Life begins with love, is maintained with love,
and ends with love.
—TSOKNYI RINPOCHE
When I was in my late teens, I put my Red Cross lifesaving certificate to work teaching swimming to children with severe disabilities. Jasmine was a beautiful sixteen-year-old who would have been the high school homecoming queen if she hadn’t had spina bifida. The way the disease contorted her body made her too self-conscious to put on a bathing suit and join us in the pool. But she loved to watch, make wisecracks, and flirt.
I spent months patiently encouraging her to give swimming a try. Each day, I tried to playfully reflect back to her the strength, courage, sense of adventure, and beauty I saw radiating from within her. When someone believes they are beyond love, you cannot convince them to love themselves. But you can show them that they are loved. As the poet Galway Kinnell wrote, “Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
One day, Jasmine slipped out of her wheelchair and onto the raised marble ledge of the pool. Weeks later, she took off her braces and heavy orthopedic shoes to dip her toes in the water. And after six months, she showed up in her turquoise bathing suit. Without prompting, she maneuvered her twisted, skinny legs onto the pool’s edge, called me closer, and with a huge smile leaped into my arms like a seven-year-old child.
* * *
In the horror of my own suffering, I always had held out the hope that one day someone would rescue me. I had imagined that I would be saved by love coming toward me. Just the opposite. I was rescued when love came through me. I discovered love through acts of kindness … not offered to me, but coming from me. I think of the words of the late John O’Donohue, who wrote, “We do not need to go out and find love; rather, we need to be still and let love discover us.”
The experience with Jasmine and the other disabled kids unlocked a compassion hidden deep in the heart of my suffering. I discovered an essential love that was reliable, vast, and undamaged. This became a source of true support, my steadfast guide throughout many years of sometimes amazing, sometimes trying experiences in hospice care.
Love has been my mentor. Love itself has taught me to love.
* * *
The boundlessness of love is made evident when the veils between this world and the invisible world are thinnest. At birth and death, love melts any division. It often allows us to move beyond what we thought possible. We do things we couldn’t have imagined. I have known women who labored through the powerful, strong contractions of childbirth, moving through exhaustion, pain, and sometimes fear only to discover a deep upwelling of love. A love that is unlike any they have known before. There are countless stories of similar discoveries near the time of death, like the daughter who thought she could not live without her father, yet out of love she released him, saying, “It’s okay, Daddy. I love you … You can go.”
In such moments, we glimpse a love without limitation, a love unlike the commerce-like reciprocal exchange that characterizes many romantic relationships (as when someone else expresses love for us and we feel obliged to react in turn). This is an entirely different order of love, one that springs from the very source of our being. It recognizes and responds to the intrinsic goodness of the human heart. It is both profoundly receptive and dynamically expressive.
This facet of love represents a more universal aspiration that all beings, including ourselves, will find happiness and the causes of happiness. It exists both before and beyond conditions. It is not something to be achieved by our personalities. It is not an idealistic love to be attained by following a certain path, nor is it the result of reaching a special spiritual state. It is always present. In a way, it is the background for all experience, the very essence of our being.
Because this love lives within us, it is always available. It is available to help us face the stuck, wounded, rejected aspects of ourselves and to meet the challenges that are yet to come. Dissolving our defenses, it enables us to grapple with the demons of negative self-image, shame, confusion, and unresolved loss, rather than continuing to avoid them. Then we can heal.
We may imagine that the tension and holding we have used to forge the armor around our hearts will keep out the pain, making us invulnerable. Instead, our armor cuts us off from love, dulling our sensitivity, steeling us to our experience, and locking out the tenderness, comfort, mercy, and joy that we need. Often, we remain frightened behind this shield and grow increasingly isolated from other people and ourselves.
Gradually, as we explore and relax the habitual strategies that once enclosed us, giving ourselves more space, we see that even our armor was never separate from love. Just as when the sun comes out it melts the ice, turns it to water and then into gas, and then absorbs it back into the atmosphere, so, too, there is nothing separate from this unlimited love of our being—not even the ugliest and most unloved parts of ourselves.
This love is the source that allows us to welcome everything and push away nothing. The sort of fearless openness required to turn toward our suffering is only possible within the spacious receptivity of love.
Carl was a homegrown philosopher. A conversation with him could easily become a never-ending stream of questions and more questions. I appreciated his keen intellect and logical mind, but I loved Carl’s heart. I noticed how graciously he welcomed people into his room. He had a grandfatherly way of making space for them. Once, when two teenage volunteers visited him at hospice, he listened for almost an hour to their scene-by-scene replay of their favorite movie. He listened generously, not so much out of interest, but out of care for them as human beings.
