don’t cut your loved one off or criticize their words.

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

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.

Sometimes a kind word is enough to help someone blossom like a flower.

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.

Recognizing our habits and smiling to them is the practice of appropriate mental attention, which helps us create new and more beneficial neural pathways.

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 love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less.

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.

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 h...

In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination.

In true love, both happiness and suffering are no longer individual matters.

Become yourself one hundred percent.

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

whenever we have a perception, we have to ask ourselves if our perception is right.

To love each other means to trust each other.

We need to be able to get help from the person we love.

Taking care of yourself, you can support your loved one and reestablish the joy in your relationship.

Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong.

Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love.

When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for.

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.

“The most important thing for you to do is to look deeply into yourself, to see if there is something that is still an obstacle for you. Is there anyone with whom you haven’t reconciled?

Reconciliation can also be with your own self. If you don’t reconcile with yourself, happiness with another person is impossible.