Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  To my teacher, Nani Bala Barua (Dipa Ma), who went through so much loss and came to the power of boundless love.

  INTRODUCTION

  Looking for Love

  Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  SINCE WE WERE CHILDREN, we have been told a patchwork of stories about love. We expect love to give us exaltation, bliss, affection, fire, sweetness, tenderness, comfort, security, and so very much more—all at once.

  Our minds are too often clouded by pop-culture images that equate love with sex and romance, delivered in thunderbolts and moonbeams. This idea of love makes us say things and do things we do not mean. It makes us cling frantically to relationships that are bound to change, challenge us, or slip away. Major bookstores often have a love section that’s actually just a romantic relationship section—volumes on how to get a relationship, how to keep a relationship, and how to cure a relationship. As one publisher said to me, “The love market is saturated.”

  Perhaps we think we’re getting the portion of love we deserve, which is not very much at all: “I’m just not lucky in love,” or “I’ve been too damaged to love.” We may feel so cynical (sometimes as a mask to hide heartbreak or loneliness) that we dismiss love as a sorry illusion. Some of us decide we are through with love because it takes much more from us than it ever gives back. At those wounded moments when we most need love, a hardened heart can seem like the best defense.

  Many of us have been told that if we loved others enough and sacrificed, it wouldn’t matter that we didn’t love ourselves, and that we could keep that up forever. Or if we loved a friend or a child enough, that love itself could cure all ills, meaning no more painful setbacks or defeats. If there is such pain, it implies we were bad at love. Or maybe it was suggested to us that all we needed in this world was love and that we didn’t have to fight what is wrong or call out what is cruel or unjust.

  But apart from all these stories, as human beings we naturally live our lives wanting belonging, connection, a home in this world. We yearn for warmth, for possibility, for the more abundant life that love seems to promise. We sense there is a quality of real love that is possible beyond the narrow straits we have been told to navigate, a possibility that’s not idealized or merely abstract. We have an intuition that we can connect so much more deeply to ourselves and to one another.

  One of my own turning points came in 1985 when I did a meditation retreat in Burma. I was practicing intensive lovingkindness meditation, offering phrases of wishing well to myself and others all day long, like, “May I be happy; may you be happy.” As I practiced, at one point it felt as though I came to a threshold. On one side was the conventional idea of who I had thought myself to be—that is, someone completely dependent on another person to feel any love in my life. It was as though I considered love to be like a package, in the hands of the all-powerful delivery person, and if that person changed their mind at my doorstep and walked away, I would be bereft—irredeemably incomplete, lacking the love I so longed for. On the other side of the threshold was the reflection of who I suspected I actually was—someone with an inner capacity for love, no matter who was present or what was happening, someone who could access love that another person might enhance or challenge, but there was no one who could either bestow that capacity on me or take it away. I stepped over.

  I saw I couldn’t flourish as a human being as long as I saw myself as the passive recipient of love. (There’s an awful lot of waiting in that position, and then damage control when it doesn’t work out, and also numbness.) But I could certainly flourish as love’s embodiment.

  This book is an exploration of real love—the innate capacity we each have to love—in everyday life. I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through. It may be buried, obscured from view, hard to find, and hard to trust … but it is there. Faintly pulsing, like a heartbeat, beneath the words we use to greet one another, as we ponder how to critique others’ work without hurting them, as we gather the courage to stand up for ourselves or realize we have to let go of a relationship—real love seeks to find authentic life, to uncurl and blossom.

  I believe that there is only one kind of love—real love—trying to come alive in us despite our limiting assumptions, the distortions of our culture, and the habits of fear, self-condemnation, and isolation that we tend to acquire just by living a life. All of us have the capacity to experience real love. When we see love from this expanded perspective, we can find it in the smallest moments of connection: with a clerk in the grocery store, a child, a pet, a walk in the woods. We can find it within ourselves.

  Real love comes with a powerful recognition that we are fully alive and whole, despite our wounds or our fears or our loneliness. It is a state where we allow ourselves to be seen clearly by ourselves and by others, and in turn, we offer clear seeing to the world around us. It is a love that heals.

  The how of this book is based on a tool kit of mindfulness techniques and other practices cultivating lovingkindness and compassion that I have been teaching for over forty years. Mindfulness practice helps create space between our actual experiences and the reflexive stories we tend to tell about them (e.g., “This is all I deserve”). Lovingkindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.

