From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax, to be peaceful, we my wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth. This is not a retreat, it is a treat. During walking meditation, during kitchen and garden work, during sitting meditation, all day long, we can practice smiling. At first you may find it difficult to smile, and we have to think about why. Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and bodisattvas.

I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling.

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.

‘Breathing in, I calm my body.’ This line is like drinking a glass of ice water-you feel the cold, the freshness, permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel the breathing calming my body, calming my mind.

‘Breathing out, I smile.’ You know the effect of a smile. A smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face, and relax your nervous system. A smile makes you master of yourself. That is why the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas are always smiling. When you smile, you realize the wonder of the smile.

‘Dwelling in the present moment.’ While I sit here, I don’t think of somewhere else, of the future or the past. I sit here, and I know where I am. This is very important. We tend be alive in the future, not now. We say, ‘Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D. degree, and then I will be really alive.’ When we have it, and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, ‘I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive.’ And then after the job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. Therefore the technique, if we have to speak of a technique, is to be in the present moment, to be aware that we are here and now, and the only moment to be alive is the present moment.

‘I know this is a wonderful moment.’ This is the only moment that is real. To be here and now, and enjoy the present moment is our most wonderful task. ‘Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment.’ I hope you will try it.”

This book is not meant to be read in only a linear manner. It often offers an experiential process. It is as much poetry as prose. Absorbed phrase by phrase, image by image, it allows healing to enter the heart, the mind, the body.

We share the process from which we are learning daily for the benefit of all who wish to use relationship as a path of self-discovery. This work is not to be taken lightly. This is a book about co-commitment, not co-dependency. These techniques are not applicable to anything that resembles the old-style dominant/submissive relationships which have for so long perpetuated our all-too-human suffering.

When true hearts truly join there is a mystical union. An inter-connecting of whole human beings which, is the foundation for great insight and growth. It is a collaboration in healing.

Although we often speak in terms of merging, or becoming one, or dissolving into oneness–this is not a giving up of one person to another. It is not, as the great German poet Rilke fears of such commitments, “a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both of their fullest freedom and development . . .”

Indeed, if two people attempt only to become one, they certainly may get lost. But if the oneness just beyond such concepts is their ultimate concern–if each heart is committed to the universal heart, our birthright, our original nature–neither stops. And the ongoing aerial act is spectacular.

Indeed, when Rilke says that the most that can be expected is that “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other,” he is speaking of the best of the ordinary way. They do not burn for the Beloved. They do not love the truth even more than each other. They refuse to give it all away. To be blessed surveying new frontiers.

The distance from your pain, your grief, your unattended wounds, is the distance from your partner. And the distance from your partner is your distance from the living truth, your own great nature. Whatever maintains that distance, that, separation from ourselves and our beloveds, must be investigated with mercy and awareness. This distance is not overcome by one “giving up their space” to another, but by both partners entering together the unknown between them. The mind creates the abyss but the heart crosses it.

A conscious relationship teaches us to treat ourselves and others as our only child. And to do it mindfully. It does not break the heart. A conscious relationship is as healing and life-affirming as an unconscious, old-style relationship is at times harmful and life-denying. The harmful effect of an unconscious relationship is that it keeps us so small, dependent on external circumstances for our happiness. More needs than gifts are brought to such an entanglement. But a conscious relationship, offers the possibility of relating across the gulf of I and other all the way into the heart of our beloved. A conscious relationship shows us to remain conscious while in relationship. It’s a whole new ball game.

A few years ago Ondrea and I were scheduled to give a talk about healing on what turned out to be Valentine’s Day. Coming from the stillness of our mountain retreat to the commotion of the “big city,” we were deeply touched by the care and kindness exhibited as the meeting hall filled. So many couples aiding each other. Those alone helped to their seats by the loved ones of the recently departed. The weary, nearly translucent faces of patients, friends and colleagues. So many others drawn with illness or gray with grief. So many returned for healing with their families. Their lovers. Men and women of every description–teen-agers and octogenarians, janitors and physicians, car salesmen and poets: black, brown, yellow, and white; gay and straight; sick and well–the loved, the loving, committed to a mutual process. So much buzz and affection. Five hundred gathered for an evening in this beautiful old stone church in an investigation of healing.

These open faces, and the exceptional, nearly initiatory, day we had just had, overwhelmed us with waves of loving kindness.

And we thought what a perfect day to speak about human kindness and maybe even share that term we love so in private but rarely used in groups: the Beloved. A word that incorporates the heart of the sacred into a profound appreciation of our deepest nature. A word that is a “bonding responder” for the way our relationship has become our spiritual practice. And how our practice, our work on ourselves, has become the central core in our connectedness.

And we asked ourselves whether we needed to talk about healing or could just effuse about the Beloved a few times before we realized there was no question. There was no difference. As healing progresses deeper, a more tangible sense of being ensues. From that sense of being there constellates the quality of “being present.” Being present we come into “the presence”: the space in which the process floats: the Moved.

We find the term “the Beloved” quite functional for many reasons including the obvious parallel between the hearts affinity for such an idea and the draw of the personal toward the universal. And, of course, because it is our practice to meet our beloved as the Beloved.

It is a term used in many spiritual traditions and is particularly well served in the Sufi tradition, whose mystical, devotional aspect seeks the “hidden mysteries,” yearning for the direct experience of the one they call “the Beloved.” In perhaps the greatest of all devotional poetry, in the spectacular longings of Rumi, Kabir, Miribai, and Rabia, the Beloved is all that is sought. The Beloved is the context into which the wounded and dismayed may enter, as the ever-injured and uninjurable vastness embraces. their pain and transmutes it to mercy. But to all who seek their own true self, whether Sufi or Buddhist, Christian or Jew, Jain, Native American, or agnostic, the Beloved is the ever-experienceable vastness of our true heart, our original nature. And for all, it is the possibility of freedom, the divine capacity to transform our pool of tears into the Ocean of Compassion.

The Beloved is neither a person nor a place. It is an experience of deeper and deeper levels of being, and eventually of beingness itself–the boundarylessness of your own great nature expressed in its rapture and absolute vastness by the word “love.” It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term “the Beloved.” The experience of this enormity we falteringly label “divine” is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and compassion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being–our greatest joy–but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within.

As we began to speak on that Valentine’s evening, the words “the Beloved” exited our lips with a sigh–a gentle bow to those gathered in the room and to that within each of us, which is only love and boundless being.

Compassion as a Wave of Change

I’ve spent the past few years researching a book on the compassionate heart. I began what I called my “field notes” feeling both hopeful and hollowed-out. In a time of war, the ice caps melting like Sno-Cones, and meanness an item on the national agenda, I had set forth, as the poet Derek Wolcott once urged, “to fall in love with the world in spite of history.”

My journey took me to a man who had forgiven his daughter’s murderer; and to one who had given his kidney to a total stranger. I chatted (via pictograms) with oddly empathic bonobo apes. I hung out with Balkan kids who called themselves “the Post-Pessimists” — survivors of war who’d made peacemaking the whole point of their lives. I met Tibetan monks and neuroscientists studying the inner workings of the soul, and spent time with those who did the heart’s heavy lifting, succoring the sick, feeding the hungry, comforting the abandoned.

Spiritual teachers have always claimed that compassion is not a case of being born a saint, but of cultivating — like diligent, sweat-stained gardeners — the secret kernel of benevolence that is our birthright.

This is not to say compassion doesn’t take some grit. It can draw us to places where the candle gutters in the soul’s darker, draftier labyrinths. The word itself derives from the Latin cum patior, “to suffer with” (think Mother Theresa: “Ache, ache, ache: one by one by one”). It might sound like a bummer but it’s what we’re made for — for that fellow-feeling that renders kindness not only possible, but ineluctable; for the joy of knowing each other deeply, as we really are. Our limbic system, the emotional brain we share with all mammals, is a powerful antenna, attuned to each others’ wavelengths. When we say, “My heart went out to him,” we’re saying we can’t help but resonate, even when we try not to notice.

A Tale of Deliverance

I’ve known my friend Kate for decades. Now 50, her rangy six-foot frame is still topped by a mane of auburn. When I first met her, Kate was an activist with a wild streak and a big heart. She’d fronted her own bar band, become a registered nurse and a midwife, gone to work for Sting, and co-founded a natural shampoo company. She eventually drifted into public relations, becoming a consultant-for-hire — a semi-retired bodhisattva in a glittery, jittery life funded by what she called, in a Seussical singsong, Boring assignments/For corporate clients.

It wasn’t even Christmas yet, but she was already sick of the season, with its synthetic cheer, slushy streets, and eggnog gossip sprinkled with leftover election gripes. Then the Great Tsunami tore a chunk out of Southeast Asia.

At first horrified, then numbed by the images of suffering that coursed at light speed around the globe, Kate was struck by a message that popped up on her friend Steve’s computer screen: “Why aren’t you on a plane to Thailand with a pocketful of cash, helping some small village recover?”

Steve, a successful businessman, also had been pierced by the images on CNN, but couldn’t bring himself to ship off a wad of his cash to some bureaucratic charity. An investment analyst and a wizard of arbitrage in a world where swarms of darting numbers demand risky split-second decisions, Steve was flummoxed. But, finally, he concluded: “The only way to see if I could make a difference was to be there on the ground.”

A few days later, they were on a plane, with Kate and Steve still asking: “Who are we to do this? How can we possibly help? Will we be in the way?” Twenty-four hours later, they alighted in Bangkok.

They wanted to get to Phuket, the tourist island whose beachfront was the tsunami’s Ground Zero. But when they arrived, they were told that the relief efforts were finished; the only work left was identifying the dead.

Kate sat down with Steve, the metaphysical agnostic, and composed a plea to the universe: “Lead us to a place where we can relieve suffering and bring hope.” She dropped off to sleep muttering it like a mantra. The next day, a man at the American Embassy appeared and directed them to a hotel 90 miles north. Arriving by rattletrap Jeep at a hilltop resort packed with relief workers, soldiers and missionaries, they entered a surreal world — inside, a luxurious tropical swimming lagoon; outside, a devastated flatland littered with miles of rubble and hundreds of white caskets where entire coastal communities once stood.

Two missionaries they met in the lobby invited them to help haul supplies to a devastated fishing village. The next day, at an encampment of plastic tarps housing 76 displaced families, they learned the group had lost more than 40 family members. Though the circumstances of these survivors couldn’t have been more dire, Kate was struck by “how incredibly warm, friendly and welcoming they were.”

The village leaders explained that they needed help rebuilding their fishing fleet. By the next day, Steve had pledged the money and Kate applied her organizational chutzpah to start a foundation to build a new flotilla of traditional long-tail boats. Within hours, Steve and Kate were in a nearby town, buying saws, drills and lumber. Later, at the site of a newly donated boatyard, they handed over the tools and equipment to the fishermen, bowing ceremoniously in the Thai manner to seal the deal. Fortuitously, the improbable debut of the Waves of Hope Boat Building Project was captured by a TV news crew. The next day the whole global village heard the story.

“Boat-building turns out to be more ‘win-win’ than I could imagine,” Kate says. “It gives people food, employment, self-reliance, dignity, hope.” Back in the States a few weeks later, she got a call from the new shipyard. In the background she could hear the “amazing, sweet music” of crews hammering in the nails on their second craft. The project may be replicated in other villages in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

The whole experience left Kate thinking about chance and design, accident and fate. She’s convinced, no matter if it sounds like mystical gobbledygook, that “setting a clear intention to serve the highest good — and empowering that through our minds and hearts — made it so.” She’s considering giving up her consulting jobs to follow “this thread of service.” She finally feels plugged back into something she’d forsaken a dozen years before, when she’d “traded away inspiration and passion to pursue houses and things.”

The High Road to ‘Elevation’

Kate’s journey was less one of self-discovery than other-discovery, our real terra incognita. Father Thomas Keating, a Benedictine monk, once observed: “The American way is to first feel good about yourself, then feel good about others. But spiritual traditions say it’s really the other way around — that you develop a sense of goodness by giving of yourself.”

It’s sometimes hard to figure out what good we can do for a world that often looks like it’s coming apart at the seams. But that cynicism is a slur, a cheap shot, on our own true nature. Our smaller selves may not know how to proceed; our larger, wider selves do. Every time we see an act of nobility, our hearts swell with the sheer certainty of it.

That very feeling has caught the interest of mind-body researchers like John Haidt of the University of Virginia, who has been investigating what he calls “elevation” — that state of soaring inspiration (sometimes accompanied by a poignant, choked-up sensation) we feel when we see a particularly selfless deed. In this near-automatic, evolved response, he thinks he might have found a key to positive social change.

“Elevation seems particularly capable of fostering love, admiration, and a desire for closer affiliation,” Haidt told me. He has written: “If elevation increases the likelihood that a witness to good deeds will soon become a doer of good deeds, [it] sets up the possibility for an ‘upward spiral’… raising the level of compassion, love, and harmony in an entire society.”

Now, more than ever, we need such a fine-mesh web of kindness to bind us together. On an interconnected globe, the good of each is tied to the good of all. Every border is porous; anyone’s business is everyone’s business; a problem “over there” becomes, in an eye blink, a problem over here. What’s in any one person’s heart right now can be as big as the whole world. A few people with desktop computers can collaborate between continents on the blueprints for a new concert hall or the specs for a suitcase nuke. Or, a few people like Kate and Steve can revive entire communities of boat builders, halfway around the planet.

The Empire of Compassion

I know a young woman, Nadja, who during the siege of Sarajevo was wounded by Serb shrapnel. After the war, watching a scared-looking Serb soldier weep during his televised trial, she couldn’t help weeping with him. When her brother angrily scolded that the man could be the same one who’d lobbed the mortar round that wounded her, she replied: “I can’t keep a separate heart, one for my friends and one for my enemies.” Yet Nadja’s no pushover. She went on to become an effective global campaigner against child slavery and the abuse of women.

She echoed a Burmese activist I know named Ka Hsaw Wa, c0-founder of Earthrights International, who confided that he feels ko gin ser (roughly translated: “My heart is trying to be your heart”) for the government soldiers once tortured him. He chose to oppose them with the nonviolent weapon of international law. His group won a settlement from Unocal, a California oil giant accused of complicity in brutalizing local villagers to build a pipeline. “We have to stand against what’s wrong,” says Ka Hsaw Wa, “But I know we have to change the human heart.”

I like to think of Kate, Steve, Nadja and Ka Hsaw Wa as loyal subjects of some rising Empire of Everybody, an emergent world order with compassion as its central organizing principle. Why not believe that a culture based on “social healing” is germinating within the husk of the old — an evolutionary leap made up of small changes of heart that will burst forth, like the Czechs’ Velvet Revolution and the Ukranians’ Orange one and gently take over the world?

I’ve been inspired lately by Gandhi’s famous 1930 Salt March. When the British government in India imposed a salt monopoly, making that necessity nearly unaffordable, there was widespread despair and a call to arms. But the Mahatma had a better idea. He led a mass procession down to the seashore, picked up some of the ocean’s bountiful white condensate, and held aloft a handful for all to see. The roar of the crowd that day shook the foundations of the British Imperium. People suddenly knew they had the resources to reclaim their lives and remake their society. They could withdraw consensus from an irrational system, unhobble their creativity and, in Gandhi’s words, “be the change you want to see.”

A lot of us are trying to do that today — to live holistically, to be smart, green consumers, to support the causes we believe in. But if we really want to heal our world, we need more than topical remedies. If war is an infection in the human system, the antidote lies in strengthening what it most directly attacks: our capacity for compassion. Knowing how to properly “value” Nature may not be enough; we may need to love it as well (either that, or start looking for a new evolutionary niche). And love, as everyone knows, is less about grand gestures than daily increments.

If we each all simply took less, gave more, tithed our time and energy, invested our love and our imagination — can we even imagine: “What then?” Loving-kindness sounds gentle, but it’s deeply unruly: it won’t stay in its seat, refuses to follow instructions, doesn’t know when enough is enough.

I’ve concluded — like any unjaundiced observer throughout the sweep of history — that compassion, empathy, altruism and forgiveness are the most powerful forces in the known universe. As St. Paul said, love is all that endures when everything else crumbles. In our beautiful, imperiled world, it is the only way to imagine an infinite future.

In my hermitage in France there is a bush of japonica, Japanese quince. The bush usually blossoms in the spring, but one winter it had been quite warm and the flower buds had come early. During the night a cold snap arrived and brought with it frost. The next day while dong walking meditation, I noticed that all the buds on the bush had died. I recognized this and thought, This New Year we will not have enough flowers to decorate the altar of the Buddha.

A few weeks later he weather became warm again. As I walked in my garden I saw new buds on the japonica manifesting another generation of flowers. I asked the japonica flowers: “Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?” The flowers replied to me: “Thay, we are not the same and we are not different When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not we go into hiding. It’s as simple as that.”

This is what the Buddha taught. When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient things withdraw. They wait until the moment is right for them to manifest again.

Before giving birth to me, my mother was pregnant with another baby. She had a miscarriage, and that person wasn’t born. When I was young I used to ask the question: was that my brother or was that me? Who was trying to manifest at that time? If a baby has been lost it means that conditions were not enough for him to manifest and the child has decided to withdraw in order to wait for better conditions. “I had better withdraw; I’ll come back again soon, my dearest.” We have to respect his or her will. If you see the world with eyes like this, you will suffer much less. Was it my brother that my mother lost? Or maybe I was about to come out but instead I said, “It isn’t time yet,” so I withdrew.

