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by John Welwood

  As long as we fixate on what our parents didn’t give us, the ways our friends don’t consistently show up for us, or the ways our lover doesn’t understand us, we will never become rooted in ourselves and heal the wound of the heart. To grow beyond the dependency of a child requires sinking our own taproot into the wellspring of great love. This is the only way to know for certain that we are loved unconditionally.

  In emphasizing the importance of not looking to others for perfect love, I am not suggesting that you turn away from relationships or belittle their importance. On the contrary, learning to sink your taproot into the source of love allows you to connect with others in a more powerful way—“straight up,” confidently rooted in your own ground, rather than leaning over, always trying to get something from “out there.” The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.

  I am also not suggesting that it’s impossible to embody absolute, unconditional love in our relationships, for this capacity for selfless caring is surely the greatest and most sacred of all human potentials. But the free flow of love between two intimate partners is usually intermittent at best, since it also inevitably invites the broken, wounded places to step forward into awareness. As that happens and we find ourselves tossed around in the stormy waves of relative love, it can be quite challenging to keep sourcing the pristine love we glimpse in moments of pure opening.

  Perhaps only enlightened saints and buddhas can be perfect vessels through which absolute love flows unobstructedly. As a total, unconditional openness to everything that life brings, spiritual awakening allows the heart to become a perfectly clear channel. And this enables the awakened one to keep giving even when the world gives nothing back. Arnaud Desjardins, a French spiritual teacher whose journey began by filming great spiritual masters of the East, searched most of his life for the perfect love that would set him free. Finally he found it, but in an unexpected place. Not where he sought it originally—in the arms of young women—but at the feet of old men—the sages in whose company he sat.

  Loving Our Humanness

  Yet though perhaps only saints and buddhas embody absolute love completely, nonetheless, every moment of working with the challenges of relative human love brings a hint of this divine possibility into our life. As the child of heaven and earth, you are a mix of infinite openness and finite limitation. This means that you are both wonderful and difficult at the same time. You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns, you become carried away with yourself. Indeed, you are quite impossible in many ways. And still, you are beautiful beyond measure. For the core of what you are is fashioned out of love, that potent blend of openness, warmth, and clear, transparent presence. Boundless love always manages somehow to sparkle through your limited form.

  George Orwell once wrote15 that the essence of being human lies not in seeking perfection but in being “prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals,” who are just as impossible as we are. Orwell is of course describing the poignant, bittersweet quality of relative love. Human relationships often seem utterly impossible because they never seem to fit our ideals and expectations. Again and again they force us to face heartbreak and defeat, until finally the only alternative is to let ourselves be broken up, so that we may remain more open and loving in the face of life as it is.

  Bringing absolute love into human form16 involves learning to hold the impossibility of ourselves and others in the way that the sky holds clouds—with gentle spaciousness and equanimity. The sky can do this because its openness is so much vaster than the clouds that it doesn’t find them the least bit threatening. Holding our imperfections in this way allows us to see them as trail markers of the work-in-progress that we are, rather than as impediments to love or happiness. Then we can say, “Yes, everyone has relative weaknesses that cause suffering, yet everyone also possesses absolute beauty, which far surpasses these limitations. Let us melt down the frozen, fearful places by holding them in the warmth of tenderness and mercy.”

  In his book Works of Love,17 the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard points out that true love doesn’t embrace others in spite of their flaws, as if rising above them. Rather, it finds “the other lovable in spite of and together with his weaknesses and errors and imperfections. . . . Because of your beloved’s weakness you shall not remove yourself from him or make your relationship more remote; on the contrary, the two of you shall hold together with greater solidarity and inwardness in order to remove the weakness.”

  The same holds true for loving yourself. When you recognize that the absolute beauty within you cannot be tarnished by your flaws, then this beauty you are can begin to care for the beast you sometimes seem to be. Beauty’s touch begins to soften the beast’s gnarly defenses.

  Then you begin to discover that the beast and the beauty go hand in hand. The beast is, in fact, nothing other than your wounded beauty. It is the beauty that has lost faith in itself because it has never been fully recognized. Not trusting that you are loved or lovable has given rise to all the most beastly emotional reactions—anger, arrogance, hatred, jealousy, meanness, depression, insecurity, greedy attachment, fear of loss and abandonment.

  While the beast has a certain limited power—to say no and shut down in self-defense—it is cut off from a much greater power, the capacity to say yes. Just as the dancer’s grace lies in yielding, bending, and flowing with every pulse of the music, this is also how our beauty reveals itself—in our capacity to open to reality and ride on life’s swiftly changing currents. The wounded beast is only the shutting down of that marvelous capacity for grace and fluidity.

