Love / The Difficulties of Love

This talk begins to explore some of the challenges and difficulties we can sometimes encounter with regard to love. It also examines some possible beliefs and attitudes we may hold around love and particularly romantic love in our lives.

Tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about love, particularly the flows and expressions, the giving and receiving of love in our life, in our relationships, in our friendships and relationships with lovers, etc. I think it's clear that this is an area that for most human beings is of great importance. We can have a lot of pain and bafflement as well, confusion in this area. I think it's fair to say that most human beings need to love and need also to feel loved. Now, sometimes one doesn't admit that to oneself, or one isn't conscious of that, but I would say that's true. And I want to just explore some aspects of this. Obviously it's absolutely immense, and more than one can bite off and chew in one talk, but I just want to offer something.

So the need to love and the need to feel loved. Sometimes the need to feel loved can be out of balance in our life, in someone's life, so much so that it can become one of the driving forces -- if not the driving need -- in the life. I remember being at a memorial service for a friend who died last year sometime. His wife, people were saying different things and memories, and his wife said something and it just stuck with me. She said, "He just so needed to feel loved." It was kind of almost a bit of a summation of his life. I wonder how commonly and how strongly that current runs through us as human beings, and when it's balanced and when it's not balanced.

There was an article I read by an American biochemist, I think, and he had won a Nobel Prize for his research. He was reflecting on his journey and how he had been an honour student and this and that, and won this prize and that prize. He said, "Eventually you win the Nobel Prize, and then you realize all along what you were really looking for was love." I'm sure that wasn't the whole story, but there's something quite strong going on there. How much of what we do in our life and in our work, etc., how much of it is governed, again, consciously or unconsciously, by the urge to look good or at least not look too bad, to look okay so that we will not feel unloved. There's so much revolving around this. A friend was telling me that she's conscious of this need, and when she's in a partnership, in a relationship with a boyfriend, that she feels loved in the relationship, and then the relationship ends -- and she's seen this pattern; either person ends it -- and then she no longer feels loved. It's like going back to square one, and then kind of has to look for another relationship to feel loved, and it's burdening that meeting, that situation, by the need to feel loved.

We can reflect and look back for ourselves and another person and think, "I see the roots of that in early childhood. I see with the family situation," etc. And yes, of course, there is something there, and there is something very influential and powerful about that. But I don't think it's the whole story. It can't be the whole story. There are people who grow up in environments where there wasn't actually that much love, and somehow their life didn't turn out burdened by this, or overburdened, unbalanced by this need to feel loved. So there are always more factors. In Dharma understanding, there's always not just one cause. There's always a web of conditions that feed something, both from the past, yes, and from the present. That feeds anything that comes up.

In a way, I want to talk about all different kinds of relationships a little bit. When, or rather if, that need to feel loved is kind of dropped into the -- I don't know what you'd call it -- the sort of whirlpool of modern culture where it's fair to say there's such a hype around romantic love, what happens when those two things meet? So our need, a need to feel loved, can actually feed this hype that is around in society nowadays about romantic love. And the hype can actually feed the need. They work both ways. Sometimes it almost seems -- and people have said this to me -- it's almost as if romantic love has become the god of our present culture -- in a secular culture, what has become god, what has become the most important thing, in a way. And that hype or whatever you want to call it puts a tremendous pressure, or can put a tremendous pressure, on that kind of intimate relationship. It overburdens it with too much expectation of too much fulfilment or too much whatever. There's a kind of distortion going on there.

I have friends, and I know, it's very hard not to believe that if we don't have that kind of relationship ... too many double negatives! [laughter] That if we don't have that kind of relationship, we will be unhappy; that not to be in a romantic relationship necessarily means that one is unfulfilled and unhappy. And I have seen friends of mine actually plunge into unhappiness, and been thinking now, is that because they don't have the relationship or because they think that they need it to be happy? It's just the momentum of belief, and one ends up feeling unhappy because one doesn't have what one thinks one needs to be happy. Again, like so much in the Dharma, it's about questioning. Can we bring a questioning to this? Sometimes we're in or out of relationship, and there can be a success or failure kind of judgment that goes with it. If one isn't or one hasn't been in a relationship for a while, one kind of feels a bit like a social failure.

