For Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day is set aside to commemorate falling in love. Saint Valentine, roses and chocolate, Cupid, and Venus—the morning star named for the goddess of love—are classic symbols of romantic love.
But, as with romance itself, surface appearances often conceal deeper realities. St. Valentine was a tragic figure. Roses have thorns. Chocolate spikes blood sugar and precipitates an emotional crash. Cupid is a hunter with the aim of a baby. And Venus, the planet named for the goddess of love, so beautiful as the first glimmer of hope in the morning sky, actually has a surface temperature of 450°F, a claustrophobic atmosphere of Methane gas. It rains sulfuric acid. It’s seismic disquiet has earthquakes and volcanic eruptions daily. It spins backwards, and each day lasts as long as a year.
And yes—this is the planet named for the goddess of love.
Not to rain acid on anyone’s parade, but problems with romantic love arise when we fail to look beyond our projections to see the truth beneath. We will never truly see another if we fail to recognize ourselves. Everything we grasp becomes poison if we fail to grasp ourselves. Loving another without knowing ourselves is like putting on silken finery without having bathed. Surface beauty disguises disillusionment without internal clarity. When we look to someone without self-awareness they will remain mere projections in our internal dramas. We cannot know another if we fail to know ourselves. We cannot love another if we do not love ourselves.
Self-love is the requisite for loving. We talk a lot about this idea of self-love. But what does that actually mean? Practically speaking, terms like self-reliance, self-respect, and self-support may be more useful. We cannot fully love what we do not understand.
The idea of self-love is vague and undefined, much like much of our cultural language. To make self-love practical, we can look at the actions that lead toward it. For meditators, that may mean developing awareness, wisdom, and clarity about ourselves—and the willingness to go beyond ourselves and work with the world around us. However, we little help to our community, to the other beings that make up the life we are part of, if we lack self-familiarity and have not developed self-reliance, self-respect, and self-support leading to self-awareness.
Without self-awareness, our world is reduced transactions with two-dimensional tools: I want this. I want that. The path of meditation suggests we can step beyond ego’s base needs and begin to see and function clearly in the world. In relationships, we often hear that we must place another’s needs above our own. Yet, seeing ourselves requires that we don’t lose ourselves. Honoring ourselves enough to go beyond ourselves without giving ourselves away; it is setting aside primal reactivity and learning to listen. Listening does not require believing. In fact, it works best when belief is suspended. With self-familiarity—developed through meditation—we can hear what the other person thinks they need. And that distinction matters. Wants, desires, and needs are not the same. “I need you to be quiet right now” is not the same as “please be quiet right now.” Our needs are often confused with wants. By becoming fixated on the surface experience of what we think we want, we often lose ourselves and actually fail to support our needs.
Pining away whining for someone else to love us nor provide for us will bring only insecurity and dependence. And news flash: dependence is not love. Hurting, yearning, self-flagellation are all very dramatic, but they are not love. Pain is not an expression of love. Pain is often the self-absorption that comes from lack of awareness.
This can be remedied through meditation. By sitting with ourselves patiently we develop familiarization which naturally leads to self-respect and self-awareness. And from self-awareness, love—caring and affection—arises on its own. Our base nature is clear, kind, and compassionate. In the Buddha’s later teachings came the radical notion that all beings possess Buddha-nature—an innate seed of wakefulness. This wakefulness can be recognized and refined through self-awareness, cultivated through meditation. Returning to the present moment is like Occam’s razor, cutting to what is essential so we can see clearly.
So beginning a meditation practice is like a courtship. We are slowly, deliberately and patiently learning to trust ourselves enough to open and reveal our Buddha Nature.
Loving ourselves doesn’t mean we have to like ourselves all the time. But if we look beyond judgment, assumption, and neglect, meditation may offer us the self-awareness and dignity to recognize someone we might like. And all of this is an act of loving. Sitting there with yourself, quelling the storms by seeing the storms, learning to hold space for the longest relationship you’ve had in this life. Learning to fall in love with no one else around.
And from there, we can look beneath the surface and begin to love others.