Becoming Nothing

Our greatest fear is that when we die we will become nothing. Many of us believe that our entire existence is only a life span beginning the moment we are born or conceived and ending the moment we die. We believe that we are born from nothing and when we die we become nothing. And so we are filled with fear of annihilation.

The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.

Finding a Lost Loved One

The same thing happens when we lost any of our beloved ones. When conditions are not right to support life, they withdraw. When I lost my mother I suffered a lot. When we are only seven or eight years old it is difficult to think that one day we will lose our mother. Eventually we grow up and we all lose our mothers, but if you know how to practice, when the time comes for the separation you will not suffer too much. You will very quickly realize that your mother is always alive within you.

The day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, “A serious misfortune of my life has arrived.” I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night, in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me.

I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants, and my hut was set behind the temple halfway up. Walking slowly in the moonlight through the rows of tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tenderly, very sweet… wonderful! Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine along but a living continuation of my mother and father and my grandparents and great-grandparents. Of all my ancestors. These feet that I saw as “my” feet were actually “our” feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.

From that moment on the idea that I had lost my mother no longer existed. All I had to do was look at the palm of my hand, feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me, available at any time.

When you lost a loved one, you suffer. but if you know how to look deeply, you have a chance to realize that his or her nature is truly the nature of no birth, no death. There is manifestation and there is the cessation of manifestation in order to have another manifestation. You have to be very keen and very alert in order to recognize the new manifestation of just one person. But with practice and with effort you can do it.

So, taking the hand of someone who knows the practice, together do walking meditation. Pay attention to all the leaves, the flowers, the birds and the dewdrops. If you can stop and look deeply, you will be able to recognize your beloved one manifesting again and again in different forms. You will again embrace the joy of life.

Nothing Is Born, Nothing Dies

A French scientist, whose name is Lavosier, declared, “Rien ne se cree, rien ne se perd.” “Nothing is born, nothing dies.” Although he did not practice as a Buddhist but as a scientist, he found the same truth the Buddha discovered.

Our true nature is the nature of no birth and no death. Only when we touch our true nature can we transcend the fear of non-being, the fear of annihilation.

The Buddha said that when conditions are sufficient something manifests and we say it exists. When one or two conditions fail and the thing does not manifest in the same way, we then say it does not exist. According to the Buddha, to qualify something as existing or not existing is wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as totally existing or totally not existing.

We can see this very easily with television and radio. We may be in a room that has no television or radio. And while we are in that room, we may think that television programs and radio programs do not exist in that room. But all of us know that the space in the room is full of signals. The signals of these programs are filling the air everywhere. We need only one more condition, a radio or television set, and may forms, colors and sounds will appear.

It would have been wrong to say that the signals do not exist because we did not have a radio or television to receive and manifest them. They only seemed not to exist because the causes and conditions were not enough to make the television program manifest. So at that moment, in that room, they do not exist. Just because we do not perceive something, it is not correct to say it doesn’t exist. It is only our notion of being and non-being that makes us think something exists or doesn’t exist. Notions of being and non-being cannot be applied to reality.

For most of us, relationships are a struggle. We each have a strong inner urge toward conscious loving: toward love relationships that are free of mistrust, disharmony, and unspoken words. We want our relationships to be springboards to higher consciousness and enhanced creative expression. Yet within us also lives an urge toward unconscious loving: we are encumbered by the burdens of our past programming. In this book we will present the results of our exploration of relationship issues over the past twenty years. From our work with over one thousand couples we have discovered the key flaws that produce distortion in relationships, and we have developed a precise, step-by-step program for turning your loving into conscious loving. We have also identified the crucial choice points in the evolution of a relationship that enhance or ruin the opportunities for intimacy.

Unconscious loving turns relationships into entanglements which bring out and actually require the destructive habits of each participant. Unconscious loving saps energy and creativity. By knowing the crucial choice points and practicing the skills of conscious loving we describe, a state emerges that we call Co-Commitment. It is a state of well-being which enhances the energy and creativity of each per-son. In our journey together through this book you will learn the intentions that allow co-commitment to unfold, how to spot and overcome the unconscious patterns that emerge in any close relationship, how to identify feelings and key body sensations, how to tell the microscopic truth, and how to make and keep commitments.

The ideas in this book apply not only to couples, but to any close relationship. They work even if you have an uncooperative partner. They work even if you have no current partner. Many of our clients worked out their major issues while single, then went on to form successful, co-committed relationships. A great deal of powerful change can occur when one person in a relationship breaks free. Don’t fall into the trap of waiting to change until your partner is ready. Waiting for others to change is a sign of unconscious loving. Go ahead and make a total commitment to your individual development. However, if your partner is willing to commit to the program, the changes can be rapid indeed.

When we first began to “wake up” we found ourselves mired in many patterns of unconscious loving. Both of us came from dysfunctional families, and in adulthood we had re-created many of their patterns in our own relationships. Unless you are very blessed, you are also trapped in some aspect of dysfunctional relationships. We developed the ideas in this book during our journey to co-commitment. Eventually, an exciting new state unfolded, which we call co-creativity. A co-creative relationship is passionate, productive, and harmonious. We turned the energy that would have been wasted through conflict into creative projects such as writing books, giving seminars and lectures, volunteering for activities, and building a happy family. We found that we had access to much more creativity as a partnership than each of us ever had on our own. Now we have applied the techniques to a substantial number of people in therapy and workshops. We have determined to our satisfaction that, with some intense work on themselves, people can move from co-dependence to co-commitment and co-creativity. Now we want to make the material avail-able to a wider audience.