Some years ago, I was at a Dharma talk by a monk in America, and he said -- I'd never realized this before -- that the ideal that we now sort of roughly, commonly share about an intimate relationship is actually relatively new in human history. All of us in this room were kind of born into that, and sort of took that on, but relatively speaking it's quite new. It had its origins, I think, in the Renaissance period with the troubadours, these sort of wandering minstrels that would go around serenading ... uh ... people. [laughter] I wonder, I don't know enough about Asian culture, but I wonder if what's been hyped up here is the same now in Asia. It probably is, with globalization and all that. And you've got Hollywood and how that hypes up romantic love, and Bollywood as far as I can tell is pretty close on its heels.

But relatively speaking, it's a relatively new ideal, which somehow we've just taken as the given and the ideal. If any of you know Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, a beautiful little volume, this was written I think in 1903 and '04, and he speaks then in a sort of optimistic way of what the future might bring in terms of relationships between two people and the equal flow, particularly between a man and a woman, etc. Very beautiful, and points to the beauty of that, but he's speaking, at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a possibility, which later, really in the sixties and seventies, etc., began to be realized more and more, or drawn close to. There's all the beauty of that, but being realistic about this, if one is in that kind of relationship -- not just beauty. A lot of hard work, really. And one puts up with, one goes through anger, irritation, doubt, boredom. All of that is part. It's natural. To hype it too much and to neglect that that can be sometimes the reality and the challenges that we face is foolish, I think.

[10:42] So there is this cultural current that kind of -- we're being fed by it, and everyone is kind of agreeing with each other to a certain extent about the importance of that. It's feeding each other, and we're kind of rolling along with this and being rolled along by it. A lot of things are feeding that. One of the things that feeds our need can be that the less perhaps intimate we are in other ways, the less intimacy we feel, say, with friends, or with Saṅgha, with community, or with nature, the more this one-person romantic ideal, the more intense the need and the hype is placed there. There feels inside more need for that particular kind of romantic intimacy. So not at all to put that down, but just to see what's feeding our perception of all that, and our assumptions and our beliefs and our expectations of all that.

Whatever kind of relationship we're talking about, it's become a kind of platitude or a kind of truism to say, "To love well, we need to love ourself. You need to love yourself. And to feel loved, you need to love yourself." That's become so common in these kind of circles that it's almost meaningless. But I want to just go into it a little bit. Often what we run into and what I run into with people is a lack of self-love, that the self-love is not really nurtured and developed so strongly. It's really strikingly common. One of the manifestations of that can be the inner critic, just this kind of stream of harshness and judgmentalism towards oneself. I could give a whole talk just about that. But I just want to say a few things.

So the inner critic, just judging, judging what we're doing or not doing. In a way, to work with this skilfully I think needs two aspects: one is a kind of heart aspect, approaching it with heartfulness, and another is a kind of cognitive aspect. Both are important. So cognitively, we can turn round to this inner critic sometimes, and it's "this isn't good enough, and that's not good enough, and you didn't do this right, and da-da-da-da-da." And we can ask it, "What would satisfy you?" Just turn around and point the finger at it and say, "What would satisfy you? Would you ever be satisfied?" [laughter] You can see it in meditation -- whatever we do is somehow not good enough. It can always be better. And just turn around and say, "Would you ever be satisfied?" The immediate response might be, "Yes." Just hang in there. "Really? Really?" [laughter] Basically, what I think we'll find with the inner critic is it's a non-rational voice. It's rubbish. It doesn't make sense. And there is a way to kind of cognitively undermine it as much as from the heart.

We have in this tradition the lovely, lovely practice of loving-kindness, of mettā, and developing that well-wishing, that deep friendliness towards oneself and towards others. Immense power in that practice and potential in that practice. Slowly, over time, offering the loving-kindness towards oneself, one literally reconditions the mind and the heart. One reconditions. The mind, the heart, are at one level a kind of stuck record of habits -- most of them not that helpful. One is taking the needle off where it's stuck and putting it down somewhere else in a way that's more helpful. One is reconditioning. It's not a very glamorous or sexy sounding image, but there's immense power in it. That can take different forms. So for some people it's tuning into Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, or Jesus, someone who embodies compassion. You see these bumper stickers, "Jesus loves me," or "Jesus loves you," and the initial reaction can be, "Well, that's just silly. That's just rubbish. I don't think that kind of thing." But I don't know if it's necessarily a kind of immature practice. I've known people, and actually for myself in the past, it's a practice that can -- it's a way into loving-kindness, to actually tune into a love that we're receiving through devotion. And it goes on its own journey. It unfolds to its own depths. So not to dismiss that as a possibility.

