Relationship as a Mirror

In a practice group in Cambridge, there was a professor of political science who was something of a militant atheistic Marxist. The woman that he was involved with had taken up vipassana meditation. He started to feel a gap between himself and her, and that was his only motive for signing up for the class. He told me right at the start that he thought meditation was a bunch of nonsense, but he wanted to understand what she was learning so that their relationship wouldn’t be damaged. To his credit, he had the energy, determination, and openness to explore his own mind.

In the same practice group was a Buddhist doing postdoctoral work in Buddhist studies. He merely knew everything about Buddhism. This class met for ten weeks, two hours once a week. By the seventh or eighth week, the fellow who said he was a Marxist was starting to taste all kinds of new things in meditation. The man who was officially a Buddhist was having a very hard time because of all the concepts that he kept tripping over; for him, it was two steps forward and ten steps backward.

Now, why was the Marxist able to open up? What enabled someone that skeptical to change? It was because the Marxist was willing to look at his mind, and to start by focusing on his breath. Gradually his mind calmed down and he could examine thoughts and feelings and bodily sensations. He started to see and experience parts of his consciousness that he had never known were there. It was pure seeing, direct. And, of course, it challenged a lot of his strongly held beliefs. What does this have to do with relationship as a mirror? In order to listen deeply to another person, you must listen deeply to your own mind. Your relationship to yourself affects your relationship to everyone else.

See Your Part in the Equation

In quite a few of his talks, the Buddha said that the hardest thing to let go of is attachment to views and opinions. If you look carefully, you might find that your views and opinions give you a feeling of identity, a sense of worthiness. Sometimes we’ve toiled hard for a cause that is vital to us. Maybe you’ve spent all of your life working to develop a certain point of view and protect it, maybe a political view. Then suddenly somebody close to you disagrees. You might react with a kind of grieving. What can come out of that? You can either get lost in hurt or anger or treat it as a dharma door to help you get free. The Marxist had the inner strength or confidence to challenge his own beliefs.

In order to listen deeply to another person, you must listen deeply to your own mind. Your relationship to yourself affects your relationship to everyone else.

Not surprisingly, reactive and conditioned behavior is often to blame when people are having trouble in relationships or marriages. Sometimes they should get divorced. Sometimes they can stay together and learn how to live together in a new and wonderful way. Awareness will show you which it is—that’s the beauty of it. What’s revolutionary in this teaching is that the Buddha said, in effect, “Spend your energy not on trying to fix others but on trying to understand yourself.” The whole point of the four noble truths is to turn everything around and see your part in the equation.

In the quest for intimacy, the main thing to be intimate with is yourself. If you’re not intimate with yourself, then how are you going to be intimate with someone else? A common problem in relationship is that people who are not intimate with themselves desperately want intimacy with others, who also are not intimate with themselves. Both of you are carrying each other’s projections on top of who you actually are and who you think you are. How can real intimacy come out of that?

Here’s where the dharma attitude can be helpful. You want the other person to make everything that’s off in your life okay. But no one can do that for you. In this practice, you begin to see that the other person suffers and that they are impermanent, they lack self; they’re not unified—and neither are you. Two ever-changing entities wanting some kind of deep fulfillment and certitude cannot provide it for each other. This is not to say you’re condemned to being alone. But there’s a deeper level to which all spiritual paths are directed. When you don’t expect a person to deliver something that they can’t possibly deliver, suddenly it can be a more fulfilling relationship, where you see their humanness and they see yours. All of us, whenever we’re in each other’s presence, are teaching one another.

This attitude of giving space to others is not always easy. I often hear from yogis: “Buddhism talks about nonattachment, but how can I love someone and not be attached?” You fall in love with someone, you live with someone, you marry someone—aren’t you attached? If Buddhism says no, well, it must be a cold, totally unrealistic teaching. The truth is that when we get involved, of course there’s attachment. We were lonely. We met someone. “Oh, thank God, finally.” We all know the variations on that attachment. But if we have an ideal of perfect attachment—in other words, what would it be like if the Buddha got married?—it’s not going to work out too well.

Here, as elsewhere, start where you are: there’s attachment and possessiveness in love. So work with that. Now, it’s best if both people are willing to work with each other. But even if you are the only person on the path, there’s no question that you can loosen your attachment so that it’s not strangling you, so that you become less possessive. Instead of, “Where are you going? When are you coming back? How long are you going to be away?”—after a while, you see that every time you say that, it feels terrible to you, and the other person hates it, too. The letting go comes not from sprouting wings and flying out of your attachment but from getting to know what attachment is. It takes courage and patience; it’s not easy. You are coming to understand, “Oh, this is what attachment feels like.”

Buddhism speaks of nonattachment. But what if, say, you are a parent? How can you be true to your heart and stay on this path? A student once told me that a mother can only be as happy as her unhappiest child. Maybe. But here’s the problem, as I see it. When you read the Buddhist texts, they’re ideals. Much of the literature comes from the monastic tradition, people who have never had children. So we receive the general teaching that attachment is suffering. But motherhood is a primal attachment—no getting around it.

All of us, whenever we’re in each other’s presence, are teaching one another.

Still, there’s a difference between attachment and love, and it’s subtle. As the mind gets quieter and begins to know itself, it can feel a distinction between holding on and love. I’m not saying that the pain goes away when your child is suffering. But often with awareness, some of the pain can be eased.

No matter what your children are going through, try to keep doing the practice. It will help you. As you pay attention to your suffering, often what you see is repetitive thinking, which throws logs on the fire and makes the suffering worse than it needs to be. This is not to say get rid of thinking, whether or not you’re a parent. But you can learn something by seeing if there’s a lot of extra thinking, repetitive thinking, the same thought over and over again.

One of the benefits—and it’s not a small one—is the realization that if your child is in pain, you aren’t obliged to encase your own suffering in cement. “I have to suffer because she or he is my child.” Be open and see what unfolds. What I’ve discovered in people who sincerely do this is that the pain of being a parent may never go away but you learn how to take care of it with more equanimity. That enables more clarity, which gives you the possibility, the potential, for being more helpful to your child in ways that you may or may not be able to imagine.

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From The World Exists to Set Us Free: Straight-Up Dharma for Living a Life of Awareness by Larry Rosenberg with Madeline Drexler. © 2025 by Larry Rosenberg and Madeline Drexler. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO