Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  CHAPTER 22 PRACTICES

  The many facets of connection

  The writer Wendell Berry said, “The smallest unit of health is a community.” On physiological and psychological levels, connecting with others improves our health and state of being. We are better able to let go of stress, to feel supported, and to find a sense of wholeness even as we move through our busy lives.

  Sure, we may not all have concrete groups we feel a part of in our daily lives, but we can create the sense of support engendered by community at any point in our day—simply by learning to pay attention in a new way.

  Here are five simple ways to find a sense of connection and community in your every day (regardless of whether or not you’re with a group of people!):

  1. Pay attention to the intention behind each of your actions throughout the day. If you hold the door for someone, do you just want to be polite, or are you expecting validation? Not every intention will be so concrete, so be mindful of more elusive expectations or desires that may fuel your behavior.

  2. As you go about your day, make eye contact with people you encounter and give them a smile. They may not see you, they may not smile back—but you may make someone’s day.

  3. Resolve to forgive yourself each and every time you make a mistake or forget something. By cultivating kindness and self-examination internally, you will be better prepared to act with awareness in your relationships with others—even those with whom you don’t actually engage.

  4. Before eating a meal, take a few breaths and reflect on the extended community that was involved in bringing the food to your table. There were the farmers who grew the food and the farm owners who employed those workers. There were the people who transported it and stored it. There were those who sold it in the grocery store. The list goes on.

  5. As you practice bringing awareness to each emotion, thought, and experience you have throughout your day, there will inevitably be moments of greater difficulty—frustration, disappointment, anger, resentment. As these states arise, and as you may react to them as being “bad,” try to reframe your judgments into recognition of your vulnerability—your “suffering” or “pain,” things you share with all other beings. How does the shift make you feel?

  23

  FROM ANGER TO LOVE

  Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

  —FRIDA KAHLO

  YEARS AGO WHILE I WAS writing a blog post on my computer at IMS, an e-mail from a student landed in my queue. This young man wanted to know about the nature of anger. I wrote back explaining that becoming lost in anger cuts us off from other people. It limits our perspective and makes us see ourselves and the rest of the world with tunnel vision. When we’re angry (not when we’re merely feeling it, but when we are overcome by anger), it often seems like the only thing we can pay attention to is the person or thing we’re angry at. Anger also tends to make us put people in boxes, so we lose sense of our connectedness as living beings; instead, we collide with the world, kicking whatever it is we think got in our way.

  Just after I clicked Reply, the computer crashed, and my stress hormones started pumping. As I tried to calm myself down, I realized that the most computer-savvy person at IMS was on vacation. My panic over missing my deadline quickly turned to anger—anger at the person who wasn’t available to help me, anger at myself for not being able to fix the problem, anger at the computer, anger even at the fact that I was getting angry!

  Flashes of anger like these can seem automatic. But in the midst of this quick reaction, I sat with my feelings. I made an effort to notice what my mind was doing. Did sitting with my feelings mean that the anger suddenly went away? Definitely not! But by inviting myself simply to notice what was coming up, I gave myself space to see that my anger was creating tunnel vision. I remembered that I had actually urged our computer person to take a break from work. I had even helped to arrange his trip. And a little later, as my panic subsided, I managed to fix the computer snafu.

  Anger at a person or a computer has a different flavor than outrage at injustice or violence. The sheer heartbreak that fills us as we witness intense suffering can naturally call forth an inchoate cry of “No!” that we know as anger. However natural it might be to feel angry, it is still useful to examine what it’s like to be repeatedly overcome by anger and the consequences both to ourselves and to others.

  Most of us are familiar with the strange, addictive quality of anger—how it fills our minds and how the rush of energy that accompanies it makes it hard to turn off. As the Buddha said, “Anger, with its poisoned source and fevered climax, is murderously sweet.” When someone or something makes us angry, our bodies and minds effectively have an “immune” response, much like inflammation in the body. We instinctively try to self-protect, similar to the way blood rushes to the site of a bee sting.

  But when anger becomes chronic, we start to see everything through a narrowed lens. So how can we resolve problems when our vision is constricted and we feel separate from others? Can we learn to recognize ourselves in one another even when our minds and bodies are on fire? Though the energy of anger might lead us to action, it can be so interlaced with fear and tunnel vision that we recklessly lash out, hurting ourselves in the process.

  Yet if we learn to recognize and let ourselves experience anger when it arises, we can use its energy productively and avoid becoming embittered and consumed by it. Paying attention actually dissolves anger’s toxicity and allows us to detect the fear, grief, and feelings of helplessness that a surge of fury often masks.

  LETTING GO AS LOVE

  INTENSE MOMENTS OF anger can arise in everyday contexts, and those feelings can do quite a fair bit of damage. A friend of mine tells me often about how much she learns from the controversies in her New York co-op apartment building. “We only have four units,” she explains, “and there’s no board to hide behind. I’ve had very painful, disruptive conflicts with the people downstairs—the kind of thing that makes your stomach churn and keeps you awake all night.” Undoubtedly, we’ve all been there—hot with anger at our roommate who leaves the toothpaste open on the bathroom sink; overwhelmed with frustration at the landlord who doesn’t return our calls; irritated by the people on the beach listening to a blaring radio. Despite the relative banality of these examples, the intensity of these feelings of anger is real.