Sometimes with the inner critic, we actually feel the pain of it, this judgment, and we feel the sting of that in the heart. Just still with the loving-kindness practice, in a way, being with that pain, being with the pain of it, and just holding that pain in love, just bathing it in love -- immensely healing. It's healing that happens over time, over time. And sometimes we need someone else. It's not that we can fix everything just sitting on our backsides ourselves. We need someone that we love and respect to say, "I respect you. I respect you." And that can make the difference. We get it from outside.

I think we also need to -- and this is very interesting -- to love and respect ourselves for the right things. We touched on this, I think, in yesterday's question and answer period. Are we respecting ourselves for our commitment to ethics, for our generosity, for our aspirations towards what's beautiful? This is really, really important. It's so easy, partly because of the culture and the kind of criterion for evaluation that exists in the culture, it's so easy to slip from that. So easy. We can be seduced into not appreciating ourselves, or using the wrong criteria -- how successful we are at this or that, how much money we make, what we look like. The Buddha said something very powerful. He said, "You can search the entire universe for someone more deserving of loving-kindness than yourself, and you will not find that person."^[1] It's very powerful. In a way, he's pointing to a whole other level that has nothing to do with what you think of yourself or what you think you deserve or don't deserve. Your beingness grants you the deserving of loving-kindness.

[18:35] There's another aspect that's quite interesting. Sometimes others criticize us or get angry with us for something or because of something. Maybe this begins in childhood -- parents get angry with us or whatever, and we're too young to really understand what's going on, and we take it as a statement and a conclusion about our essence. And it's actually a statement about our action: "You shouldn't do that," or "Don't do that," or "When you do that it makes me angry." The thing is, one of the things is, we can keep that pattern of making conclusions about our essence. It keeps going through adulthood. So even when people are communicating skilfully about our actions, we keep concluding about our essence: "I am a bad person." Sometimes we know this intellectually and it still happens, still happens. Some of it has to do with unskilful communication, people being angry and not communicating skilfully that it is about an action. One of the really quiet but most significant shifts in Dharma is that we move from essence to action. So what's important in Dharma is our actions, on all levels. It's not about essence. That's a shift that brings an incredible amount of freedom. Again, it doesn't sound very dramatic.

I feel we need to love our own love. I mean, if we look at our life, there are instances and there are areas where we really love, whether it's loving nature, or loving a pet, or loving the truth. We need to actually love and see the beauty of our own love. Loving our own curiosity. There's something very important and precious, I think, about that. To love and cherish, even, one's own longing for intimacy. So as lay people, we are interested in this, and I think it's important that we see that in ourselves and really recognize the beauty of our own longing for intimacy, emotional and sexual. Sometimes we can even ignore the fact that we want it, and we just kind of go through life pretending we don't want it.

Or we feel it very strongly, a person feels this longing for intimacy very strongly and very deeply. We can assume that the very strength of it means something is wrong with me: "I want it so much, I feel such a deep longing for it. What's wrong with me?" What am I assuming it means about me if my desire for intimacy is really deep, if there's a really deep longing? Again, like many things, some of these assumptions are often not fully conscious: "If I were more together, if I were more spiritual, if I were more evolved, if I was less damaged, I wouldn't feel this intensity, this need, this longing so much." Are those kind of thoughts there? Maybe, maybe, much of our longing, or part of it, is actually something very beautiful and very natural to who we are and how we are, part of our juiciness. And, as well as that, it dependently arises, because of past conditions and again because of present conditions. Both are there.

So we look at our life and our relationships and the flow of love or the absence of love in our life, and we need to ask: am I, or how am I, blocking love and intimacy in my life? Is there shame around sexuality, for instance? What havoc this wreaks. Complete havoc when there's shame around sexuality. What pain there is in that, and what ends up coming out of that, and the pressure on the being. Is there shame around sexuality and sexual longing, sexual desire? Is there shame around our emotional need for intimacy? I think this cherishing really needs to be there, that we see the beauty of that in ourselves, the preciousness of that in ourselves, and we really cherish it. If it's not there, or rather, when it's not there, then when we enter into a situation where we're meeting someone and there's potential intimacy, we're actually burdening that meeting, burdening that potential intimacy by needing the other to kind of accept something about ourselves that we don't accept. Now, sometimes this works, and we kind of get away with it. [laughter] Sometimes. I've seen it happen. But generally speaking, it backfires.

When we're not cherishing, when we're not really accepting that part, there will be fear and the vulnerability of that part being exposed. Of course there will. Not only that, because we're not cherishing that very deep, very tender part of ourselves, in a way, then, we're also less intimate with ourselves. We're not in contact with that. And that lack of intimacy with ourselves gives more intensity to the need for intimacy with another. So you get this kind of vicious cycle.

