Fear and Love

 

Audre Lorde

https://insig.ht/N2WK1BnKC5b

Ancient Language - Hannah Stephenson

 

https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2015/10/hannah-stephenson-ancient-language.html

Ancient Language by Hannah Stephenson 

If you stand at the edge of the forest

and stare into it 

every tree at the edge will blow a little extra 

oxygen toward you 

It has been proven 

leaves have admitted it. 

The pines I have known 

have been especially candid 

One said 

that all breath in this world 

is roped together.

that breathing 

is the most ancient language.

Support for the living and the dying

What to Say to Someone Who Is Dying

Renshin Bunce on presence, listening, and the words that truly bring comfort.

Renshin Bunce

28 November 2025

When the doctor sent my mother home to die, I went with her even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. In those days, hospice offered little support beyond a weekly nurse visit. I moved in, kept my mother clean, took care of her cat, made smoothies for her as long as she was able to swallow, and stood back when my aunt and sister came and went. I often told her I loved her.

But I made one mistake. When the nurse told me my mother would die that day and then left us alone, I laid down next to her and said that she didn’t have to be afraid, because God was waiting for her in heaven. We weren’t religious, and it rang false even then. I said it because I didn’t know what else to say.

A decade later, I left my conventional life and moved into a Zen monastery where I ordained as a priest. And a decade after that, back out in the world, I found work as a hospice chaplain. No one can teach you how to be a chaplain, so in learning what to say to dying people, and finding the courage to open my mouth and let words come out, I found my own experience to be my best teacher. I moved from wanting a person or a book to tell me exactly what to do and say, to contemplating for myself: What is this person really asking? What would I want, if I were them? What is helpful? 

For some decades, death was hidden in hospitals behind closed curtains, turned over to the experts as if it were a failure, so my hospice patients were often surprised to learn that this time they weren’t going to get better. I believe that understanding what’s happening makes it easier to accept, and that acceptance is the key to grace, so I tried to talk openly with them. I used qualifiers, such as “just in case” or “if the doctors can’t find any more treatments,” to cushion the news that death was approaching. 

It’s harder to listen than to talk, and my meditation practice helped me pay attention, to discern whether the information I was delivering was useful or hurtful, whether I should continue or whether I should back off and rest in platitudes. It was up to my patients. My only job was to not turn away.

I’d been a chaplain for about a year the first time I talked directly with someone about his death. By that time, I’d seen enough to have an idea of how his death was likely to go and had visited him enough times that there was trust between us. One afternoon when we were alone in his darkened hospital room, I asked whether he wanted to talk about his dying. He was eager to hear what I had to say. He was very old and worn out and had been bedridden for months, so I felt safe in telling him that watching death is like watching the lights go out gradually in a large house, one at a time, until the building is dark. I told him that his death would probably be like that, a fading away, and that he probably wouldn’t feel pain or even distress. He was grateful and, as it turned out, his wife and daughter told me that his death was indeed gentle, and my talking about it with him was the kindest thing I could have done. 

Many people struggle to hold on to life. When death approaches, they grow restless and agitated. They fight. Sometimes what people need to know is that their job of waking up one more day, no matter what their circumstances are, is over. They can relax. 

I found something useful to say when I told a dying woman, “You know, this is only going one way. The doctors say they’ve done all they can do, and you’re probably not going to get well this time. You have before, but not now.” Another thing I said, because that’s what I would want to hear, was “You are safe.” 

What I’d tell a lot of people is that curiosity about death can replace fear. I’d say, “This is just death. You’re okay. I mean, I know that’s easy for me to say. You’re the one who’s doing it, not me, but this is the very natural thing that we all know is coming. It’s just coming soon for you.

“We’re afraid of death because we think we’re separate, and we have to keep our walls up. There’s something else going on, though, and I think you already know about it—you’re a part of the universe and will never be separate from that no matter what happens to your body. It’ll help if you can remember that you’re connected.

“And there’s something else I’ve heard about working with the fear of death. I heard this in a talk from a great American Zen master. He said his wife was dying and that she was facing it with an attitude of curiosity, asking over and over, ‘What is this?’ If you’re engaging with curiosity, there’s no room for fear.”

