Real Love

by Sharon Salzberg

  In the wake of the riots following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, the Holistic Life team organized a citywide event they called “Be More Love.” “There was so much friction and anger, the only way we saw to counter that angry vibe was with a loving vibe,” explains Atman. “So we brought people from diverse backgrounds together in the area where the uprising happened. We had people from more affluent communities who had never been to West Baltimore. They were seeing some of the things they’d only seen on TV. And people from our community came, including the kids in our program. We led a group lovingkindness meditation and people sent love to themselves, to Freddie Gray’s family, to victims of police brutality, and victims of violence everywhere.”

  “We wanted to get past the anger and move toward the healing,” adds Ali. “The anger did bring a lot of problems to light, but love was the cohesive force.”

  Ali acknowledges, “Anger can be the spark for the fire. But then you have to create a controlled burn. Instead of a forest fire that will bring down the whole forest, you have to imagine a controlled fire burning up the invasive species and weeds, and letting everything else flourish. It’s the same with anger … You need to say, ‘Okay, I’m angry.’ And then adjust your focus to come from a place of love, empathy, and compassion.”

  There will always be people and situations that ignite our outrage—for good reason. Yet when we stop resisting our anger and relate to it with awareness, we free ourselves from anger’s stranglehold. By allowing ourselves simply to feel what we feel, we release the expectation that painful states of mind such as anger will consume us. They can arise, and we can let them go—like the tides of the ocean or the waxing and waning of the moon. It’s a practice of not holding on, of choosing not to identify. In this way, the energy we have to try to make a difference becomes cleaner and stronger.

  CHAPTER 23 PRACTICES

  The many sides of anger

  It’s often hard to see anger as being a complex feeling. After all, when something makes us angry, we tend to feel inundated in a static state of being, and we fixate on it. But when we practice being more mindful of anger as it arises, we can actually prevent ourselves from getting lost in the state of tunnel vision and instead can see that anger is multi faceted—it contains emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and even love.

  Recognizing these elements of anger makes it seem more complex, but also more manageable. Anger is not solid and irrepressible but part of our changing system of feelings and conditions, an alive system that is ever shifting and ephemeral.

  1. To familiarize yourself with the multifaceted nature of anger, list all of the emotions that you have experienced when feeling angry with another person, a situation, or even yourself.

  2. As you brainstorm, it may help to close your eyes and visualize a specific instance of feeling angry. What emotions come up? You may want to write down some of the emotions that came up prior to the peak of your feelings of anger.

  3. As you breathe in and out, think about how the anger felt in your body. Did your muscles tense? Did you feel an urge to cry? Remember that anger and stress produce the stress hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and accelerates heart rate.

  4. Try to focus on some of the other more psychological nuances of anger (frustration, impatience, insecurity, and so on).

  The art of self-intervention

  Anger is uncomfortable—but it’s also addictive! In tough situations, anger emerges as a defense mechanism, a tool to help you energize so you can handle whatever catalyzed the feeling. We convince ourselves again and again, whenever we get angry, that the inner fire of anger will help us deal with whatever or whoever injured us. Little do we know that we often injure ourselves even more deeply by allowing the toxicity to take over.

  The good news is that we can intervene in moments of anger as we learn that letting anger control us is often the greatest enemy of all. So the next time you are in a situation that sparks a reaction of anger, try out this practice of self-intervention.

  1. Recognize your anger as it arises. Suppressing anger just makes the feeling more intense and insurmountable.

  2. Consider whether there is anything concrete you can do or say to make the situation better (such as leaving the room where a heated conversation took place, or taking a walk to cool down).

  3. If there’s nothing you can do in the moment, keep your attention on the simple recognition of your anger. The simple gesture of directing your mind to managing the situation with mindfulness prevents you from tunnel vision. This is an act of self-care.

  4. If it feels impossible to tolerate the discomfort of your anger, try opening your perspective. Think of all the things you’re grateful for in the moment. This may help you change your perception of the situation at hand.

  Believe it or not, accepting ourselves—angry as we may be—is an act of compassion, of love. These moments will always come and go again and again. The greatest question, then, to ask is, how can I alchemize this anger into some act of love?

  24

  SAY YES TO LIFE

  You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.

  —LOUISE BOURGEOIS

  I BOARDED A TRAIN IN New Delhi once bound for Bodh Gaya and a silent meditation retreat—that is, I assumed that at the end of the seventeen-hour journey, I would alight close to the legendary town where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. And so I crawled into my tiny compartment and fell asleep. But when I awoke, ready to disembark on holy soil, I discovered that while I slept, the train had reversed course and returned to Delhi. There was some problem with a stubborn cow on the tracks—or maybe it was a whole herd. I never knew for sure.

  And so before taking my place on a meditation cushion, I received a reminder of one of the most profound lessons of mindfulness training: Don’t pick a fight with reality. Even then, as young and naïve as I was, I realized that I could respond to the situation in one of two ways: I could be anxious and upset about perhaps missing the start of the retreat, or I could be open to what was happening and view it as a surprising adventure that I could learn something from, though at the time I couldn’t say what. And as it turned out, I need not have worried about being late. Unknown to me until we arrived, the teacher I was heading to Bodh Gaya to sit with—the renowned S. N. Goenka—was on the same train!