  There are meditations, reflections, and interactive exercises designed to be suitable for anybody. They outline a path of exploration that is exciting, creative, and even playful. I draw from my own experience and from that of the many meditation students I have guided, several of whom have generously offered their stories here. The meditations in particular are meant to be done more than just once—over time, practicing them will create a steady foundation in mindfulness and lovingkindness in our lives.

  Our exploration begins with that often-forgotten recipient who is missing real love: ourselves. We expand the exploration to include working with lovers, parents, spouses, children, best friends, and work friends, divorce, dying, forgiveness—the challenges and opportunities of daily life. And we move on to exploring the possibility of abiding in a sense of profound connection to all beings, even those around whom we draw strong boundaries or have tried in the past to block. We may not at all like them, but we can wish them to be free (and us to be free of their actions defining us). This vast sense of interconnection, within and without, leads us to love life itself.

  I am writing this book for all who find that yearning within to be happier, who dare to imagine they might be capable of much, much more in the matter of love. And I am writing for those who at times suffer in feeling, as I once did, unloved and incapable of changing their fate. My hope is that through this book I can help you cultivate real love, that beautiful space of caring w
here you come into harmony with all of your life.

  SECTION 1

  INTRODUCTION

  Beyond the Cliché

  YOU ARE A PERSON WORTHY of love. You don’t have to do anything to prove that. You don’t have to climb Mt. Everest, write a catchy tune that goes viral on YouTube, or be the CEO of a tech start-up who cooks every meal from scratch using ingredients plucked from your organic garden. If you’ve never received an award and there are no plaques proclaiming your exceptional gifts hanging on your walls, you still deserve all the love in the world. You do not have to earn love. You simply have to exist. When we see ourselves and see life more clearly, we come to rely on that. We remember that we do deserve the blessing of love.

  A lack of real love for ourselves is one of the most constricting, painful conditions we can know. It cuts us off from our deepest potential for connecting and caring; it is enslavement to powerful—but surmountable—conditioning.

  And yet, no matter what bravery we show to the world, most of us have recurring doubts about our worth. We worry that we’re not desirable enough, good enough, successful enough. We fear we’re not enough, period. Intellectually, we may appreciate that loving ourselves would give us a firm foundation, one from which we could extend love out into the world. But for most of us this is a leap of logic, not a leap of the heart. We don’t easily leap toward things we don’t trust, and most of us don’t trust that we are worth loving.

  Nora expresses her confusion: “You always hear that you need to practice self-love in order to love others. But no one tells you how to love yourself. On the one hand, it feels like a cure-all: I need to love myself to find a lover. On the other hand, I think a lot of people seek out romance as a way of not loving themselves. In some sense, self-love is the most difficult. You’re also the most convenient person to hate.”

  Michelle describes a wake-up call: “One day, when I was in my late twenties, a dear platonic friend said to me, ‘Do you know how much I love you?’ I instantly felt a wave of sadness. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t know how much you love me.’ ‘I know,’ he replied gently. At that moment, I became aware that I had never even thought of myself as being lovable. And I realized that it was not possible for me to receive love either.”

  Why is it so difficult for us to love ourselves? Why is it so much harder to offer ourselves the same sort of care and kindness that we readily dispense to our friends?

  For one thing, the notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for “number one.”

  In fact, just the opposite is true. When the airplane cabin pressure is dropping, no one would call it selfish when a father secures his own oxygen mask before turning to help his child. More broadly, to love oneself genuinely is to come into harmony with life itself—including all others. Psychotherapist and meditator Linda Carroll explained the difference to me this way: “Loving yourself is holding yourself accountable to be the best you can be in your life. Narcissistic love has nothing to do with accountability.” In other words, when we cultivate tenderness and compassion for the whole of our experiences—the difficult and hurtful parts, in addition to the triumphs—we naturally behave more kindly and responsibly toward others. Our hearts soften and we see that each of us is, in our own way, grappling with this human life that Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe”—replete with wonder and sorrow.

  And so we begin with ourselves.

  We are born ready to love and be loved. It is our birthright. Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment. But we’re also born to learn, and from our earliest days, we begin to create our map of the world and our place in it. We form simple expectations: if I cry, someone will come—or not. Soon we start to weave fragments of our experiences into stories to explain what is happening to us and in the world around us. When we’re very young, most of these expectations and stories are implicit, encoded in our bodies and nervous systems. But as we grow older, they become more explicit, and we may be able to recall where and when we first received a particular message about our worth and about our ability to love and be loved.

