Skillful Relationships
Q: What is the nature of true love and how does it arise?
A: True love arises in the midst of purity and goodness. This is the way we talk about it in monastic circles. We know from our own insight that the pure mind is capable of acceptance without conditions. Really, the trick is to provide space for love to arise.
The nature of love is giving. It comes from compassion and an understanding of the-way-things-are.
Q: The poet Rilke said, “It is a great undertaking just to love one person.” Is this enough for one lifetime?
A: You have to decide that for yourself. But to learn to love just one person properly and appropriately is to learn to love everyone and everything. It is no insignificant undertaking. Is there anything else worth pursuing?
To love anyone or anything, there must be total, unconditional acceptance. This is the first step. And, magically, it is the last step as well.
Q: When I think about getting married, it seems like a good idea. Then I think about not getting married, and that seems like a good idea too. Can you resolve this dilemma for me?
A: In this instance I will defer to the wisdom of Daniel, a student of mine: “Whatever you do, you’ll regret it!”
Most of us know from experience the difficulties of making male/female relationships work. (This is not to imply that homosexual relationships are easier or better.) Men and women are “wired” differently, and this makes a harmonious relationship inherently difficult.
We generally start out in the wrong lane. We fall into romantic love—an intrinsically problematic situation, for it is easier to fall into a foolish love than a wise one.
The nature of foolish love is to cling to what we desire. It is a false love that inevitably leads to disappointment and despair, for it reaches out and attaches. It is self-serving and shallow. This is the surest path to suffering.
To sustain a male/female relationship requires genuine love. In a relationship, genuine love is the answer to everything, whereas selfish love is the catalyst for every kind of tragic occurrence. Without genuine love, each partner can inflict all manner of abuse upon the other, for they are slaves of their desires and wants. If only one partner develops the wisdom and courage to cultivate genuine love, she can carry the relationship. In time, the other person will have the opportunity to learn by example, and if he is sensitive, will learn the way of love as well.
To love another fully is to love all and everything. To love one thing fully is to recognize the interrelationship between everything. To come to love everything, you must learn to love yourself first. Goodness will follow automatically.
Genuine love is both an offering and an acceptance. It carries no demands and makes room for things to flow. Genuine love exists between people—it’s not fixed and attached to them. All attempts at intimacy fail unless there is a spiritually based, heartfelt commitment to establish a foundation for it in genuine love. Unless there is offering—a giving that is unhampered by wanting something reciprocal—the relationship has no feet on which to stand. Without selflessness there is only transaction.
When we cultivate love for ourselves, we recognize deeply our spiritual nature and clean out the “stuff” that obscures this reality. Our spiritual nature, which is imbued with wisdom and metta, is what has the capacity to love another.
Q: Can couples use meditation to support their relationship?
A: I would say that in this era, couples must use meditation to bond their relationship and to grow together in the same direction.
All the defending that often arises in a relationship pushes the other away and sows the seeds for separation. When you meditate together, you meet on an elevated, cool common ground. This helps one to live respectfully and appropriately with the other. Then each person is willing to accept the disappointments, frustrations, foolishness, and fear-based demands of the other.
Statistics indicate that in the present day few people can come together in an intimate relationship, commit to that relationship, and then make it work. In many of the states in the United States, eight out of ten marriages and committed partnerships fall apart within a few years.
A relationship that isn’t founded properly has almost no chance of surviving the inevitable changes and challenges that arise over time. If two people come together in a primarily romantic and sexual relationship, no matter how hot the romance and how passionate the sexuality, the relationship is destined to plunge into a sea of sorrow. Any relationship that functions without self-sacrifice, without nurturing, and without sufficient encouragement for both people to become free and independent has to come apart—if not physically, certainly psychologically and spiritually.
Look at a typical relationship in terms of how unenlightened minds function. Initially, the two people come together in a state of romantic enchantment and total absorption with each other. It feels great! However, soon the enchantment can no longer saturate every moment. Things change. A speck of suspicion enters their minds; something is not quite right. Right behind this speck of anxiety comes fear, and then all sorts of schemes to reconstruct things as they were, or better than they were! Now there is struggle, self-consciousness, frustration, disappointment, and all the rest.