With so many Buddhist volunteers around, it was inevitable that Carl’s curiosity would lead him to ask about meditation. He was using a self-administered morphine pump that released prescribed amounts of pain medication to help with his stomach cancer, but it left him foggy at times. He thought he could use mindfulness to manage his abdominal pain instead of morphine. So he asked me to teach him how to meditate. I agreed to try.
In meditation, pain is considered a great teacher. There are many different techniques for working with the experience. I began with the most common, encouraging Carl first to notice the pain by directing his attention to the general area of his body, then to precisely sense the tension, the sharpness, the sometimes searing, ever-changing sensations. We would alternate between this pinpointed, concentrated attention and coming back to the breath in order to stabilize and refresh so that his mind wouldn’t become too exhausted.
Carl was very determined. I noticed his furrowed brow and the tightness around his eyes. He was at war with his pain, enduring it rather than allowing, opening, or softening to the experience. He was trying to use mindfulness to conquer his pain, and he grew frustrated with the lack of immediate results. The pain was too much for him. He started screaming.
We needed to find another way.
Gently, I laid my hands on Carl’s belly. This time I encouraged him to feel into the space between the center of the pain and the warmth of my hands.
“It still hurts too much,” he groaned.
I pulled my hands farther away from his belly. “How’s that?” I asked.
“That’s a bit better.”
I pulled my hands out still more, encouraging him to soften the muscles around his stomach, relax his forehead, and let the pain float in the space he was discovering.
“Oh, that’s better,” he said.
“Now a little more,” I suggested. My hands were two feet away from his body.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” he whispered.
I wasn’t doing energy-healing work. There was no magic being performed. All that was happening was that Carl was making space for his pain. He was breathing easier now. The muscles around his jaw had relaxed. He lay back against the pillow, eyes closed.
“Can you just rest there?” I wondered aloud.
“Rest in love,” he murmured.
The words didn’t come from me, but from some deep, innate place within Carl. His awareness was now infused with love. He had found the reliable resource in love that he could draw from when he needed to. He didn’t have to generate the love or do something special to make himself worthy of it. Love was already present and in ample supply within him.
From then on, whenever Carl felt overwhelmed by his pain, he would push his morphine pump and say to himself, “Rest in love, rest in love.”
His wife came to visit a few days later. She was a nervous woman, more anxious about Carl’s condition than he was. She sat by his bed, her legs bouncing and fingers twitching. Carl reached his hand through the bed rails, touched her lightly, and said, “Rest in love, my dear. Rest in love.”
I later shared this story with my old friend Ram Dass one morning over breakfast. Ram Dass is the beloved spiritual teacher best known for his book Be Here Now, which first brought awareness of Eastern philosophy to the West in 1971. He has been a guiding light for three generations. In late 1997, he suffered a near-fatal stroke, which left him paralyzed on the right side of his body, along with other challenging ailments like expressive aphasia, which limits his ability to speak. His teachings stem in part from his personal experience facing pain.
Ram Dass suggested that Carl had tasted the fruits of “loving awareness.” He explained that to understand loving awareness requires only a short journey “from ego to the spiritual heart.” Ram Dass illustrated this with a simple gesture, moving his left hand from his head to his chest while repeating gently, “I am loving awareness.”
He went on to say, “When I am loving awareness, I am aware of everything outside and inside. I’m aware of the waves on the ocean, the hibiscus flowers in the garden, my scary thoughts and dark feelings. Loving awareness witnesses it all without getting identified with any of it. When I merge with love, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Love neutralizes fear.”
Ram Dass was speaking about an open, all-embracing love. Of course, we all get caught up in our likes and dislikes. Love doesn’t mean we should tolerate bad behavior or say yes when we need to say no. We will fall prey to doubt, unworthiness, boredom, desires, and resentments. At times, we will be driven by our temperaments, beliefs, and lifestyles. Love doesn’t eliminate any of these. Rather, it provides us with a way of approaching life that softens the identification that keeps unskillful habits from hardening into character.
Love is what helps us to accept ourselves, our lives, and other people as is. When something unwanted—such as death, illness, loss of a job or relationship—approaches, it is natural for fear to arise. In such moments, we need to find some part of us that is not afraid.
When you are afraid, don’t you know that you are afraid? Then that means some part of you, the part that is witnessing your fear, is not afraid. It is not caught by the fear. We can learn to relate to difficult thoughts, strong emotions, or challenging circumstances from the vantage point of the witness, of loving awareness. When we do, it all becomes a lot more workable.
