Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  Tutu further clarifies that forgiveness can bring about self-improvement: “If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too.”

  The effect of allowing ourselves to connect with “the enemy,” the Other, is a radical act of love, and one that is as much about peace as it is about self-love. I was moved recently by an article in Haaretz written by an Israeli mother, Robi Damelin, reflecting on the murder of her son by a Palestinian sniper. Damelin wrote her story in Haaretz in response to outrage in Israel, which was prompted by a national radio show host making a comparison between the grief of Israeli mothers and Palestinian mothers when their children are withheld by the other side. Damelin is a central member of a grassroots organization called the Parents Circle–Families Forum, which brings together Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost loved ones due to the conflict. In the article, she asks powerful rhetorical questions: “What makes you think that the tears on the pillow of a bereaved Palestinian mother are of a different color or substance than those of a grieving Israeli mother?” Her answer is that “grief knows no borders.” These kinds of organizations offer clues as to how we might go about recognizing the power of reconciliation—rather than revenge—amid real and urgent conflict.

  Certainly, such brave acts of reconciliation shouldn’t be used as a substitute for social change or as a Band-Aid to help sustain the status quo. Nor should we make overly idealized, unreal figures out of people who are able to go there or blame those who are not so able. But these stories show the hard work of justice when it is so much greater than merely a more polite way of saying revenge—and the role of the hard work of love, feeding it all the while. It’s our own work.

  CHAPTER 21 PRACTICES

  Revisiting your role models

  This exercise is about revisiting some of the role models you have had throughout your life—and adding some new ones to your list.

  Is there someone in your life who has inspired you, who has opened your mind, perhaps gently or perhaps swiftly, so that you feel a different sense of possibility?

  See if you can bring that person here. Keep in mind that just because you consider someone a role model doesn’t mean that you necessarily follow his or her worldview at all times. And although we owe a lot of gratitude to those who have inspired us, it can also be an emotional trap for us to expect ourselves to follow in their footsteps at all times. To do so simply makes us feel inadequate—and goes against the expression of self-love and self-respect that we’ve been cultivating.

  For this practice, you may want to close your eyes and softly visualize your role models, and feel the effects they have had on you. You may also choose to write their names down and perhaps reflect on a few admirable qualities that you associate with these particular individuals.

  These names need not exist in isolation in your thoughts or in your notebook. By taking the time to reflect on the people who inspire you to act with more love and compassion, you are taking strides toward greater mindfulness in your own actions, thoughts, and words.

  Visualizing togetherness

  Robert Thurman, professor at Columbia University, uses a powerful (though admittedly humorous) image to teach how anyone can practice living with compassion. “Imagine you’re on the New York City subways and these extraterrestrials come and zap the subway car so that all of you in it are going to be together forever.” If someone is hungry on the subway car, we help get them food. If someone begins to panic, we do our best to calm them down. The truth is that everyone on the subway car is in it together—so coexisting peacefully and with a basic understanding of shared humanity makes it more pleasant for everyone.

  You may choose to close your eyes or rest your attention softly below you as you consider this image. You may try introducing particularly challenging people into your subway community, to see what difficulties come up as you remind yourself again and again that you are all alike and deserve love and compassion. If your focus begins to wander, you may silently repeat phrases of lovingkindness to yourself, to all others, and perhaps to specific difficult people as you visualize the scene.

  Meditation: lovingkindness for all beings

  We offer lovingkindness to all beings everywhere in order to touch the immensity of life. This is an expression of our capacity to connect to and care for all of life, through focus on phrases like, “May all beings be safe, be happy, be healthy, live with ease.”

  You can use these phrases or any phrases that are meaningful for you. What would you wish for all beings everywhere? Remember the feeling tone is one of offering or gift-giving.

  We offer the phrases of lovingkindness to all beings everywhere, then all creatures, all individuals, all those in existence. Each way of phrasing this opens us to the boundlessness of life.

  And when you feel ready, you can end the session. Notice if there is a sense of spaciousness or expansiveness and how it affects you throughout the day.

  22

  CREATING COMMUNITY

  The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

  —bell hooks

  A FEW YEARS AGO, MY friend David was severely depressed. Like many people struggling with depression, he felt lonely and disconnected from the world. I suggested that he might break through his feelings of isolation by volunteering for a cause he believed in. He immediately warmed to the idea and offered his services to an organization that delivers meals to homebound people who are ill. But when David showed up the first day and the manager handed him a sharp knife for slicing sandwiches, there was a problem. David’s hands trembled, a side effect of the medication he was taking, and he had difficulty doing even this simple task. The manager soon noticed and switched David’s assignment from slicing sandwiches to wrapping them, a job he could handle easily. David was so touched to be seen and cared for and given a job he could do with pride that he was motivated to keep coming back. “I went from feeling lost in the dark tunnel of my mind to being part of a loving community,” David says now. “Working with this wonderful group of people helping others was a critical turning point in my recovery.”