Meanwhile, a psychological bonding between these two people has formed, and they have become attached to one another. With attachment comes fear of loss or separation. When ignorance is in charge of things, the more we fear, the more disappointment we experience, and the greater the delight, the more fiercely we cling. Delight leads us to want more, to want to continually embrace what makes us feel good. Inherent in that clinging are the seeds of suffering, which take the form of fear of change. And change inevitably occurs, which triggers stronger clinging—the struggle to maintain the status quo in a moving stream of perpetual change. The result? Broken hearts, tears, despair.
What works, then? A relationship has the best chance of lasting and bringing happiness to both partners if it is built on a foundation of selfless, nurturing service to each other. This kind of relationship can endure all manner of change, difficulty, frustration, disappointment, and the other challenges that come with living this human life together with another.
It takes a kind of intuitive genius in letting go to relate properly to another human being. When we have stepped out of the way and backed off from our personal desires, we can hear the inner need of the other, which is the need of the moment.
Q: As far back as I can remember the relationship between myself and my mother has been full of hostility, alienation, and ill-will. In therapy as a young adult, I was told by my therapist that beneath all the icy aversion, my parents really had a well-spring of love for me. I recognized that it would be natural for it to be that way.
Now another fifteen years have gone by and things are still basically the same. I can honestly say that I’ve done nothing to deepen the rift, and yet the situation remains the same as when I was a child. I’ve studied Eastern philosophies and practiced yoga and meditation for many years, so I understand something about karma and a bit about the human mind. And truly, I don’t see a well-spring of love either within my mother or within myself. Given this situation, how is it possible to shift things?
A: Some parent/child relationships are difficult in the extreme. They are bound up in all kinds of negative emotional, cultural, and biological energies. There just isn’t enough love within the relationship to meet the larger body of fear, hatred, disappointment, shame, and guilt. Looking at this situation with sentimentality only leads to further distress. You can’t really live on the hope that things will get better when the underlying conditions deny it. It’s okay to drop your pursuit of any accommodation at all. Sometimes we need to acknowledge a hopeless situation for what it is, and then let go of it and go on from there.
By totally letting go, you will gain a tremendous amount of psychic energy. Letting go creates a new beginning out of which you can radiate loving kindness and help to heal things from a psychological distance. You are not obliged to create fairy-tale endings in your life, or to run into your mother’s arms with both of you streaming tears of pent-up joy. Even when that happens in the movies, they don’t show us how things turn out after that peak moment!
You are obliged, however, to do the wisest thing you can. Sometimes the karma of a relationship requires stepping far, far back from it. In doing so, you may also free your mother. But be very careful that you don’t step away with the intention to make things better for her. Step out of the relationship in order to create an opening for a new beginning.
Q: I am nineteen and am living at home with my parents and attending the university. I feel that I’ve lived at home too long, but financial circumstances demand that I stay there for one more year. Then I should be free to live somewhere close to the campus.
The tension level in my parents’ house is so high that I just want to scream. I need more room, more freedom. What can I do to survive the next twelve months?
A: If you are feeling so stressed at home, your parents are probably feeling the same and are on the verge of blowing their lids as well. If you can live in a more skillful way, the situation will cool down. How to do this? By radiating love to everyone in the house.
Life is like this at nineteen years of age. It is a difficult time. You have arrived at the age of responsibility. This is just the beginning of meeting difficult situations as a responsible adult. There will be challenges along the way, regardless of what kind of lifestyle you choose and what kind of economic and social status surrounds your life. If there were no difficulties, you would be flowing along free of karmic influences, and in fact wouldn’t have been born into this realm at all.
This being so, you must learn how to gather your mental and physical resources to deal with difficulties, patiently enduring them, intelligently and sensitively making the most of them, and honoring them for the opportunities they provide for you. None of the demands that difficulties present asks that you judge yourself on the results. You simply do the best you can. If the best you can isn’t sufficient for the situation, life will throw it back for you to meet again.
