“All human behavior is either an act of love or a cry for love” Stan Dale (HAI founder)
“The hardest to learn was the least complicated” Indigo Girls
Please consider Aaron Stark’s story about how he almost became a school shooter. What saved him? A friend’s undemanding love. The friend wasn’t trying to fix him, he just wanted to spend time with him. Even though Aaron had lied to him and stolen from him, his friend was still there. Love freely given with no expectations. What a beautiful, simple, powerful gift. What would the world look like if more people got the love they needed? Please sit with that thought for a moment. Maybe breathe into it. It really is the core of my plan – my longing is for us to all get back to here. To that place where we feel loved and are willing to take the scary risk of loving others. Loving others is a discipline that can be cultivated and strengthened until it is a way of life. Simple enough to say, but quite hard to do at times. For many of us the hardest to learn was the least complicated. We always have the choice; to love or not, to let love in or not. It is fear and pain that holds us back. That is not where we truly want to be. But to get where we want to go we often need help. We need training.
The Buddhists have a beautiful exercise called Metta, the loving kindness prayer. It starts with sending unconditional love to yourself. Then you send unconditional love to the people that you are closest to and find easiest to love. Then to ones that are maybe a little further out, then further out and more neutral, eventually getting to people you don’t love at all. In fact you maybe even hate these people. They get included too. Eventually you get to a place of loving absolutely everyone and every thing. This takes work! It is like a muscle that has to be built up.
When I was staring so fearfully into that mirror back at the workshop I was struggling to get to even the very first step of this prayer. For many of us this is the hardest step. The Dhali Lhama was famously astonished to find this out. He was told that many Buddhist teachers here have people start out the Metta prayer with people they love and then circle back to themselves later on as one of the harder steps. “How can you not love yourself!?! It makes no sense!” he asked.
He is absolutely right of course, but here we are. So many of us are struggling to love ourselves. I’m going to talk about Love in all eight spiral stages before I’m done, but this is the foundational stage. The one where everything else gets built upon. And many of us are struggling with this. We find ourself descending into self hate storms, saying harsh, cutting things to ourself that we never would say to a friend. Climbing out of this self-hate takes so much work! At a HAI workshop I was assisting, one of the attendees exclaimed, “I’ve already done this self love work! I had my big breakthrough! Why is this self hate still coming up for me?!?”. I blinked and told her the hard truth — learning to love yourself is a daily practice that never ends. We have to keep doing it just like we have to keep on doing exercise. We can’t just go on a couple of runs and say we are done with exercise. In exactly the same way we can’t just do a few self compassion workshops and then say we are done with self compassion. Please have patience with yourself. But also please hold out for loving yourself deeply and all the way. Again this is the foundation. Everything gets built on top of this. This is ongoing life long work. We need to come back to this practice over and over.