If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We canāt accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things donāt make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.
When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. Thatās why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.
Understanding someoneās suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is loveās other name. If you donāt understand, you canāt love.
If our parents didnāt love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.
Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person.
The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You canāt 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.
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If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment ā whether itās spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day ā can be a moment of joy.
This interrelatedness of self and other is manifested in the fourth element as well, equanimity, the Sanskrit word for which āĀ upekshaā is also translated as “inclusiveness” and “nondiscrimination”:
In a deep relationship, thereās no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.
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In true love, thereās no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering. You can no longer say, āThatās your problem.”
Supplementing the four core elements are also the subsidiary elements oftrustĀ andĀ respect, the currency of love’s deep mutuality:
When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is not yet love. Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature. You are part of the universe; you are made of stars. When you look at your loved one, you see that he is also made of stars and carries eternity inside. Looking in this way, we naturally feel reverence. True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself and for the other person.
To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.
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When you love someone, you should have the capacity to bring relief and help him to suffer less. This is an art. If you donāt understand the roots of his suffering, you canāt help, just as a doctor canāt help heal your illness if she doesnāt know the cause. You need to understand the cause of your loved oneās suffering in order to help bring relief.
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The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are thsuffering.
Often, when we say, āI love youā we focus mostly on the idea of the āIā who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love thatās being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We canāt exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of inter being between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering
(Nhat Hanh)
Courtesy : Brainpickings.
Arrividerci
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