Practicing The Art Of Loving

Self-love is the foundation of the art of loving. Our ability to give love to others is directly related to our ability to love ourselves. Other people act as mirrors to our own strengths and flaws. When we judge other people, it is actually a sign that there is a part of ourselves that we cannot accept because what we see in other people is always related to something that is a part of who are. To love ourselves, we must learn to be truly honest to ourselves, to accept those things that may not be the most attractive parts of our character. Loving ourselves is a two-step process: fully accepting who we are and understanding of the darkness within ourselves; and secondly, the practice of giving love to ourselves on a daily basis.

Erich Fromm states that we cannot love something that we do not know well. To love our bodies - the one and only vehicle given to us to go through life - is another fundamental aspect of the art of loving. And to properly love our bodies, we first have to get to know it better. We have to be more and more attuned to what it needs and the messages it sends us. Through the technique of the body scan, we can dive deeper into the myriad sensations our bodies are constantly experiencing. The more we practice observing the sensations in our bodies without reacting compulsively but rather noticing them with equanimity, the better equipped we become in reining in the thoughts and emotions that tend to limit our ability to give and receive love.

In this session, we expand our practice of the art of loving by turning it outward by learning to listen to others. Erich Fromm said that to love something, we must know it. And to know it, we must learn to listen to it to the best of our abilities. More often than not, we are focused on what we want to tell other people, on selling the stories of our lives that we forget the art of listening. To properly listen to someone, we must give utmost focus and precedence on what they're saying, not just for the sake of adding our clever response or idea. Practicing our ability to listen is crucial to making progress in our practice of the art of loving.

One of the most difficult aspects of the art of loving is learning to love aspects of our personalities that are not so beautiful. These aspects, which include selfishness, anger, jealousy, narcissism, and fear, are what we refer to as the shadow or lower self. These are the things that we all attempt to conceal behind our masks. In our practice today, we learn to accept that we all have a shadow. There is no such things as selfish and kind people, smart or dumb people, or kind or mean people. Everyone's capability to give love is contextual. We are all capable of good and not-so-good deeds. Acknowledging our dark side is key. Denying it can mean unconsciously acting out our dark sides and hurting others. Meeting ourselves with compassion and understanding when it arises, increase our ability to respond to these darker aspects of ourselves consciously and wisely.

It's easy to be a loving person to the people who are nice to us. However, the real test of our ability to practice love is when we're confronted with someone who is negative, maybe even someone who is attacking us. If we withhold love during those instances, then we're not truly practicing the art of loving. Why? To love is to understand that other people's negativity always arises from some sort of suffering. It has nothing to do with us, and that we're free to choose not to take it personally. To love is also to want to alleviate suffering whenever we see it. Loving our enemies is where we can truly progress in the art of loving. Going from judgment to compassion is not only good for our hearts but also terrific for our brains. Neurological studies suggest that nothing is as good for our brains as connecting to the frequency of love and wishing for the suffering of other people to end.

To become the Picasso of the art of loving, we must truly learn to love those who do not love us. That includes those who trigger some aspects of our shadow self. True love is unconditional. Mastering the art of true love is akin to how a tree gives its fruits, without regard as to the identity of its recipient. To perfect the art of loving, there's no better exercise than to send love to the people who may have wronged us or whom we may not like.

Our greatest tendency is to give more weight to negative information such as threats than to positive ones. This has the effect of taking for granted important things in our lives such as people close to us. Sometimes, we get stuck in unfulfilling patterns with our loved ones, and it's easy to lose sight of the fact that they won't always be with us. Today's meditation is about celebrating and actively nurturing our relationships with our loved ones.

According to Erich Fromm, the fundamental problem of human existence is the feeling of separateness we feel from others and the rest of the world. Although there are temporary ways of numbing this feeling of separateness, such as addiction, the only real and sustainable way of addressing this problem is simply to love. Contrary to the notion of love propagated by society as an emotion we can receive from a specific person, love here is to mean an attitude, an orientation of character towards acknowledging the relatedness of a person to the whole through our work and our relationships with others. In this meditation, we move from extending love to our small circles of friends and relatives to seeing the whole of humanity as one big family.

To truly become the master of the art of loving, we need to connect not just with other humans but to the whole of creation. Distinctions and separations we make as human beings between ourselves and nature are arbitrary and conceptual. We are all living organisms and fundamentally inseparable from our living environments. We're as much a part of nature as nature is part of us. When we remember that we are not an isolated entity far removed from the external world, we can understand intuitively how we treat our environment with kindness is reflected back at us in the form of wellbeing.

The essence of the art of loving, according to Erich Fromm, is to change our view of love from the common understanding of receiving it as an object from someone to viewing it as an art, as a lifelong practice of furthering the growth and wellbeing of all the relationships in our life in an ever-expanding circle of love. It's about loving ourselves, our loved ones, strangers, and enemies, and ultimately, loving the whole of nature and humanity around us. This is a truly great idea but it remains a theory until we put it into practice. Fromm reminds us of three fundamental qualities that any artist has to develop within themselves to become a master of the art of loving: discipline, concentration, and patience. The art of loving is only mastered by practicing on a daily basis, cultivating each quality along the way.