  In the four decades since my train trip to nowhere, I have been reminded again and again that we don’t have to go anywhere to approach life with the sense of adventure and openness that I felt that morning in Delhi. It’s just a matter of saying yes to life.

  Saying yes to life is enlivening and invigorating.

  Saying yes to life frees up our energy to be present with whatever is happening.

  Saying yes to life is the gateway to unimagined adventures and possibilities—as readily available to us in our living room as on a trek across India. It’s a matter of how we relate to our unfolding experiences.

  OPENING TO THE MOMENT

  SUSAN, A MEDITATION student, wrote me this: “When I’m feeling disconnected or lonely or anxious, I do my best to remember to pay attention to details. While paying attention does have a calming effect, I realize that paying attention—exquisite, extraordinary attention—is a way of falling in love. I can fall in love with the intricacies of a maple seed. I can fall in love with the sharp sound of the blue jays and squirrels fighting nearby. I can fall in love with the tension in my heart and throat when I think about the uncertainty of the coming months. This is a love that I consciously choose and that transforms any moment from one I’m rushing through or impatient with or not noticing to one I’m in love with.”

  The more we open to our present circumstances—our internal experiences, as well as our relationships with others and the world around us—the more we create the conditions for happiness to blossom. Eventually, we come to realize that, in fact, everything we need to be happy is here right now, when we say yes to life.

  S
aying yes to life doesn’t mean that we have to like what is taking place at every moment. And in fact, we grow and can make ourselves happier even by just noticing those moments when we find we are saying no to life. One fall, I was in Santa Fe for a retreat with the Tibetan teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche. One rainy afternoon, I pulled into the parking lot of my hotel and noticed crowds of people trying to photograph the sky. I looked up, and there was an incredible rainbow. I hopped out of the car to join the others in documenting the moment, but by the time my old iPhone turned on, the rainbow had disappeared. Instead, there were luminous pink clouds in the sky. And yet I was disappointed. I fixated on the fact that I had neglected to buy a new iPhone. A few moments later, two women left the hotel and walked past me. I heard one of the women gasp. “Wow. Look at those amazing clouds,” she said to the other. It was at that moment that I realized I could be saying yes to life, and I did. I was able to laugh at my habit of disconnecting from the beauty of life by clinging to old tendencies, stories, judgments, and criticisms. But as I laughed, I let go. I settled back into the moment, and I allowed my no to become a yes. Those clouds were extraordinary!

  When we open to this moment and don’t judge it or try to change it, even when we’re suffering and wish it were otherwise, we tap into the spaciousness of mind that allows us to move forward skillfully, with discernment and joy. In other words, every aspect of our experiences is included. No unwanted thought, emotion, or bodily sensation is left behind. This is wholeness.

  CURIOSITY AND AWE

  JUST AS WE looked earlier at ways we can reclaim these qualities in personal relationships so that they transform us rather than just seeming mawkish and clichéd, so, too, can we reclaim them in our relationship to life itself.

  Awe doesn’t ask our permission to wow us; it just smacks us in the face with something bigger without bothering to argue us out of our tedium. Awe can come in a single glance, a beautiful sound, a heartfelt gesture. Think of how we can slog along in our little tunnel of daily life, back and forth, and then one day pass a lilac bush in bloom. The fragrance catches us first and then the beauty of the full blossoms. In pausing to appreciate it, we receive a reminder of the spectacular. Much like that, awe can bring this invigorating sense of novelty into everyday relationships that might otherwise feel stale or dull.

  Curiosity is the place where awe is born, and it starts with heightening our senses. We may suspect life holds many mysteries, but only by paying attention can we access the grandeur and subtleties that make each person different and each encounter something fresh. By using our senses and paying a different kind of attention to the world around us, we may see that people we took for granted are more complex than we think they are. If we are able to open the mind to investigate, we may also discover some people are much simpler than the story we had constructed around them. Curiosity brings us the unexpected. It is the antidote to those times when we find ourselves in a rut, unable to take in anything new because we just can’t risk disrupting the dreary order of the day to day. With that frame of mind, curiosity looks like it would take too much energy. What, on top of everything else, you want me to question my reality? Honestly, I haven’t got the time for awe or wonder.

  Instead of gripping tightly to a fixed idea of how things are and how they should be, we can train our mind to hold those notions lightly and begin each day ready to explore. We do not need to face the world demanding that it prove us right. Instead, we can say to it: Surprise me. We can become excited by the possibility that if we keep our eyes open, we open our hearts to something new. To have the kind of openness that cultivates awe does not mean we have to be credulous and sentimental, but the ironic stance—to act unimpressed because we fear looking foolish—has us experiencing our own lives at a distance. If, instead, we open our hearts to real love, we allow ourselves to feel the wonder of life, which research says is vital to sustaining our connection to the world and to one another.

