Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Forgiveness is a personal process that doesn’t depend on us having direct contact with the people who have hurt us.

The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are.

We’re capable of much more than mediocrity, much more than merely getting by in this world.

Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.

Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.

When we don’t tell those we love about what’s really going on or listen carefully to what they have to say, we tend to fill in the blanks with stories.

If we truly loved ourselves, we’d never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

Self-compassion is like a muscle. The more we practice flexing it, especially when life doesn’t go exactly according to plan (a frequent scenario for most of us), the stronger and more resilient our compassion muscle becomes.

Trying to impose our personal agenda on someone else’s experience is the shadow side of love, while real love recognizes that life unfolds at its own pace.

Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That’s life. That’s human nature.

Meditation can be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love

For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.

We cannot simply forgive and forget, nor should we.

With mindfulness, loving kindness, and self-compassion, we can begin to let go of our expectations about how life and those we love should be.

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences—good and bad alike—are opportunities to learn and grow.

You are a person worthy of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that.

The combination of realizing our distinctiveness along with our unity is seeing interdependence.

Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

Letting go is an inside job, something only we can do for ourselves.

Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.

This is why clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier to real love for ourselves. Perfection is a brittle state that generates a lot of anxiety, because achieving and maintaining unwavering standards—whether they’re internal or external—means we’re always under threat. We become focused on avoiding failure, and love for the self cannot be a refuge because it has become too conditional, too dependent on performance. As Oscar Wilde said in his play An Ideal Husband, “It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.” And that means every last one of us.

Kindness is really at the core of what it means to be and feel alive.

With a clear intention and a willing spirit, sooner or later we experience the joy and freedom that arises when we recognize our common humanity with others and see that real love excludes no one.

It is awareness of both our shared pain and our longing for happiness that links us to other people and helps us to turn toward them with compassion.

Forgiveness can be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime.