"Το ν' αγαπάς χωρίς να ξέρεις πώς ν΄ αγαπάς πληγώνει το πρόσωπο που αγαπάς".

Το κείμενο προέρχεται από τη διδασκαλία του βουδιστή δασκάλου Thich Nhat Hanh και το αναπαράγω (αποσπασματικά) από εδώ.

What does love mean, exactly? [...]

Learning to meet this mystery with the full realness of our being — to show up for it with absolute clarity of intention — is the dance of life.

That’s what legendary Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, and peace activistThich Nhat Hanh (b. October 11, 1926) explores in How to Love (public library) — a slim, simply worded collection of his immeasurably wise insights on the most complex and most rewarding human potentiality. [...] To receive his teachings one must make an active commitment not to succumb to the Western pathology of cynicism, our flawed self-protection mechanism that readily dismisses anything sincere and true as simplistic or naïve — even if, or precisely because, we know that all real truth and sincerity are simple by virtue of being true and sincere. At the heart of Nhat Hanh’s teachings is the idea that “understanding is love’s other name” — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. (“Suffering” sounds rather dramatic, but in Buddhism it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual.) The question then becomes how to grow our own hearts, which begins with a commitment to understand and bear witness to our own suffering:

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness.

[...] Real, truthful love, he argues, is rooted in four elements — loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity — fostering which lends love “the element of holiness.”

Supplementing the four core elements are also the subsidiary elements of trust andrespect, the currency of love’s deep mutuality:

When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is not yet love.

 The essential mechanism for establishing such trust and respect is listening — something so frequently extolled by Western psychologists, therapists, and sage grandparents that we’ve developed a special immunity to hearing it. And yet when Nhat Hanh reframes this obvious insight with the gentle elegance of his poetics, it somehow bypasses the rational cynicism of the jaded modern mind and registers directly in the soul:

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen.


Βέβαια, υπάρχει και το "Πες το όπως θες, αρκεί να είναι αγάπη", του Ελύτη νομίζω. Καλό είναι κι αυτό και συμφέρει!