  Awe comes on a spectrum from being inspired by something quite small to springing from the soaring and majestic. On one end is “Aw!”—the sound we make when we notice something that reminds us of the struggles we all share and how we take them on with a full heart, endeavoring to do the best we can. “Aw!” comes out of the mouth almost without us noticing, the automatic connection to the heart we spontaneously experience when we see a child taking his first brave steps, his little hands steadied by those of his beaming grandmother. The toddler is joyful in the newness of his body and excited by his growing capabilities, and the grandma is joyful in guiding another child to step fully into this life. Awww! We see a spring-loaded puppy bound after a stick, we get an unexpected call from a friend who remembers that this is the anniversary of our mother’s death, we watch as a teenager on the subway who looks for all the world like a character from an angsty dystopian novel pops up from his seat when an elderly man hobbles onto the train car. This very sound—“Aw!”—captures our amazement at the simple things, the wondrous moments that happen between people all the time.

  The other end of the spectrum is awe with an e. This awe may be revealed in the small things, the tiny personal triumphs, but what we get a glimpse of is a sense of the immensity of the world in all its possibilities, the vastness of its expanse and our piece in the unfolding of it all. This awe generates its resonance through a connection to the grand and limitless. In our experiences of real love with ourselves, with another, with the world, we get the full spectrum of awe, from the commonplace to the infinite, with someone who is very close at hand or with all of life.

  Two psychology professors, Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, performed an experiment about the significance of awe, a quality they defined as “being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world [and] shifts our focus from our narrow self-interest.” In one experiment, they brought study participants to a grove of eucalyptus trees on the edge of the University of California–Berkeley campus. Piff and Keltner hoped to demonstrate how experiencing awe makes us more collaborative, accepting, and more strongly bound to one another.

  They gave the study subjects the choice of looking up at these magnificent trees, many of which are more than two hundred feet tall, or looking instead at the concrete façade of a science building that stands just east of the grove. While the participants were contemplating their options, the professors staged a mishap. They had someone walking on the path through the grove stumble and drop a handful of pens. Those who had spent a minute, just a minute, looking at the trees were more helpful to the person who tripped, picked up more of the scattered pens, than those who had been gazing at the building. The lines of the building stirred the rational mind, the researchers concluded, but not the heart. When the heart and the mind were opened by gazing at the trees, the sense of awe reinforced those people’s instincts to be less self-interested, kinder, and more helpful to a stranger.

  I remember overlooking the Straits of the Bosporus the first time I traveled to India. I was excited to be at the juncture of two continents. I stood in Istanbul, waiting for a ferry, and saw Europe on one side of the narrow body of water and Asia on the other—with all the mystery and possibilities it held. That instant for me was the same as it was for those in the study looking at the tall trees: I felt connected to the immensity of the world, to the limitlessness of my dreams and curiosity about what might come next.

  A friend who attended Berkeley says she’d like to show me that eucalyptus grove, because when she came upon it as an undergraduate, she felt the same things she’s heard me describe about standing on the edge of the Bosporus. Sometimes between classes, she told me, she would take refuge in the grove and deeply inhale the trees’ menthol perfume. The temperature in the core of the grove is cooler than the rest of campus, and in the morning, the fog lingers there, giving the stand of trees a mystical quality. Two forks of Strawberry Creek, a waterway that runs through Berkeley, merge in that grove. Breathing in the scent of the trees, hearing the sound of water running ov
er the rocks in the creek bed, she felt her body releasing into the sensation that she was a cluster of atoms among other atoms, supported by the world and also a vital and integrated part of the web of life. This humbled her, yet also connected her to the infinite scale of life. As joy coursed through her body, she embraced it and subsequently felt the chatter in her mind lessen. She felt less stressed and more available, emotionally, to the people in her life. My friend was experiencing what the researchers described as awe’s impact—imbuing people with humility and a different sense of themselves, one that is part of something larger.

  In my friend’s case, she sought out this experience intentionally, as a way to bolster her connection to herself and the universe and to replenish her energy for those she loved. We can train our minds to be like my friend’s: finding delight in everyday life will elevate us, too, and help us fully see ourselves and those we love. I like what the actress Rashida Jones has observed about her parents, music producer Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton, because it suggests that she is awed by awe. “My parents are the coolest of the cool on every single level,” Rashida said in an interview, “and it’s because they have a deep appreciation for every moment of their lives.”

  TRANSFORM NO INTO YES

  THE MORE WE cultivate mindfulness, the more clearly we see and appreciate what’s right in front of us, unclouded by judgment or expectation. And the more we cherish the life around us, the more we cherish ourselves. It’s a powerful equation.

  It wasn’t until she moved into her new apartment that Donna noticed the post office across the street. She’d relocated to the small city in search of peace and quiet, but the post office and adjacent parking lot bustled with activity. Donna was angry with herself for not having realized this before signing the lease. But she didn’t want to move again, so she decided to pay attention both to her resistance and to the commotion outside her window.