Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  “I’ll never forget it,” Ben says now. “I was devastated. Until that moment, I believed my home and family were perfect. We were happy. We had plenty of food on the table. My father worked for the post office, and my mother taught kindergarten. But after Justin’s remark, doubt and shame crept in. I felt as if there was something fundamentally wrong with us, especially me, which took years to get over.”

  When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished. It’s as though someone suddenly turns off all the lights, and we lose faith in our dreams, as well as in our capacity to love and be loved. If we accept it as true, that one story can plant seeds of jealousy, resentment, anxiety, and depression that we struggle with for years to come.

  Sometimes, though, the perspective of a friend can help us see our behavior more clearly and restores our foundering faith in ourselves. One of my students, Julia, feels profound gratitude for her friend’s caring but honest assessment of Julia’s relationships with men.

  “One of my female friends has been honest with me in how she perceives I behave romantically,” Julia explains. “She wants me to treat myself better. Seeing her insight and pain on my behalf has pushed me to regard myself differently. She’s not trying to guilt-trip me. She just wants me to care for myself in the way she thinks I deserve. Seeing how deeply she loves me and wants to protect me makes me want to love and protect myself more.”

  Taking in another’s criticism, even when it’s offered out of love, requires courage. Had Julia reacted to her friend’s comments defensively, not only would the friendship have likely suffered, she might have continued to relate to men in ways that were disrespectful to herself.

  Today, with social media as a primary tool of communication, there’s more opportunity than ever before to learn what others think of us. Sometimes what we hear is positive and affirming, but too often it’s not. Internet bullying and smear campaigns spread like wildfire and can do irreparable harm: 52 percent of kids report having been bullied online, while about 20 percent of those who’ve been targeted contemplate suicide, and one in ten attempt it. Given the proliferation of cell phones and social media usage among young people (the average age for obtaining a mobile phone is between eleven and twelve), the viral spread of damaging rumors and accusations has become a disturbing social phenomenon. And of course many adults are flamed and shamed, too.

  If we truly love ourselves, do we avoid sharing anything that is deeply personal, or do we publicly stand up for who we are and what we believe? What approach best reflects your care and concern for yourself?

  SOCIETY’S CHILDREN

  OUR RACE, RELIGION, social class, ethnicity, or gender and sexual identity are all constructs that imply different things about us to others, depending on their conditioning. That’s why it’s so meaningful—and essential for the growth of our society—when limiting, negative stories undergo revision on a mass scale.

  Sometimes a dramatic shift in a society’s projections can confer a sense of legitimacy and belonging that once seemed unimaginable. Such was the case with the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling on same-sex marriage, which has liberated gay men and women in ways that far surpass the freedom to walk down the aisle and legally say “I do.” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni movingly described his own response, at age fifty, to the ruling:

  Following a few extraordinary years during which one state after another legalized same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court rules that all states must do so, that the Constitution demands it, that it’s a matter of “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy writes.

  I can speak for a 50-year-old man who expected this to happen but still can’t quite believe it, because it seemed impossible when he was young, because it seemed implausible even when he was a bit older, and because everything is different now, or will be.…

  And that’s because the Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t simply about weddings. It was about worth. From the highest of this nation’s perches, in the most authoritative of this nation’s voices, a majority of justices told a minority of Americans that they’re normal and that they belong—fully, joyously and with cake.

  Around the same time that the Supreme Court issued its ruling, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a gay clergyman who had already been with his partner for thirteen years and married for almost two, commented on the ambivalence of religious authorities who had inched toward support, only to later withdraw it. “The idea that some random people are debating my life and my love now seems strange and insulting,” he wrote in The Huffington Post. “While I will continue to pay professional attention to these debates, as a member of the media and a person who cares about justice for all people, on a personal level I couldn’t give a shit what these people think about my life. I’m not going to give them that power … I know I was beautifully made by God and that my relationship … is blessed.”

  Still, whether gay marriage is denounced by religious leaders or upheld by the Supreme Court, the conversation never would have taken place without decades of prior struggle by members of the LGBT community—often at great risk to their safety—to openly identify as gay. Only then could the issue of marriage equality be put forth.

  For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance. I’ve seen low-wage workers in the United States bravely face the possibility of losing the only jobs they have (however poorly compensated), standing up to their bosses and telling them, “We’re human beings with innate worth who deserve to be treated as such and paid a living wage.” For many of these workers, it has been both frightening and empowering to take action.