  MESSAGES FROM OUR FAMILIES AND LIFE HISTORY

  EACH OF US has our own individual histories, families, and life events that broadcast messages like a twenty-four-hour cable news channel. Some of these messages penetrate our conscious minds, while the majority are received by our unconscious and may take years to retrieve and articulate. Elliott recalls that, as a small boy, whenever he expressed sadness or fear, his father tried to talk him out of his feelings. “You’re not sad,” his dad would say. Or “You don’t look like a chicken, so why are you acting so scared?” Without being aware of it, Elliott internalized the message that it was unsafe to reveal his emotions. It wasn’t until the near breakup of his marriage—averted by a combination of psychotherapy and meditation—that he finally felt free enough to express his true feelings.

  For most of us, life experiences are a rich mix of positive and negative, but evolutionary biologists tell us we have a “negativity bias” that makes us especially alert to danger and threat, lest we get eaten by a tiger (or so our nervous systems tell us). In order to ensure our survival, our brains remember negative events more strongly than positive ones (all the better to recall where the tiger was hiding). So when we’re feeling lost or discouraged, it can be very hard to conjure up memories and feelings of happiness and ease.

  While this default response is essential to our survival when we’re in real danger, it can also be the source of great suffering when we’re not. With meditation, however, we can actually retrain our nervous systems away from this fight-or-flight response. We learn to identify our thoughts and feelings for what they are, without getting swept away by them.

  MESSAGES FROM OUR CULTURE

  FRIENDS RAISED WITH a notion of original sin often tell me that guilt has shadowed them from the time they were very young. Common thoughts include things like, I was born bad; I was born broken; there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Even if such concepts weren’t part of our religious or family backgrounds, they persist in our culture and can result in a pervasive sense of defeat: nothing I am or do will ever be good enough.

  For some, the sin is being born the “wrong” gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation, all of which can lead to feelings of not belonging. These cultural messages not only impede our ability to love and care for ourselves but can inhibit our potential by causing us to lower our expectations and rein in our dreams. At the same time, the opportunities available to us may realistically be diminished because of society’s projections onto us. We may even become the target of outright hatred and threats to our safety.

  James Baldwin, the late, brilliant, gay African American author, described his process of coming to terms with such messages in his essay “They Can’t Turn Back”: “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

  We may also be swamped by the pervasive messages of our materialistic culture, which stresses competition, status, and “success” over character and emotional intelligence. This makes it easy to fall into the lose-lose trap of comparing ourselves to others. But, as psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky points out in her book The How of Happiness, “The more social comparisons you make, the more likely you are to encounter unfavorable comparisons, and the more sensitive you are to social comparisons, the more likely you are to suffer their negative consequences … No matter how successful, wealthy, or fortunate we become, there’s always someone who can best us.”

  When we constantly hear that we should be smarter, better connected, more productive, wealthier—you name it—it takes real courage to claim the time and space to follow the currents of our talents, our a
spirations, and our hearts, which may lead in a very different direction.

  MESSAGES FROM THE MEDIA

  HAVE YOU EVER wakened in the morning feeling contented and quiet, and then, within fifteen minutes of checking your phone, felt out of sorts and jealous? Longing for something more?

  Many of us now spend as much time immersed in images on a screen as participating in the world outside our devices. Whether subtly or blatantly, ads tell us that our bodies need making over, our clothes just won’t do, our living room is a mess, and we’re not invited to the right parties—all as a way to sell us more and more. Along the way, what might be a source of pleasure becomes infused with anxiety.

  Social activist Jerry Mander hypothesizes that media is deliberately designed to induce self-hatred, negative body image, and dejection, with advertising drummed up—and sold—to offer the cure.

  Regardless of the source of these messages, we can become more aware of them. We can see which messages we’ve adopted as our own beliefs and learn instead to hold them more loosely; in time, we can even replace them with an inquiring mind, an open heart, an enhanced sense of vitality. We may not be able to make the messages disappear, but we can question them. The more we do so, the less intrusive and limiting they become. In turn, we become freer to connect more authentically with others, as well as to our own deepest yearnings.

  START WHERE YOU ARE

  I HAVE NEVER believed that you must completely love yourself first before you can love another. I know many people who are hard on themselves, yet love their friends and family deeply and are loved in return—though they might have difficulty in receiving that love. But it’s hard to sustain love for others over the long haul until we have a sense of inner abundance and sufficiency.