  Like David, we all yearn for connection. Yet we often tend to withdraw when we’re suffering. Perhaps we feel we don’t have the energy to be with other people, or we wish to spare them our pain. But withdrawal only adds to our sense of isolation. It can require enormous willpower to reach out when the impulse is to turn off the lights and hide beneath the covers, but it can also be an act of great self-compassion. So often it’s only when we connect with other people that our moods lift and we start to come home to ourselves.

  As Barbara Fredrickson has said, our daily moments of connection with others are “the tiny engines that drive the upward spiral between positivity and health.”

  And yet loneliness has become epidemic in our country. In his book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, political scientist Robert Putnam documented our declining participation in once-popular community groups from the PTA to civic and church organizations to, well, bowling leagues—all of which he saw as the bedrock of a democratic society. Since then, disconnection has continued to grow as our cable channels proliferate, our moves become more frequent, our commutes longer, and our neighborhood ties weaker. In a recent study published by American Sociological Review, researchers studying the existence (or lack thereof) of community in America found that one in four people reported not having anyone that they could really talk to.

  DO-IT-YOURSELF COMMUNITIES

  EVEN AS OUR social landscape changes, my own experience suggests that religious institutions, meditation and other spiritual centers, and twelve-step programs continue to provide a crucial sense of belonging—and many people are also finding creative new ways to connect that suit their needs and interests.

  Sometimes it’s a sense of need or shared vulnerability that brings groups together.
“Many years ago, when I was a single mom recovering from alcoholism, the home my nine-year-old daughter and I were renting had a gas explosion one week before Christmas,” my student Matty writes. “Fortunately, we were out at the time, but we returned to discover that where we lived had been declared ‘not fit for human habitation.’ Unable to lose any time from my minimum-wage job, I quickly located an apartment in town and managed to move what could be salvaged. The little money I’d put aside for Christmas presents was needed for a rent deposit and moving expenses. There would be no holiday turkey that year.

  “Then, on Christmas Eve, while I was cooking dinner, a police officer knocked loudly on the door. Panic struck my heart. I feared that some part of my past might have caught up with me. My daughter, so pleased by my sobriety, gave me a look, as if to say, ‘Oh, Mama, what have you done now?’ When I opened the door, a very gruff cop told me to put on my coat and come downstairs. My daughter and I followed him down several flights of stairs in silence. When we got to the police car, he said, ‘I was asked by Santa to make a special delivery.’

  “The entire car was filled with presents! When I asked him who was responsible, he just repeated, ‘Santa.’ I told him I hoped this blessing would be returned to him many times over. My daughter was overjoyed. All the toys were tailored to her interests. All the clothes were a perfect fit.

  “I knew the gifts had to have come from my AA group. No one else knew us in our new town. It was just the most benevolent thing to receive such kindness. At nine, my daughter no longer believed in Santa, but she had to reconsider that year.

  “The AA group had also arranged to have an open house over the holidays for members without families. People volunteered to keep it going night and day. My daughter and I took a shift in the middle of the night. We served food and kept the coffeepot going.

  “As the years went on, my finances improved and I became more secure in my sobriety. We had all we needed: plenty of gifts, turkey dinners, and friends to share them with. But once in a while, we looked back and recalled our best Christmas was when we were loved by strangers and gave love back to strangers. That love shown to me inspired me to remain sober, and I have not had a drink for thirty years.”

  Matty’s story shows the transformational impact community can have, especially in trying times. And yet I also see rich communities being created all the time in relatively everyday contexts: in book groups, community gardens, writers’ and artists’ circles, progressive dinner parties, and neighborhood associations for aging in place. I have friends who meet monthly to read poetry aloud, another friend who has started a meditation group to address environmental concerns, and still others who have volunteered for rescue work in places like Haiti and New Orleans.

  One of the best things about the create-your-own-community movement is its flexibility, and I recommend that people start small. Intention is necessary, but formality and large numbers are not.

  A few years ago, some friends and I decided to launch what we call the Turn Left Community. It all started when my friend told a few of us that he confronts two choices when he wakes up in the morning: the computer to the right of his bedroom, and the meditation cushion in a room to the left. If he turns to the right, he feels compelled to check his e-mail, but if he turns left and meditates first, he says, he can deal much more skillfully with the pressures of his high-powered job. There are five of us Turn Lefters, and we check in with one another every day by e-mail. The subject line is always turned left. Then, if you wish, “I just did thirty minutes.” Or, “I only did five, I have an 8:00 A.M. meeting, mea culpa!” or maybe just “I’m in Seattle—it’s raining.” It’s all said in a lighthearted, conscious way, and our responses and interactions provide endless grist for our own unfolding awareness.