There were times when words weren’t possible. My patient Catherine had outlived her friends and her money, so she was living in a sad facility. She was cheerful and well-liked, and such staff as there were, were glad she had a regular visitor at last. The only time I heard her complain was when she said she’d been left in a dirty diaper for hours over the weekend. When we first met, she was nearly deaf, so I would slowly shout answers to her questions. As her hearing became worse, even that was impossible, so I’d ask her to tell me stories about her childhood and settle back and listen. We became friends. By the time death was near, when it was clear she was down to her final hours, the only way I could offer comfort was to sit by her bed and put my hand on her arm to let her know she wasn’t alone. I believe she knew I was there, and I believe it was enough.

Ira Byock, an expert on death and dying who has written many books, says we should tell dying people four things: “Please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “Thank you,” and “I love you.”

Although those words don’t come naturally to many of us, they need to be said, either with words or actions. When patients’ families asked me what they should do, when it was clear that their loved one was going through the final hours of life, what I could tell them with confidence is that their job was to love. I’d join them in prayer if they were Christian. If they asked me to beg God for healing, I’d suggest acceptance instead. Many of my patients were not practicing Christians, yet they also wanted some spiritual reassurance. They often asked me where I thought we’d go after death, and I always said I didn’t know. “Sit with your mother and love her,” I’d say. “Let her know she’s not alone, and that her work here is finished. That’s what she needs now.”  

One day when I was visiting in a large facility, I entered a long corridor and heard someone repeating, “Hello? Hello? Hello?” I saw an old lady standing in an open door, leaning on her walker and calling out. I went to her and introduced myself and soon realized that she was blind and her talking watch had been mis-set and was telling her it was time for dinner when it was only mid-afternoon. We went into her room and chatted for a bit. I was able to use my phone to find instructions for setting the watch, and I took care of that. But for me, the time and the dinner weren’t the point. The loneliness was, the calling out for help into the silence.

She was giving voice to what we all feel, what we all need: “Hello? Am I alone? Does anybody see me?” In death and in life, the one best thing there is for us to say to each other, however long we might have between this day and our death, is “I see you. You’re not alone.” 

If I had my mother’s death to do over, knowing what I know now, I’d do just what I did then, except for that one thing I said at the time of her dying that I can’t take back. We had already offered and received forgiveness and gratitude. So, I’d only say I love you, again and again, letting those be the final words she would hear as she left this life.

Sitting Vigil

 Sitting Vigil

 

Can you sit awhile with me.

Simply sit with me,

knowing that there is so little that you can do

to ease my pain,

to make me well,

to keep me alive.

And know that the distance between us,

the well one and the ill one,

the one now enjoying life

with little of the oppression of the body,

the other in the strangle hold 

of what can go wrong

with the sweet rhythm of life,

is not so great.

That we are simply in different phases of

the same dance of life.

And that the distance between us is nothing.

Nothing compared to the closeness 

of this shared experience.

And be comforted by the fact

that all I need is knowing 

that you can somehow tolerate

your helplessness, and mine.

All I need.

Can you sit awhile with me.

 

                                                                                   Michael Shea

 

https://insig.ht/e3nbiYEgIQb

Hugh Byrne - Untangling the Tangles

 Live Session Summary, Sunday, September 8, 2024: It was good to be with you yesterday for our Live session. The focus of the session was ‘Untangling the tangles of our life…’ 

Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from today’s Live session:

I began by sharing the sutta, or talk/discourse, from the Buddha that is known in the Pali language as the Jata Sutta, and in English as the discourse on ‘The Tangle.’ For the first five hundred years after the Buddha’s death (c 483 BCE), the Buddha’s teachings were passed down by being chanted by monks and nuns until they were first written down on palm leaves in the Pali language 2,000 years ago in what is today Sri Lanka. This discourse has the simplicity and directness to suggest that it is an original teaching of the Buddha, rather than having embellishments added after his death.

In the discourse a Brahmin visits the Buddha and asks one question about the entanglements of this human existence. He says, “A tangle within, a tangle without, people are tangled in a tangle. Master Gotama (the Buddha’s family name), I ask you this, who can untangle this tangle?”