Sometimes we might be relatively okay with something in ourselves, but really unsure if we can bring that into relationship, whether it's friendship or a lover or whatever. And something feels unacceptable. We assume that it's unacceptable in the territory of relating. So, for example, crying, or something like that. We think when I'm with another, it's not okay to cry. Somehow it's not acceptable. And again, the roots can be because of the upbringing, because of the family, because of the education system, etc., the peer pressure when we were young.

One of the beautiful things about human relationships is this is the kind of thing that can really be healed. We see that when we bring something that we assumed was unacceptable, it can be that we're met, whether it's by a friend or a lover or a teacher or a therapist or whatever, we're met, and they can handle it, and it is okay. Maybe they even really appreciate it. They appreciate our tears or whatever it is. They appreciate that depth of feeling, that honesty, that vulnerability, and regard it as a gift. In that, and in the seeing of that, that it's okay with the other and the other appreciates it, there's healing there. There's healing. So again, it's not all coming from me and my work that I do on the cushion, etc.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation, in a relationship with one or more people, and there's a possibility of some intimacy, of some real connection and flow of communication and feeling, and we find ourselves shutting it off without realizing it. It's barely conscious, the way we just shut off, we close the door. Someone was telling me, there was a group, sort of a sharing and discussion situation, and they were telling me they were noticing someone was about to speak, and just the thought, "Oh, I know what they're like. I know what they're going to say. I know what they think. I know where they're coming from." This can happen in groups. It can also happen one on one, especially when one has a history, a long-term partnership, and one knows that person. One feels that. It can become a little, "I know what they're going to say and where they're coming from." And in that moment when we do that, when that is carried through and we do shut down because we just turn off a little bit, lose interest, in that moment we're not meeting and receiving another person. There isn't intimacy then.

Or, same person said she was noticing, in the same situation, she wanted to express something and then she thought, "Well, my opinion isn't worth much compared to others." It's this self-depreciation. And what happens? We block the self-expression. And again, we're shutting off the intimacy. We shut off the intimacy. And what happens? The inner kind of feelings of intensely needing it increase. It gets more intense.

[29:06] There's another area in the way we kind of can block the flow of love and intimacy. Someone was sharing this with me a while ago. It has to do with feelings, and the feeling of love, and the way we usually regard love as a feeling. We relate to love as a feeling, understandably, but actually love is much more than a feeling. He was saying how he noticed situations where feelings had much more authority than intentions. He gave tremendous priority to his feelings in a situation rather than the intentions. He was saying he didn't hug friends or whatever it was when he didn't feel like it. He thought for a long time that this was being true to himself, being more real: "Why should I hug when I don't feel like it? It feels untrue. I feel like I want to be in my honesty and my integrity, and I'm doing something which is acting as if something is there that's not there."

Why do we give feelings, oftentimes, more priority than our intentions to love? I think this is very interesting. Sometimes -- I know this is true for myself; I've seen it -- we feel or have felt in our life disconnected from our feelings, disconnected from our emotional life, oftentimes for years. If I think back, a long stretch of my life felt, in hindsight, disconnected from the feeling life, and then working very hard in psychotherapy for a number of years I felt I managed to reconnect with the whole feeling life and open that up again, understand that again, draw close to that and have the richness and the beauty of that again, rediscover and recover that for myself. Tremendous gift in that. But along with that, it was almost like I felt that because I had been disconnected from my feelings and then reconnected, it felt like I was reclaiming my self in the reclaiming of my feelings. If there was a situation where I felt like I wasn't in touch with my feelings or I wasn't paying that much attention to my feelings, the fear was that I would lose my self again. Does that make sense? This was operating for quite a while. It's very interesting.

Why do we identify the self with feelings so much, with emotions so much? We tend to. And that's where this person who was sharing this with me was coming from. Sometimes the actual experience of emotion is quite dense, especially when they're difficult feelings -- anger or whatever, or I don't want to hug you because I feel angry right now, I don't want to hug you because I need some space or whatever. Difficult feelings actually have a kind of density and solidity to the way they feel in the body, their expression. And in the very density and solidity of them, they feel more real. They literally feel more solid. Compared to that, our intentions to love feel so flimsy and kind of superficial or artificial. But with that, oftentimes we don't see how our feelings, our emotions, are actually fabricated, are built by all kinds of conditions in the present.

The story we tell ourself about a situation, the story we tell ourselves about our life and our history, how much does that feed and build our feeling and emotionality in the present? We think, "I have this history of whatever it is, the way I'm looking at it in my story," and it feeds the feeling, it fabricates a feeling in the present. The self-view, how I'm defining the self, what I'm concluding about myself, that will fabricate my feelings in a moment. What my view is of the feeling -- "It's great that I'm allowing this feeling," "It's terrible that I have this feeling," "It really means I'm a bad person," "It means I'm a great person" -- all this is building and fabricating feelings, and it goes on, generally speaking, below the level of consciousness. We're building our feelings, fabricating them. Aversion -- "I don't like this feeling. It's unpleasant. It's difficult" -- that's actually a builder of feeling. Or identifying with a feeling -- "That's me. It's my real self." We can very easily believe that feelings are kind of really true: "They're really true. They're a given. That's just what's happening in the moment. That is what is," or that they somehow are an accurate reflection of what's going on, an accurate barometer. It's a very rich and delicate area.

So is love just a feeling? I think it's actually much more than that. And there's something about learning to get behind the intentionality to love that, in a way, perhaps ends up being more significant than the feeling in any moment. And then there's this whole area, crazy area maybe, of falling in love. I was talking with someone who was here on retreat -- I can't remember when it was, maybe a month ago or so, I don't remember. And she was in a period of falling in love, and somehow miraculously found herself at Gaia House for about a week in the middle of it. She was sort of sitting here with a lot of these feelings and just saying, "It seems like this swinging between clinging and fear, and between clinging and fleeing, between clinging and grasping and fear of hurt and fear of rejection. It just seems to be flip-flopping back and forth," and "that's what falling in love is all about" kind of thing. We were talking. Can we really, really know, deep down, in a heartfelt way, can we really know that we are okay, that we will be okay, that we can be happy whatever happens, whatever the outcome of this relationship or falling in and out of love? What happens when we're really secure in that happiness inside?

This is where the aspect of the Dharma about cultivating what's lovely and what brings happiness and what brings a sort of depth of inner resource, that's so important. What happens when we are in life with a sense of a relatively stable and deep inner reservoir of well-being, of nourishment, of happiness? Then we meet the conditions, such as falling in love, in quite a different way. We can stay somehow steady in that, knowing that if it works out, great, and if it doesn't, also great. Not a problem. It's actually there as a real possibility. The reservoir of inner well-being can be so strong that it just matters much less, this or that outcome.

We were talking, myself and this retreatant. I can't remember whether she asked or I asked this question: what would falling in love look like without all the delusion? What would that look like? And is it even possible? I actually think it is, definitely. But a friend, a good friend I have in the States, she said that she thinks projection at the beginning of a romantic relationship, without that projection, a kind of seeing other people as totally wonderful and perfect and all this stuff, without that level of projection, most relationships would never even get off the ground! [laughter] In a way, it might be a valid point. It's like, we need a certain amount of delusion to get the wheels rolling. Maybe that's just okay, and it's just part of maturing in the relationship and maturing in love to learn to see through that: "Oh, look, you're ..." [laughter] "It's not quite what I thought." And it's okay. And then something a bit more authentic and deep begins to get welded there and cemented.

[39:20] In situations of falling in love, but even in friendships or other kind of relationships, so often we hear or I hear or a person says, "I feel vulnerable. I feel so vulnerable." We can feel very vulnerable with another human being, with other human beings. And it's such an interesting word, this word, 'vulnerability,' and feeling vulnerable. Such an interesting word to me. And it's so common and such a strong and palpable sense. Again, it's one of these feelings that has a tremendous amount of power in our lives, this feeling of vulnerability. It has an immense amount of power. But do we ever really explore it? And what does it mean when I say or when you say, "I feel vulnerable," or "I might feel vulnerable"? What does it really mean? Vulnerable to what? Vulnerable to what, exactly? What does it mean? To hurt? To ridicule? That someone makes fun of something that we expose? To rejection? To abandonment? Feel vulnerable to being abandoned and to feeling abandoned? To misunderstanding? What does it actually mean? What are we vulnerable to? What are we feeling vulnerable to?

And then a question with that, a question with that. Can we really be hurt in the way that we believe we can? That's not an easy question. Can we really be hurt in the way that we believe we can? Actually this same woman that I was talking to who was on retreat and falling in love, she was saying sometimes this fear of rejection feels like a death fear. It's so strong it feels like a fear of death. What is the mind cementing and compounding and making into something and then believing in, oftentimes without us being fully aware of that process? Something can be so strong in consciousness and so solidified. What have we cemented, in terms of the way we believe we can be hurt and the depth to which we believe we can be hurt? What's going on there? So I think we need to unpack this. I don't think it's easy. But we need to, usually slowly in our lives, unpack this. Sometimes it happens quite quickly, but we need to unpack this question of vulnerability, fear of rejection, etc.

