What is love? Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the world's best-known and most respected Zen teachers, poet, Peace and Human Rights activist, describes true love through the following four elements:
- Unconditional kindness or benevolence (Maitri):It is the ability to give joy and happiness to the person you love. It involves learning to observe carefully who we love because if we cannot understand, we will not be able to love. Understanding is the essence of love and it takes time to be present to look deeply. That is what I call understanding.
- Compassion (Karuna):It is defined as the desire and the possibility of alleviating the suffering of another person. To know the nature of her suffering and help her, one must also observe and listen deeply generating love and happiness. That's what meditation is necessary. Meditating is looking deeply at the essence of things.
- Joy (Mudita): If there is no joy in love, it is not true love. If we are suffering and crying all the time or if we cry for the person we love, that means that it is not a true love, it can even become the opposite of it.
- Equanimity and freedom (Upeska):True love allows freedom to be achieved. When you truly love you give the other absolute freedom. If not, it is not a true love. The other must feel free, not only on the outside, but also on the inside.
Kindness, joy, compassion and freedom, aspects of true love, are qualities that are innate in all human beings. Through deep observation, listening carefully, being present and practicing daily contact with our interior (which can be from meditation) we can learn to develop them.
This appreciation of love transcends the couple and refers to the possibility of developing a full feeling towards life, towards what surrounds us and, also, towards oneself: the capacity to love others is related to the capacity to love oneself. same. The self becomes a we and that we becomes a whole.
In this sense, love is a communion: it allows us to unite and merge. In addition, the healthy impulse to fly is found in us, to be free from the attachment that suffocates and hurts, respecting our partner, sharing life without fear or anguish, offering him our presence, our learning, humbly and lovingly.