  Finding a way to let go—with love, both for yourself and others—doesn’t mean you stop feeling angry. And yet holding on to the feelings and allowing them to become heavy and inflexible hurts us more than anyone. We do not have to love everyone who lives in our apartment building or forget about how annoying it is that our roommate is sloppy. We can acknowledge that we’re frustrated, choose to take an action, and then let it go.

  In the last chapter of section 2, “Forgiveness and Reconciliation,” I wrote about the process of grief and forgiveness, and their relationship to seeing one’s life as a part of something bigger. Recognizing that all of our lives are interdependent—that our landlord counts as much as we do, and that she or he wants to be happy as much as anyone else—is a radical act of love in and of itself. This creates a strong foundation from which we can practice letting go.

  Practicing lovingkindness for all beings, including those we feel angry at or wronged by in everyday life, doesn’t mean we suddenly feel positive. Rather, it’s a way we can reformat our relationships. It’s like changing the channel. As you increase your ability to see and to love, it will feed into your next interaction and to how you see the world. You are sending this person lovingkindness for the benefit of all. In these situations, we aren’t necessarily explicitly transforming anger into activism, but we are similarly using the energy of our anger toward collective well-being.

  START WHERE YOU ARE

  I HAVE SEEN time and again that anger is a special quandary for people who devote their lives to helping correct the world’s injustices. We often need a giant j
olt of energy, as in outrage, to open our eyes and shake us out of complacency. Many of us have enough to do just to manage our own lives day to day, let alone get passionate about someone down the block or half a world away. The work, though, can make you vulnerable to chronic rage. In fact, for many activists, cultivating anger feels like part of their job description.

  It takes profound courage to shift such entrenched feelings. As my friend Mallika Dutt, founder of the global human rights organization Breakthrough and an activist for thirty years, recognized, anger was undermining her physical and psychological health, as well as her ability to help others. She told me, “Many of us who do this work carry trauma from our own lives, along with the pain and trauma of the people we’ve worked with. When you focus on the horrible things people do to one another, in a way you’re constantly re-traumatizing yourself. What we don’t learn in advocacy training is how to heal our own trauma and find ways to take care of ourselves as we hold space for other people and their pain.”

  But five years ago, around the time we met, Mallika says she felt a deep sense of fatigue and began questioning how she was doing the work. After decades of work to end violence against women, she said, “I don’t know how to turn the anger off. It is manifest in my organization, in my relationships. I need to be able to develop a different relationship to it.” This, coupled with the breakup of her twenty-year marriage, led to a time of personal crisis. “That got me started on the spiritual path that I had previously avoided,” she says. “In the process, I began to explore emotions other than anger and fury and a pervasive sense of injustice. I opened up more to compassion, connection, and love.”

  Her spiritual journey, including the study of shamanism and other indigenous traditions based on the interconnectedness of all life, has enabled her to heal her own trauma and approach her work from a place of love and compassion. Now, she reflects, “As I watch the world around me struggle with finding solutions to the problems we face, I feel increasingly grounded in the idea that love is an essential component of the pathway forward. If you begin with the understanding that we’re all connected, then the solutions have to include everyone and everything on the planet.”

  Mallika emphasizes that working toward social justice from a position of love does not mean rolling over. She points out: “Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that famous speech about love and power … He talked about how love without power can be anemic and how power without love can be ruthless. For me, it’s really about how one steps into power and how one can exercise power from a space of love.”

  When we recognize that we can impact the world from a position of love and strength, we free ourselves from the notion that we must always meet injustice with a clenched fist. We develop critical wisdom about our anger and realize our profound sense of choice in approaching change we want to see. “Critical wisdom is fierce … yet at the same time subtle and tender,” wrote my colleague Robert Thurman in Love Your Enemies. We can meet hatred with love. But to be able to do this, like Mallika, we must also turn our attention inward and learn to hold our own emotions and experience with compassion. As she says, “The self-care piece is critical. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t show up effectively for other people.”

  THE DISARMING POWER OF LOVE

  AI-JEN POO IS the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an organization working to build power, respect, and fair labor standards for nannies, caregivers for the elderly, and housekeepers in the United States. In a realm where efforts to create change are frequently fueled by animosity and conflict, she says, “I believe that love is the most powerful force for change in the world. I often compare great campaigns to great love affairs because they’re an incredible container for transformation. You can change policy, but you also change relationships and people in the process … I think that you can love someone and be in conflict with them.”

  Ai-jen Poo is a unique activist for many reasons, one of which is her prodigious ability to help people find common ground. Her organization, Caring Across Generations, helps workers build on their shared values of family and the recognition that we all at one time need care.