The Buddha responded, implicitly affirming the underlying premise of the question—that getting ‘tangled’ is inherent in this human condition, until we find a way out. And he responded directly by saying that a person who lives ethically and compassionately, trains their mind, and cultivates insight and wisdom can untangle the tangle. Those who train their minds through practicing the Noble Eightfold Path (the fourth of the noble truths) can untangle the tangle and live free from suffering. 

In the talk I emphasized that while the specific conditions of people living 2,000 plus years ago in India were very different from our own, nonetheless, our entanglements are not fundamentally different from those of this earlier time. The reason for this similarity and continuity lies in the fact that the Brahmin—and the Buddha—were addressing something –the truth of suffering—that is inherent in the human condition and that is elaborated in the Buddha’s four noble truths.

The state of being ‘entangled’ or caught in a tangle can be understood as a metaphor for suffering: We all experience suffering (the first noble truth)—in unpleasant experiences, loss, aging, sickness, death, etc., until we find a way out of suffering. Our suffering is caused by craving/clinging—essentially, wanting our experience to be different than it is (this is the second noble truth, that suffering is caused by clinging), for example, getting caught up in—or entangled in—anger, fear, greed, judgment, blame, resistance to the way things are. 

When we bring awareness to our experience through wise effort, mindfulness, and concentration—elements of the fourth noble truth, the path to the end of suffering—we can let go of clinging and experience freedom from suffering, the third noble truth, the end of suffering.  

I invited participants to reflect on where they experience suffering, or entanglement, in their own life—and how, by bringing awareness in the present moment to their direct experience, letting go of mental stories or narratives about how things ‘should’ be right now, they can experience greater freedom in life.

I shared a quote from the psychologist Carl Jung, “What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.” In other words, if we don’t bring awareness to our experience, we will continue to act out unskillful and reactive habit patterns that keep us tied to suffering, to entanglement. 

I also shared Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron’s metaphor of being ‘hooked,’ a translation of the Tibetan word shenpa, which she frames as like having an itch and the urge to scratch the itch. She gives as examples the “urge to smoke that cigarette, the urge to overeat, to have one more drink, to say something cruel or to tell a lie.” (Chodron, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears)

I stressed that an event or situation, or the way someone acts towards us, or a loss is not in itself suffering—many people, including ourselves, have had ‘bad’ or ‘difficult’ things happen to them but without it leading to suffering. The event, situation, etc. is like a first arrow that is often not easy or pleasant, but only becomes ‘suffering’ in the Buddhist understanding when we add our resistance to this; this is like adding a ‘second arrow,’ for example, the arrow of anger, blame, judgment, etc. 

This understanding that suffering lies in the resistance, or second arrow, is conveyed in the common Buddhist spiritual axiom, that ‘pain is inevitable [part of the territory of being human, or sentient]; suffering is optional’ [coming from our own resistance or lack of awareness]. 

As the Buddha says in the discourse on ‘The Tangle,’ through training the mind we can find our way out of suffering and live a life completely free of suffering. And, if we don’t realize or attain complete freedom, we can, in the words of Thai forest meditation teacher Ajahn Chah, “Let go a little and you’ll experience a little freedom; let go a lot and you’ll experience a lot of freedom; let go completely and you’ll experience complete freedom. Your struggle with the world will be at an end.” The training of the Buddhist path is to end suffering, to untangle the tangle. 

I shared the poem ‘There was a time I would reject those…’ by Muhyiddin Ibn al ‘Arabi; and ‘I live my life in widening circles’ by Rainer Maria Rilke.

I hope this summary is helpful. Have a good week and see you on Sunday, October 22, at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻

There was a time I would reject those

who were not of my faith.

But now. my heart has grown capable

of taking on all forms.

It is a pasture for gazelles,

an abbey for monks,

a table for the Torah,

Kaaba for the pilgrim.

My religion is love.

Which ever the route love's caravan shall take,

That shall be the path of my faith.    

