It was the end of the workday, and I had seen seven psychotherapy clients in a row, several more than is typical for me. The content of those sessions was emotionally intense, and what awaited me at home was also quite heavy. My wife and I had recently given birth to our third child, and our middle child, who was 3 years old, was undergoing treatment for a serious medical condition. The drugs had changed the shape of his body, left rashes on his skin, thinned out his hair, and impaired his nerves. Our infant was still waking up multiple times at night, and my wife and I were severely sleep-deprived as a result. Medication alarms for our son rang at all hours of the day, and our aging dogs barked desperately in the background for some attention. It took very little for us to lapse into anger and tears, and our eldest, a 6-year-old girl, was absorbing much of our stress. Empathy and kindness were in short supply.
Usually, the bike ride home from work, along a car-free path through the woods of suburban Maryland, feels spacious and joyful, but on this day I felt disconnected from the world outside, as if I were watching everything unfold on a television screen. On the inside my chest felt like a hard plastic shell with a rodent inside, trying to gnaw its way out.
I was just a minute or two into this miserable ride when I saw a young teen, with large eyes and tufts of curly brown hair protruding from under his bike helmet, riding toward me with no hands on his handlebars. He looked relaxed and sat upright, staring right at me. As I peered back at him, it slowly occurred to me that he had a gloved hand extended to the side, such that it would almost touch me when we passed. I realized, just in time, that it was a gesture meant for me. He was offering me a high five. I put my hand out and we touched, briefly, as our bikes rode past each other and then off in opposite directions. I didn’t look back at him, because as soon as our hands touched, the feeling of plastic in my chest melted into the sensation of liquid, my whole body softened, and I started sobbing. As I rode on, the misery I had been feeling turned to grief, and the grief then opened up into a deep, quiet peace.
If I had to offer a single clinical observation to summarize my experience thus far as a psychotherapist, it would be that everything in the human psyche responds to love. And in studying my own mind and heart as a meditator, I have come to the same conclusion. On silent retreats, my mind would often become quiet enough that I could see the way it was knotted up around my own clinging to ideas about regret and shame, and yet, a simple gesture that would help to undo these knots was when a teacher would lovingly listen to me describe them, or offer me a gentle prayer. In lots of the literature surrounding psychotherapy, it is often posited that the relationship between client and therapist is the primary determinant for successful outcomes. In their respective times and styles, both the Buddha and Carl Rogers, a pioneer in the field of psychotherapy, said that relationships can be the entirety of the transformational process. Simply put: If we feel loved and cared for, we feel better.
The relationship between loving-kindness and stillness is often bidirectional.
In our culture, love is most often associated with romance, sex, attachment, preference, and divinity. Yet the way I’m using it, to love is to see and to care about. To feel loved is to feel seen and cared for. The experience in the body of being seen and cared for is the feeling of softening and relaxing—the hard plastic in my chest melting into liquid. When we feel seen and cared for, our capacity to be with pain, fear, shame, grief, or unpleasantness in any form increases, and our system relaxes and allows those feelings to arise and move through us rather than remaining stuck in our bodies and minds. That boy who put his hand out for me loved me in that moment, and his love allowed me to relax in my struggle with life and to find peace.
Often, all we need is the smallest touch of love to start this process of softening. A good friend picking up the phone or moving toward us in a room can be enough to allow stuck feelings to start moving again. I have had many clients who start crying before our conversation even begins because the feeling of loving connection comes through without words.
While Buddhist practice often focuses on cultivating metta (Pali: loving-kindness) within, the teachings also value receiving the loving care of others. In the Sigalovada Sutta, which details guidelines for virtuous conduct for lay practitioners, the Buddha tells the householder’s son Sigalaka to seek “a friend who is a helper, one the same in both pleasure and pain, a friend of good counsel, and one of sympathy.” It is this same receiving of kindness that we see in the Buddha’s search for enlightenment, as it was only after receiving the gift of food from the village girl Sujata that he was able to succeed in his own quest for liberation.
In meditation, the relationship between loving-kindness and stillness is often bidirectional. Bringing in the quality of calm and softening the body makes us more sensitive to the sensation of love—of being cared for—which can further calm the mind and body. In my own practice, it seems to me that love must always be here within me, even when I don’t recognize it, because as soon as I start to soften and feel some space in my mind, love is already there too.
We can all get stuck in a place of tension, stress, and fear. Sometimes opening up to love within ourselves can feel like an impossible task. In these cases, start in the other direction. Open yourself up and give other people a chance to love you. In a simple way, invite a hug or a smile, make a call or send a text, invite a kindly connection, and, most importantly—be ready and open to receive it. We are all social beings. Let others love you a little. Their natural seeing and caring can be the key to your own spiritual awakening.