The Questions that Began Our Search

Our approach to relationship therapy grew out of questions we began asking ourselves many years ago. These are questions that you have no doubt asked yourself, such as: Why are close relationships, which are supposed to be about love, often so painful? What are we doing that causes the pain? What are we overlooking? How can we have more love and less pain? The answers came, not always in the way we expected or in a kindly manner. Sometimes we were so stubborn and resistant to learning that life had to take a sledgehammer approach to teaching us. Ultimately, we got the relationship we wanted, but it was many times better than we ever could have imagined.

Most of us are born into families that are full of conflict or the avoidance of conflict. Both of us came from families in which conflict was always avoided, so we had to learn to acknowledge conflict before we learned to transform it. It is important, however, not to stop there. In close relationships, conflict is not necessary or desirable, although it is what most of us know. In this book you will learn how to resolve conflict effectively and you will find a path that will take you beyond conflict, if you are willing.

Love is a powerful force. If we do not know how to handle its power, we slip very quickly into its powerfully painful distortions, such as conflict and co-dependence. But know this: It is resistance to love that causes the problems. There is nothing wrong with love. Love is a force that focuses its light on the deepest shadowy parts of ourselves. It brings to the surface the parts of ourselves that we most desperately try to keep hidden. When these parts of our-selves emerge, we often retreat, blaming love and those who have loved us. In this book you will learn how to do something radically different, something that will allow you to live in a state of continuous love and positive energy. You will begin where you are, possibly stuck in a troubled relationship or feeling the pain of not having a close relationship, and you will move at your own pace to a place of freedom and real growth.

Part I of this book explains all the essential ideas, with examples drawn from our personal experience and that of our clients. (All the examples in this book are drawn from real life. Names and identifying details have been changed to ensure the privacy of the people involved.) The thirty-four activities in part 2 contain the experiential techniques that will make the ideas a reality for you. We want to acknowledge you for beginning this journey with us. Our relationship has been the catalyst for unparalleled growth and creativity in our lives. We hope that you will use your relationships to fulfill undreamed-of potential in yourself. It will help if you commit yourself completely to this process now, at the beginning. The most creative and evolved people we know are those who use every situation as an opportunity to learn about themselves. Openness to learning is a hallmark of evolution. It makes learning and acknowledging even the most soul-shaking facts about yourself easier and more fun. With a strong commitment to inquiring into yourself, the universe does not have to use catastrophes to wake you up.

Unconscious Loving and Co-Dependence

Co-dependence, a term that first appeared in the field of alcoholism treatment, is a particular form of unconscious loving. It originally referred to a pattern that healers noticed time and again when working with addicted persons. Frequently the addicted person was in a relationship that supported the addiction and interfered with the treatment. Often the co-dependent did not drink, but due to deeply flawed interaction patterns, he or she made it possible for the addicted person not to change.

Anyone shopping for a Mother’s Day card today might reasonably linger in the Sympathy section. We can’t seem to stop mourning the state of modern motherhood. “Madness” is our new metaphor. “Desperate Housewives” are our new cultural icons. And a mother’s brain, as commonly envisioned, is impaired by a supposed full-scale assault on sanity and smarts.

So strong is this last stereotype that when a satirical Web site posted a “study” saying that parents lose an average of 20 I.Q. points on the birth of their first child, MSNBC broadcast it as if it were true. The danger of this perception is clearest for working mothers, who besides bearing children spend more time with them, or doing things for them, than fathers, according to a recent Department of Labor survey.

In addition, the more visibly “encumbered” we are, the more bias we attract: When volunteer groups were shown images of a woman doing various types of work, but in some cases wearing a pillow to make her look pregnant, most judged the “pregnant” woman less competent. Even in liberal San Francisco, a hearing last month to consider a pregnant woman’s bid to be named acting director of the Department of Building Inspection featured four speakers commenting on her condition, with one asking if the city truly meant to hire a “pregnancy brain.”

But what if just the opposite is true? What if parenting really isn’t a zero-sum, children-take-all game? What if raising children is actually mentally enriching for mothers – and fathers?

This is, in fact, what some leading brain scientists, like Michael Merzenich at the University of California, San Francisco, now believe. Becoming a parent, they say, can power up the mind with uniquely motivated learning. Having a baby is “a revolution for the brain,” Dr. Merzenich says.

The human brain, we now know, creates cells throughout life, cells more likely to survive if they’re used. Emotional, challenging and novel experiences provide particularly helpful use of these new neurons, and what adjectives better describe raising a child? Children constantly drag their parents into challenging, novel situations, be it talking a 4-year-old out of a backseat meltdown on the Interstate or figuring out a third-grade homework assignment to make a model of a black hole in space.

Often, we’d rather be doing almost anything else. Aging makes us cling ever more fiercely to our mental ruts. But for most of us, our unique bond with our children yanks us out of them.

And there are other ways that being a dedicated parent strengthens our minds. Research shows that learning and memory skills can be improved by bearing and nurturing offspring. A team of neuroscientists in Virginia found that mother lab rats, just like working mothers, demonstrably excel at time-management and efficiency, racing around mazes to find rewards and get back to the pups in record time. Other research is showing how hormones elevated in parenting can help buffer mothers from anxiety and stress – a timely gift from a sometimes compassionate Mother Nature. Oxytocin, produced by mammals in labor and breast-feeding, has been linked to the ability to learn in lab animals.

Rethinking the mental state of motherhood is reasonable after recent years of evolution of our notion of just what it means to be smart. With our economy newly weighted with people-to-people jobs, and with many professions, including the sciences, becoming more multidisciplinary and collaborative, the people skills we’ve come to think of as “emotional intelligence” are increasingly prized by many wise employers. An ability to tailor your message to your audience, for instance – a skill that engaged parents practice constantly – can mean the difference between failure and success, at home and at work, as Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, may now realize.

To be sure, sleep deprivation, overwork and too much “Teletubbies” can sap any parent’s synapses. And to be sure, our society needs to do much more – starting with more affordable, high-quality child care and paid parental leaves – to catch up with other industrialized nations and support mothers and fathers in using their newly acquired smarts to best advantage. That’s why some of the recent “mommy lit” complaints are justified, and probably needed to rouse society to action – if only because nobody will be able to stand our whining for much longer.