~ Muhyidden Ibn Al-'Arabi

Limbic System & Love & Connection

 

FROM THE ARCHIVE | Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human relationships. It is a cruelty of life that, along the way, people who once appeared fitted to the task crumble in character when the going gets hard in that natural way hardship has of visiting all human lives. When relationships collapse under the weight of life, the crash is not merely psychological but physiological — something less and less surprising as we learn more and more about consciousness as a full-body phenomenon beyond the brain. A quarter century ago, the pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg began demonstrating how relationships affect our immune system. But there is no system they impact more profoundly than the limbic: our neurophysiological command center of emotion — something psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore throughout their revelatory book A General Theory of Love (public library), which also gave us their insight into music, the neural harmonics of emotion, and how love recomposes the brain. Art by Maurice Sendak from a vintage children’s book by Janice May Urdy. The profound disruption of relationship rupture, they observe, is related to our earliest attachments and the way our system processes separation from our primary caregivers — a primal response not singular to the human animal: Take a puppy away from his mother, place him alone in a wicker pen, and you will witness the universal mammalian reaction to the rupture of an attachment bond — a reflection of the limbic architecture mammals share. Short separations provoke an acute response known as protest, while prolonged separations yield the physiologic state of despair. A lone puppy first enters the protest phase. He paces tirelessly, scanning his surroundings from all vantage points, barking, scratching vainly at the floor. He makes energetic and abortive attempts at scaling the walls of his prison, tumbling into a heap with each failure. He lets out a piteous whine, high-pitched and grating. Every aspect of his behavior broadcasts his distress, the same discomfort that all social mammals show when deprived of those to whom they are attached. Even young rats evidence protest: when their mother is absent they emit nonstop ultrasonic cries, a plaintive chorus inaudible to our dull ape ears. Behaviorally and psychologically, the despair phase begins when fretfulness, which can manifest as anxiety in humans, collapses into lethargy — a condition that often accompanies depression. But abrupt and prolonged separation produces something much more than psychological havoc — it unleashes a full-system somatic shock. Various studies have demonstrated that cardiovascular function, hormone levels, and immune response are all disrupted. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon capture the result unambiguously: Relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain… Prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness. But harrowing as this reality of intimacy and its ruptures may be, it also intimates something wonderfully assuring in its mirror-image — just like painful relationships can so dysregulate us, healthy relationships can regulate us and recalibrate our limbic system, forged in our earliest attachments. The solution to the eternal riddle of trust emerges as both banal and profound — simply the practice of continually refining our discernment about character and cultivating intimate relationships of the kind life’s hard edges cannot rupture, with people who are the human equivalent not of poison but of medicine, and endeavoring to become such people ourselves for the emotional ecosystems of those we love. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write: A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure. […] Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. This might sound simple, almost simplistic, but it is one of the most difficult and redemptive arts of living — for, lest we forget, “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” Complement with Alain de Botton on the psychological Möbius strip that keeps us in unhealthy relationships (and how to break it) and David Whyte on the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, then revisit Hannah Arendt on what forgiveness really means. FORWARD TO A FRIEND/READ ONLINE/ donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.   one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. KINDRED READINGS: Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity * * * How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment * * * Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship * * * ALSO THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK

Time is....

 
Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is Eternity.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/20/time-is/

Verse by Rumi

I prayed for change, so I changed my mind.

I prayed for guidance and learned to trust myself.

I prayed for happiness and realized I am not my ego.

I prayed for peace and learned to accept others unconditionally.

I prayed for abundance and realized my doubt kept it out.

I prayed for wealth and realized it is my health.

I prayed for a miracle and realized I am the miracle.

I prayed for a soul mate and realized I am the One.

I prayed for love and realized it’s always knocking, but I have to allow it in.

~Rumi 💕

Love, love and objects

 

“In love, even objects are elevated to life. The Sun,Moon & the entire creation becomes alive. When there is no love, even people become objects.”

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

 

What I Learned From My Mother

BY JULIA KASDORF

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Reprinted from Sleeping Preacher, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, by permission of the publisher. First printed in West Branch, Vol. 30, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Julia Kasdorf.

Source: Sleeping Preacher (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992)

• • 
    

Deep breathing

How to Be a Bodhisattva - Lion's Roar

How to Be a Bodhisattva - Lion's Roar

It may seem like an unattainable ideal, but you can start right now as a bodhisattva-in-training. All you need is the aspiration to put others first and some inspiration from helpful guides like the Buddhist teachers found here.