So, understand your situation from a greater perspective. Don’t think that what is happening to you is unfair or unjustified; what is happening to you at all times is just what should be happening. Your situation at home is an opportunity for learning. See it that way. Begin to make the best out of the opportunity by being more careful. Watch your mind. Don’t let a small irritation go unnoticed, for it is the small irritations that build into deep resentment. When there is enough anger in the air, war is inevitable. Be a peacemaker. To be a peacemaker you need only to be someone who doesn’t generate violent mental states.
One last comment for you to reflect upon: When the kettle is about to boil, remember that sometimes we just have to clench our teeth, retreat from a heated situation, and go out for a brisk walk around the block. This too can be a manifestation of love in action.
Q: Has your relationship with your parents grown warmer and closer, now that you live the gentle life of a monastic?
A: Though I am living a good life as a monk, this hasn’t changed the perception my parents have of me. I grew up in one of those toxic families that is full of confusion and abuse. Twenty years ago I decided that I would only visit my parents if I could stay in a motel or a separate apartment. The situation has not changed. Regardless of how much I have developed and matured as a person, my parents have chosen to remain in a time-warp and still regard me as an obstinate adolescent unwilling to live my life according to their ideas and expectations. Such is karma.
Through meditation I have become content with this situation and don’t expect it to be any more than it is. I no longer feel disappointed or feel it is my job to make everything okay. This is what I mean when I say things are as they are. Wisdom is simply being in alignment with things as they are. Nothing more, nothing special.
The ability to assume a stance of nonattachment in one’s family relationships comes from reflecting on and penetrating through the deceptive nature of conventional ideas. By doing this exercise often and consistently, one discovers that roles such as mother, father, husband, wife, sister, and brother are deeply embedded social and cultural constructs. Eventually we see that these are labels we ourselves superimpose. In essence, there isn’t really any self who those labels apply to.
Wisdom allows us to step back from clinging relationships and their vagaries. This does not mean that one should refuse to recognize one’s family duties or to express appreciation for the goodness of one’s family. Rather, it offers one the restful spaciousness to allow all family members to grow in their own unique ways.
If our parents don’t love us, it is because they don’t see us, or they see us incorrectly. They need only to love us for who we are, not for what we do or what we believe in. Find your own way, no matter how much it isolates you. You can never be happy by living only to make others happy.
Q: So many of the questions people ask you are about relationships. Why is this?
A: Modern people suffer a great deal over relationships. This is a major source of anxiety in present-day Western culture, and as globalization seeps into Asia, it is becoming more of a problem here too. In the not-too-distant past, say ten to fifteen years ago, this wasn’t a problem here at all.
People keep wanting something for themselves out of a relationship. It won’t work that way. The selfishness of wanting something for yourself creates the need to do something to make it happen. The tangle only gets tighter. This is the common, mistaken idea that we can make something work by doing, rather than by letting go. As long as two people are each pulling the world toward themselves, there will be an endless struggle to find peace and happiness in that relationship.
The secret to making a relationship work is to reduce the number of needy persons in the relationship by one.
The root of the problem is that people no longer know how to relate to themselves. They don’t know who they are, where they are going, what the point of this existence is, whether they should marry and have children or stay single and enjoy their freedom, and so on. With their own lives uncertain, they can hardly be expected to be able to build and sustain a healthy relationship with another. Even close friendships cannot be established in this milieu of confusion and anxiety. People often remain emotionally close to their nuclear family and have a ring of acquaintances who they see occasionally.
Meditation is a path that provides access to understanding and wisdom. Meditation allows us to slow things down enough to penetrate the confusion and to see things that have been hidden. We come to see the order and harmony in which things unfold. When we see how we ourselves fit into the world, we also recognize what makes relationships between people blend and flow. In the end, we come to understand that our responsibility is to learn to live in proper relationship with everything—that is, to relate with compassion and respect to everything in every moment.
Only wisdom can give us this understanding. Wisdom sees to it that our behavior is kind, loving, and appropriate. It is the force behind all spontaneous, appropriate actions.