True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart

In true love, you attain freedom.

I am determined to practice deep listening. I am determined to practice loving speech.

Being rich is an obstacle to loving. When you are rich, you want to continue to be rich, and so you end up devoting all your time, all your energy, in your daily life to stay rich.

Life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now.

This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. If a person does not know what hunger is, he or she will never know the joy of eating every day. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness.

To love is to recognize ; to be loved is to be recognized by the other

In true love, you attain freedom. When you love, you bring freedom to the person you love. If the opposite is true, it is not true love. You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free. (p.4, Shambhala Publications)

The Buddha said this: "The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself." If you are not able to take care of yourself, if you are not able to accept yourself, how could you accept another person and how could you love him or her?

Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply. I think, therefore I am really not there.

The third element of love is mudita, joy. True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.

be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other is the second step. To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other.

The object of your practice should first of all be yourself. Your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself.

The most precious gift you can give someone to the one you love is your true presence

Buddhist meditation is based on the principle of nonduality. This means that if we are mindfulness, if we are love, we are also ignorance, we are also suffering, and there is no reason to suppress anything at all.

ACCORDING TO BUDDHISM, THERE ARE four elements of true love. The first is maitri, which can be translated as lovingkindness or benevolence. Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer. Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha. If a husband, for example, does not understand his wife’s deepest troubles, her deepest aspirations, if he does not understand her suffering, he will not be able to love her in the right way. Without understanding, love is an impossible thing. What must we do in order to understand a person? We must have time; we must practice looking deeply into this person. We must be there, attentive; we must observe, we must look deeply. And the fruit of this looking deeply is called understanding. Love is a true thing if it is made up of a substance called understanding. The second element of true love is compassion, karuna. This is not only the desire to ease the pain of another person, but the ability to do so. You must practice deep looking in order to gain a good understanding of the nature of the suffering of this person, in order to be able to help him or her to change. Knowledge and understanding are always at the root of the practice. The practice of understanding is the practice of meditation. To meditate is to look deeply into the heart of things. The third element of true love is joy, mudita. If there is no joy in love, it is not true love. If you are suffering all the time, if you cry all the time, and if you make the person you love cry, this is not really love—it is even the opposite. If there is no joy in your love, you can be sure that it is not true love.

With our eyes in good condition, a paradise of forms and colors is available to us. There are people who have lost their sight, and they live in darkness. And they think, they very profoundly believe, that if anybody could help them get their sight back, this would be like entering paradise, the paradise of forms and colors. And we do have our eyes in good functioning order and we really are in a paradise of forms and colors. But without mindfulness, we forget that. Your eyes are already one of the basic conditions of your happiness, and mindfulness helps you to touch one of those conditions.

When we talk about the theology of 'God is Dead,' this means that the notion of God must be dead in order for God to reveal himself as a reality. The theologians, if they only use concepts, and not direct experience, are not very helpful. The same goes for nirvana, which is something to be touched and lived and not discussed and described. We have notions that distort truth, reality. A Zen master said the following to a large assembly: 'My friends, every time I use the word Buddha, I suffer. I am allergic to it. Every time I do it, I have to go to the bathroom and rinse my mouth three times in succession.' He said this in order to help his disciples not to get caught up in the notion of Buddha. The Buddha is one thing, but the notion of Buddha is another.

I think, therefore I am really not there.

Caring for yourself, reestablishing peace in yourself, is the basic condition for helping someone else. So that the other can stop being a bomb, a source of pain for ourselves and others, you really have to help him to defuse the bomb. To be able to provide help, we have to have a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion in ourselves.

we are joy, but we are also pain; we are understanding, but we are also ignorance

mindfulness is not something that is only done in a meditation hall; it is also done in the kitchen, in the garden, when we are on the telephone, when we are driving a car, when we are doing the dishes.

Fear is born from our ignorance, from our concepts regarding life, death, being, and nonbeing. If we are able to get rid of all these concepts by touching the reality within ourselves, then nonfear will be there and the greatest relief will become possible. For the Buddhist it is necessary to transcend the notions of birth and death because those notions do not apply to reality. This is equally true with regard to the notions of being and nonbeing. For the Buddhist, to be or not to be is not really the question. The true question is whether we have enough concentration, enough mindfulness, enough practice to touch the foundation of being that is nirvana.

To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other. If you love someone and you continue to ignore his or her presence, this is not true love. Perhaps your intention is not to ignore this person, but the way you act, look, and speak does not manifest the desire to recognize the presence of the other. When we are loved, we wish the other to recognize our presence, and this is a very important practice. You must do whatever is necessary to be able to do this: recognize the presence of the person you love several times each day.

In Buddhism we talk about a bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara, the one who has the ability to listen and to understand the suffering of others. If we evoke his name, it is in order to learn to listen.

According to Buddhism, we are dealing with samyojana, the lump of suffering within us that is translated as an “internal formation.” When you say something that makes another person suffer, that person develops an “internal formation.

You must always check things out by going to the person in question and asking for his or her help: “Dear one, I am suffering so much, help me please.

This is real meditation. In this particular meditation, all at once there is love, compassion, joy, and freedom—the four constituents of the true love of which the Buddha speaks.