How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh - Family - Nairaland
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| How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by MizMyColi(f): 3:49pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
This is a topic that got me, no, it didn't just get me, it got to me. So I thought to share. What does love mean, exactly? We have applied to it our finest definitions; we have examined its psychology and outlined it in philosophical frameworks; we have even devised a mathematical formula for attaining it. And yet anyone who has ever taken this wholehearted leap of faith knows that love remains a mystery — perhaps the mystery of the human experience. Learning to meet this mystery with the full realness of our being — to show up for it with absolute clarity of intention — is the dance of life. At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding. He illustrates this mismatch of scales with an apt metaphor: 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 can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t 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. The question then becomes how to grow our own hearts, which begins with a commitment to understand and bear witness to our own suffering: When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love. Nhat Hanh points out the crucial difference between infatuation, which replaces any real understanding of the other with a fantasy of who he or she can be for us, and true love: 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. Out of this incomplete understanding of ourselves spring our illusory infatuations, which Nhat Hanh captures with equal parts wisdom and wit: "Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better so we’ll feel less alone, less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. There’s also the deep thirst to be loved and to love. We are ready to love and be loved. It’s very natural. But because we feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day!" |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by MizMyColi(f): 3:52pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
Real, truthful love, he argues, is rooted in four elements — loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity — fostering which lends love “the element of holiness.” The first of them addresses this dialogic relationship between our own suffering and our capacity to fully understand our loved ones: 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. Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s 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 can’t 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 interbeing 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. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Tallesty1(m): 4:15pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
Bleep Love |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by MizMyColi(f): 4:18pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Truckpusher(m): 4:22pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by MizMyColi(f): 4:58pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Truckpusher(m): 5:00pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
MizMyColi:What I do ?  |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Nobody: 5:05pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
Observing |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by MizMyColi(f): 5:16pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by thorpido(m): 5:24pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
The world needs love even more at this challenging times. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by otipoju(m): 5:56pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
This article is deep... when my woman is sad, I become sad ...all I want to do is to make her happy. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Nobody: 6:05pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
I know Thich Nhat Hanh and his teachings have never resonated with me for one reason or another and still don't. He focuses too much on suffering for my taste. "At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.)" The quote says that we can only love people when we understand that they suffer and when we understand how they suffer which at the same time implies that we can't love people who don't suffer. I believe that we do not need suffering to love and that we shouldn't focus on suffering at all because nobody is helped when we commiserate with them. My approach is totally different. First learn to love yourself UNCONDITIONALLY. If you love yourself UNCONDITONALLY, you become love and you will love everyone and everything because love will flow through you abundantly. So the next question is how do you love yourself unconditionally? First understand that you are unique and therefore very special. There is no other like you. Then focus on your good traits and COMPLETELY ignore anything you do not like about yourself. Do not allow yourself any negative thoughts about you. Stop judging yourself and stop beating up on yourself. Appreciate yourself. Remind yourself how far you have gotten and what you have already achieved. Appreciate every success and every struggle. Focus on the positive and re-direct your negative thoughts to the positive. Replace any negative notion and idea by a positive one. I promise you that you will feel great if you practice doing it all day and every day and then you won't help it but have the same thoughts about everyone else in the process of loving yourself. And remember that you can't get sick enough, sad enough, poor enough to make anyone else feel better. You can only make people feel better if you feel good. Commiserating has never helped anyone. The solution is simple. Focus on the positive and you will get more of it. You will shine bright and bring light to darkness. Forget about suffering, life is meant to be fun. Enjoy the journey. The secret is to learn how to control your thoughts, which for the most part are negative - and so to choose the positive ones over the negative ones. You have the power to control them and it is your choice and your choice alone. Would you rather put yourself down or uplift yourself? It is all a matter of the right mindset and attitude.  With lots of love, Mindfulness. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Nobody: 8:26pm On Nov 18, 2015 |
Don't get it twisted, Luv is a beautiful thang but I do not subscribe to it. I can luv in Moscow but not in Naija.  |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by joseph1832(m): 8:13am On Nov 19, 2015 |
Mindfulness I tow your line of reasoning, but not entirely. Thich Nhat Hahn harping on suffering as a medium to love or find love to me is wrong. Even what you said about learning to love yourself first is not entirely true because, loving yourself (no matter how much)mean you might start becoming infatuated with yourself. Which can have not very good results. It breeds tremendous amount of hubris is a person. To me, I believe Love exists, not just love, but True Love And the surest way to find it first is to understand that humans, yes all humans are not perfect. Understanding and tolerance is the key. If you get to understand a person, and you tolerate his or her wrong doings, you will come to love that person. Understanding and tolerance breeds respect, which might even mutate to love. That's why its very possible for we humans to love people in different ways, at the same time because, we understand and tolerate different things about ourselves. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by Nobody: 1:52pm On Nov 19, 2015 |
joseph1832: I am extremely infatuated with myself and I enjoy it. |
| Re: How To Love; As Explained By Thich Nhat Hanh by joseph1832(m): 1:56pm On Nov 19, 2015 |
Mindfulness:Awesome! Whatever rocks your boat bruv. *thumbs up. 1 Like |
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