The more we practice sympathetic joy, the more we come to realize that the happiness we share with others is inseparable from our own happiness.
To truly love ourselves, we must open to our wholeness, rather than clinging to the shivers of ourselves represented by old stories. Living in a story of a limited self – to any degree – is not love.
We cannot instantaneously force ourselves to forgive – and forgiveness happens at a different pace for everyone and is dependent on the particulars of any given situation.
Anger often makes us hurt ourselves more than any enemy.
Loving kindness is the practice of offering to oneself and others wishes to be happy, peaceful, healthy, strong.
Ultimately, we forgive others in order to free ourselves.
Equanimity’s strength derives from a combination of understanding and trust. It is based on understanding that the conflict and frustration we feel when we can’t control the world doesn’t come from our inability to do so but rather from the fact that we are trying to control the uncontrollable.
What happens in our hearts is our field of freedom. As long as we carry old wounds and anger in our hearts, we continue to suffer. Forgiveness allows us to move on.
What’s really transformative is our willingness to keep going, our openness to possibility, our patience, our effort, our humor, our growing self-knowledge, and the strength that we gain as we keep going.
This mirroring quality, whereby we “reteach a thing its loveliness,” is one of the greatest attributes of metta. The power of metta enables us to look at people and affirm the rightness of their wish to be happy; it affirms our oneness with them. The power of love reflects both to ourselves and others the manifold possibilities available in each moment.
Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness.
To truly love ourselves, we must challenge our beliefs that we need to be different or better.
I see real love as the most fundamental of our innate capacities, never destroyed no matter what we might have gone through or might yet go through.
Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism – a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.
Mindfulness is so much wiser and more robust than our inner critic.
Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.
When we direct a lot of hostile energy toward the inner critic, we enter into a losing battle.
Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.
Embracing what is We’re conditioned to believe that painful feelings are “bad” and that pleasurable ones are “good.” It’s often easier – though not healthier – for us to avoid grief and sorrow, while only embracing sensations like happiness, confidence, and love.
Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.