How to Love

“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.”

To show up for it (love) with absolute clarity of intention — is the dance of life.

Do not give in to the Western pathology of cynicism that readily dismisses anything sincere and true as simplistic or naive.

"...understanding is loves other name." To love another means to fully understand their suffering. Understanding is what everybody needs but we get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer true understanding.

When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.

Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness.

Out of our incomplete understanding of ourselves we search in the wrong areas for love

Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day!

Real, truthful love, he argues, is rooted in four elements — loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity

The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself.

In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one.

Of course, first you have to have trust, respect, and confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature.  True love cannot be without trust and respect for oneself and for the other person.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen. ... The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. ... But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone ... Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-love-legendary-zen-buddhist-teacher-thich-nhat-hanh-on-mastering-the-art-of-interbeing