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The third title in Parallax's "Mindfulness Essentials Series" of how-to titles by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, "How to Love" introduces beginners and reminds seasoned practitioners of the essentials of mindfulness practice. This time Nhat Hanh brings his signature clarity, compassion, and humor to the thorny question of how to love and distills one of our strongest emotions down to four essentials: you can only love another when you feel true love for yourself; love is understanding; understanding brings compassion; and deep listening and loving speech are key ways of showing our love. Featuring original illustrations by Jason DeAntonis, "How to Love" shows that when we feel closer to our loved ones, we are also more connected to the world as a whole. With sections on Love vs. Need, Being in Love, Reverence, Intimacy, Children and Family, Reconciling with Parents, and more, "How to Love" includes meditations readers can do alone or with a partner to expand their capacity to love. This comprehensive guide to understanding the many different kinds of love also includes meditative practices that expand the understanding of and capacity for love, appropriate for those practicing in any spiritual tradition, whether seasoned practitioners or new to meditation.… (more)
User reviews
"If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. 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. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?"
The second part includes some practical advice/exercises for nourishing true love.
The format of short notes, each a few sentences, makes the book convenient not just to read as a whole, but to occasionally just open randomly and remind ourselves of its inspirational wisdom.
For me, this is just one of the more challenging thoughts in a book that is largely encouraging, insightful, and loving in its own right. It's a short book, and the sections or chapters are mostly less than a page, each
And that's really my one significant point of disagreement or discomfort - the suggestion that there is such a state as 'true love'. This is a notion that oversimplifies the complexity and diversity of loving relations, and holds one such way of relating up as an idealised embodiment of a concept that has any number of definitions, experiences and ideas attached to it. Pursuing one ideal of love is reasonable I suppose as part of an aspirational spiritual or psychological agenda, as is 'over'-simplifying a vastly rich territory of human experience in order to encourage us in that agenda. And while I subscribe to much of this particular spiritual and psychological agenda, I do still struggle and squirm with the normative implications of 'true' and with the loss of the messy human richness and history of the word 'love'.
It's a lovely book overall, and while at moments it verged slightly on the saccharine, it also has some provocative 'bite' in places, and some helpful practical ideas on improving loving relationships.