“Hands of Compassion” by Mayumi Oda.

Everyone Is Your Guest

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on your life as a future bodhisattva

Many Mahayana scriptures speak of inviting all sentient beings as our guests. When we invite a guest, we have a sense of the importance of that relationship. Guests are usually fed specially cooked food and receive extra hospitality. The life of a bodhisattva is relating with all sentient beings as guests. The bodhisattva invites everyone as a guest, constantly offering a feast.

Inviting all sentient beings as our guests is the starting point of applying compassion in the Mahayana. By viewing sentient beings as guests, the bodhisattva has a constant sense of the impermanence of the relationship, because eventually all guests leave. So we view the time with our guests as precious. There is a sense of the preciousness and the impermanence of the relationship. Our guest may be our husband, our wife, or our child—everybody is the guest of everybody, constantly. On a day to day level, all relationships for a bodhisattva are based on relating with guests.

Just as fish cannot live without water, compassion cannot develop without egolessness.

Compassion is a combination of maitri, or loving-kindness, and generosity. It is a journey outward, a journey of communication. On one level, compassion is feeling friendly toward ourselves. On another level it is experiencing a sense of richness, that we can expand the warmth we feel toward ourselves to other sentient beings.

It is said in the scriptures that just as fish cannot live without water, compassion cannot develop without egolessness and without the experience of emptiness, or shunyata. It may seem that this view of compassion is somewhat abstract, but in fact it is the heart of the practice of meditation in action.

The presence of compassion is experienced as a sudden glimpse, a sense of clarity and warmth simultaneously. According to the scriptures, that glimpse, if you analyze it, takes one-sixtieth of a second. It is so fast and so sharp. The sharpness is the intelligence of the compassion. Compassion also means being open and communicative. It contains warmth.

So, first there is maitri, trusting in the heart.

Second, there is a gap in which you experience the openness of tathagatagarbha, or buddhanature.

Third, there is a sense of communication—having already woken up at that level, there is a sense of freedom to expand and to relate with your actions, whatever you are doing. That seems to be how to develop compassion.

6 Baby Steps to Kindness

The path of compassion, says Judy Lief, starts with stepping out of your usual storyline. Here are five ways to do it.

It is amazing how often we think we are out in the world interacting with and helping others, when actually we are simply acting out our preconceived internal storyline. Our vision is clouded and we can only take in what feeds into our plot line.

One way to soften this pattern is by exploring some basic steps that can lead us in the direction of kindness. Instead of trying to will ourselves to be kind—presto!—we can create an atmosphere congenial to the development of loving-kindness.

Here are five small steps to kindness you can practice. You can explore these steps singularly or in combination. The idea is that if you create the right atmosphere, compassion naturally arises. It is already present, just waiting for your invitation.

1. Settle Down

There has to be a here to be a there, and a connection between the two. So the first step is to slow down and let your mind settle enough that you are able to drop from the heights of conceptuality back into your body, a simple form in space. Can you really feel present, in your body as it is, right where you are?

2. Be in the Moment

Now that you are more solidly somewhere, you can let yourself be more clearly sometime. When your thoughts drift from the past or the future, from memories and regrets to plans and dreams, you can gently bring yourself back to the present moment.

3. Drop Escape Routes

Stay put in this particular place and time, just the way it is.

4. Pay Attention to Space

Notice the quality of space within you and around you. Pay attention to the boundaries of your physical body and the space in front, behind, and on each side of you. Also pay attention to the mental–emotional space that accommodates the comings and goings of sensations, thoughts, moods, and emotional upheavals. Whatever arises on an outer or inner level, notice the space in which both you and your perception rest.

5. Share the Space

Explore what it is like to share this space with whoever is there with you. Notice the power of accommodation, acceptance, and nonjudging. When you sense the arising of territoriality and fear, accommodate that too in greater spaciousness.

6. Alchemy

What ordinary people see as lead, alchemists see as gold in disguise. Like alchemists, we can learn to uncover the gold hidden within our human condition—no matter how conflicted and unpromising we humans often seem to be. Our dramas and fascinations, our obsessions, our loves gained and lost may captivate us, but they are fundamentally ephemeral. However, anything that awakens and touches our hearts even a little bit can open us to the possibility of something more. Within the fluctuating passions of the human realm, we can discover the unwavering force of selfless compassion and loving-kindness.

