How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh #1

by | afflictions, anger, awareness, breathing, compassion, consciouness, deep listening, equanimity, garden, happiness, heart, joy, listening, love, meditation, mindfulness, Peace, present, true home, understanding

Heart Like a Rcffwindowiver, Page 8

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. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?

Feeding our Love, Page 9

Each of us can learn the art of nourishing happiness and love. Everything needs food to live, even love. If we don’t know how to nourish our love, it withers. 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.

Love is Organic, Page 14

Love is a living, breathing thing. There is no need to force it to grow in a particular direction. If we start by being easy and gentle with ourselves, we will find it is just there inside of us, solid and healing.

Be Beautiful, Be Yourself, Page 23

If you can accept your body, then you have a chance to see your body as your home. You can rest in your body, settle in, relax, and feel joy and ease. If you don’t accept your body and your mind, you can’t be at home with yourself. You n=have to accept yourself as you are. This is a very important practice. As you practice building a home in yourself, you become more and more beautiful.

The Practice of Metta, Page 64 

To love is, first of all, to accept ourselves as we actually are. The first practice of love is to know oneself. The Pali word Metta means “loving kindness.” When we practice Metta Meditation, we see the conditions that have caused us to be the way we are; this makes it easy to accept ourselves, including our suffering and happiness. When we practice Metta Meditation, we touch our deepest aspirations. But the willingness ad aspiration to love is not yet love. We have to look deeply, with all our being, in order to understand the object of our meditation. The practice of love meditation is not autosuggestion. We have to look deeply at our body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. We can observe how much peace, happiness, and lightness we already have. We can notice whether we are anxious about accidents or misfortunes, and how much anger, irritation, fear, anxiety or worry are still in us. As we become aware of the feelings in us, our self-understanding will deepen. We will see how our fears and lack of peace contribute to our unhappiness, and we will see the value of loving ourselves and cultivating a heart of compassion. Love will enter our thoughts, words, and actions.

 

Watering the seeds in the ground of love

by | compassion, garden, love, seeds, Thich Nhat Hanh, Uncategorized, understanding

16299107_1661521150542076_6310428942049543838_nYou have two gardens: your own garden and that of your beloved. First, you have to take care of your own garden and master the art of gardening. In each one of us, there are flowers and there is also garbage. The garbage is the anger, fear, discrimination, and jealousy within us. If you water the garbage, you will strengthen the negative seeds. If you water the flowers of compassion, understanding, and love, you will strengthen the positive seeds. What you grow is up to you.

– Thich Nhat Hanh
(Painting: Van Gogh)

Global Day of Prayer, Sunday, February 12, 2017

by | Uncategorized

16473908_1605604559455490_3964028372599920408_nAware of the suffering and serious division that is being created in the US and around the world, by opposing views and lack of understanding, we will be observing a Global Day of Prayer on Sunday, February 12. It is our hope that you will join us at 10 AM EST, which would be 11 PM in Beijing when for an hour or two we can practice prayer and meditation. We will send our energy of love and peace to all who have lost awareness of our interconnection as a human family, part of the larger family of all life. Let us help to create conditions for peace on earth to manifest. We hope you will be willing to be a part of this effort.
If the timing is inconvenient for you in your time zone, we also invite people to join at 10 AM in your own time zone. Then we will have the energy of prayer circling the globe all day long, which would be wonderful.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
― Mother Teresa

“Peace in oneself, peace in the world.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Internal Knots, Teachings on Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

by | afflictions, anger, awareness, Buddha, ignorance, mental formation, mind consciousness, understanding

cffwindowIn Buddhist psychology, the word samyojana refers to internal formations, fetters or knots. When someone says something unkind to us, for example, if we do not understand why he said it and we become irritated, a knot will be tied in us. The lack of understanding is the basis for every internal knot. It is difficult for our mind to accept that it has negative feelings like anger, fear, and regret, so it finds ways to bury these in remote areas of our consciousness. We create elaborate defense mechanisms to deny their existence, but these problematic feelings are always trying to surface. If we practice mindfulness, we can learn the skill of recognizing a knot the moment it is tied in us, so that the work of untying them will be easy. Otherwise, they will grow tighter and stronger.

You and your object of love cannot be two, Teachings on Love, TNH

by | awareness, breathing, compassion, deep listening, heart, interbeing, listening, love, meditation, present, seed, store consciousness, suffering, understanding

cffwindowAsk with your whole body and mind… Ask the person who causes you the most suffering these questions: “Who are you who brings me such pain, who makes me feel so much anger and hatred?” To understand you have to become one with your beloved, and also with your so-called enemy. You have to worry about what they worry about, suffer their suffering, appreciate what they appreciate. You and your object of love cannot be two. They are as much you as you are yourself.

Continue until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Practice until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of the Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your store consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.