What is Love? As much as we might like to, we can’t force love to happen. But we can understand its many levels and connect more easily to its source.

BY SALLY KEMPTON  | Originally posted here in Yoga Journal

“I know love is there,” my old friend Elliot said. “My question is, Why is it that so many times, I can’t feel it?”

We were in the middle of a workshop I teach called “Exploring the Heart.” Elliot had recently lost his father, and so I asked him, “Are you talking about something specific?”

“Of course,” he said. As he told me the story of his father’s death, I felt a deep sense of recognition. The questions his experience raised are essential ones, questions we all deal with as we probe that most fundamental and yet elusive of all human feelings: love.

Elliot and his father had been polite strangers for nearly 20 years. Yet when the father became seriously ill, the only person he wanted around him was his son. “I knew we’d been given our big chance to open up to each other,” Elliot said. “I kept thinking, ‘Now he’ll finally get who I really am! We’ll bond, and I’ll be able to feel love for him at last!’”

See also Love-What-Is Meditation

The problem was that Elliot couldn’t dig out a single nugget of love for his father. He wanted to love him. He knew he should love him. But their history together had formed such a habit of disconnection that he felt nothing at all.

How Love Feels

So Elliot did the only thing he could think of to close the gap. He asked himself, “How would I act if I did feel love for my father?” Then he acted on the intuition that arose for him.

Elliot realized that when we really love someone, we’re attentive to even the smallest minutiae of that person’s existence. So he practiced paying close attention to his father. He slowed himself down and tried to keep his awareness linked to his father’s breath. He served his father. He fielded the emotional crises of the other family members. He did everything, in short, that a devoted son would do—and he did it, as best he could, as an austerity, a practice.

See also Feel Your Best This Season

Elliot’s father died three months later, and Elliot sat through the funeral dry-eyed, still waiting for his heart to open. During the last hymn, he finally gave up hope. He slumped down in his seat, deeply tired, with no more effort left in him.

At that moment, like a small trickle from a dammed-up stream, he felt a stir of tenderness in his heart. It came softly, yet it was almost shockingly sweet. It was the love he’d been trying to feel. “It felt as if I’d tapped into some kind of big, impersonal loving energy,” he told me. “It didn’t exclude my father, but it definitely wasn’t about him. Instead, the feeling I had in that moment was that there was nothing but love.Everything was love. ‘Oh, my God,’ I thought, ‘I’m having a spiritual experience, right here at my father’s funeral!’” The thought struck him as so funny that he giggled—causing something of a commotion in the funeral chapel, as people turned to see what was making him laugh at such an inappropriate moment.

“I wondered where that love came from,” he told me. “Was it a reward for taking care of my father? If so, why wasn’t it there when I needed it, so to speak?”

I realized that behind Elliot’s question was an even deeper set of questions, ones that plague us all. They go something like this: If love is real, why doesn’t it feel the way I’ve always heard it was supposed to feel? Why can’t I feel it all the time? And why does love so often feel lacking, or painful, or both?

Love Is a Many-Leveled Thing

Most of us have been confused about love all of our lives. In fact, we often begin the inner life as a search—conscious or unconscious—for a source of love that can’t be taken away. We may have grown up feeling unloved or believing we had to perform heroic feats to deserve love. Our parents, the movies we see, our cultural and religious milieu give us ideas about love that go on influencing us long after we have forgotten their source. When we read spiritual books and encounter teachers, our understanding about love can get even more complicated, because depending on what we read or whom we study with, we get slightly different takes on what love means in spiritual life.

Continue reading here on Yoga Journal.

BY EDWARD ESPE BROWN | Originally published here in Yoga Journal

At my first formal interview with Suzuki Roshi, I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps I really could not think of what to say, or nothing I was thinking was worth saying. I was young and sincere, and I wanted to make a good impression. After a couple of minutes of sitting quietly facing each other, I began to relax and Suzuki took the initiative.

“How’s your meditation?”

“Not so good,” I replied.

“What’s not so good?”

“I’m thinking a lot.”

“And what’s the problem with thinking?” he asked.

That stumped me. When I looked directly for the problem with thinking, I couldn’t find it. My fallback position was to tell him the do’s and don’ts of meditation.

“You’re not supposed to think in meditation,” I said. “You’re supposed to quiet your mind.”

“Thinking is pretty normal, don’t you think?”

I had to agree with the Roshi, who then explained that the problem with thinking was not thinking per se, but thinking that was stuck.

When people tell me meditation is “difficult,” what they really mean is that quieting their minds or stopping their thinking is what’s difficult. And just as I was as a new student, they are extremely reluctant to examine the issue more carefully. It’s not so simple. And when it is not simple, the simplest approach is to stick to the rules.

I’ve known people who have seriously devoted themselves to “not-thinking,” and when I ask them if they called to let their friends know that they would be late, they say, “No, I didn’t think of that.” This is not a new phenomenon. An old Chinese Zen Master once said, “Some of you are taking me literally when I say, ‘Don’t think,’ and you are making your minds like a rock. This is a cause of insentiency and an obstruction to the Way. When I say not to think, I mean that if you have a thought, think nothing of it.”

Mind Against Mind

The capacity to think is an essential element of our lives. We need to plan, make decisions, and communicate. The problem is not that we think but that we haven’t had a truly new thought for most of our lifetime. In other words, our thinking is fixed.

For example, once I believe no one likes me, do you think I’m going to let anything change my mind? No way. I can explain any contradictory evidence: You don’t know me well enough; if you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me; you are just pretending to like me so you can get something out of me. Thinking tends to be for and against—and to be intolerant of thoughts that do not obviously concur. This is often referred to as “the disease of the mind is to set mind against mind.”

Rather than eliminate thinking, you could say that one of the basic skills to develop in meditation is to be able to hold and sustain contradictory thoughts—calming the impulse to eliminate the opposition. One obvious example has to do with sitting still. You want to sit still, so can you have the thought to move and go on sitting still? Or do you have to do what the thought says?

If sitting still means eliminating the thought of moving, you may find meditation difficult—because the way to remove thoughts is to tighten muscles, and this makes sitting quite painful. Holding on to a thought, such as, “I am not going to move,” also tightens muscles. This is what you are busy doing a good deal of the time, so if you are serious about releasing and calming the body and the mind, thoughts are going to be popping up one after the other. The trick is not to mind.

You could say that the point of meditation is to liberate thinking, and understanding this, you are ready to examine what to do with thinking during meditation. There are two basic strategies. One is to do something other than thinking and to use your thinking to help accomplish that. The other is to give your thinking something to do other than what it usually does.

It’s important to keep in mind that the goal is not to eliminate your thinking. I hear this all the time: “I’m so sick and tired of my thinking. I just want to get rid of it once and for all.” Your thinking knows you want to get rid of it, so it is going to cling to you for all it’s worth.

So what do you do with thinking during meditation? This first strategy, which is basic to Buddhism, especially Zen, emphasizes posture and breathing. With energy and commitment, give your attention fully to them rather than to your thinking.

This means emphasizing a straighter spine, including the small of the back curved slightly in and the neck long. But don’t be shy about asking your thinking to lend a hand when needed. Is the neck shortening and the chin jutting forward? That’s a red flag that thinking is in full bloom, and when your thinking notices that, lengthen your neck. You can also have your thinking count the breaths, say on the exhalation, or note the breath as it proceeds in and out.

Any Questions?

The second strategy involves giving your thinking a task.

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Read more here: http://www.yogajournal.com/article/practice-section/thoughts-on-thinking/