Another question. What is rejection? One of the main fears that people can often have, either in romantic coming together or with friendships or any kind of social situation, is a fear of rejection. Sometimes to turn around and say, "What is rejection?" What does it actually mean? Is that really a kind of concept that I've built up, and it has got this enormous emotional charge to it, almost untouchable?

So I remember another person that I was talking to. She was talking about the context both of romantic relationships and friendships, and talking about this fear of rejection. Interestingly for her, she couldn't even go near yet the question, "What actually is rejection? What is it?" There wasn't, I felt, enough of that reservoir yet of well-being, developed through practice over time. It was too raw. Too painful. Too threatening. There wasn't enough of a sense of inner balance to really approach this question, "What is rejection?", and just really kind of look at that in a very bold and open way. She wasn't yet able, and that was fine. It's okay. You can come back to it.

But in a way, to ask a question like that, so loaded and can be so difficult, actually takes a lot of inner strength. Again, that's where the practice comes in. It's part of what practice is about. To be able to ask that in a really meaningful way, in a way that actually begins to disentangle it, unentangle that. Because at one level, basically that's what's happened: a concept of rejection -- it doesn't feel intellectual; it doesn't feel like a concept, but a concept of rejection has become entangled emotionally, etc., and it's there, and it needs unentangling. With this, we need to respect where we are and respect when we have fear and we need to go slowly in opening up to people and letting people in in a relationship. We need to respect that. But also to play with our edges.

Similarly, two people who have been together, say in a romantic relationship, and there's a breakup, there's a split-up. That's obviously very common. How often that gets interpreted as a rejection. One or even sometimes both parties feel it as a rejection. Sometimes we even know it doesn't make sense, and yet something in us is interpreting it that way, or even more, interpreting it as we feel unlovable. Because this person has rejected us, we feel unlovable.

One way of seeing -- we were talking in the questions and answers today -- ways of looking that bring freedom, practising ways of looking that bring freedom. What would it be to look again at the relationship and just see it wasn't about rejection, it wasn't that I was unlovable; the conditions weren't there at the time? The conditions weren't there, and so it couldn't blossom, it could not flower. The conditions weren't there. That's a very different way of looking. Or at that time we lacked the skill in relationship. We lacked the skill in relationship. The Buddha talks a lot about this word, skill. In a way, relationship is also a skill. Sustaining a relationship is also a skill. And at that time, we just lacked it. It's possible that I or we can develop that skill, but right then we just lacked it. We didn't have it. It's very different seeing it that way. Can we turn the perception around, turn the view around?

Sometimes the fear in terms of particularly romantic relationships is actually the opposite: it's a fear of being trapped. That's the sort of other end of the spectrum. A person feels, "Whoa." And again, we need to question this. It's not easy. This is not easy at all. Is there really such a thing as being trapped? And what does it mean, trapped? I won't be able to do what? Explore a lot of different other partners? Is that what it means? And is that really so bad? [laughter] What does it mean? Interesting. Our life is made of forms, at one level. We move in forms of relationships or partnerships or jobs or this or that situation. Situations are forms. And in a way, Dharma practice is moving towards seeing through forms, seeing the emptiness of forms, feeling free within form. One of the reasons we walk up and down, up and down in walking meditation, or around in circles, is because it's a contained form. Eventually one sees through that and feels a freedom within a form. The form is not imprisoning. Not easy.

So certainly if we can let go of all that and the fear goes out of that in relationship, does that mean the beauty goes out? No, not at all. And then one is in, maybe, a romantic relationship. One has gone through that period of falling in love, and then one is in it. What does it take to maintain and sustain and keep nourishing and nurturing that kind of relationship? Or a friendship -- what does it take to maintain a friendship? Again, I really feel it's a skill as much as anything. It's a skill, and one can develop that. There was a survey a while ago that I came across, and it said it was surveying couples who felt they were really happily married after a long time, or happily in a couple after a long time. What almost unanimously they said was that, "I actually see that to have sustained that and to have kept it going, it could have been quite a number of people." Rather than this myth that we can sometimes have of "the one, I need to find the one," actually it's a skill, and there are quite a few people that I could probably sustain that with.

