Where is true love?
Soul mate is one who knows, remembers and masters oneself. As the word "Tri Kỷ" implies, it's important to remember that the true love--the soul mate we're always seeking--is already always present inside of us." (Sister Dang Nghiem, "Mindfulness as Medicine").
When people come in to therapy, no matter what the illness presents, the root cause of all human maladies is the lack of an inner ability to love themselves. From this lack of inner love born countless mental afflictions in the form of addictions, depression, anxiety, anger, self-neglecting, overeating, sexual promiscuity, laziness and stuckness in life. Some will delude themselves into thinking that they have great self-love by taking good care of their bodies in the form of exercising, having regular massages, clothing themselves in finest fashions and jewelries, driving fancy cars, living in big houses as well as dining fine foods and traveling to exotic places.
"Did suffering cease to exist? Did anxiety and depression still find refuge in you?"
Whatever you do in life, if you cannot find the joy and peace in the here and now, you are not doing it correctly.
The first noble truth to Self-Love and inner-peace is Self-Responsibility.
Recognizing that all sufferings in life are caused by ignorance or incorrect view and faulty thinking. Our superseded mind cloaking in past sufferings and shrouding by future anxiety tends to chain us to some deadlocked worldviews. The mind constantly creates itself with all its fallacies, delusions, pain, joy, beauty and suffering. Even when you have a valid reason to suffer in terms of being victimized and kicked to the curb of life , you should not perpetuate the offense in the form of self-repetition. Through our daily alienated living, we isolate ourselves, engulfing in our own suffering and drowning in our own sorrow. We inadvertently dispose more weights of suffering onto our existence by believing that we have it worse and no one can carry more burden than we are. This egocentric thinking shoots the second arrow to our psychical wound.
Self-Responsibility teaches us to remove all of the porcupines' quills one by one. Healing occurs with a deep empathy to ourselves. Therapy begins with an inner session to ourselves, closing the perpetual wound of narcissistic injuries "caused by other people". Calling out our name as the most soothing word, "I love you, my dear! I really love you!", practicing deep abdominal breathing in sitting meditation, taking refuge in our breaths, loving our body as the solo spaceship in our cosmic journey.
Some people will claim that they don't have time for this devotion and it seems utterly boring to turn the attention inward and be disconnected from all sources of sensory stimulus in life. They are afraid to look inside of themselves and find barren landscape of the mind. Loneliness is one of the greatest social diseases. Some people fears that the practice of sitting still and listening to themselves will intensify their loneliness. Fearing of facing your own self is like running away from all mirrors in life. Paradoxically, sitting meditation will lessen your loneliness in time, when you learn to develop the profound capacity for self-love, you won't have the aching and wrenching existential feelings of alienation and being lost in the corridor of time.
I am too busy for this.
"No matter how busy your day is, would you forget to charge your phone? And what happens when you don't charge your phone?"
Our body needs this tender, loving charge. If we don't have ten minutes to ourselves, the message that we give our body is it's not important enough for us to take note, listen, observe and nurture ourselves. One research study shows that up to 95% of people report that they don't live to their fullest potentials. If we don't charge our phone, it cannot work at its fullest potentials. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective ways to rebuild our visceral organs and repair our internal neurophysiological system.
The second noble truth of Self-Love is Self-Awareness.
Being aware and observing your thoughts, feelings and actions every step of the way strengthen the muscle of self-responsibility. You are broadcasting 24/7 to yourself and discharging neurochemical in your system daily through your thoughts, speech, feelings and actions. Most people regularly shoot themselves up with daily doses of cortisol and adrenaline by scaring themselves with thoughts of poor health, failed missions, false relationships and misfortune. This is the most common form of self-abuse. Growing up in a country of thousand years of war trauma, many Vietnamese people endorse the belief that by thinking negatively, when negative things come, they have the stamina to face it, when positive things come, it's a bonus.
Loving yourself has everything to do with how you regulate and monitor the thoughts and emotions inside of you. Stop torturing yourself with other people's negative downloading onto you since childhood. Reversing every negative thoughts, emotions, actions with gentle loving care and positive thinking is part of the prescribed medicine toward healing. Letting go and forgiving those who have hurt you is one of the most noble things that you can do for yourself. When you grow in daily mindful self-awareness, your capacity to love others increases exponentially as well.
The last noble truth to Self-Love is the practice of Interbeing, a concept fostered by world renowned Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.
Interbeing is the ability to see common roots in all of us. Nature and the cosmic system thrive in self-governing and overlapping patterns of development and growth. Interwoven and repetition are the matrix of all lives from the making of an insect to a million year-old mountain. DNA-the molecule that serves as the instructional manual to build each species showed that the homo sapiens' DNA is 99% matched to each other, 98.9% matched to chimpanzees and at least 97% similar to the rest of the mammals. Therefore, all judgments lie in the ignorance of maximizing our differences and overlooking our similarities. Compassion is the recognition that all aspects of sufferings stemmed from the delusion of a separate self , which leads to chronic anxiety and deep-rooted fear of rejection from what is indivisibly human connection.
When we see each and every one of us as a micro-cosmism inside of a macrocosmic system, we are all brilliant star dusts and crystal sands at sea; none of us stands out from the other. Our ability to manifest ourselves infinitely makes us seemingly different from each other. Our hate, love, fear, joy, enlightenment, all came from the collective pool of universal consciousness. Through delusion and ignorance, we manifest pathogenic agents of hate, envy, and dividedness. Through love and understanding, we manifest the antibody of love and joy, peace and unity.
The practice of loving kindness is the antigens that neutralize all human toxins of judgments, envy, separateness and defensiveness. When we develop an inner awareness and Compassion (Community Passion) in life, we can build on each other's strengths. We can deepen our capacity to listen and to love one another with all of individuals' fallacies and errors just like we would our own. We can be fully present to ourselves and to others with undivided attention and genuine care. We can eliminate all criticisms and harsh judgments on self and others for perceived inadequacies and errors. We can have respect for our Interdependent nature and deep appreciation for all sentient beings, animals, minerals, trees and water on earth.
This is True Love.
(My deepest gratitude to Zen Master Thích Chân Đẳng Nghiêm. Deer Park (Lộc Uyển) Monastery, Hidden Valley Mountain (Đại Ẩn Sơn) San Diego, September 2017).