“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
I chose this topic, not because I am an expert, but because I wanted to look at how I have nourished love and understanding and find more ways to nourish it in my practice. Love and understanding are not things we are born with. They are the result of how we use our minds and how we practice. We can choose to train our minds to truly love by understanding ourselves and others. Or we can allow our stories and habit energies to make us feel separate, alone and in need of defending ourselves.
Attachment or Love
As infants we probably fell in love with whoever took care of us. That love was born from our need to be taken care of. But this desire to be taken care of can result in a near enemy of love, an unhealthy clinging. When we are clinging, we’re not standing on our own two feet and giving love; we’re holding on to someone. It often happens that the person we cling to doesn’t find it especially pleasant. Because the entire world revolves around wanting-to-have, we also interpret love this way. But that’s not love, because love is the will to give.
If you are like me, you are much better at giving love and being kind than you are at receiving love and accepting acts of kindness. To be truly happy, we need to learn to both give and accept/receive love and kindness.
True love doesn’t foster clinging. It is generated from within. To truly love someone, you need to feel complete in yourself. Love is not looking for someone to complete you. Sometimes we can’t accept love because it is not truly love, but attachment.
“Attachment masquerades as love. It looks and smells like love, but it’s a cheap imitation. You can feel how attachment grasps and is driven by need and fear. Love is selfless; attachment is self-centered. Love is freeing; attachment is possessive. When we love, we relax, we don’t hold on so tightly, and we naturally let go more easily.” Frank Ostaseski
People-pleasers, like me, often confuse attachment with love. You may have been raised to believe that being helpful and pleasing is the only way to earn love. It may be so ingrained in your internal chatter that you don’t even notice it. You do things for people you were not asked to do, and you fix problems you were not asked to fix. You put others’ needs ahead of your own and try to be the person you think they want you to be. I know from experience that it is exhausting. Unconsciously, you think this is the way to receive love and approval. The only way we are worthy of love is to earn it. So, when love is given freely, we feel like we don’t deserve it and can’t accept it.
Brick Walls
We all have internalized conditions of worth: what and who we must be to be lovable. When we don’t meet those unrealistic expectations, we feel we are not worthy of love. And since we are not worthy, we can’t let love or even kindness in. How often does someone offer to do something nice for you and you reject the offer: “No thanks, I’ve got it.” Or we reject compliments: “It was no big deal.” We also reject affection: “Stiffening up when we are hugged.” That rejection of help, kind words or affection are bricks on the wall we have built to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We don’t want others to see our needs and vulnerabilities.
I built a big brick wall in my life. To dismantle that brick wall, I found I needed to build my kindness muscle. Kindness (both giving and receiving) is a skill that we can all develop. It starts with how you pay attention. Kindness practice aims to increase feelings of caring and warmth for our self and for others. We increase feelings of caring by mentally sending goodwill, kindness, and warmth towards ourselves and others by silently repeating a series of phrases. Click here for a list of phrases you may want to practice with.
Loving Acceptance
Kindness meditation can help us to develop a selfless love. It does so by developing the quality of ‘loving acceptance.’ Kindness meditation acts like self-psychotherapy, a way of releasing our troubled mind from its pain and confusion. It has the immediate benefit of sweetening and changing old habituated negative patterns of mind. But that only happens if we actually practice kindness meditation.
By practicing kindness for ourselves, we develop a calm mind, a mind free from anger, greed and jealousy. Only in the fertile ground of a peaceful mind can kindness flower. As long as we calm our mind, even if we ‘don’t feel loving,’ the practice will work anyway. If you keep doing it, staying with the intention, and just repeating the phrases and making a connection with yourself, it will inevitably work. We set the intention to be better friends to ourselves and to others, by realizing that we all want to be happy and free of suffering.
Sending kindness gives expression to our wishes for the well-being and happiness of ourselves or others. You will find that recognizing and expressing goodwill will have a softening effect on your heart. Usually it evokes feelings of love, tenderness, and warmth.
But softening of the heart can expose difficult or painful buried emotions. Allowing all these emotions to surface in their own time is one function of kindness practice. By allowing difficult emotions to surface, we learn that we don’t really need the brick wall we have built. The kinder we are to ourselves, the more resources we have to support us in being with difficult emotions.
Neuroplasticity shows us how your brain is shaped by where you focus and rest your mind. But it is hard for a people-pleaser to stop being who you’re not. You want to make people happy. You want them to like you. You assume that they won’t like who you truly are. So, you don your mask or put up your brick wall to hide who you really are. But you don’t need the mask or the brick wall, you just need to develop relationships with the people who will accept you as you are.
True love includes accepting yourself and others as they are now, with all our strengths and weaknesses. True love can only grow on this ground of understanding. Understanding ourselves and understanding others. Mindfulness meditation slows us down so that we can see what is needed for happiness and what causes suffering. Then we see the value of understanding the ones we love.
While I loved my mother, I did not understand her when she was on her journey with dementia. I thought I did not need practice to cultivate the feeling of love for my mom, but I was actually clinging to who she was before dementia.
My mind went sour, resenting the fact that my mom had dementia. Each time I drove to Chicago, I would pray that she would be having a good day. I wanted to visit my mom as I knew her all my life, not the mom with dementia. Doing loving kindness meditation for my mom was not enough to sweeten my mind. I was afraid of losing my mom, angry at her for getting dementia, and greedy to have more time with her as she used to be.
Luckily around that time, I started my teacher training and learned the importance of doing loving kindness practice for myself. So, I began to develop care toward myself. One of the keys to caring for ourselves is to change where we are looking for happiness. We learn to quit trying to control the uncontrollable and instead learn how to be open to whatever is happening. Accepting, even when my mother thought she was away at college and was sad because her mother had not come to visit her. Accepting, even when my mother made me uncomfortable because she kept asking me to take her home and I didn’t know how to respond.
Awakening of love is not bound up in things being a certain way. It is not easy to access that place inside of us that can love no matter what. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give them. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love. To understand, we need to listen.
After I had been practicing loving kindness for myself, it opened me enough to begin to listen to my mom’s needs. She did not need someone abruptly changing the subject or telling her what was really happening. She needed to be seen and heard. No matter how untrue what she was saying was. She needed to be comforted when she was sad and given hope that her mom would visit soon. As the disease progressed, she did not need to be frustrated by my trying to get a conversation going. She just needed someone to sit with her and hold her hand or stroke her arm.
When you love someone, you want to bring relief and help her to suffer less. This is an art. You can’t just impose what you think is needed for her to be happy.
True love includes accepting the other person as she is now, with all her strengths and weaknesses. Every day we are different, so if we grasp on to our idea of who someone is based on the past, that is not true love. We have to accept them as they are in this moment. If you only like the best things in a person, that is not love. You have to accept her weaknesses with patience and understanding. This kind of love brings a feeling of protection and safety.
Nourishing love is a lifelong kindness practice. The more you practice, the more you see your love grow. Kindness practice counteracts the loneliness and sense of separation that comes from not feeling connected to other people.