Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  The idea of letting go of control when a loved one is suffering feels unimaginable; letting go of our desire to appear okay to those who love us might make us feel weak; and letting go of our universal expectations around love can feel like a recipe for disappointment.

  The key in letting go is practice. Each time we let go, we disentangle ourselves from our expectations and begin to experience things as they are. We can be with. We can show ourselves repeatedly that letting go is actually a healthy foundation upon which we can open up to real love—to giving, receiving, and experiencing it authentically and organically.

  1. Bring to mind (or write down) a situation in which you felt afraid of letting go. Perhaps you wanted to help someone feel better and were frustrated by your inability to change certain circumstances. Perhaps you were afraid to let go of a certain self-image you sought to project. Perhaps you had an expectation in mind for a particular interaction or experience.

  2. Based on the ideas about letting go in this chapter, try to ask yourself some new questions about this situation. Were you responding only to the incident, or were there other contributing factors that created more tension? What other factors might have influenced your feelings, thoughts, and behavior?

  3. Now let’s consider the other person in the dynamic. Were there consequences for you or the other person based on the difficulties you experienced? Did you try to offer help in a situation, and then express impatience or frustration when you were not able to fix it? Explore how the other person may have been responding to your behavior.

  4. Now imagine yourself in the same situation with a sense of calmness, openness, and warmth, allowing yourself to exist in the present moment with acceptance. How do you behave differently? Have you developed new insights about the situation? Feel free to write down any reflections you have.

  For some, this practice is an internal dialogue; for others, a formal writing exercise. Others may want to think of this practice as a more abstract visualization or meditation about the situation they have called to mind—and an exploration of what “letting go” feels like in their bodies. Be creative!

  16

  HEALING, NOT VICTORY

  Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.

  —ZELDA FITZGERALD

  A FRIEND OF MINE HAS been seeing the same psychotherapist for more than two decades. In the face of divorce, remarriage, serious illness, and the death of a parent, her therapist has been so insightful that my friend refers to her as “the Rocket Scientist.” “I have no intention of ever stopping,” my friend says. “I plan to see her until one of us dies.”

  After so much time and so much support, my friend knows that when she introduces a new emotional entanglement or problem in her multigenerational family, the Rocket Scientist will listen carefully, pause thoughtfully, and then respond with the same opening phrase. Sometimes, my friend jumps in and says it for her:

  “I know, I know—you’re going to tell me that ‘this is a fabulous opportunity!’” She and the therapist share a laugh, and then they get down to work.

  To look at painful marital and parent-child conflicts, in-law dustups or friendships run aground as opportunities may seem counterintuitive. But when we can step back even briefly from our hurt, sorrow, and anger, when we put our faith in the possibility of change, we create the possibility for non-judgmental inquiry that aims for healing rather than victory.

  This is the promise of mindfulness. Mindfulness won’t ensure you’ll win an argument with your sister. Mindfulness won’t enable you to bypass your feelings of anger or hurt either. But it may help you see the conflict in a new way, one that allows you to break through old patterns.

  DISMANTLING THE BARRICADES

  SAM AND LUCY have been having the same argument for years. She gets angry at him for not doing more around the house. However, from Sam’s perspective, Lucy is so critical of how he does things that he feels anxious about what her response will be whenever he completes a task. As a result, Sam often checks out and doesn’t follow through on many projects he takes on. But his withdrawal only fuels Lucy’s anger and frustration. Now, with the help of a therapist, Sam and Lucy recognize the repetitive nature of their conflict and are taking steps to address it in a more productive and caring way. Yet at times they still reach a heated standoff.

  When things approach the boiling point, a time-out is in order, counsels couples therapist George Taylor. We may have told ourselves to be understanding, and we may aspire to speak more consciously, but sometimes we’re simply flooded with emotion. “This flooding is usually a signal that some childhood issue has been triggered,” he writes in his book, A Path for Couples. “Couples need a clear way to stop the escalation and to calm themselves down. It’s hard to practice authentic communication when our biology is going haywire. Our bodies are saying to us, urgently, ‘Flee or fight.’”

  Taylor notes that many of us practice unconscious time-outs when our systems get overwhelmed with anger or anxiety, and like Sam, we withdraw into ourselves. But, he says, “This method of ending an argument works to de-escalate the feelings, but it doesn’t bring any transformation. There is no closure, no understanding.” Instead of changing a painful pattern, withdrawal may simply reinforce it.

  In order to help couples shift the energy, Taylor recommends that they practice deliberate time-outs. At a time when they are not fighting (perhaps with their therapist’s help), Sam and Lucy agree to pause when either of them gets triggered or defensive. (Maybe Lucy can identify when her voice is rising or she’s going into attack mode. Maybe Sam can recognize when he wants to escape.) They also agree on a signal, verbal or nonverbal, to stop right away and, in a few words, decide when they will come back to their discussion. Range of time for the pause varies depending on the severity of the conflict. During the pause, they might do a practice like RAIN or any other technique that helps them get calm enough to explore their thoughts and physical reactions. Once they feel stabilized within and safe with each other, they are much more likely to find common ground—a solution that works for both.

