Matters of the Heart Are In Our Hands
Written by Karen O’Hara
Love is having a pop-culture moment at a time when it is sorely needed.
During half time at the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny, a trailblazer in Latin music and one of world's most-streamed artists, boldly displayed the message: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” While this may strike some of us as stating the obvious, imagine the ripple effects of this simple reminder.
Some advertisers chose to focus on themes of love, connectedness, community, and neighborliness rather than their products during the American football contest. Meanwhile, at the winter Olympics in Italy, harmony was selected as a one-word way to convey a universal message of peace, unity, and dialogue.
The Roots of Love
The roots of love are intricately entwined in meditation practice. The four divine states or abodes (brahmaviharas) are core aspects of love as described by the Buddha:
Loving-kindness (metta): Wishing happiness for all, without bias
Compassion (karuna): Practicing empathy and compassion to help relieve suffering
Empathetic joy (mudita): Celebrating the happiness of others
Equanimity (upekkha): Maintaining a balanced mind free from prejudice or clinging
In an interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Buddhist teacher Tich Nhat Hanh explained that love is “truly a practice” that starts from within. It involves the “capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish…In the Buddhist teaching, it’s clear that to love oneself is the foundation of the love of other people.”
In an essay on Compassion and the Individual, His Holiness the Dalai Lama says the purpose of life is to be happy. To achieve happiness, he writes, “I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. It is possible to divide every kind of happiness and suffering into two main categories: mental and physical. Of the two, it is the mind that exerts the greatest influence on most of us.”
Meditation and Your Well-being
Meditation has been extensively studied for its physical and mental health benefits. Loving-kindness and compassion practices have been shown to help practitioners better manage the common human tendency to be self-critical. Practices that support self-acceptance and empathy toward others are strongly associated with reduced symptoms of burnout, anxiety, and depression. Consistent meditation practice help lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, boosting mood, calming nerves, and disrupting rumination.
From a physiological perspective, the benefits of meditation practice can help reduce risk for health disease by lowering heart rate or limiting blood-pressure fluctuations. Being mindful about overall wellness includes heart-healthy behaviors like getting enough sleep, eating nutritious foods, and getting plenty of exercise.
Your Heart is in Your Hands
Valentine’s Day and American Heart Month in February may have you thinking more than you usually do about the nature of love – romantic, familial, platonic, for yourself, and for others who you will never meet. Ask yourself:
What do different types of love mean to me?
Am I as kind to myself as I am to others in my life?
How can I use the healing properties of love to make a difference?
The next time you practice loving-kindness meditation, take a moment to reflect on the reasons why you wish to be safe, happy, healthy, and to live with ease. Focus on extending those thoughts to reinforce connectedness in your personal life, your community, and beyond – to all of humanity. When you drop your sense of goodwill like a pebble into a still lake, you can generate concentric circles that do not dissipate until they reach the shore.
E.E. Cummings’ poem, “i carry your heart with me,” is an eloquent expression of love that we can carry in our own hearts as we navigate through these troubling times. Here’s an excerpt:
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart”
In this moment, we have an opportunity to give flight to the deepest secret. As William Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 116, “Love is not love when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove…” Let’s join hands with others, including those in our Mindful Heart Programs community, to give love all of the power it needs to overcome hatred.
Karen O’Hara is a Mindful Heart Programs board member.
