A Program for Learning to Love

How do I become more and more capable of love at deeper and deeper levels? That's the question we'll answer in this episode.

DavidFlowersTherapy.com
YouTube
Facebook

Transcript

I am finding more and more that Buddhism helps me understand Jesus better. Jesus told us, "Love your enemies," but gave us almost no information on how to actually do it. Isn't it strange that one of the most central of all Jesus' teachings comes with no "how" attached? You can certainly ascertain a how by looking at the way he lived and some other things he said (e.g., "pray for your enemies"), but there's no practical guide as to how to do it. I mean it’s not like it’s something where you just go, “Oh, I should love my enemies, ok, check, I’ll just do that from now on.” It would be kind of like if Jesus had said, “Run a marathon,” and you go “Okay, I’ll just go outside and do that right now.” 

In that sense it’s an impossible command. Jesus is telling you to do something you’re not capable of doing. No better way of knowing how incapable you are than to look at your own experience and see how many times you have failed to love even people who are much easier to love than enemies! We’ll talk more about that in a second, but first, if you believe, as I do, that love is the most powerful and potent thing in the universe, and that it deserves whatever efforts are required to learn how to do it well, then you have to respond to the order, “Love your enemies,” with the question, “How?” That’s seems impossible. How do I do that? Better yet, I like to phrase it this way—not even so much how do I do that, but how do I become the kind of person who can do it? It’s not how do I go outside right now and run a marathon, it’s what disciplines, what practices, what habits do I need to adopt, so that gradually, over time, I’ll become the kind of person who has the stamina, the muscle strength, the lung and heart capacity that makes it possible to run a marathon.

So how do I love? What habits and practices must I adopt, so that over time I’ll become the kind of person who has the power—the self-control, the compassion, the insight, the ability to handle my own darkness properly—the power that will allow me to actually do this seemingly impossible thing.

A core practice in Buddhism is lovingkindness, and it's really the same thing as the love Jesus was referring to. The Buddhists teach that there are seven steps to learn how to love our enemies.

1. Engender lovingkindness for yourself. Expand at your own pace to include the following:

2. Loved ones

3. Friends

4. Neutral persons

5. Those who irritate us

6. All the above as a group

7. All beings throughout time and space

So our training in doing this seemingly impossible thing begins with a first step that, in and of itself, will take a lifetime—learning to love yourself.

As a relationship therapist, I work with people who are struggling to love each other. Over and over I see how difficult it is not only to love someone else but to actually accept the love one is given. That’s why self-love is so difficult. It’s hard to love well, and it’s hard to accept love, and when you’re trying to love yourself, you’re trying to do both the giving and the receiving. I’ll do another episode entirely on self-love soon, I think, because it’s hard, and there are a lot of misconceptions about it I want to address.

But let’s just be clear that it's not that you have to wait to love others until you fully love yourself, for you will never arrive at perfect love for anyone or anything, since perfection is not possible.

No, the idea is that you must begin by mustering whatever love for yourself you can muster, and then you extend that love out further and further, as shown above. The more you come to love yourself, the more you can see yourself as worthy of love and compassion and kindness, the more love you will have to extend outwards.

This process also reveals how difficult love for enemies really is. We’ve talked about how hard self-love is. But it can also be so hard sometimes to truly and selflessly love members of your own family. Any decently self-aware person can name times when they’ve been impatient, hangry, irritable, snippy, even cruel, to the people they love most. As you go further out from yourself, love gets harder and harder. 

Finally, it shows the most obvious thing of all which is that if you want to increase your love for other people, you have to proceed intentionally through an ever-widening circle. It's not something you just hope to do, or wish to do. You don’t run that marathon by just going outside and starting to run. There is a path. There is a course, a training program. Here’s how it works:

At each of the levels I read to you, you pray the following for each person/group at that level (we'll start with level 1 in our example):

May I be safe and well.

May I be happy and content.

May I be healthy and strong.

May I be peaceful and at ease.

Now, you don't say it because you feel it. You say it because it is your intention to live it out in your words and deeds. You may feel it sometimes, but love is not primarily a feeling, but a way of being towards others in the world. Oh, another episode right there!

At each level you face increasing resistance, as your heart will struggle more and more to stay open to people in the outer circles. This will help you feel that feeling of your heart closing, help you really get familiar with how that feeling starts in your physical body. Then you can practice being patient with that feeling, sitting with it, staying with it, repeating the prayer, and working on allowing your heart to slowly open. You may only experience two seconds of what feels like genuine openness, but you celebrate it! Just like you celebrate if you ran a quarter mile yesterday and only twenty feet further tomorrow. Because remember, it’s not about doing it, it’s about becoming the kind of person who’s capable of doing it. Many people in the world want to be a certain kind of person, but very few are willing to become that person. I say this with love, as that has probably been the greatest struggle in my own life, focusing more on being than on becoming.

  Finally—I don't know how close this may be to the path Jesus followed personally, but I do know that, because he was a human being, he did not all of a sudden produce, in the instant the nails were being driven through his hands and feet, the miraculous power to pray for his murderers, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He cultivated this ability, worked at it daily, hour by hour, until one day, on his final Friday, in that moment of horrific suffering and grief, it reached all the way to those Roman centurions, those in his level 7, and he exhaled those words with some of his dying breaths. 

If that’s not true, if he was born with it, if he didn’t have to struggle like anyone else to cultivate that capability, then he is not an example I can learn from and I need to study Gandhi more, or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Buddha. I say anyone who has cultivated a great ability to love is worth studying and emulating.

I think this is  equally valuable for anyone who aspires to take love as seriously as it deserves to be taken, given how deeply it is needed in our world.