There was another survey that was in last Sunday's Observer, and it was a survey of 2,000 adults, so I'm guessing representing 4,000 married couples. More than half reported [they were] unhappy in their marriage, more than half. Two thirds of wives revealed they would divorce immediately were their economic security assured. [laughter] Half of husbands considered their marriage loveless. Thirty percent of those questioned were lingering in doomed marriages to avoid upheaval. [laughter] You just think, what's going on here? What's going on? On one hand, there's this tremendous hype in the culture, tremendous hype, and on the other -- and I don't know who they surveyed, etc., but -- there is the realization that actually it's very difficult. The reality is it's very difficult to maintain and sustain it well. It's very difficult.

We could ask, what is actually the purpose of a romantic partnership or relationship like that? Are two people really supporting each other in growing? Is that really what's going on? Is that perhaps what might be the most beautiful purpose of a coming together, that there's a mutuality of supporting, supporting each other to grow in lovely and beautiful and profound ways? Is that actually what's going on? Or is there a kind of mutual support in fear and dependency? Fear for myself and for the other? Oftentimes it's actually a mix going on. But this, again, this is not easy to look at this. It's not easy to really turn around and look at what one wants and look at one's relationship and say, is that really what's going on there, or can that be what's going on?

Oftentimes in a partnership, you hear someone say, "I feel like I lost myself or I lose myself in this relationship," or "I'm losing myself." It's a certain kind of language. It obviously doesn't sound very Dharmic. But what does it really mean? I feel it means losing touch with one's needs, losing touch with one's desires, losing touch with one's feelings, losing touch with one's authenticity. Sometimes that can happen for hours and sometimes people report it happens for decades. Decades that one person or even both people have actually lost themselves in a marriage or a relationship. Why does that happen? What is happening? Why does that happen? How does that happen?

[52:35] I was teaching in just a brief visit somewhere else last week and talking with someone who, again, was taking a little time away from their relationship. Their being away for I think a week brought up a lot of fear in their partner. She was saying, "I don't want to hurt him," by just going ahead and taking time away, etc. To really bring an honesty of questioning -- is that really the true intention, that I don't want to hurt another? We were exploring this a little bit. Or is it that perhaps I don't want to be seen as the one who is hurting, or I don't want to see myself as the one who is hurting? Or, more commonly, maybe if I do this or go away or ask for this or take this, maybe I'll lose them. How much is that kind of fear and mutuality of fear being reinforced in a relationship?

So Dharma practice, a very broad summary of what it might be, is cultivating inner resources, over time, gradually, with the development of all these lists -- generosity, and loving-kindness, and compassion, and equanimity, and mindfulness, and calmness, etc., concentration -- developing all that, one really develops the inner resources. And out of that, a sense of well-being that's more steady, a sense of happiness that's more steady in our life. And that gives one, allows one, an honesty in life, and an honesty in one's relationships. It allows one a fearlessness in one's relationships. Can you see how that works? One doesn't feel so dependent: "What if I lose them? What if this? What if that?", because one feels more stable in oneself. It's a gradual process.

So on one hand, Dharma practice is cultivating what's beautiful and what leads to inner resource. And on the other hand or alongside with that, it's investigating. The awareness we're developing here, and the mindfulness and the attentiveness, allows a kind of subtlety of seeing and more and more subtlety of seeing. So we begin to see in our life the subtle kind of intentions operating that run through our relationships, if we're honest, if we're really honest. All kinds of subtle intentions running through. And it's the development of awareness that allows us to see them, allows us to see what is subtle and what would otherwise be hidden. And it's the cultivation of the inner resources that gives us, allows a kind of honesty and fearlessness with that.

Often, again in particularly romantic relationships or marriages or partnerships, one of the most common dynamics -- and it's really quite a painful one, can be really quite a painful one -- is one person wants a lot more space, and the other person is in the role of being "I need more contact, needy, needy." Either it stays in that sort of thing, or sometimes it can even flip. There's something set up there that can be very painful, the kind of dance back and forth. The more the one person needs contact, the more the other person wants space. The more the one person wants space, the more the other person has the need for contact, the need to be close and the need to be together more. Something like that, which is so common, is not going to go away without talking about it. We can kind of hope that if we just ignore it it will go away, but it's not going to. To be able to look at it and talk through it honestly together is really nourishing the relationship and working through something that's potentially really painful and difficult.

