ABOUT TRUE LOVE
We attribute the most beautiful meanings to love, analyse it psychologically and define it with philosophy. It is not enough, we even come up with the mathematical formula of gravity. But love and affection are still mysterious. Perhaps the most important mystery of human existence.
Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh explores love in in his short book “How to Love,” written in simple sentences and with great wisdom.
Nhat Hanh, deals with the deepest problems of the soul with awareness and simple metaphors. In order to listen to his teachings, it is essential to leave aside the defence mechanisms that see everything honest and sincere as simple and naive.
Another name for love is…
At the heart of Nhat Hanh's teachings is the idea that "understanding is another name for love".
Understanding someone else's pain is the greatest gift you can give that person. If you don't willingness to understand, you can't love.
Feeling that someone understands us, sees us as we are is something we all need. But even if we grasp this theoretically, we get so lost in our own thoughts, feelings and troubles that we often cannot show this understanding to the other person. Nhat Hanh explains this situation with a beautiful analogy:
'If you put a handful of salt in a glass of water, that water will be undrinkable. But if you throw a handful of salt into a river, people can still drink and cook from that water. The river is huge, capable of accepting and transforming. If our heart is small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We cannot accept other people and their mistakes and expect them to change. But when our heart grows, such things do not cause us pain. We can be very understanding and accepting of other people. When we accept them as they are, they have a chance to change.'
In this case, the real question is how we can enlarge our own hearts. The way to do this is to understand ourselves, realize our own pain, and start showing compassion to ourselves. When we learn to make ourselves happy, we develop our ability to love.
Because love is a dynamic interaction that is learned, most of us learn our understanding (and misunderstanding) system at a young age by copying it from others. Nhat Hanh says: 'How do we know what love looks like if our parents didn't love each other? The most valuable inheritance that parents can leave their children is not money, house, land, but their own happiness. If we have happy parents, we have the greatest wealth.'
Difference Between Craving and Falling in Love
Nhat Hanh also draws attention to the importance of the difference between "fucking" someone and falling in love. A crush is just a fantasy that prevents true love, and we completely ignore who that person really is and what it means to us, he says.
We often “hit” someone, not because we understand or love others, but to distract ourselves from the pain we feel. Only when we truly understand and love ourselves can we have a true love for others.
Nhat Hanh brilliantly explains this:
Sometimes we feel empty, we feel a great lack of something. We cannot understand why, it is very vague. But still, this gap is very strong. We constantly expect something good to happen, things that will make us feel less alone, things that will make us feel less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and life is very strong. The desire to love and be loved is also very strong. We are ready to love and be loved, and that is very natural. But because we feel empty, we look for an object to reflect our love. Sometimes we have not had the opportunity to understand ourselves, but we have found the object. When we realize that not all of our wishes and desires can be fulfilled by that person, we begin to feel empty again. We want to find something, but we don't know what we are looking for. We all have a constant desire and expectation, always waiting for something better to happen. That's why we check our email account or social media multiple times.
The Four Elements of True Love
True love consists of four elements: kindness, compassion, joy, and calmness.
Loving-kindness is being able to bring happiness to others. However, if you are happy, you can give happiness to others. When you accept and love yourself, it is possible to bring happiness to others.
If you have enough understanding and love, any moment in your life – whether you cook breakfast, drive a car, water the garden – can be a happy moment.
In a deep relationship, there are no boundaries between you and your partner. You are it, it is you. Your pain is his pain. Happiness and pain are no longer personal matters.
The two elements that help the four main elements are respect and trust. When you love someone, there is respect and trust in the relationship. Love without trust is not yet to love. First of all, you have to trust and respect yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature. True love cannot exist without trusting and respecting both yourself and the other person.
The thing that will create this respect and trust is to listen to the other person. This has been told to all of us a million times by our elders, teachers, psychologists, therapists, so we may be immune. But it may still reach your soul when sung in Nhat Hanh's elegant and poetic language:
Loving without knowing how to love hurts the person we love.
To understand how to love someone, we need to understand him. To understand, we must listen...
When you love someone, you should be able to comfort that person and ease their pain. This is an art. You cannot help if you cannot understand the root of that person's suffering, just as a doctor cannot cure your illness without knowing the cause.
The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. These are two sides of one reality.
Legendary Zen teacher D.T Suzuki's memorable "ego shell we live in is the hardest thing to grow and get over." Supporting his aphorism, Nhat Hanh explains how the understanding of “I” precedes mutual understanding:
Often, when we say "I love you" we focus on the "I" person doing the work of loving. This is because we are obsessed with the sense of self. We believe we have a self. In fact, we do not have an individual self. The things that make a flower a flower are things that are not flowers, like chlorophyll, water, and sunlight. If we remove everything that is not a flower from a flower, there will be no flower left. A flower cannot exist alone. It can only exist with us. People are like that too. We cannot exist on our own. Nor am I made of elements that are not me, like the earth, the sun, the parents, and the ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see that you exist with your partner, you will realize that their pain is your pain and their happiness is your happiness. With this perspective, you will talk and act differently. That alone can relieve a lot of pain.
Love and Light,
Rana & Ayca