We love the positive experiences of our lives. It’s relatively easy to accept them without questioning their origins. But one of love’s most exquisite capacities is its ability to embrace whatever it comes into contact with—even if, at first glance, the situation, experience, or person seems unlovable. Love has its own freedom. When we feel love, it doesn’t seem to concern itself with who or what we should love. Loving awareness helps us to embrace our sadness, loneliness, fear, depression, and physical pain. It shines a light in the darkness and reveals the actual sources of our suffering.
Love is not a gated community. Everyone and every part of ourselves is welcome. “No part left out,” they say in Zen. This is the receptive function of love.
* * *
Once we have found this treasure, there is no point in keeping it to ourselves. The ground of love is limitless. We don’t have to be stingy about it. We get caught up in scarcity about it, but it’s not a commodity to be traded. There is an endless supply of love, and so we can endlessly give it away. One way to tap into this bountiful harvest of expressive love is through the Buddhist practice of metta.
Metta is a practice in which we consciously evoke a boundless warmhearted feeling. Through the recitation of phrases such as “May all beings everywhere be happy and free,” we gradually establish benevolence, friendliness, and love in our own hearts, and then we extend the wish for well-being and happiness to all beings in every direction. Metta expresses the strong desire for peacefulness and the welfare of others. It recognizes that love cannot be owned, but that our contact with it can be cultivated with practice. It is my belief that loving kindness is the essential human quality most beneficial in the lives of those who are dying and their caregivers.
I had the joy of working with a man named Michael who was an artist and longtime Buddhist practitioner. Michael had been ordained a Zen priest and had been living with Parkinson’s disease for twenty-five years. It was now in its final stages.
His wife invited me to come to talk to Michael about dying, but he wasn’t so interested in the subject. Instead, we discussed his paintings, how his love for detail had to be surrendered now that his hands shook uncontrollably, how something new was emerging in the process. We spoke of the beauty of the plum tree that stood outside his window.
We had several visits, each with a different focus of his choosing. One conversation was about tools, especially pruning tools and paintbrushes, and the necessity of carefully caring for and choosing the right tool for the job. Other times, he would reminisce about his early years, or we would sit quietly in the backyard listening to the birdsong.
Sometimes we would talk about our wives, as men do more than women might imagine. Michael had an unusual marriage in which there was a great deal of love but also strain and separateness. He spoke of his stubbornness and habits of control that had taken their toll. He and his wife lived in the same house, but they also lived apart. Within their commitment and marriage, they were often at odds.
Of course, we also spoke of Zen, the power of silence, and the paradoxical teachings that made our minds spin. Ultimately, we touched on the simplicity of relinquishment, the total dropping off of body and mind.
I asked Michael what he thought of metta, or loving kindness practice.
“Crap,” he said. In Michael’s mind, metta lacked the clarity and sparseness that he found so satisfying in his own Zen practice. Then he added, “But I could do with a little love right now.”
Metta practice generally proceeds in a very structured and specific way. Traditionally in Asia, you start this practice by first calling to mind yourself or your mother or sometimes your most beloved teacher. But Westerners often have the most complex relationships with those people, and many of us stumble when we try to begin our loving kindness practice in that way. So I asked Michael to name the one person it was easiest for him to love, or the person who had loved him without hesitation.
He took his time.
Then he said, “My dog Jonesy.” His childhood companion, he explained.
“Your dog, huh … Why?” I asked.
Michael replied, “Well, no matter what I did, my dog loved me. If I went away for the day or even longer, he was at the door to welcome me when I got home, tail wagging, a big doggy smile. He was full of love for me.” Michael went on to say, “It didn’t matter whether I was grumpy or happy-go-lucky. He never judged me. He just loved me.”
So we began with Jonesy. Michael lay in his bed, repeating traditional and creative phrases of his own making about loving his dog. “May you be happy.” “May you be free.” “May you have all the dog bones you want.” “May you know you are loved.”
As Michael repeated these phrases, his face broke into a joyous grin. Later, there were tears of gratitude. He kept up the practice over the next month. He would always start with Jonesy. Gradually, his love was like a cup spilling over. He now had so much love when he practiced metta that he naturally came to include his teachers, his mother, and, in time, his wife—demonstrating the expressive, contact-oriented function of love.
When Michael died, his wife was lying in the bed next to him, holding him. They had made their own form of reconciliation. It wasn’t so much about words. It was about re-discovering love. The love that always had been there, hidden behind habit.
If love is bountiful and endless, why then do we get caught up in scarcity, feeling that we must hold on to our beloveds so tightly? In part, it is because we confuse love and attachment.