  Taylor says that he and his wife, Debra—“both passionate, outspoken people with our own histories of emotional turmoil”—have found taking time-outs extremely beneficial. “I often feel some level of shame, for example, when Debra says what she wants. Part of me thinks, I should have read her mind and known that,” he writes. “In this moment of self-judgment, I can escalate into defensiveness. Shame is one of the hardest feelings for me to know and describe. I have an internal conflict: I want to protect myself from feeling the shame, and I want to acknowledge her needs. This conflict is hard for me, so I get emotionally confused. This is a good time for me to time myself out, before I react angrily or withdraw.”

  Taylor adds that although at first time-outs may seem awkward and artificial—after all, we’re adults, not four-year-olds who snuck more than our fair share of cookies—the practice helps to heal recurring, painful patterns of reactivity and eventually becomes second nature.

  ENLARGING THE PICTURE

  AT TIMES, HOWEVER, a relationship becomes so broken that it seems we have nothing to build on. Then it can help to view our suffering through a wider lens.

  In a private meeting during a lovingkindness retreat, Megan told me that she couldn’t stop thinking about her ex-husband. They’d had a contentious divorce following her husband’s affair with a co-worker, a woman he was due to marry that week. Megan’s daughter was the designated flower girl and her nine-year-old son was the best man. This had Megan so agitated that she’d signed up for the retreat to help her get through the week of the wedding.

  Alas, neither the meditation nor the silence was having a soothing effect. As Megan sat on her cushion, her mind bombarded her with images. She envisioned her ex and his bride blissfully walking down the aisle accompanied by her children, which aroused her sense of betrayal, sorrow, and rage, along with a generous helping of revenge fantasies. She imagined her children cryi
ng every night because they wanted to be with her. In this context, she kept trying to offer lovingkindness to her ex-husband, but each time she silently invoked the phrase May he be happy, her next thought was, Not while I’m miserable!

  When we met, she told me how unsettled she felt.

  I asked, “But don’t you want your children to be happy?”

  “Of course I do,” she replied. “What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t want my children to be happy?”

  When I saw Megan a few days later, her face was much more open and free of scowls. Despite her initial resistance to my question, it became the focus of her meditation. She’d switched her attention from trying to wish her ex happiness to affirming, without hesitation, that she wanted her children to be happy. Along the way, she realized that previously she’d wanted her children to be happy only when they were with her, a bitter and restricted wish for their happiness.

  It became clear to her as she meditated that a truly loving wish would be broader and allow her children to be happy with all of the people in their lives, not just her. She wanted them to live in a world where their relationships were solid and sustaining, and the people they encountered were kind. Her question became, “Don’t I want my children to be loved and accepted wherever they are?” She knew she did, which meant that she wished her ex to be happy in his new marriage, too.

  Not deliriously happy, however. Just happy enough so that being with him would be good for her children. Deliriously happy would be asking too much, and concepts such as lovingkindness should never be used as weapons against our real feelings. For Megan, the challenge was to hold her own pain alongside the wish for her children to live a life as friction-free as possible. This did not come easily; expanding her focus and reframing her story took intention and practice. Yet because she wanted her children’s lives to be graced by love, she recognized that as long as she did battle with her ex—either in reality or in her heart—her son and daughter would pay a steep price.

  A PLACE FOR PLEASURE

  WHEN I ASKED for stories for this book, a friend sent this one with the caveat that it might be too real:

  “My husband and I married in our late thirties and rushed to have a baby right away. I was so proud to be pregnant that nothing fazed me for nine months. But once our son was born, my body seemed to feel its job was done. My husband was tender and patient, but the more he advanced, the more I pulled back. After work, it was all I could do to make dinner, get the baby to bed, and collapse myself.

  “The pattern got more and more painful. I could tell when he wanted to have sex, and I would just shrink into myself, trying to make myself disappear. I hated feeling pursued. I knew he felt rejected, sad as much as angry, and that made me feel worse about myself. We got along pretty well on the surface, but he was going to bed drunk many nights, and there was an undertow of unhappiness in our lives.

  “I think it was an article I read in a magazine—that some couples made dates to have sex. Maybe that could be us. If we could agree on one night a week, I’d have six nights a week to myself. I didn’t have to feel turned on, I just had to be willing. The first surprise was that he was okay with that. The second was that once we started, I began to enjoy myself. Things relaxed between us.

  “It was still a long haul to where we are now. His drinking didn’t magically go away, and neither did my depression. But our bodies had made a deal to be together, to live skin to skin. Once a week, we acknowledged that we were at home with one another.

  “I sometimes imagine how pathetic this might seem to a hot young couple. But we have gotten better through the years, past cancer, past joint replacements, more playful, more creative, more celebratory in how we give each other pleasure. There is a green shoot at the center of our marriage, and we are both grateful for it.”