  The first step in freeing the beast from its burden is to acknowledge the hardening around our heart. Then, peering behind this barrier, we may encounter the wounded, cut-off place in ourselves where the mood of unlove resides. If we can meet this place gently, without judgment or rejection (and chapters 3 and 4 will concretely demonstrate how to do this), we will uncover the great tenderness that resides at the very core of our humanness.

  Our beauty and our beast both arise from one and the same tenderness. When we harden against it, the beast is born. Yet when we allow the tenderness, we begin to discern the contours of a long-lost beauty hidden within the belly of the beast. If we can shine warmth and openness into the dark, tender place where we don’t know we’re lovable, this starts to forge a marriage between our beauty and our wounded beast.

  This is, after all, the love we most long for—this embracing of our humanness, which lets us appreciate ourselves as the beautiful, luminous beings we are, housed in a vulnerable, flickering form whose endless calling is to move from chrysalis to butterfly, from seed to new birth. As earthly creatures continually subject to relative disappointment, pain, and loss, we cannot avoid feeling vulnerable. Yet as an open channel through which great love enters this world, the human heart remains invincible. Being wholly and genuinely human means standing firmly planted in both dimensions, celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time.

  Here at this crossroads where yes and no, limitless love and human limitation, intersect, we discover the essential human calling: progressively unveiling the sun in our heart, that it may embrace the whole of ourselves and the whole of creation within the sphere of its radiant warmth. This love is not the least bit separate from true power. For, as the great Sufi poet Rumi sings:18

  When we have surrendered totally to that beauty,

  Then we shall be a mighty kindness.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Mood of Grievance

  Who is it t
hat’s unhappy?

  The one who finds fault.

  —ANONYMOUS

  THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE element in human relationships is the urge to make other people bad or wrong, and then judge, reject, or punish them for that. The tragic consequences of this show up everywhere: in feuds within marriages, families, and organizations; wars between nations; and constant strife between people who are unable to accept one another’s differences. The long-standing conflicts in the Middle East have this character, where the intensity of the grudges and the urge to retaliate have developed a momentum that keeps escalating far beyond where it has the slightest benefit for anyone.

  The suicide bomber expresses the mind-set of grievance in an especially intense way. Most of us probably find it hard to understand how anyone could value his life so little that he is willing to blow himself up in order to get back at those who have wronged him or his people. Yet if we look closer, we can find the makings of a suicide bomber within each one of us.

  Nursing a grievance—treating our intimate partner as someone to get back at, or resenting how badly life or other people have treated us—is a self-destructive act. For in wanting to hurt or reject someone or something we resent, we unwittingly wind up hurting or rejecting ourselves at the same time. This is easy to see: just notice how your whole body tightens and constricts when you hold something against someone. When you do this, you are destroying your own life—the presence, openness, and warmth that is your lifeblood. So to make the other bad at the expense of feeling good ourselves is to choose death over life, just like the suicide bomber.

  This is one of the most striking phenomena I observe in working with couples: how they often have much more energy for making each other wrong than for setting things right between them. They often have tremendous investment in their complaint: “You did this to me; you said that to me. You have wronged me.” Some people are so deeply wedded to their grievance that they are willing to blow up the relationship and their own happiness just to prove that their partner is wrong and they are right.

  Grievance at Work

  Dan and Nancy were a case in point. After five years of marriage, Nancy had amassed a large collection of grievances against Dan, based on her hurt about not feeling fully loved. Dan was certainly not the most responsive lover and husband. But Nancy also seemed to take perverse pleasure in holding his sins of omission and commission against him. It was as though she kept a running tally and were continually saying, “See, there you go again. You just proved once again that you don’t really love me. If you really loved me, you would have: paid closer attention . . . listened more carefully . . . called me . . . apologized . . . acknowledged me more in public . . . not looked at any other woman in the room . . . not raised your voice. . . .”

  To Dan, Nancy’s list of grievances seemed endless. Each time he did something that provided fresh evidence that “he didn’t really love her,” Nancy would pull out her list to seal the case. Dan felt he didn’t stand a chance, because every time he did something “right,” it could never measure up against the long list of his recorded wrongs. So he gradually lost interest in trying. While he certainly had difficulty being attentive to others’ needs, he did care about Nancy and wanted to make her happy. But out of frustration about never being able to do enough for her, he had hardened into the position that she was simply impossible.

  When this couple first came in, they were like two prosecuting attorneys trying to prove just how wrong the other was. Nancy was firm in her righteous grievance, while Dan was steadfast in his complaint that Nancy would never be happy with him, no matter how hard he tried. Since most of their relational energy went into the battle between their two grievance positions, there was little energy left over for trying to move in a new direction. This kind of standoff is common in marriage and long-term relationships.