Attachment likes to impersonate love. It says, “I will love you if you give me what I need.” Love is focused on generosity; attachment is obsessed with getting needs met. Love is an expression of our most essential nature; attachment is an expression of the personality. Love engenders faithfulness, aligning with our values, moving with purpose; attachment clings in fear and grasps tightly to a particular end result. Love is selfless and encourages freedom; attachment is self-centered and engenders possessiveness. Attachment leaves scars. Love inclines us to gratefulness.
Consider the experience of unhealthy attachment: It is tight, irritated, closed, fixed, and often compulsive. It creates an unwholesome dependency. We come to believe that our ability to feel pleasure and happiness, to have our needs met, is dependent on the words and actions of something or someone outside of ourselves. But love encompasses everything. We can love someone even if we don’t agree with them and even if we don’t like all their habits. My wife loves me, but she still gets annoyed with me when I forget to close the kitchen cabinets. Love is not blind to our day-to-day human challenges, yet it is not limited by them.
Healthy attachment is essential in forming and sustaining human relationships, as in the attachment between mother and child. However, love is possible without forming an unhealthy attachment, in which we cling to the point of not recognizing or allowing for the inevitable truth of impermanence.
There is an old Buddhist story of a family whose love was a model for the whole village. They lived in harmony and cherished each other. One day, the oldest son died. The villagers went to the home to console the family in their bereavement. When they arrived, they found the family was happy. They explained to the villagers that the secret of their love and harmony was that they understood how one day they would part. When and how this would happen was uncertain, so they lived as if it could happen at any time. Now, when the time had finally arrived, they were prepared.
A teaching story like this isn’t a demand for an idealized response to death. All of us grieve. Even the most awakened people I know mourn. Rather, stories such as these challenge us to rethink our current actions, to consider what might contribute to a beneficial outcome. They help us consciously consider how we love the people in our lives.
* * *
As people come closer to death, I have found that only two questions really matter to them: “Am I loved?” and “Did I love well?”
When my heart attack and emergency open-heart surgery brought me close to my own death, I truly began to understand the depth of these questions. I now allow them to guide me in living well.
Recovery from heart surgery was daunting. I was fundamentally shaken up. I was caught up in the pain, identified with my deficiency, and experiencing a great deal of fear. I questioned my self-worth and value. I felt an objective helplessness that was without reason. I worried that I would be forgotten. I felt lost.
Initially, I couldn’t get to the toilet by myself or shower without assistance. I was fragile, weak, inadequate, dependent, and my body was covered with ugly scars. At times, my mind wandered aimlessly; at other times, it was like a barking junkyard dog. I felt unacceptable, unattractive, and unlovable. I was a mess.
Fortunately, I had people around me who loved me in spite of myself. My name was placed on altars in Buddhist centers everywhere, and friends and students chanted my name during their prayers and practices.
I hadn’t known I was so loved. The love of others opened me to personal self-love and more profoundly to the recognition of the very boundless love that we have been exploring. It was not simply an emotional response. It was palpable, warm, pleasurable, and included a sense of deep contentment. I felt nourished, reminded of some basic goodness within me. There was a melting, an intimate appreciation that the essence of my being was indeed love.
For months I just cried, as I recognized again and again what a blessing it was to know such love in my lifetime. I said to friends, “The doctors told me I couldn’t get my incisions wet, but I have been bathing in love every day.”
This experience of love opened me to trust not in the actions of others or even my past experiences, but in an intelligence within me that was a wise, loving guide in unknown territory. It was a trust in the process, that what was happening was optimal and that whatever happened to me, I would ultimately be fine. A natural buoyancy filled me. It wasn’t a belief; it was a non-conceptual, implicit trust that I could lean back into, as if it were supporting me. I had witnessed this many times in other people as they came close to death.
This love and trust gave rise to a profound rest. I felt a deep sense of ease, like warm, golden honey running through my veins, soothing, comforting. It freed me from my obsession with trying to make things other than what they were. There was no need to resist, to grasp. I simply rested with things as they appeared, changed, or disappeared. Body at rest. Heart at rest. Mind at rest.
Rest in love, I thought to myself. Rest in love.
When people are sick or wounded, just love them. Love them until they can love themselves again. This has worked for me. It makes me wonder if maybe love really is the best medicine.
Love is the very human quality that allows us to welcome everything, not just what we prefer most. Love is the motivation that enables us to move toward fear—not in order to conquer it, but in order to include it so that we might learn from it. In love, there is no separation. Caring for all things is therefore a natural action of love. Nothing remains isolated from its care.
Why is love the quality that allows us to welcome everything? When we view reality from the vantage point of our personalities—from a small, separate self—we are constantly looking for what distinguishes us from one another. But when we live from the vantage point of boundless love, we begin to see all the points of connection that join us together.
Love breeds love.