A Great Gift of the Dharma - Loving w/o Fear

At the last meeting of the POC Sangha, one of the anchors of my life, we were asked about how our practice hand informed our lives. I threaded through the different answers that presented themselves to me, but this is the one that has had the greatest impact on my life and stands as the reason I am so wedded to the Dharma--the ability to love without fear.

Specifically, I said (as I remember it), "I can meet my desire to love without fear of being destroyed by the loving." Because of Buddhism, I have come to understand that real love does not come from a hungry heart, but a whole one. It does not come from sacrifice, but bounty. Most important to me, I can love without depletion. It does not trigger fatigue, or depression as the object(s) of my "love" "disappoints" me and a "love them anyway."a

Instead I am both emboldened and humbled by the joy of loving without fear. The old "disappointment," when its echo arises, is replaced with either a wry sense of understanding (a recognition that "I've done that") or a deep sense of compassion (a recognition that "I've done that") often it's both.

I am no longer am lost in the illusion of separateness. I am free from that illusion and that means there is no "other" who will either fulfill my love or disappoint me. I have my preferences, I would rather you smile than frown at me, but more and more it is just a preference. Some days, I walk the streets greeting strangers with my bucked tooth smile. How do they respond? It doesn't matter :-)

Through the Dharma, I am free to love whoever presents themselves in my life--without fear. There is nothing to be afraid of.

Metta

The Tyranny of Fluffiness - Thinking About Wise Speech

I've been thinking about wise, I prefer skillful, speech over the last few weeks. I see the benefit and even the necessity to speak with compassion and awareness, but I've often seen how much damage and suffering can arise not from wise speech, but from fluffy speech. By that I mean speech that only vaguely deals with what the speaker really wants to say. It is speech so soft and fluffy as to be, at least sometimes, useless and at worst damaging.

As I've reflected on this, it can be a real issue with "educated" and "progressive" people. The have both a large vocabulary and a sense of what is "correct." This causes suffering for the people who are trying so hard to be kind and for those they communicate with as they try to understand what they are hearing and what they feel about what they may be experiencing under the words.

"Taking care" of other people under the label of wise or skillful speech, is a type of co-dependency that assumes people are too weak for clarity. It also allows the speaker to be unconscious of their lack of clarity, while being "compassionate."

I've had an opportunity to see the difficulty that arises when speech is unclear. Some of that lack of clarity arose from genuine confusion, some arose from an effort to maintain relationship, but all of it served confusion. One of the many benefits of this path is the goal to be clear. Fluffy speech is not kind, it is confusing.

I am willing to restate or even apologize for inelegant words, but I have faith in my heart, a growing faith in the skillfulness of my words as I grow in my Buddhist practice, and faith in the beings I interact with. I offer my best effort to be both kind and clear to all sentient beings.

Metta