  CHAPTER 16 PRACTICES

  Time out!

  We learn from conflicts only when we are willing to do so—if we can open ourselves up to recognize why certain emotions are coming up, and be willing to negotiate with someone else’s feelings. After all, a relationship is the union of two psychological systems. While mindfulness may help you gain insight into your role in conflicts with others, it won’t single-handedly help you resolve them.

  This practice builds upon George Taylor’s notion of a time-out. Of course, both people in a given relationship must agree to participate in the time-out system in order for it to work.

  1. Get to know the indications that you’ve been triggered and are slipping into a mode of regression, self-defense, or resentment. Are you raising your voice? Are you being provocative for the mere sake of provoking the other person? This first step is a practice of mindful self-awareness—of thoughts, patterns of behavior, and bodily sensations. Getting to know these signals is the first step in developing a time-out system that works.

  2. Get to know the other person’s trigger points. Odds are, you know this person fairly well—and there is a certain dynamic at play during the conflict that contributes to your reactions. By getting to know your own behaviors in Step 1, it becomes easier to notice the signals in the other person that trigger you. You may even want to find a time to discuss these dynamics with the other person during a non-conflict time.

  3. In the moment of a conflict, determine a mutually agreed upon signal, verbal or nonverbal, that indicates it’s time for a time-out. Essentially, this step can be likened to choosing to meditate or close your eyes and breathe during a time of stress. Rather than allowing the situation to spin out of control, we take a step back to give ourselves space for insight, reflection, openness, and healing.

  4. Before taking the time-out, make a clear agreement on when the time-out will be over. Depending on the conflict at hand, perhaps it’s only an hour. For other conflicts, maybe a few hours—or even an entire day. Be realistic, and know that the time-out isn’t a gesture of withdrawal but actually one of opening up to seeing what is.

  5. During the pause, take some time to reflect. You may want to practice the RAIN method (explained in chapter 3), to explore why you were set off or why your feelings became exacerbated in response to the other person. This is a time for real investigation (Step 3 of RAIN), so that you can eventually come back to the other person with a clearer sense of why things went the way they did and what you need and would be willing to give in order to avoid conflicts like that in the future.

  Anger’s kaleidoscope

  While the previous exercise focused on really exploring the particulars of a given conflict, this practice is more about noticing the ways in which our habits of mind can contribute to the way most of us tend to relate to anger. In this practice, rather than investigating the nuances of your feelings or the situation and how it unfolded, we will explore the role of perspective in conflict—and how we can release the grip of anger even in the midst of feeling it.

  1. Bring to mind the person who you are angry at—during the height of your conflict. Really get in touch with your feelings, as much as you may feel guilty or distasteful toward the negativity.

  2. Now imagine that person sitting across from you, looking at you. Feel what it feels like to have that person mirror your feelings of anger, hurt, resentment. Look at yourself through these feelings.

  3. Once you have felt the anger from both sides, you may find you feel angrier with the other person as a result of recognizing that they may feel angry with you. But part of the practice is recognizing the choice we have when it comes to perspective. We can see ourselves and others in a different way.

  4. Next, try imagining how the other person’s mother, father, sibling, or teacher sees them. You may even want to recall a time when you saw the other person with such joy and warmth. This may have been as recently as a few hours before the conflict!

  In practicing these shifts in perspective, you may find that your feelings of anger are wrapped up with vulnerability—worries about being the object of the other person’s anger or frustration.

  You may try sending ph
rases of lovingkindness to the other person during this exercise or afterward for a short meditation. In this practice, you silently repeat phrases of lovingkindness (“May he be happy, be peaceful, be healthy…”) to the other person, in an effort to recognize your oneness, despite the temporary feeling of separation and alienation. Or you may find that you’re not quite ready to do that, and that’s okay, too.

  17

  THE HEART IS A GENEROUS MUSCLE

  Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

  —BUDDHA

  A WOMAN I KNOW COMMITTED to a six-hundred-mile, seven-day bike ride to raise money in memory of a friend who had died of AIDS. The fund-raising scared her more than the physical demands of the trip, but as it turned out, raising money was effortless. So many other people had loved her friend that she became one of the top fund-raisers that year. When she crossed the finish line, glowing from the sun, her whole family and many of her donors were waiting to cheer for her. All had something to celebrate: her achievement in finishing the long ride; the months of training that preceded it; the generosity that brought them together; a chance to honor and remember their lost friend. My friend still draws on the joy generated on that day.

  Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others. We stand up and cheer when, after some struggle, a promising teenager graduates from high school. We dance late into the night at a dear friend’s wedding. At other times, sympathetic joy can come as a gasp of relief. A friend is sick and waiting for some crucial test results and they come back fine! There may be complications ahead, but for this moment, we can share one of the flashes of connection that hold our lives together.

  These are times when sympathetic joy comes naturally, but in a complex relationship, with all its unspoken comparisons and personal disappointments, the heart may not leap up so easily.