Appreciating your own goodness

If you have difficulty extending loving feelings to yourself, you may want to take five or ten minutes to reflect on your good qualities or the good things you’ve done in your life. Go ahead, it won’t hurt you!
In the West, we have a cultural taboo against praising ourselves. Instead, we often focus on our shortcomings, which only ends up making us feel contracted and afraid. “Pride goes before a fall,” chides the old slogan, suggesting that you’d better watch out because any satisfaction you take in yourself or your accomplishments could destroy you. “Who do you think you are?” intones the childhood voice of an exasperated mother or father, unwittingly teaching shame and self-doubt.
Despite what your parents (or other influential people) may have implied or told you, it’s okay to be happy and to feel good about yourself. By focusing on your goodness, you actually generate positive, expansive feelings that nourish you and everyone around you. “Joy,” said the Buddha, “is the gateway to nirvana.”

Love begins with you

You may find it difficult to feel love and extend it to others because you didn’t get much of it yourself as a child. Even though you never really learned how to give and receive love freely, people are constantly asking you for what you believe you don’t have. You’re like a person living in the desert with a dry well; you can’t share any water with others because you don’t have any yourself. Or you may find that your well has water but constantly runs dry just when you need it most.
The meditations provided in this chapter dig a well deep into your soft spot, where the waters of love never run dry. (In fact, the love I’m talking about doesn’t belong to anyone; it just bubbles up from a mysterious and inexhaustible source.) You may need to prime the pump, though. That’s why the traditional instructions counsel you to begin each meditation on love and compassion by focusing on yourself. When you’ve filled your own well to the brim, you can begin to extend the overflow to include others as well. Just as you can’t really heal others until you’ve healed yourself to a certain degree, you can’t love others until you feel deeply loved yourself. Besides, you deserve love at least as much as anyone else. In the West, we often practice self-denial, while equating self-love with selfishness. Yet, the reverse generally holds true: People who love themselves give love more freely and generously than those who don’t.
As a remedy for the widespread Western disease of self-criticism and selfdenial, the meditative traditions offer the practice of self-love. In particular, as you work with opening your heart, you can remember to keep your heart open to yourself even, paradoxically, when your heart is closed.

The warrior of the heart

For all you tough guys (and gals) who believe that opening the heart is best reserved for sissies and fools, here’s some wise counsel from the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa. (No stranger to toughness, Trungpa, like the Dalai Lama and thousands of other Tibetans, escaped from his homeland when the Chinese invaded and walked across the Himalayas over a series of precipitous mountain passes to India.)
In his book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he explains that facing your fear and negativity and being willing to keep your heart open — even in the most challenging circumstances — takes tremendous courage. Although you probably think of warriors as impenetrable, unfeeling, and heavily defended, Trungpa takes the opposite view. The sacred warrior who practices meditation, he suggests, is not afraid to feel tender — or to communicate this tenderness to others.
The point is, you can take care of yourself —even defend yourself from harm, when necessary — without closing your heart. An open heart doesn’t make you powerless or ineffectual. Quite the contrary, it allows you to respond to situations wisely and skillfully because you feel others’ suffering as well as your own.

Discovering your “soft spot”

One of my teachers, the Tibetan meditation master Sogyal Rinpoche, used to refer to the place inside where you feel tender, loving emotions as your soft spot. The soft spot can be found in your heart, beneath all the toughness and defensiveness. To reach it, you have to risk encountering feelings you might otherwise wish to avoid, such as fear, grief, anger, and the others talked about earlier in this chapter. You’ll know the soft spot when you get there because it has a tender sweetness to it that’s often tinged with a certain sadness or melancholy about the human condition. (In fact, you may find it slightly painful to open your heart at first, simply because of this sadness, which is actually one of the seeds of compassion.) Because you’ll need to be familiar with your soft spot in order to practice the meditations provided in the remainder of this chapter, you may want to experiment with the following exercise:

1. Begin by closing your eyes, taking a few deep breaths, and relaxing your body a little on each exhalation. Remember to be kind to yourself.
2. Imagine the face of someone who loved you very much as a child and whose love moved you deeply. In the East, they recommend using your mother, but some Westerners tend to have more problematic relationships with their parents, so you may prefer to use your grandmother or grandfather or some other unconditionally loving figure. (If you never received love like this as a child, you can think of some famous person that you consider to be unconditionally loving, such as Jesus or Buddha or the Divine Mother.)
3. Remember a particular instance in which this person showed his or her love for you and you really received it and allowed it to nurture you.
4. Notice the tender, loving feelings this memory evokes in your heart. The place where you feel them is your soft spot.
5. Notice if any other feelings accompany the tenderness and gratitude you feel.
6. If you find it difficult to re-experience the love, pay attention to what gets in your way. What are some of the feelings standing guard over your soft spot?
7. Begin to explore the area around your soft spot. What is the state of your heart right now? What are some of the other feelings you find stirring inside, in addition to (or instead of) love? Do you notice any tension or bracing around your heart that keeps it from opening to love?
8. Be aware of what you find, without judgment or self-criticism.

