So this week we're talking about love and love in the most basic sense of the word is about connection.
That's it.
When we talk about love,
We are talking about a simple connection.
That's how I'm defining it,
Just connection.
A song that breaks my heart on a regular basis is Eleanor Rigby.
Look at all the lonely people.
Loneliness is an epidemic.
And it's an epidemic we don't talk about a lot.
It got more attention when we were isolated during COVID.
But not only did millions of people die from the pandemic,
Suicide also increased during that time.
Millions of people live with very little contact with other people.
And research tells us that lonely people are more likely to become ill and experience cognitive decline and die early.
But being connected on the other hand,
Even having as few as three people,
Three people in your life supports longevity.
There's a poem that speaks of this simple connection.
It's called The Corner Store by Alison Luterman.
He was a new old man behind the counter,
Skinny,
Brown,
And eager.
He greeted me like a long lost daughter,
As if we both came from the same world,
Someplace warmer and more gracious than this cold city.
I was thirsty and alone.
Sick at heart,
Grief soiled,
Exiled from my family through my own faulty temperament.
And his face lit up as if I were his prodigal daughter returning,
Coming back from the freezer bins in front of the register,
Which were still and always filled with the same old cable car ice cream sandwiches and cheap frozen greens.
I lumbered to the case and bought my precious bottled water and he returned my change beaming,
As if I were the bright new buds on the just bursting open cherry trees,
As if I were everything beautiful struggling to grow.
And he blessed me as he handed me my dime over the counter and the plastic tub of licorice whips.
This old man who didn't speak English beamed out love to me in the iron week after my mother's death so that when I emerged from his store,
My whole cockeyed life,
What a beautiful failure,
Glowed gold like a sunset after rain.
Frustrated city dogs were yelping in their yards,
Mad with passion behind their chain link fences and in the driveway of a peel painted house,
A woman and a girl danced to contagious reggae.
Praise Allah,
The Buddha,
Quan Yin,
Jesus,
Mary,
And even jealous old Jehovah,
For eyes and hands of the blessed one are everywhere.
Simple connection.
When I think about love in this simple way,
I remember in Reverend Martin Luther King's final book,
Where Do We Go From Here?
Chaos or Community?
He talked about how love is a key part of creating community that will work for everyone.
And he made this distinction between three forms of love,
Which are key to the human experience.
Eros is a form of love that is most commonly associated with desire.
Philia is often the love that we experience between good friends or family or our group,
Our community of practitioners.
And agape,
Agape,
Which was at the center of the movement he was building,
He defined agape as purely spontaneous,
Unmotivated,
Groundless and creative.
It is the love of God operating in the human heart.
So agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate.
It means understanding,
Goodwill for all people,
A love that seeks nothing in return,
Just simple connection.
So in the Buddhist tradition,
This simple connection,
This simple love is known as metta.
It's most commonly translated as loving kindness.
I like goodwill,
Friendliness.
Even tolerance is a kind of metta.
Some years ago,
The teacher Joseph Goldstein,
Who founded the Insight Meditation Society in Berry,
Massachusetts,
And who is a teacher that really has been so instrumental in bringing insight meditation to the West.
He wrote about a Tibetan teacher who was considered by many to be enlightened,
An enlightened being.
And this teacher offered this teaching.
He said,
I would like to pass on one bit of advice I give to everyone.
Relax.
Just relax.
Be nice to each other.
As you go through life,
Simply be kind to people.
Try to help them rather than hurt.
Try to get along with them rather than fall out with them.
With that,
I will leave you with all my good wishes.
Relax.
Just relax.
In practice,
Metta is kind of an exploration of the heart.
And when we start to practice something,
We may find that the conditioning of the heart is to protect it,
Is to close the heart.
So if we see that the heart is not metta,
Is not tolerance and friendliness and goodwill,
If what we see is ill will perhaps,
Or if what we see is some kind of attached love,
Great.
We're learning.
Relax.
Relax.
It's like what Rumi said,
Your task is not to seek for love,
But to merely seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built up against it.
That's what we're doing here.
We're discovering all the barriers that prevent connection with ourselves and with other people.
What I learned about this practice is that I had to forgive myself for harm that I caused to myself and to others,
And I had to forgive the harm that was caused to me.
The forgiveness practice was for me the predecessor to the metta practice.
So on Tuesday I shared with you a phrase that I sometimes repeat to myself.
Beloved,
Break your heart no longer.
Here is the full poem,
And it's by Swami Kripalu Bapuji.
My beloved child,
Break your heart no longer.
Each time you judge yourself,
You break your own heart.
Stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your own vitality.
The time has come,
Your time to live,
To celebrate,
To see.
To see the goodness that you are.
Let no one,
No thing or ideal or ideas obstruct you.
If one comes,
Even in the name of truth,
Forgive it for its unknowing.
Do not fight,
Let go,
And breathe into the goodness that you are.
Breathe into the goodness that you are.
So for a few minutes,
Let's just practice breathing into the goodness that we are.
Just feel yourself sitting,
Arriving with these reflections on love,
Connection,
Forgiveness.
Relaxing your shoulders and softening your hands,
And taking some breaths,
Feeling the inhale and the exhale.
And in the stillness,
Invite whatever wants attention.
Watching this practice as a life process is not just one little meditation.
We have to sense our intention to stop warring with ourselves and relax.
What's the wish?
To regard our waves of conditioning with more compassion,
With a forgiving heart.
I'll close with a short story.
Some of you have heard before,
But it's worth hearing again.
Maybe you'll see yourself in it.
It was the coldest winter ever,
So cold that many animals froze to death.
In an effort to save themselves from this icy fate,
The porcupines decided to gather together to fend off the chill.
They huddled close to each other,
Covered and protected from the elements and warmed by their collective body heat.
But their prickly quills provided to be a bit of a problem in close proximity.
They poked and stabbed each other,
Wounding their closest companions.
The warmth was wonderful,
But the mutual needling became increasingly uncomfortable.
Eventually,
They began to distance themselves from one another,
Scattering in the forest,
Only to end up alone and frozen.
Many died.
It soon became clear that they would have to choose between a solitary death in the frigid wilderness and the discomfort of being needled by their companions' quills when they banded together.
Wisely,
They decided to return to the huddle.
They learned to live with the little wounds caused by close relationship with their fellows in order to benefit from the collective heat they generated as a group.
In this way,
They were able to survive.
And we must too.
In this way.
Thank you for your kind attention.