  Somewhat more formal than my Turn Left posse, Kalyana mitta (KM)—or spiritual friends—groups have taken off throughout the mindfulness world. Not everyone can get to a meditation center regularly, but they can gather locally to sit, discuss books, and share their own spiritual journeys. My friend Barbara and her husband recently relocated from DC to California, and for them, one of the toughest aspects of the move was leaving their KM group. “A core group of seven of us met in our living room every other week for twelve years,” Barbara reflects. “We sat together, shared our stories, supported one another through illness, our kids’ crises, our parents’ deaths, and other major life transitions. We cried together and laughed uproariously. There was a level of intimacy and trust in that group that’s hard to replace.”

  CAST A WIDE NET

  IN THE HANDS of creative groups, social media can serve as a virtual community organization. For example, CaringBridge provides a place for people who are ill and their loved ones to communicate directly with their chosen circle of family and friends. This takes the pressure off caregivers, who don’t have to make multiple phone calls or send individual e-mails whenever there’s a new development.

  Following surgery for cancer, author and longtime meditator Joyce Kornblatt wrote this to her CaringBridge circle: “What this space for medical updates has unexpectedly turned into—a community of wisdom, love, and generosity from so many of you—has been a precious gift to me.”

  Another meditation student, Susan McCulley, told me this story: “Five months ago, two days before Christmas, a close friend’s only daughter was killed in an auto accident. From that moment, waves of grief and love rippled out from person to person. Our community calls it ‘the Invisible Net of Love,’ meaning that we are all always surrounded by love, but we don’t notice it’s there until we reach out. Not just people close to the family, but acquaintances and strangers reached out to offer their support. They also reached in to recognize that this could have happened to any of us (and still could) and that we all know (or can imagine) the pain of losing someone we dearly love. On her last day, it happened that the girl and her mom had brownies for breakfast: it was the first day of Christmas break, and they wanted to celebrate. Two months after her death, to honor what would have been her seventh birthday, the girl’s mother invited her Facebook circle to celebrate their dear ones by having brownies for breakfast. And on that day, more than thirty-eight thousand people around the world started their day with a brownie. Love is a net that connects us.”

  SEEING THROUGH SEPARATION

  WE’RE ALL PART of countless ephemeral communities as we move through our days: the fellow travelers on our plane, train, or bus; the audience at a concert or movie; the glum crowd waiting in rows of chairs at the DMV. For the most part, we don’t identify our brief shared occupation of time and space as a community. Yet most of us can also recall a time when an unexpected occurrence created a spontaneous bond among strangers. These are the times when we suddenly recognize the unshakable truth of our interdependence.

  For a meditation student named Shirley, the catalyst was a massive snowstorm that brought her town to a standstill. After several freezing hours at home without power, Shirley headed to a nearby diner, hoping for some warmth and a quiet corner where she could read. But the place, which had a backup generator, was soon buzzing with customers, and Shirley reluctantly volunteered to share her table. Then, as she recalls, something shifted. “I offered to share some of my scrambled eggs, and the ice in me began to melt.” Before long, Shirley and the others at her table were squeezing in even more cold and hungry refugees from the storm. “Thus,” she concludes, “the way from separate discomforts to holy gatherings: from grumpy attitude to gratitude, finding that the unbearable becomes lessened when shared compassionately.”

  Such compassionate sharing is the subject of Rebecca Solnit’s remarkable book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit investigated five disasters in depth, from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and discovered that ordinary people typically responded to calamity with spontaneous altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity. Rather than panicking, neighbors and strangers came together
to rescue, feed, and house each other. As she interviewed survivors, “it was the joy on their faces that surprised me,” Solnit writes. “And with those whom I read rather than spoke to, it was the joy in their words that surprised me.” She concluded that the joy revealed an unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work. “The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful they shine even from wreckage, carnage, and ashes … These accounts demonstrate that the citizens any paradise would need—the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough, and generous enough—already exist.”

  And then there are those moments of illumination when we glimpse our connectedness in the most everyday circumstances. Author Alix Kates Shulman describes her experience this way in her memoir Drinking the Rain:

  I was sitting alone on the downtown subway on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the 23rd Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed … Then suddenly, the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew into a vision, larger and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun—our entire living cohort—formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.