How to Love (Mindful Essentials): 3 (Mindfulness Essentials)

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In the general Buddhist style of befriending complexity through simplicity and with his particular gift for simple words strung into a rosary of immense wisdom radiating immense kindness, Thich Nhat Hanh writes: Happiness is not an individual matter; it has the nature of interbeing. When you are able to make one friend smile, her happiness will nourish you also. When you find ways to foster peace, joy, and happiness, you do it for everyone. Begin by nourishing yourself with joyful feelings. Practice walking meditation outside, enjoying the fresh air, the trees, and the stars in the night sky. What do you do to nourish yourself? It’s important to discuss this subject with dear friends to find concrete ways to nourish joy and happiness. When you succeed in doing this, your suffering, sorrow, and painful mental formations will begin to transform. Emptiness is not something to be afraid of, says Thich Nhat Hanh. The Heart Sutra teaches us that form may be empty of self but it’s full of everything else. The Four Layers of Consciousness

I think of our behavior in terms of being more or less skillful rather than in terms of good and bad. If you are skillful, you can avoid making yourself suffer and the other person suffer. If there’s something you want to tell the other person, then you have to say it, but do so skillfully, in a way that leads to less rather than more suffering The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person. In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering. Out of this incomplete understanding of ourselves spring our illusory infatuations, which Nhat Hanh captures with equal parts wisdom and wit:

You are partly right - 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.” Next, observe your mental formations, the ideas and tendencies within you that lead you to speak and act as you do. Practice looking deeply to discover the true nature of your mental formations—how you are influenced by your individual consciousness and also by the collective consciousness of your family, ancestors, and society. Unwholesome mental formations cause so much disturbance; wholesome mental formations bring about love, happiness, and liberation. Again, we begin with ourselves to understand our own true nature. As long as we reject ourselves and continue to harm our own body and mind, there’s no point in talking about loving and accepting others. With mindfulness we will be able to recognize our habitual ways of thinking and the contents of our thoughts. We shine the light of mindfulness on the neural pathways in our mind so we can see them clearly. To be there is the first step, and recognizing the presence of the other person is the second step. Because you are fully there, you recognize that the presence of your beloved is something very precious. You embrace your beloved with mindfulness, and he or she will bloom like a flower. To be loved means first of all to be recognized as existing. Gathas help us to practice mindfulness in our daily lives and to look deeply. Reciting these short verses will bring awareness, peace, and joy to simple activities. Thich Nhat Hanh offers gathas for recycling, touching the earth, and more. Wake Up to the Revolution

Thich Nhat Hanh quotes The ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see the land. Finally, look at your consciousness. According to Buddhism, consciousness is like a field with every possible kind of seed in it: seeds of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity; seeds of anger, fear, and anxiety; and seeds of mindfulness. Consciousness is the storehouse that contains all these seeds, all the possibilities of whatever might arise in your mind. When your mind is not at peace, it may be because of the desires and feelings in your store consciousness. To live in peace, you have to be aware of your tendencies—your habit energies—so you can exercise some self-control. This is the practice of preventive health care. Look deeply into the nature of your feelings to find their roots, to see which feelings need to be transformed, and nourish those feelings that bring about peace, joy, and well-being.To love someone, you have to understand the real needs of that person, and not impose on her what you think is needed for her to be happy. Understanding is the foundation of love

One nice point of emphasis is letting go of our infatuations with "self" (would Donald Trump could read!). Hanh uses the metaphor of a flower which, he insists, is not really a flower so much as chemicals, photosynthesis, water, sunlight, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. Point being? We are not so much "self" as surroundings, upbringing, parents, grandparents (etc.), friends, the Earth that nourishes us, the sun that nourishes food that nourishes us, and on and on it goes. Next, observe your feelings—whether they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Feelings flow in us like a river, and each feeling is a drop of water in that river. Look into the river of your feelings and see how each feeling came to be. See what has been preventing you from being happy, and do your best to transform those things. Practice touching the wondrous, refreshing, and healing elements that are already in you and in the world. Doing so, you become stronger and better able to love yourself and others. A teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. Happiness in Every Breath Free from attachment and aversion.” The kind of love the Buddha wanted us to cultivate is not possessive or attached. All of us, young and old, have a tendency to become attached. As soon as we are born, attachment to self is already there. In wholesome love relationships, there is a certain amount of possessiveness and attachment, but if it’s excessive, both lover and beloved will suffer. If a father thinks he “owns” his son, or if a young man tries to put restrictions on his girlfriend, then love becomes a prison. This is also true in relationships between friends, teachers, students, and so on. Attachment obstructs the flow of life. And without mindfulness, attachment always becomes aversion. Both attachment and aversion lead to suffering. Look deeply to discover the nature of your love, and identify the degree of attachment, despotism, and possessiveness in your love. Then you can begin untangling the knots. The seeds of true love—lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity—are already there in our store consciousness. Through the practice of deep looking, the seeds of suffering and attachment will shrink and the positive seeds will grow. We can transform attachment and aversion and arrive at a love that is spacious and all-encompassing. This interrelatedness of self and other is manifested in the fourth element as well, equanimity, the Sanskrit word for which — upeksha — is also translated as “inclusiveness” and “nondiscrimination”:We are aware that our joy, peace, freedom, and harmony are the joy, peace, freedom, and harmony of our ancestors, our children, and their children