This is not love.

 This is not love.

Love does not rescue someone from their pain. Love sits and listens, trusting each spirit's own essential wholeness and ability to heal.

Love does not punish, reproach or condemn. Love is patient, love is kind. Love honors that we are not separate, but that our pain of perceived separation and aloneness is the same, that we are one.

Love does not hold on, force or resist. Love allows all things to flow. A child's cry, a mother's scream, a father's fear, all are allowed to exist in a space of love.

This love is available to us in every moment. We don't have to force it or try to make it happen, we just allow it. Life already loves all of you. There is already a great well of love all around you. You can allow the tap to open and love to flow in any moment.

Even our suffering leads us to more love, so in this way the source of every experience is one of love, of divinity, of truth and wholeness. In this way we know we are safe.

Through our suffering we build compassion. Through compassion we see our oneness.

Some people are harder to love. In Buddhism these people are called hungry ghosts. Maybe today we call this narcissism. Narcissism is suffering, a contorted view of oneself as unacceptable, unwhole, unworthy, not good enough. A hungry ghost is someone who's stomach is very large, but who's throat is very small, so very little love can get in. In this way the hungry ghost is starving.

We are all capable of being narcissists in some way (unless you're fully enlightened!). Thich Nhat Hanh says society is full of hungry ghosts and that (we) hungry ghosts need more space, love and compassion.

If you've ever called someone a narcissist, please do us all a favor and see it as a sign that those same parts of you are needing extra love. Allow the love that already is to heal you and through that healing you can extend compassion to the person who is suffering.