Still, it’s worth considering that the torrent of negativity about motherhood comes as part of an era in which intimacy of all sorts is on the decline in this country. Geographically close extended families have long been passé. The marriage rate has declined. And a record percentage of women of child-bearing age today are childless, many by choice.

It’s common these days to hear people say they don’t have time to maintain friendships. Real relationships take a lot of time and work – it’s much more convenient to keep in touch by e-mail. But children insist on face time. They fail to thrive unless we anticipate their needs, work our empathy muscles, adjust our schedules and endure their relentless testing. In the process, if we’re lucky, we may realize that just this kind of grueling work – with our children, or even with others who could simply use some help – is precisely what makes us grow, acquire wisdom and become more fully human. Perhaps then we can start to re-imagine a mother’s brain as less a handicap than a keen asset in the lifelong task of getting smart.

Katherine Ellison is the author of “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter.”

Several times in my medical career I have been privileged to witness miraculous cures. The most recent began last year when a 32-year-old Indian woman came to see me in my office outside Boston. She sat quietly facing me in a blue silk sari. To keep her composure, she clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Her name was Chitra, she said, and together with her husband, Raman, she ran a neighborhood import store in New York City.

A few months earlier, Chitra had noticed a small lump in her left breast that was sensitive to the touch. She underwent surgery to remove it, but unfortunately the surgeon found that the lump was malignant. When he explored further, he detected that the cancer had spread to her lungs.

After removing the diseased breast and a large portion of tissue around it, Chitra’s doctor gave her initial doses of radiation and then placed her on intensive chemotherapy. This is standard procedure for treating breast cancer and saves many lives. But the lung cancer was going to be much harder to treat; it was obvious to everyone that Chitra was in a very precarious position.

Examining her, I noticed that she was very anxious. When I tried to reassure her, she surprised me with a touching statement: “I don’t mind for myself if I have to die, but my husband win be so lonely without me. Sometimes I pretend to be asleep and then sit up all night, just thinking about him. I know Raman loves me, but after I’m gone, he will start seeing American girls. I can’t bear to lose him to an American girl.” She stopped and looked at me with suffering in her eyes. “I know I shouldn’t say that, but I think you understand.”

You do not get used to the sorrow that cancer creates, but I felt a deeper sorrow from knowing that time was Chitra’s enemy. For the moment, she still looked healthy. She had even managed to hide her disease from her relatives, dreading having to be watched as she wasted away. We both knew it was going to be very bad for her.

No one can say that he knows a cure for advanced breast cancer. Conventional therapy had provided all that it could for Chitra. Given that her cancer had already spread to another organ, the statistics said that her chance of surviving for five years was less than 10 percent, even with the most intensive routine of chemotherapy that could be safely administered.

I asked her to start a new course of treatments, as prescribed by Ayurveda.

Like me, Chitra had grown up in India, but she had little idea of Ayurveda. Her grandparents’ generation was the last to “believe” in it, I would imagine; today, every progressive Indian living in a big city would prefer Western medicine if he could afford it. To explain to Chitra why I wanted her seemingly to turn her back on progress, I told her that her cancer was not just a physical disease but a holistic one. Her whole body knew she had cancer and was suffering from it; a tissue sample taken from her lungs would show that malignant cells had migrated there, while a sample from her liver would be negative. Yet, her liver had the same blood coursing through it, and therefore it picked up the signals of disease that were coming from the lungs. This in turn affected its own functions.

Similarly, when she felt pain in her chest or had to sit down owing to shortness of breath, signals were racing throughout her body, going to and from her brain. Sensing the pain, her brain had to respond to it. The fatigue she was feeling, along with her depression and anxiety, was a brain response that had physical consequences. So it was wrong to think of her cancer as just an isolated tumor that needed to be destroyed. She had a holistic disease and for that she needed holistic medicine.

The word “holistic” which tends to offend orthodox doctors, simply means an approach that includes the mind and body together. I believe Ayurveda does this better than any alternative, although it may not be very apparent on the surface. In fact, many well-publicized mind-body techniques such as hypnosis and biofeedback are far more flashy than Ayurveda. If Chitra had gotten sick at home in Bombay, her grandmother might have fixed her some special meals, brought home medicinal herbs in a brown paper sack from the Ayurvedic pharmacy, and insisted that she stay in bed. Various purgatives and oil massages might be prescribed to clean the body of toxins generated by the cancer. If there was a spiritual tradition in the family, she would have begun to meditate. In essence, I was going to have her do these same things, with a few additions.

There is as yet no scientific reason why any of this should work, except that it does. Ayurveda has hit on something deep in nature. Its knowledge is rooted not in technology but in wisdom, which I would define as a reliable under-standing of the human organism gathered over many centuries.

“I want you to go to a special clinic outside Boston for a week of two,” I told Chitra. “Some things that will happen to you there will seem highly unusual. You are used to the idea of a hospital as a place with respirators, IV tubes, transfusions, and chemotherapy. By that standard, what we will do for you at this clinic will seem like nothing. Basically, I want to get your body into a deep, deep state of rest.”

Chitra was a trusting person; she agreed to go. In part, of course, she had no alternative. Modern medicine had done all it could, using the strategy of physical assault on her cancer. The initial advantage of assaulting a disease is that you hope to wipe it out physically as soon as possible. The tremendous disadvantage is that the whole body is damaged in the assault on one of its parts. In the case of chemotherapy, there is the very real danger that the immune system will become so weakened that the door is opened for other cancers to develop in the future. However, untreated breast cancer is considered deadly, and today’s medicine is good at wiping it out over the short run. In a climate of opinion ruled by fear, people prefer to run the risks of the cure rather than the disease.