Usually in Dharma talks and Dharma teachings, we talk much more about loving-kindness and mettā and that quality. There's something about that in relation to all this that I've been talking about this evening. In the mettā practice, in the loving-kindness practice, we're working on giving love. We give love to ourselves, and we give love to other beings. But there's an aspect in that, too, of receiving love, and actually feeling like you're receiving love in the mettā practice. One is giving it to oneself. One is focusing on and feeling [oneself] receiving it as well. Am I open to receiving love for myself? It's a different orientation within the loving-kindness practice. When we practise giving love in the loving-kindness practice or in our life, there's a giving in a wide way -- and that's what mettā is; it's a kind of wide giving, a boundless giving -- something happens in terms of receiving. The more we give, the more we find we receive. The Buddha talked about this. He talks about, I think it's eleven blessings or benefits that come from loving-kindness practice, from developing a really wide love. One of them is that you're loved. People love you. They like you.^[2] And so eventually the giving leads to a kind of receiving.

But there is something else that goes on there. When we give love, when for instance we're in the mettā practice, when it feels like it's cooking a little bit and going quite well, you could say the heart centre opens or the heart opens or the energy centres open. We're giving love, and something happens in the being. We actually feel open in this outflow of love. When the heart opens, when the energy centres open, what happens to the mind? What happens to the perception? The perception changes. Our perception of the world -- we were talking about emptiness in the question and answer period today -- the perception changes because the heart has changed. So the way we see depends on the heart. The perception changes, and we actually perceive more love. We perceive love is there and it's available and we have it, we're getting it. So in the giving, something opens, and the perception changes, and we perceive more love, we feel more loved.

In some of the questions and answers, we were talking about self and not-self and selflessness and all this. Just to reiterate some of those points: both of them are important, both the view and the avenue of talking in terms of selflessness and no-self and not-self, but also the language and the view of self. They're actually equally important. They're both important. So it's not as Dharma practitioners that we're always gravitating towards this view of selflessness and this way of relating in terms of selflessness. It's not that at all. But something happens. We were talking about letting go or loosening the self-definition and the self-view and the constriction of self-view. As we let go of the self-definition and the tightness of the self-view, what happens? There's actually an opening out of the being, less separation, and a less unbalanced need to feel loved. We're less kind of out of balance in our dependency to feel loved. This is a fruit of the practice of letting go of self-definition. It brings with it an accessibility to love and less neediness around love. Less, also, hyped dependency on one person.

Mettā, when we talk about loving-kindness, it's this kind of equality of love. It's equal. It flows out equally. It's not just to one person. But as the self-view gets less defined and less tight, we actually experience more love. This is something to investigate in one's practice as practice deepens. It can actually open up more love, the less tight the self-view is, and the more the sense we have of receiving love in that. It's almost like there's no separation, there's no barrier, and the love is just there as something, in a way, pregnant in the space, just filling the space. The less self we have, the more we find ourselves in a space, in a climate, in a universe of love.

So perception and perception of love changes. It changes. We need to be interested in this change of perception. It's probably one of the most key elements of the Dharma, perception and how it changes. Sometimes we find ourself blocked to seeing love. We can't see love. It feels like we're in a loveless universe, a loveless relationship, we have no love in our life. We actually cannot see it. And sometimes for a person that seems to go on for really a long time. We find ourself blocked. We cannot feel and see and sense love. The other end of the spectrum is that there's a big opening and we perceive love everywhere. Everything can seem, in a very deep meditative space, like it's an expression of love. Everything. It's like the whole universe is actually an expression of love. That's a very beautiful, mystical experience, intuition, that's actually available for us as meditators with dedication.

Sometimes our consciousness deepens and it deepens sort of into equanimity, through love, beyond love. Or it deepens into a kind of nothingness. It's not really love; it's gone beyond love. It's transcended it in some way. But in that space, there's no sense of feeling unloved or a lack of love. We've actually gone through and beyond love. Perception of love changes. Immense range to it, immense range. And so love depends on perception. It depends on perception, even in the most mundane way. An ex-partner says, "I still really love you. I really love you. I'll always love you," and then they meet someone else. [laughter] And then ... what happens? What happens to that feeling? It's dependent on their perception of feeling alone or not. [laughter]

But our perception of love can be less, can be a lack of love, can be more, can be infinite. We can transcend it. It can be transformed. And in the transcending and transforming, it's not cold, not nihilistic. With that, we actually see that love itself lacks inherent existence. It's not actually something. And that doesn't mean that we're rejecting love at all or that we live in a cold way or a harsh way at all. What it really gives us is a kind of huge spaciousness of really deep okayness with love, in relationship to love. We're really okay in that realm in terms of feeling the need to be loved and the expression of love in our life in different ways. There's space for that to be really, really okay, for it to flow both ways, for it to be there in the space as a perception that comes and goes and changes. There's an okayness with it.

Okay. So, shall we sit together for a bit?