  Sometimes the stories we internalize originate not just in our family, our community, or the wider social sphere but a combination of all three. When the messages are negative, they can result in an emotional pileup of pain and suffering that requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

  Trudy Mitchell-Gilkey, an African American Buddhist lay disciple and mindfulness-based psychotherapist in Takoma Park, Maryland, grew up the youngest of thirteen children in a relatively poor household in rural Arkansas. Early in life, Trudy says she absorbed the message from her early childhood suffering: “I had little worth compared to those from better homes and gardens,” she explains. Although within her family Trudy says she felt plenty invisible at times, when she entered first grade at her town’s newly integrated elementary school, she was too visible—in a bad way. Trudy suffered from blatant discrimination and physical assault, and after being cast in a role in the school play, she was told she wouldn’t be allowed to participate. She knew it was because she was black. “The first story I was told when I ventured out into the world was, ‘You’re not really a whole person,’” she reflects.

  It wasn’t until she got an A+ on a writing assignment in tenth grade that she caught a glimpse of her inherent worth. “My teacher wrote in bright red pen, ‘I love the way you write!’” Trudy recalls. “That teacher was the first white person who gave me a lasting, positive reflection of myself, and those six words changed the course of my life.” Yet she still needed to qualify her experience: “When you’ve had so much hatred festering in your heart from adventitious forces, it takes more than one person saying you matter to clear up all the darkness inside.”

  Trudy had other important mentors along the way, including a friend from church who helped her see that she “could confront all this suffering and get beyond it. Talking to her blew open the door,” Trudy says, “and I saw that I had the capacity to be somewhat present with suffering—my own and the suffering of others—and to transform it.” She earned a master’s degree in social work a few years later and, soon after, began practicing psychotherapy.

  Still, early in her psychotherapy career and without a refuge that was yet secure, one year, in the throes of loss and grief, she felt suicidal. In a moment of grace, when she was sitting in her car in a garage with the motor running, she rec
eived a phone call from a caring therapist. Trudy turned off the engine so she could hear what the woman had to say. Later on, another moment of grace occurred when Trudy was writing a suicide note. She says, “I had given myself about thirty days off work to finish the suicide note, which somehow went from lines to paragraphs to chapters in a book that I decided I needed to write in order to adequately explain my death to my very young daughter. Oddly enough, by the time I had finished the first draft, I felt a deep sense of peace and calm, as if my life suddenly had become just a little more workable. I was fortunate that a good friend had introduced me to yoga, and while in the corpse pose, I had felt a similar sense of peace and calm unlike I’d ever experienced before in this life. And so, having gone from feeling suicidal to writing the suicide note that saved my life, I was ready to find a way to live again.”

  Seeking the same sense of peace she’d felt during yoga, Trudy found a meditation class and began practicing in earnest. “Going to the class is what lit the match. The Buddha’s teachings were the fuel,” she says. In time, a teacher—Tara Brach—invited Trudy to train to become a meditation teacher herself.

  She adds that her sense of “little worth” was further transformed through the skillful means of working with therapy clients. “By seeing the universal suffering in others and reaching in deep to help them love themselves better, I was healed by the same meditation on lovingkindness that I was offering them.”

  It’s not easy to know who we are underneath the stories others tell about us and the labels society heaps upon us. To do so implies a willingness to take risks, to step into the unknown and choose courage over fear. When we do, as Trudy discovered, a door blows wide open. We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us and allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

  REFLECTION

  TRY RETELLING YOUR story as a hero’s journey, where you survived hard times and failures to become the stronger and wiser person you are now. Try telling it as a series of random events over which you had no control. Then rewrite the story. How did your choices shape who you are now?

  Are you living someone else’s story? What would happen if you declared independence? Are you fighting someone else’s fight? Does loyalty to that person keep you from choosing happiness now?

  Does the situation bring up parts of your story? Does your story help you in the present, or does it make things harder?

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  WELCOMING OUR EMOTIONS

  REAL LOVE FOR OURSELVES BY definition includes every aspect of our lives—the good, the bad, the difficult, the challenging past, the uncertain future, as well as all the shameful, upsetting experiences and encounters we’d just as soon forget. This doesn’t mean we have to celebrate everything that’s ever happened to us or write thank-you notes to people who have hurt us. But, like it or not, the emotional residue of our experiences is part of who we are. If we resist any aspect of it, we feel like impostors, unreal and split off from ourselves.

  If we neglect our authentic selves, we risk being dominated by others, instead of being in loving relationships with them. But when we open our hearts to the breadth of our experiences, we learn to tune into our needs, unique perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the present moment, without being trapped by judgments based on the expectations of others. That is how we eventually sense our own worthiness.

  This kind of integration arises from intimacy with our emotions and our bodies, as well as with our thoughts. It arises from holding all that we know and want and fear and feel in a space of awareness and self-compassion. If we reject or resent our feelings, we won’t have access to that kind of intimacy and integration. And if we define ourselves by each of the ever-changing feelings that cascade through us, how will we ever feel at home in our own bodies and minds?