I referred Chitra to the clinic where I work, the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She stayed for a week and received treatments; she also learned an outpatient program to use at home that included a change of diet, some Ayurvedic herbs, a specific daily routine including simple yoga exercises, and instruction in Transcendental Meditation. These measures look different on the surface, but underneath they all aimed at bringing her day-to-day existence to a settled, restful state, building a foundation for healing. In Ayurveda, a level of total, deep relaxation is the most important precondition for curing any disorder. The underlying concept is that the body knows how to maintain balance unless thrown off by disease; therefore, if one wants to restore the body’s own healing ability, everything should be done to bring it back into balance.

All beings require equality. There must be a balance between the spiritual, emotional, and physical being. When the balance is off, we are off. We feel the repercussions through physical pain, discomfort, anxiety, anger, and depression. When we go to the doctor to seek pills for physical ailments, typically we are focusing treatment on the symptoms and not the underlying problem.

Again, I am not discouraging anyone from going to the doctor, however most doctors would agree that a well-balanced person tends to be a healthier person. Nothing that improves the outlook and helps reduce stress can hurt you. There are various natural methods that can be used by anyone in even the busiest lifestyles, to help restore a sense of balance. I will be touching on the basics of light meditation, visualization, affirmations, and journaling.

Meditation:

There are many misconceptions about meditation. Many feel it takes a lot of time or that it is a serious religious practice. It definitely does not have to be and is one of the most powerful tools anyone can integrate into their lifestyles.

It takes a little effort, but the rewards are immeasurable. The truth is even a moment or two a couple of times a day will allow the mind a chance to regroup. This is particularly helpful for those who suffer from anxiety or problems with short-term memory.

Meditation is the practice of stilling the mind, and controlling where ones thoughts flow. Through doing this you can gain a better perspective on situations in your life, as well as become clearer and more focused throughout your daily activities. There are dozens of other benefits to this practice as well, which I cover more in some of my classes.

For beginning meditations I recommend sitting in a comfortable position in a location as free from outside noise as possible. Close the eyes and simply focus on clearing your mind of all conscious thought. If this is difficult you can repeat a word that makes you feel comfortable and at ease. My word is “repose”. If you catch your mind starting to wander gently pull it back to your word or to the stillness. When you first start try doing this for only a minute or two, and then as you do it more you can increase the time. This helps to avoid frustration and will help you stick with it.

If you are patient and persistent, you will find that the benefits are well worth the effort. Your mind will thank you for the break.

Visualizations:

Next I would like to move on to Visualizations. All of us know how to daydream. The truth is when you daydream you are doing a visualization of sorts. You are removing the conscious mind from all the hustle and bustle of its thoughts and placing it somewhere else. In visualization exercises the purpose is to control where you put your thoughts. It can be used to aid in pain relief, depression, (I am seasonally depressed and use visualization therapy a lot to help me get through winter) and in anxiety reduction.

Bring into vision in your minds eye a place that relaxes you, a place that is all your own. It can be an actual place you have been to, or a place you create. This will be your sanctuary. Picture the place in your mind. Now go deeper into the picture. What do you see? Look for the details of your special place. What is the temperature like? If you are outside, how is the weather? What do you hear? What do you smell? Reach out and touch the ground or the floor, what does it feel like? Touch; hear, smell everything here.

Spend a minute or two exploring your senses and familiarizing yourself with this special place. Really develop this place to the tiniest details. If it helps you, write a description of it. It is very important to bring it to life in your mind in a way you can always go back to it and see it in its fullest details and unique beauty. This place is the center of your soul, a sanctuary for you where you can relax and be free from everyday worries.

Affirmations:

Next I would like to cover affirmations. Affirmations are brief, positive statements developed to help us to reprogram certain parts of our subconscious. We have all heard that inner critic kick in with “ You’re not pretty enough, you’re not smart enough” etc. This can be a very powerful voice and the more negative thoughts we have the more we feed it.

Many people are not aware of just how much negativity they consume, self-inflicted or otherwise. I recommend keeping a pen and paper close to you for one hour. During this hour be conscious of your thoughts, as well as external influences. For every negative statement you take in, make a mark on your paper. Once this exercise is finished multiply the number of marks on your page by at least 16, which will give you a small idea of the amount of negativity you are continually bombarded with.

One of the most powerful tools to use against this ingrained negativity is to reprogram our thought patterns. Our subconscious minds don’t care what they are programmed with, negative or positive. When you hear something enough you start to believe it and those negative thoughts can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Our goal here is to fight fire with fire so to speak, and come back at the negatives with positives, almost like reprogramming a computer.

An affirmation should have the following qualities:

Must be brief
Must be concise
Must not have the word no in it or any negative connotations
Must be easy to remember
Must be repeated

An example of a good affirmation would be I have all I need and I am thankful, or I love myself unconditionally.

As a general rule I say to keep the same affirmation going for at least a week. Learn to say it with conviction. Pay attention to what you are saying every time you repeat it. When you have a few minutes to yourself go look in the mirror and say it to yourself and mean it! Yes, you will tell yourself you look silly, that’s OK, do it anyway. The more you do the less silly you will feel and the more empowered you become. When we face ourselves we find our true strength!

Journaling:

I cannot say enough how much writing helps. There are many different ways to do this, and the best method is to find your own method – one that is comfortable to you, as this is a very intense, very personal experience. When you first start just write/type whatever comes into your head, no matter how silly it might seem. This is the key to unlock the floodgates. Gradually as you get into it and time progresses you will open many doors of self-discovery, and through this begin to regain your balance.

To develop a habit of writing set up a 5 – 15 minute period in your day where you sit and write. You can make this a part of your nighttime ritual, or do it first thing in the morning when all is quiet.

With a little self-discipline and practice you can make yourself a happier more balanced person through just a few simple practices.

I know from personal experience that taking time for the Self is so vital to personal empowerment and wellness. It is easy to get so involved in our “roles” that we forget to remember our true Spirit. Take some time for yourself and get to know your own best friend, he/she has been right there with you all along.

