Love Dharma. Geri Larkin

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СКАЧАТЬ most of my woman friends, I have spent much of my adult life searching for tools that genuinely help to sustain both love relationships and independence. Tools that promote relationships as partnerships. Over the years, I’ve discovered that, communication skills aside, the best tools are internal to both partners and promote the intention of honoring and protecting the relationship as it grows and evolves. What you and I really need are anchors independent of the relationship. What anchors? Unchanging ones, anchors that are “true” not only in the context of loving another person but that are helpful in the other dimensions of our lives as well. When I started to look for anchors from the larger perspective of feeding all parts of us, choices suddenly narrowed down to a handful or less.

      At first I zeroed in on the Golden Rule—treat others as you would like to be treated—for its simplicity. But then I took it out of the running. I don’t know about you, but I don’t always want to be treated the way my partner wants to be treated. Here’s just one example, so trite it could make The Man Show. Someone I’d known intimately for years liked to go to sleep right after sex. Me? I wanted to talk, cuddle, analyze our lives, make future plans. The Golden Rule positioned us for an argument every single time one of us brought it up as a potential relationship ground rule.

      I kept looking. Buddhism and the Buddhist precepts, while they go a long way in feeding world peace, did not give me tools for feeding an intimate relationship, although they did provide a broad refuge. Not lying; not taking what isn’t given to us; not engaging in promiscuous sex; not muddying our minds with too much alcohol, drugs, or whatever—all useful. After an embarrassingly long time, given that they are pasted onto the front of my refrigerator, I landed on the six paramitas, or perfections. A core part of Buddha’s teachings, the paramitas are sort of like oil you can throw on a fire to help it to burn brighter. They are typically introduced as behaviors that strengthen spiritual practice. They also happen to be terrific catalysts when it comes to building relationships as partnerships.

      May I be generous and helpful. May I be pure and virtuous.

      May I be patient. May I be able to bear and forbear the wrongs of others.

      May I be strenuous, energetic, and persevering.

      May I practice meditation and attain concentration and oneness to serve all beings.

      May I gain wisdom and be able to give the benefit of my wisdom to others.

      Jackpot.

      All the ancients who followed Buddha lived by the paramitas. Starting with Ambapali.

      May I Be Generous and Helpful

      I’ve always loved weddings. Partly it’s because weddings are so beautiful. Brides always glow. Grooms always weep. Love permeates the air like a drug. Now, one of the perks of being a dharma teacher is that I get to go to between three and six weddings each year—as the minister. It is the single most enjoyable thing I do. The ceremonies are a celebration of life and its possibilities, always filled with excitement and a determination on the part of the couple to make their union one that lasts. Usually the couple asks me for advice—despite my own spotty personal history. My response, and the gift that I give to couples, whatever their spiritual tradition, is a small paperback book by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh called Touching Peace. While it is not a book focused solely on personal relationships, it has some of the best advice of any I’ve encountered. And all of it has to do with the six paramitas and how we need to see our partner as precious, whatever our circumstances. Here’s a taste:

      We can do this. We see that the other person, like us, has both flowers and compost inside, and we accept this. Our practice is to water the flowerness in her, and not bring her more garbage. We avoid blaming and arguing. When we try to grow flowers, if the flowers do not grow well, we do not blame or argue with them. We blame ourselves for not taking care of them well. Our partner is a flower. If we take care of her well, she will grow beautifully. If we take care of her poorly, she will wither. To help a flower grow well, we must understand her nature. How much water does she need? How much sunshine? We look deeply into ourselves to see our true nature, and we look into the other person to see her nature. . . . We can sit down, hold our partner’s hand, look deeply at him, and say, “Darling, do I understand you enough? Do I water your seeds of suffering? Do I water your seeds of joy? Please tell me how I can love you better.” 5

      Loving someone better is about mindfulness, about doing the small things that matter, not the big things. Just because. Maybe it’s showing up with her favorite cup of coffee when you spontaneously stop by where she works. Maybe it’s running an errand for him because he doesn’t have time to get to the ATM machine, the accountant’s, and then home at a decent hour for dinner together. Feeding each other’s essence is as much about surprise acts of kindness as it is about abiding to the negotiated parameters of the relationship. It is your turn to make dinner and your partner just happens to show up with a ready-made meal of your favorite foods. It works, right?

      The Buddha taught, over and over and over, that generosity is the first door we walk through if we are serious about our spiritual work. Without generosity enlightenment is flat-out impossible. We’re too self-centered. Unless our relationships are bathed in generosity they don’t have a chance. At the other extreme, generosity can buttress a faltering relationship, giving the other paramitas time to work their magic. It fuels the little extras, the surprise moments that keep us fresh and interesting. And it demonstrates our regard for each other, whatever we’re going through together.

      When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, one of the tasks I committed to doing was walking door-to-door in an inner-city neighborhood to do random interviews with the families that lived there. It was pretty scary to a twenty-six-year-old. I had spent many of my formative years in Australia, where strangers simply do not knock on your door—ever.

      Here I was breaking my own rules of etiquette. Plus, I didn’t have any idea who lived behind the doors. Maybe Jack the Ripper was still alive. Who could say?

      On the other hand, it was obvious that doing the interviews would provide the “primary data” (i.e., “from the horse’s mouth” information) I needed to make my point that a particular federal loan program was helping families to remain in a fast-gentrifying neighborhood. One of the most generous things anyone has ever done for me was my husband getting out of bed with me early each morning before I left. He’d give me the pep talk I needed. On some days, without saying anything, he’d get dressed and get in the car and drive me into the neighborhood, waiting outside through each interview even though he had his own full day of work ahead of him. While we never talked about it, his wide-open generosity told me more about how much he loved me than any bouquet of flowers ever did.

      He was so generous and helpful, that man. It was magic for our marriage and got us through more relationship samsara than I care to remember.

      May I Be Pure and Virtuous

      Trust matters. In partnerships between independent people, trust matters because we are each living self-contained lives in the middle of a shared future. If I can’t trust you in an intimate relationship, particularly one that incorporates spirituality into its ether, then the relationship is doomed. Period. And until courtesans come back into vogue, monogamy matters.

      I don’t care what anyone else says. In my experience, adultery or any other behavior that betrays the concepts of “pure and virtuous” destroys relationships, even those in which the partners agree that monogamy is unnecessary. Buddha was a broken record on this:

      Indulging in transient pleasures

      While failing to do the real work of our lives

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