  I went to the launch of Poo’s book, The Age of Dignity. Before she spoke, we were asked to turn to the person sitting next to us and share a story of having been the recipient of someone’s care. The first person who came to my mind was one of my meditation teachers, who was incredibly nurturing and loving. (Remember, I had gone to India when only eighteen, out of a fractured, traumatic childhood. My teachers basically re-parented me.) I was uncertain as to how the notion of meditation teacher as caregiver would go over as a cultural concept with my partner, but it turns out she was from Nepal and was right there with me.

  We so often just take for granted the care we have received, and we take for granted those who are providing the care. Poo is basically calling for a shift in consciousness, lifting up love. She says, “I’ve always believed it’s important to make the invisible visible. And valuing that which has been taken for granted is something that I’ve always instinctually known is the key to the kind of society I want to live in and raise my children in.”

  Poo first became involved in the labor movement by volunteering for a domestic violence shelter, one that specialized in creating community for Asian immigrant women. Looking back on the origins of her work, Poo tells The Nation about her “growing hunger for getting at the root causes of the issue”—an insidious mix of poverty and gender-related oppression. One of Poo’s goals in developing the organization Caring Across Generations was to expand the notion of “workers’ issues” to include pay discrimination, childcare, schools, and housing—issues women typically deal with, and which are indispensably important when it comes to workers’ needs to feed their families while also holding a steady job. Her organization frequently partners with other national organizations such as 9to5, in addition to other race-and gender-related non-profits.

  Ai-jen Poo isn’t simply trying to help workers catalyze the right fights—between each other, and between them and their employers; rather, Caring Across Generations seeks to build a support system for progress and reforms—to benefit all parties in a collaborative way. This model stands in stark contrast to the typical union actions of pitting workers against one another. “I learned that there is no such thing as an unlikely ally,” Poo has said in another interview with The Nation. While her work may be sustained, in part, by steadfast commitment to resisting the status quo, it’s clear that she recognizes the disarming strength of love and connection.

  LEAN IN WITH LOVE

  BROTHERS ALI AND Atman Smith and their partner, Andres “Andy” Gonzalez, founders of Baltimore’s Holistic Life Foundation, jokingly refer to themselves as “love zombies.” I first met them several years ago at the Omega Institute at a conference on mindfulness and education, and simply fell in love with them. I felt that they loved me, too, which many, many people would say about their own experience—I’ve heard from their students, trainees, colleagues, and supporters, “They reminded me of the love that does exist,” “They showed me I was worthy of something,” “I stopped thinking it was weird to say ‘I love you’ because of them.” And much more like that.

  Though Ali and Atman grew up in West Baltimore (the same inner-city neighborhood where a young man named Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015), they weren’t your typical boys from the hood. Their father and uncle taught them yoga at an early age, and the siblings attended a private Quaker school. But even the neighborhood was different in those days. “There was more of a sense of community, including an informal mentoring system, with the older guys being role models for the younger ones,” says Atman. “Then crack came and wiped out a generation of people. They used or sold drugs, got locked up, or died. I think that’s why the gang explosion happened. No one was holding kids accountable the way they did when we were growing up.”

  Ali and Atman met Andy at the University of Maryland–College Park. Together, th
e three young men practiced yoga and devoured books on spirituality. After college, they moved back to Baltimore and delved even more deeply into yoga, meditation, breath work, and self-inquiry. Then one day Ali and Atman’s mother asked her sons and their friend if they’d like to teach football to twenty “bad kids” at the school where she was a teacher. But when the three met with the principal, they asked if they could teach yoga instead, and she told them they could try. “The kids were crazy and off the hook,” Andy recalls. But, he adds, “After just a few weeks, the teachers and staff said to us, ‘We don’t know what y’all are doing, and we don’t really care. Whatever you’re doing is working, so please keep it up.’” Fast-forward fifteen years and the majority of that first group of “bad kids” is now on the Holistic Life Foundation staff, which has mushroomed from the original three to twenty-five.

  “We saw an opportunity, and we jumped on it,” says Andy. “There was suffering all over, and we wanted to make a difference. We focused on underserved communities—inner-city kids, drug rehab centers, mental health facilities, homeless shelters, and homes for the elderly—where these practices weren’t available. We wanted to provide them for free. Our after-school program started with twenty kids; now we serve a hundred and twenty every week. I imagine that five to ten years from now, those kids will come back and our army of love soldiers will keep spreading and spreading.”

  Ali tells the story of Ja’Naisa, one of the kids in the after-school program, who had a history of getting into fights with her peers. “Boys or girls, it didn’t matter, they would make fun of her, and she’d knock them out,” he says. But then one day in the gym when another girl made a disparaging remark about her, Ja’Naisa grabbed her and slammed her against the wall. “She looked at the girl, then at us, then back at the girl and said, ‘You’d better be glad I meditate,’” recalls Ali. “Then she walked to the corner and meditated for a while. When she was done, she got up, smiled, and went to play with her friends.”