So today is Valentine's Day.
Happy Valentine's Day.
In traditional folktales and through our consumer culture,
We created a day to stop for love.
So I'd like to explore love with you a little bit.
I've heard that this Buddhist path that we're on is referred to often as a religion of love.
Like when the Dalai Lama said that his religion is kindness.
So for the Buddha,
Love is one of the paths.
It's really the path of full liberation.
Full spiritual liberation love is.
So if we call Buddhism a religion of love,
We need to be clear what we mean by love.
So freedom is considered the guide or the ultimate goal of all things related to Buddhism.
Freedom.
So love that is characterized by freedom.
So love that involves clinging or lust or confusion or neediness or fear or grasping to self,
The ego,
Would be in Buddhist terms seen as an expression not of love but of bondage and limitation.
So to be free only when things are pleasant is not real liberation.
Like similarly to love only in optimal conditions is not real love.
You know,
It's not uncommon to have experienced great love while we're in meditation.
It's easy.
In fact to love all beings in the abstract,
But it can be a really great challenge when we're living with them or we're working with them,
Right?
It's one thing to love and it's another thing to express that love in daily life.
Thich Nhat Hanh has a teaching that understanding is love by another name,
Understanding that to love another means to fully understand their suffering and to understand their stress.
He describes love as loving kindness,
Compassion,
Sympathetic joy,
And inclusiveness or equanimity.
And these are the four kinds of love that are taught and encouraged in classic Buddhist teaching and they're not unique to Buddhism.
There are four qualities of the heart that reside within us.
They're known as the four Brahma Viharas.
And in the next couple of weeks,
We'll explore these innate capacities within us.
And so for clarification,
Brahma Vihara,
This is a Pali word,
The original language of the Buddha and it translates as divine abodes.
So in the Buddhist mythology,
Brahma is a powerful god.
It refers to the supreme deity in the pantheon of deities.
And some people are kind of surprised to learn that Buddhism has deities,
Thinking it's more of an atheist belief.
But Buddhism actually has a lot of gods,
But in my experience,
They just don't think that highly of them.
It's just not that important.
And Vihara,
So Brahma is the god and Vihara means dwelling or home.
So the home of the gods,
That's where the home of the divine and we can live there.
We can learn to live there.
And so how can we understand and cultivate this true love?
That's what Thich Nhat Hanh calls it,
True love.
And one of the analogies that's used,
That if you put a spoonful of water in a glass,
In like a short glass,
And drink that water,
The water will be bitter and it'll be hard to drink.
But if you put the spoonful of salt,
I'm sorry,
If you put the spoonful of not water,
The spoonful of salt in a glass and drink it,
It's hard to,
It's salty and it's bitter.
But if you put the same spoonful of salt in a larger vessel,
In a pitcher,
Or in a pot,
You might not taste the salt at all.
So,
And the teaching is that we can't affect the salt.
The salt is the bitterness of life.
It's in there,
You know,
Things happen.
But what we can do is we can expand the container that holds it.
We can expand our hearts.
And we just saw in our practice how that happens,
The space that's created by stopping.
And when our hearts are small,
Our understanding and our compassion are limited.
We suffer.
It's harder to accept and to tolerate other people and ourselves when our hearts feel small,
Limited,
Not at capacity.
But when our hearts expand,
And you may have noticed in our meditation,
Coming into the practice,
Maybe your heart is smaller and you have,
You're not even aware of your heart when you sit down.
But all of a sudden,
As you stop and you be,
Your heart starts to expand.
And those same situations in our life,
Those same shortcomings,
They don't cause us as much suffering.
We have more capacity for understanding and compassion.
We accept ourselves as we are,
And then we can accept others as they are.
So how is it that we grow our own hearts?
You know,
It starts with us.
We start feeding and supporting our own happiness.
We actually in practice,
In this stopping that we do,
This intentional pause that we take together,
We're nourishing our ability to love and what gets in the way of that is when we,
Like if we happen to take on the practice,
Like,
Okay,
So I'm going to cultivate self-love and self-compassion and this is the intent and then you sit down and then all of a sudden what you come up against is not self-love and compassion.
What you come up against is a feeling of lack.
It's subtle,
But the feeling of being empty is there and we don't really know the cause and we we hope that something outside of ourselves will come along.
So we'll feel less alone and less empty.
And so on the way to understanding ourselves,
Having compassion for ourselves,
Sometimes we look outside ourselves for an object to be found.
For an object for our love and how that goes is when we realize that all our hopes and expectations can't be fulfilled by that person.
Well,
Then we go back to feeling empty.
We want to find something and we don't know what we're searching for and it's in all of us.
There's this kind of continuous desire and expectation deep inside of us.
Like we're still expecting something better to happen.
Even we can,
You know,
Apply it to practice.
Still looking for this Enlightenment experience.
You know,
That's why we often check our emails and text all day long.
Still expecting something better to happen.
So the true love on this path of practice is the cultivation of these elements,
This loving kindness,
Compassion,
And joy and equanimity.
Thich Nhat Hanh calls these the elements of holiness.
Holiness.
So my intent for our time ahead is to explore each of these Brahma Viharas and build a home for ourselves.
We have to construct it though.
And the first we will explore is Metta.
Metta translates as loving kindness.
And just to say that the essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness.
And you can't offer genuine happiness until you have it for yourself.
So we're going to build a home inside ourselves by accepting ourself,
Learning to love and heal ourself.
When we can create moments of happiness and joy within,
It's food.
And then we have something to offer other people.
So I'd like to offer a short practice that as I'm going to this is from Joan Halifax,
The founder of Upaya Zen Center.
And this short,
It's very short,
But it's kind of like a daily vitamin that she offers and that I'm offering now to you and to me.
So just taking a deep inhale and exhale and relaxing in your body for a moment and saying to yourself,
May I be grateful for this life.
May I be grateful for this life.
May I be grateful for all those who are in my life.
May I be grateful for all those who are in my life.
May I be grateful for the lessons given to me,
Including my own errors and faults.
May I be grateful for the lessons given to me,
Including my own errors and faults.
May I be grateful that I have the heart to serve.
May I be grateful that I have the heart to serve.
