How to Love (Mindful Essentials)

Don’t miss the opportunities you have to sit down, without having to worry or think about doing anything. Lay down your burdens, your worries, and your projects. Just sit and feel that you are alive. Sit with your son, your daughter, your partner, your friend. That’s enough to be happy.

But being in love can be transformed, so that blind attachment, selfishness, and domination are replaced by the capacity to understand and bring happiness to the person we love, without demanding specific conditions and expecting something in return. To transform being in love in this way is to transform an internal formation.

In true love, we must have trust and confidence in each other. This is a practice not of spontaneous feeling, but of concrete daily observations of ourselves and of each other.

Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body — or you can at least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and so become destructive of love.