January 7 – Looking through the eyes of love

Dear Friends,

For this month, I’m dedicating Sundays to practices of the heart. As Jeanne often explains, our practice has two wings – the wing of mindfulness, and the wing of kindness. So we’ll use Sundays to strengthen our kindness muscle.

On Saturday, I needed to flex the “kindness to self” muscle… I had run some batch jobs on Friday night and was very pleased that they ran so smoothly… until I realized that I had an error in the code I had written. Right away, old stories of unworthiness and self-doubt jumped in with their tired refrain of “not good enough”, “stupid”, “failure”.

In her latest book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, Sharon Salzberg writes:

Although love is often depicted as starry-eyed and sweet, love for the self is made of tougher stuff. It’s not a sappy form of denial. You might still feel rage, desire, and shame like everyone else in the world, but you can learn to hold these emotions in a context of caring.

Real love allows for failure and suffering. All of us have made mistakes, and some of these mistakes were consequential, but you can find a way to relate to them with kindness. No matter what troubles have befallen you or what difficulties you have caused yourself or others, with love for yourself, you can change, grow, make amends, and learn. Real love is not about letting yourself off the hook. Real love does not encourage you to ignore your problems or deny your mistakes and imperfections. You see them clearly and still opt to love.

In the next chapter, she adds:

If we heard a friend say, “I’m not worth much. I’m not interesting, I’ve failed at so much, and that’s why no one loves me,” we would probably leap to her defense. “But I love you,” we’d insist. “Your other friends love you, too. You’re a good person.” Yet so often we don’t counter the negative statements that crowd our own minds every day.

Instead, we might ask ourselves: If I look at what’s happening through the eyes of love, how would I tell this story?

So that’s my practice this weekend… as I resubmit the jobs again!

For those of us who have had the opportunity to sit at a meditation when Doris is leading, she often starts with recalling benefactors and receiving their good wishes, as remembering that sense of being loved often makes self-love easier to access. John Makransky’s book Awakening Through Love includes a guided meditation on receiving love from a benefactor. You can listen to an audio recording here:
Identifying Benefactors and Receiving Love

May you have deepest well-being, happiness, and joy.

With best wishes,
Andrea