  When I first began my meditation practice, I was only eighteen years old, and although I knew I was deeply unhappy, I wasn’t aware of the separate threads of grief, anger, and fear at play inside me. Then, through meditation, I began to look within more clearly and to detect the various components of my sorrow. What I saw unsettled me so much that at one point I marched up to my teacher, S. N. Goenka, and said accusingly, “I never used to be an angry person before I began meditating!”

  Of course I was hugely angry; my mother had died, I barely knew my father, I felt wrenchingly abandoned. Meditation had allowed me to uncover the strands of that pain. When I blamed Mr. Goenka and meditation itself as the causes of my pain, he simply laughed—then reminded me of the tools I now had to deal with the difficult feelings I used to keep hidden, even from myself. I could begin to forge a new relationship with my emotions—to find the middle place between denying them and being overwhelmed by them.

  TAKING REFUGE INSIDE

  MINDFULNESS MEDITATION CAN be a refuge, but it is not a practice in which real life is ever excluded. The strength of mindfulness is that it enables us to hold difficult thoughts and feelings in a different way—with awareness, balance, and love. This, rather than trying to annihilate painful feelings or eradicate negative patterns of thinking, is what heals us. Actress Daphne Zuniga came to a realization similar to mine during a ten-day silent retreat.

  Before arriving at the retreat center, Daphne had been meditating on her own and experiencing, in her words, “a very heightened state of happiness and openheartedness.” But by day four, she recalls:

  “I was sure something was going wrong. Reeling with insecurity and loneliness, I thought maybe our esteemed teachers were not so talented. I remember sitting in the room where we put on our shoes; jackets hung on the walls, shoes in cubbies below, water bottles and hat-filled shelves above. All of a sudden, I had a flashback to being a little girl in elementary school, at those same cubbies, and I was overwhelmed with shame. My parents had divorced when I was six, so Dad left, and it made sense to me then that I was not good enough to have both a mommy and a daddy, because there were many things wrong with me.

  “Tears came to my eyes. My body felt just like it did back then, a rock of immovable shame in my stomach. I looked around with my head lowered at people’s feet, legs, and jackets. I wondered if they felt what I was feeling? Then I thought, what if all along it was true? I wasn’t worthy of what others had. What if I will always be alone because I’m not worthy of more? I left the meditation hall feeling the dread that the retreat couldn’t help me with my faulty-at-the-core self.

  “I went to bed crying, facing the wall with the blanket pulled around me tightly, the way I had in my bunk bed when my mom and dad were fighting in the other room.”

  The next day, Daphne asked to see me. “How are you?” I asked. Daphne was only too ready to let me hear it!

  “I have never been so lonely in my life! This is crazy. All these loving, trusting people around me, we all came here trusting you, and I just keep having painful negative feelings about myself! I am a happy person! Before I came here, I was waking up smiling! I was in a state of real joy and love for everyone.” She was crying now, letting it all pour out of her. “I mean, you can’t just take all these people and make us feel this way. It really hurts.”

  I gently pushed the box of Kleenex across the table toward her. “You’re right on course,” I said.

  Daphne was incredulous. “What do you mean? I was meditating every day and feeling this flow of ecstasy, like I’ve never felt before. I had so much love for all of life.”

  So I told her, “If you think of meditation practice as building a house, you began in the attic. Now you’re starting at the foundation.”

  Daphne wasn’t too sure, but I encouraged her to just keep going.

  She stayed at the retreat. She stayed with the feelings and kept bringing her attention back to her breathing and to her feet as she walked, one step in front of the other. Daphne told me, “And I began to notice something remarkable. The quality with which I noticed my thoughts and feelings arise and disappear became very gentle and compassionate, like a mother watching her beloved child. A mother interest
ed in each barely perceivable breath, a mother who wasn’t going anywhere. Apparently, I was enough, I was worthy of attention by just breathing. That presence became stronger as the loneliness faded. Even when memories or sensations of a familiar loneliness would come, they were just memories. I lovingly noticed them come, then pass.

  “I’m going to protect you, precious one, I thought. I’m going to protect you.”

  OPENING THE DOOR TO FEELINGS

  IF WE TRY to block off or deny a big part of what we experience, our wakeful, connected relationship to ourselves gets sharply whittled down. How then can we possibly feel alive?

  Awareness and love are qualities we can rely on moment to moment. They help us find ourselves when we’ve lost our way. They protect us during whatever storms or blowouts we undergo. And they help us let go of our preconceived notions of what we should feel or how life should be at any given time.

  In June 2015, shortly after the massacre of African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, I co-led a retreat for people of color. One evening in a question-and-answer session, a woman named Erika spoke to the group about her experience during meditation. “I imagined I was having a dinner party and decided to invite all the different parts of myself that I usually try to avoid,” she said. “It was hard, but I just had to let profound sadness sit at that table and fully acknowledge it was there, not just try to get on with my life.” As she spoke, a chorus of soft weeping rippled through the meditation hall.