  Some would argue that this kind of adversarial bitterness shows that human beings are basically aggressive, or that war is more fundamental than love in human relations. But I see it the other way around. Just as a clenched fist is possible only because of the open hand that precedes it, so war and aggression are not primary, but a shutting down of our more fundamental openness. They are what we do when we feel wounded or insecure, that is, cut off from love. Similarly, just as the sky can hold clouds but clouds cannot hold the vast expanse of the sky, so love is greater than hatred because it can embrace hatred, while hatred cannot embrace love. While love can exist free of hatred, hatred19 exists only because of love, as a painful symptom of our disconnection from it.

  So if love is primary, why then is war so prominent in human relationships and world affairs? The answer lies in unpacking the phenomenon of grievance. Grievance is the missing link between love and war: Peace degenerates into war and honeymoons lead to divorces through the reenactment of old grievances.

  Unpacking Grievance

  Most of us are unaware of how invested we are in grievance and how much it governs our life. To set things right in this world and allow love to occupy its rightful place at the center of our life, we need to bring the mood of grievance into the full light of awareness. We need to recognize how much we hold on to grudges—and to understand why. We need to see how grievance works and what function it serves. In this way we begin to unpack grievance, opening up the tight, dark corner that it occupies within us. And this starts to remove the grime that has formed on the window of the heart, so that love’s clear light can enter in more fully.

  Every grievance has its roots in old hurt about not being fully loved and old frustration about not being able to do anything about that. Once established, this hurt and frustration become like a hidden virus that remains dormant in our nervous system, ready to flare up the moment someone looks at us the wrong way. This is what triggers all the emotional eruptions that afflict our relationships.

  So rather than concluding that human beings are basically belligerent, we need instead to understand exactly why we hold on to these old grievances that underlie all our acts of aggression. What is clear is that holding in mind what has hurt us in the past is a survival mechanism, a way of trying to make sure it won’t creep up on us again while we’re off guard. The mind holding on to grievance is like a full-time sentry guard whose job is to remain on the lookout for emotional threats from other people. Simply put, we don’t want to be wounded again, like we were before, once long ago.

  Most of the time the sentry quietly goes about his patrol and we’re not even aware he’s on duty. But then when someone crosses us, slights us, ignores or hurts us, the alarm bells go off. As this alarm runs through our nervous system, it triggers an upsurge of charged emotion. And then we swing into some aggressive or defensive maneuver—anger, blame, attack, withdrawal, or flight—to fend off this threat.

  A less dramatic, more recurring symptom of grievance at work is our perpetual tendency to judge other people. Have you ever noticed how many judgmental or blaming thoughts pass through your mind every hour of every day? Usually it’s hard to be aware of just how many judgments we have of others unless we slow down and observe the mind more carefully. The first words out of the mouth of an eighteen-year-old I know, at the conclusion of her first silent meditation retreat, were: “I never realized before just how judgmental I was!”

  Why all these judgmental thoughts? Standing in judgment of others is a way to feel superior, by placing ourselves above them. Yet why on earth would we need to feel superior unless we also somehow felt inferior deep within and were trying to compensate for that? Judging others allows me to feel righteous and one up, which shields me from the pain of their judgment and rejection of me. In judging them, I neutralize their power over me. So here again we see the wound at work: Judging and condemning others is an attempt to avoid experiencing the pain and fear of not feeling loved.

  And so our judgmental thoughts arrive like automatic interest payments that we continually receive on our investment in grievance. Unfortunately, they take us away from being right here in the
present, the only place where real love and happiness can happen. The mind that scans the environment for threats, insults, and things we don’t like keeps us edgy and tense, preventing us from opening up and letting love in.

  The Bad Other

  An important step in releasing ourselves from the grip of grievance is to recognize the linchpin that holds it in place: the fixation on the “bad other.” The bad other is our internal image of the one who doesn’t love us or treat us well. It can be seen operating in our tendency to be on the lookout for wrongs directed at us. Unless we bring this inner image to consciousness and see how much we focus on other people as potential threats, this tendency will operate unconsciously, forever poisoning our relations with others.

  Let’s look at how the bad-other image forms in the mind. As young children we totally depended on our parents for everything. When receiving our mother’s care, we formed a sense of the “good mother” within us. Yet since no mother can ever be totally attuned to her child, we also had experiences of a mother who neglected, frustrated, or hurt us.

  Young children have no way to comprehend how a parent can be “good,” a source of pleasure and happiness, one minute, and “bad,” a source of pain and frustration, the next. It requires a great deal of maturity to hold a balanced, nuanced picture of other people that includes both their pleasing and unpleasant qualities. If children had this maturity, they might be able to say to themselves: “I’m feeling neglected right now, but I can see that my mother is having a hard time. She is burdened and pressured herself. She has had a hard life, and having a young child is bringing up all of her own unresolved conflicts and needs. So the fact that she can’t be there for me right now doesn’t mean anything bad about her or about me.” If children were capable of that kind of understanding, there would be no need for psychotherapists!