___________________

Cristin Snyder is a Spiritual Guidance and Personal Empowerment coach who offers a wide variety of Spiritual and Personal Growth Resources through her website Mystical Treasures. Visit Cristin today at www.mysticaltreasures.net.

One morning I found myself running through the Newark, New Jersey, train station, trying to make a connection to New York, dodging frantically through the crowd as complex scenarios of missed appointments flashed through my mind. I reached the steep stairway to the platform and ran up, two steps at a time. Blocking my path at the top was a heavy swinging door with a large grimy window set into it; on the other side an old man in faded work clothes was washing the glass with a spray bottle and rag.

Out of the middle of the grime he had just wiped a clean circle about a foot across, through which, our noses inches apart, we now faced each other. Suddenly all the worry and hurry in which I had been caught up seemed to be illuminated in the morning light breaking through the circle, and then to drop away. It was as if the window were my clouded mind and the old man with his rag had made a clear space for me to see, once again, that everything was light, everything was fine, and it always would be.

Am I making too much of a simple encounter? (Did Dante?) I don’t know…maybe…yes and no. All I know is that the old man smiled broadly, and in that moment I could have sworn he knew exactly what he had done. Then he opened the door for me and stepped aside as the train pulled into the station.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. —Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

When I was about six years old I received the essential bodhichitta teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.”

Right there, I received this pith instruction: we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

If we were to ask the Buddha, “What is bodhichitta?” he might tell us that this word is easier to understand than to translate. He might encourage us to seek out ways to find its meaning in our own lives. He might tantalize us by adding that it is only bodhichitta that heals, that bodhichitta is capable of transforming the hardest of hearts and the most prejudiced and fearful of minds.

Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”

Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta.

An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.

The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta. The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition. Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.

Given that we are so familiar with the clouds, of course, we may find the Buddha’s teaching hard to believe. Yet the truth is that in the midst of our suffering, in the hardest of times, we can contact this noble heart of bodhichitta. It is always available, in pain as well as in joy.

A young woman wrote to me about finding herself in a small town in the Middle East surrounded by people jeering, yelling, and threatening to throw stones at her and her friends because they were Americans. Of course, she was terrified, and what happened to her is interesting. Suddenly she identified with every person throughout history who had ever been scorned and hated. She understood what it was like to be despised for any reason: ethnic group, racial background, sexual preference, gender. Something cracked wide open and she stood in the shoes of millions of oppressed people and saw with a new perspective. She even understood her shared humanity with those who hated her. This sense of deep connection, of belonging to the same family, is bodhichitta.

Bodhichitta exists on two levels. First there is unconditional bodhichitta, an immediate experience that is refreshingly free of concept, opinion, and our usual all-caught-upness. It’s something hugely good that we are not able to pin down even slightly, like knowing at gut level that there’s absolutely nothing to lose. Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.

Those who train wholeheartedly in awakening unconditional and relative bodhichitta are called bodhisattvas or warriors—not warriors who kill and harm but warriors of nonaggression who hear the cries of the world. These are men and women who are willing to train in the middle of the fire. Training in the middle of the fire can mean that warrior-bodhisattvas enter challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering. It also refers to their willingness to cut through personal reactivity and self-deception, to their dedication to uncovering the basic undistorted energy of bodhichitta. We have many examples of master warriors—people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King—who recognized that the greatest harm comes from our own aggressive minds. They devoted their lives to helping others understand this truth. There are also many ordinary people who spend their lives training in opening their hearts and minds in order to help others do the same. Like them, we could learn to relate to ourselves and our world as warriors. We could train in awakening our courage and love.

There are both formal and informal methods for helping us to cultivate this bravery and kindness. There are practices for nurturing our capacity to rejoice, to let go, to love, and to shed a tear. There are those that teach us to stay open to uncertainty. There are others that help us to stay present at the times that we habitually shut down.

Wherever we are, we can train as a warrior. The practices of meditation, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools. With the help of these practices, we can uncover the soft spot of bodhichitta. We will find that tenderness in sorrow and in gratitude. We will find it behind the hardness of rage and in the shakiness of fear. It is available in loneliness as well as in kindness.

Many of us prefer practices that will not cause discomfort, yet at the same time we want to be healed. But bodhichitta training doesn’t work that way. A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us afraid.

Bodhichitta training offers no promise of happy endings. Rather, this “I” who wants to find security—who wants something to hold on to—can finally learn to grow up. The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?

All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don’t dare to leave the nest. Here we sit in a nest that’s getting pretty smelly and that hasn’t served its function for a very long time. No one is arriving to feed us. No one is protecting us and keeping us warm. And yet we keep hoping mother bird will arrive.

We could do ourselves the ultimate favor and finally get out of that nest. That this takes courage is obvious. That we could use some helpful hints is also clear. We may doubt that we’re up to being a warrior-in-training. But we can ask ourselves this question: “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

All beings have the capacity to feel tenderness—to experience heartbreak, pain, and uncertainty. Therefore the enlightened heart of bodhichitta is available to us all. The insight meditation teacher Jack Kornfield tells of witnessing this in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Fifty thousand people had become communists at gunpoint, threatened with death if they continued their Buddhist practices. In spite of the danger, a temple was established in the refugee camp, and twenty thousand people attended the opening ceremony. There were no lectures or prayers but simply continuous chanting of one of the central teachings of the Buddha:

Hatred never ceases by hatred
But by love alone is healed.
This is an ancient and eternal law.

Thousands of people chanted and wept, knowing that the truth in these words was even greater than their suffering.

Bodhichitta has this kind of power. It will inspire and support us in good times and bad. It is like discovering a wisdom and courage we do not even know we have. Just as alchemy changes any metal into gold, bodhichitta can, if we let it, transform any activity, word, or thought into a vehicle for awakening our compassion.