#77 Infinitely Wise & Gentle, My Dear Thay 🌸

May we hold your wisdom and gentleness

Jan 23, 2022

Dearest,

Today’s letter was previously published in The Nook on November 8, 2020. Resharing it today as a tribute to Thich Nhat Hanh, someone I owe my life to in a strange and magical way.

“To love someone is to also help process that person’s trauma with them. What are your thoughts on this?”

I recently received this intriguing question from one of Nook’s readers. I have been mulling over it, and no matter what route my thoughts take, I end up at Thich Nhat Hanh’s soft wisdom,

“To love without knowing how to love, wounds the person we love.”

That's the thing about the insights offered by great souls, isn’t it? They encapsulate the universe in a sprinkling of words, just the way spiritual seekers find the ocean in a drop.

Thich Nhat Hanh goes on to add,

“To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand better, we need to listen.”

To help your lover heal, he notes, you have to get to the root of what is causing them suffering, and that is only possible when you offer them the gift of generous listening, something we meditated on in the seventh edition of The Nook, where we shared Rachel Naomi Klein’s stirring vision of generous listening, an art powered by a great deal of curiosity and vulnerability; “a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity”.

Healing is a slow process, and most of the time it lasts a lifetime. What fuels empathetic listening and willingness to be vulnerable in long-term relationships, is continued forgiveness. In the book ‘Consolations’, David Whyte writes that a friendship can be sustained only through continued mutual forgiveness (“without forgiveness, all friendships die”). And what is a true relationship if not one of the deepest friendships?

The tricky part, I have come to realize, is to afford the same forgiveness to ourselves that we offer our partners. This is a skill that takes more time and maybe rightly so.

“Learning to be a pair”, according to an unknown writer, “is more work than just being on your own”. And therefore, it is necessary to learn to cut ourselves some slack and allow some nooks for mistakes.

What we try to do in love is nothing short of magic, and so some spells are likely to go wrong and you can expect some potions to spill. In trying times like these, it does us a world of good to remind ourselves that we are not alone. Almost everyone is moving heaven and earth to make life beautiful for the one they love, and they are failing and they are giving it another go. Think of this reminder as your Patronus. 😊

Some soft wisdom by Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh on The Practice of Mindfulness - Lion's Roar

Source: Plum Village

Some tunes by Parekh & Singh:

Down memory lane with Thich Nhat Hanh

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.