Some good reasons for keeping your heart open

Imagine that an extraterrestrial lands on Earth and tries to make sense of us human beings from our pop music. It would probably conclude that we regard love (whatever that might be!) as infinitely more precious than everything else combined. But once the ET figures out how to measure love, it might be surprised to discover how little of the invaluable substance actually flows between us most of the time. Love, the ET would no doubt deduce, is not only precious, it’s incredibly hard to find.
For creatures who want to be loved, appreciated, even adored, we certainly go about fulfilling our desire in a curiously unfulfilling way. Instead of manufacturing it ourselves in the little love machine inside our chests, we complain about not getting enough of it, search frantically for someone else to give it to us, and try to make ourselves more lovable by improving our looks or earning more money. But the truth is, the Beatles song has it right: The love you take is equal to the love you make. In other words, the most effective way to get love is to generate it yourself.
By cultivating caring, loving feelings, you can actually provide yourself with the nourishment you seek. At the same time, by radiating those feelings outward to others, you can touch their tender hearts and naturally elicit the same feelings in them, creating a flow of love that keeps circulating between you and building on itself.
If you’ve never experienced this kind of flow with someone yourself, you’ve perhaps met people who live this way. Their eyes sparkle with positive regard, their words speak well of everyone, and they elicit love wherever they go. Through the practices described here, you, too, can begin to generate a flow of loving feelings. It all depends on you.
Here are a few of the innumerable benefits of learning how to love:
_ Energy and expansiveness: If you’ve ever been in love (maybe you are right now!), you know how vital and alive you can feel when your heart is wide open. Instead of the usual sense of limitation you ordinarily experience, you feel like you have no boundaries, as though you can’t really tell where you leave off and the outside world (or your beloved) begins.
_ Peace and well-being: When your heart is filled with love, you feel happy and peaceful for no external reason. In fact, love, happiness, joy, peace, and well-being are just different names and versions of the same basic energy — the loving, life-giving energy of the heart.
_ Good health: Yes, love is life-giving and life-enhancing. For one thing, it brings people together to create babies, and, in general, love contributes to optimal health by providing an immeasurable vital spark that not only nourishes the internal organs but also provides the body (and the person) with a reason to live. Dean Ornish, M.D., author of Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease, found that love is more important than any other factor in the healing process, including diet and exercise. To heal your heart, he discovered, you need to open your heart.
_ Belonging and interconnectedness: As another old song puts it, love makes the world go round — and it certainly draws people together and keeps them connected. When you open your heart to others, you naturally feel joined with them in a meaningful way. In the deepest sense, love is the source of all meaning and belonging.
_ Spiritual awakening: As they gradually erode your sense of separateness from others, loving feelings can eventually reveal the essential nature of life, which is, paradoxically, also love. Ultimately, the Sufis teach, we are simply love searching for itself.

Kindness is the key

Although the cultivation of an open heart definitely deserves a chapter of its own, it’s traditionally considered the foundation on which meditation practice rests, rather than a separate technique or approach.
In Southeast Asia, for example, meditators are taught how to develop generosity, patience, and lovingkindness before they learn how to meditate. And Tibetan practitioners dedicate the benefit of every meditation to the peace and harmony of all beings, not just themselves. As the Dalai Lama, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, says, “My religion is kindness.” You can follow every technique to the T, but if your heart’s not in it, you won’t reap all the wonderful benefits of meditation.
To be open to the present moment, for example, as mindfulness meditation teaches, you need to be open with every dimension of your being: body, mind, spirit, and heart. So be sure to bring a measure of love and caring to your meditation —especially toward yourself!

Some factors that keep closing your heart

Like most human beings, you close your heart, whether automatically or deliberately, because you feel angry, hurt, or threatened by others. Perhaps you’re afraid they’ll take advantage of your kindness or crush your tender feelings with their insensitivity or restimulate painful memories. Or maybe you’re just ticked off about all the times you’ve been mistreated, and you don’t want to let it happen again. We all have our own unique reasons for closing our hearts. Whatever yours happen to be, they may be preventing you from getting the love you really want.
Here are some of the most common factors that close the heart:

• Fear: When you’re afraid, for whatever reason — of being attacked, criticized, manipulated, overwhelmed — you close your heart in selfdefense. As one popular slogan puts it, love is letting go of fear — and learning how to trust, both yourself and others.
• Resentment: When you hold on to old hurts and let bitterness and resentment build up in your heart, you shut your heart, not only to the people who hurt you but also to life itself.
• Unresolved grief: This natural human emotion can get stuck if you continue to mull over your losses and refuse to let go of the past. When grief fills your heart, you’re reluctant to open it because you don’t want to feel the pain inside.
• Jealousy: Actually a brand of resentment, jealousy can close your heart to the person who has what you wish you had — and to yourself as well for being somehow “inferior.”
• Pain: Also known as hurt, this feeling, if allowed to build to intolerable levels, may cause you to board up your heart completely and post a sign saying, “Keep out! No trespassing!”
• Grasping and attachment: As long as you’re emotionally attached to having life go a certain way, you’re going to close your heart as soon as other people interfere. In fact, emotions like grief, pain, and even resentment are ultimately rooted in attachment — and the fear of losing what you’re attached to.
• Self-clinging: If you believe that you’re an isolated individual cut off from other people and from your own essential being, you’re going to hold on to your own little piece of turf — your own possessions, your own accomplishments, your own happiness — and close your heart, if necessary, to defend it. Also known as ego in many of the meditative traditions, self-clinging perpetuates separation and gives rise to the other factors in this list.

Ultimately, of course, only the most enlightened, selfless people can keep their hearts open all the time. I mean, we’re talking Jesus or Mother Teresa here! As for the rest of us, we’re going to keep closing our hearts again and again. Only when we’ve dissolved the barriers that separate us from others —which is what enlightenment is all about — can we keep our hearts open even in the most difficult circumstances.
But, enlightened or not, you can definitely develop the ability to open your heart when you choose to do so. In fact, the regular practice of meditation gradually erodes the experience of separation that causes the heart to stay closed in the first place. Who knows? One day you may open your heart and never close it again!