“Kanzeon & Dolphin” by Mayumi Oda.

You Deserve Compassion Too

Compassion makes no distinction between self and other, says Christina Feldman. Care for your own suffering in the same way you care for others’.

Some people, carrying long histories of a lack of self-worth or denial, find it difficult to extend compassion toward themselves. Aware of the vast suffering in the world, they may feel it is self-indulgent to care for their own aching body, broken heart, or confused mind. Yet this too is suffering, and genuine compassion makes no distinction between self and other.

The path of compassion is cultivated one step and one moment at a time.

The Buddha once said that you could search the whole world and not find anyone more deserving of your love and compassion than yourself. Yet too many people find themselves directing levels of harshness, demand, and judgment inward that they would never dream of directing toward another person, knowing the harm that would be incurred. They are willing to do to themselves what they would not do to others.

The path of compassion is altruistic but not idealistic. Walking this path we are not asked to lay down our life, find a solution for all of the struggles in this world, or immediately rescue all beings. The path of compassion is cultivated one step and one moment at a time. Each of those steps lessens mountains of sorrow in the world.

The Buddha’s Love

Thich Nhat Hanh describes how love for one person becomes love for all.

Question: More than anything else, we want to love and be loved. Why do we find it so difficult to love?

Thich Nhat Hanh: Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generating that kind of energy toward yourself, it is very difficult to take care of another person. In the Buddhist teaching, it’s clear that to love oneself is the foundation of the love of other people. Love is a practice. Love is truly a practice.

Why don’t we love ourselves?

We may have a habit within ourselves of looking for happiness elsewhere than in the here and the now. We may lack the capacity to realize that happiness is possible in the here and now, that we already have enough conditions to be happy right now. To go home to the present moment, to take care of oneself, to get in touch with the wonders of life that are really available—that is already love. Love is to be kind to yourself, to be compassionate to yourself, to generate images of joy, and to look at everyone with eyes of equanimity and nondiscrimination.

When people love each other, the distinction, the limits, the frontier between them begins to dissolve, and they become one with the person they love.

As you progress on the path of insight into non-self, the happiness brought to you by love will increase. When people love each other, the distinction, the limits, the frontier between them begins to dissolve, and they become one with the person they love. There’s no longer any jealousy or anger, because if they are angry at the other person, they are angry at themselves. That is why non-self is not a theory, a doctrine, or an ideology, but a realization that can bring about a lot of happiness.

You have written about a woman you loved deeply a long time ago. At this point in your life, do you regret not being with her?

That love has never been lost. It has continued to grow. To love someone, if it is true love, is a very wonderful opportunity for you to love everyone. In the insight of non-self, you see that the object of your love is always there and the love continues to grow. Nothing is lost and you don’t regret anything, because if you have true love in you, then you and your true love are going in the same direction, and each day you are able to embrace, more and more.

So to love one person is a great opportunity for you to love many more. That nourishes you, that nourishes the other person, and finally your love will have no limit. That is the Buddha’s love.

“I Will Be With You” by Mayumi Oda.

Unbearable Compassion

For our compassion to be effective, says Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, it must be as unbearable as the world’s suffering is.

Our compassion must have a broad focus, including not only ourselves and those close to us but all sentient beings. All beings want to be happy and free of suffering, yet most sentient beings experience only suffering and cannot obtain happiness. Just as we have a desire to clear away the suffering in our own experience and to enjoy happiness, we come to see through meditating on compassion that all other beings have this desire as well.

When we practice, we must bring our meditation on compassion to the deepest level possible. We must reflect on the intense suffering of sentient beings in all six realms of samsara. Reflecting on our connection to these beings, we must engender a compassion that cannot bear their suffering any longer.

To make our compassion strong, we need the path.

This great, unbearable compassion is extremely important. Without it, we might feel a compassionate sensation in our minds from time to time, but this will not bring forth the full power of compassion. But when we witness with unbearable compassion the suffering of sentient beings, we immediately seek out ways to free them from that suffering. We are unfazed by complications and doubts; our actions for the benefit of others are effortless and free from doubt.

To make our compassion strong, we need the path. We already have compassion, wisdom, and many other positive qualities, yet our mental afflictions are stronger than these most of the time. It is as if the afflictions have locked all of our positive qualities away in a box.

One day, when we open that box and all of our good qualities spring forth, we will not have to go looking for our compassion. We will discover that compassion is present in our minds spontaneously, and a wealth of excellent qualities will become available to us.

Toward a Culture of Love

Love is the ultimate transgression, bell hooks argues. Its transformative power can shatter the status quo.

To work for peace and justice we begin with the individual practice of love, because it is there that we can experience firsthand love’s transformative power. Attending to the damaging impact of abuse in many of our childhoods helps us cultivate the mind of love. Abuse is always about lovelessness, and if we grow into our adult years without knowing how to love, how then can we create social movements that will end domination, exploitation, and oppression?

To begin the practice of love we must slow down and be still enough to bear witness in the present moment. If we accept that love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we can then be guided by this understanding. We can use these skillful means as a map in our daily life to determine right action.

To be transformed by the practice of love is to be born again, to experience spiritual renewal.

When we cultivate the mind of love, we are, as Sharon Salzberg says, “cultivating the good,” and that means “recovering the incandescent power of love that is present as a potential in all of us” and using “the tools of spiritual practice to sustain our real, moment-to-moment experience of that vision.”

To be transformed by the practice of love is to be born again, to experience spiritual renewal. What I witness daily is the longing for that renewal and the fear that our lives will be changed utterly if we choose love. That fear paralyzes. It leaves us stuck in the place of suffering.

When we commit to love in our daily life, habits are shattered. Because we no longer are playing by the safe rules of the status quo, love moves us to a new ground of being. We are necessarily working to end domination. This movement is what most people fear. If we are to galvanize the collective longing for spiritual well-being that is found in the practice of love, we must be more willing to identify the forms that longing will take in daily life.

Folks need to know the ways we change and are changed when we love. It is only by bearing concrete witness to love’s transformative power in our daily lives that we can assure those who are fearful that commitment to love will be redemptive, a way to experience salvation.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

ABOUT THICH NHAT HANH

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) was a renowned Zen teacher and poet, the founder of the Engaged Buddhist movement, and the founder of nine monastic communities, including Plum Village Monastery in France. He was also the author of At Home in the World, The Other Shore, and more than a hundred other books that have sold millions of copies worldwide.

ABOUT CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1940-1987) is recognized for playing a pivotal role in the transmission of genuine Buddhadharma to the West. One of the first Tibetan Buddhist teachers to come to America, he established Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and an organization of some 200 meditation centers worldwide known as Shambhala International. In addition to his best selling books on the Buddhist teachings, including Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and The Myth of Freedom, he is the author of two books on the Shambhala warrior tradition: Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala.

ABOUT JUDY LIEF

Judy Lief is a Buddhist teacher and the editor of many books of teachings by the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She is the author of Making Friends with Death. Her teachings and new podcast, “Dharma Glimpses,” are available at judylief.com.

ABOUT BELL HOOKS

bell hooks (1952-2021) described herself as a "Black woman intellectual, revolutionary activist." A leading cultural critic and thinker about such issues as feminism and race, bell hooks published more than 30 books, including All About Love: New Visions.

ABOUT CHRISTINA FELDMAN

Christina Feldman is the author of Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World. She is cofounder and a guiding teacher at Gaia House, a Buddhist meditation center in Devon, England, and a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

ABOUT THE KARMAPA

His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje is the head of the 900-year-old Karma Kagyu Lineage and guide to millions of Buddhists around the world. The Karmapa resides in his temporary home at Gyuto Monastery in India after making a dramatic escape from Tibet in the year 2000. Traveling the world, the Karmapa teaches traditional Tibetan Buddhist teachings, while also advocating topics such as environmental care, feminism, and more.

TOPICS: bell hooks, Bodhisattva, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Judy Lief, Middle-home, Plum Village Tradition / Order of Interbeing, Shambhala, Shambhala Sun - Jan '15, Shantideva, Teachings, Thich Nhat Hanh, Vows