Above is an excerpt from “The Destitute Child”, a mindful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is truly speaking from his heart and you can feel the love and compassion in his words. Honestly, to me it seems all of his writings, spoken words, and deeds are expressions of his heart.
We all want love but, even more precisely, what we want is to feel love, experience it in our hearts, our souls, our being. We often come to love with a lack mentality that love is something to seek out and find.
For instance, we think we need to be in a loving relationship with someone who says that they love us and if we are not in that kind of relationship we don’t have love. And perhaps, what can be even more challenging, are the times when we do find ourselves in a relationship, where the person we are with says they love us, but we still do not feel loved.
So where’s the love?
You want love. How do you get it?
The truth is you never lost love. You don’t have to find it. You don’t have to protect it. You already have love. If you do not feel loved, you need to reconnect to the love that resides within you.
There are many ways to feel love again. One way is to feel the love you have for those in your life you love or have loved the most deeply. Connect to that feeling and magnify it by reimagining experiences with them where you felt that love with them. You can take this further by writing down these experiences of love and reconnecting to that love.
Another way to connect to love is to express love, share your love, speak love. Maybe there is someone in your life right now whom you love but you have not shared this with them. Be brave and express your love and share it with them. Even if you just write down how you feel this act can help you reconnect to love.
Or perhaps you are already in a loving relationship that does not feel as loving as it once was. Reconnect with those times where you felt the most love in the relationship and talk with them, sharing with them those loving memories.
There may be no one in particular you are feeling love towards right now. If so, you can simply connect to the present moment as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests in the poem. You can also connect with all of what makes you feel loved that others have done for you and do an act of service for someone else, giving to someone else one of those same loving acts. Experiencing how your loving act affects another is one of the strongest ways to connect to and to feel love.
Regardless of how you connect to your love, what you may understand now is the true reciprocity of love. Any love we feel, express, or give to someone else is also directed towards our own hearts.
So, if you want love, find the love in your own heart and share it.
“The Destitute Child” by Thich Nhat Hanh
Precious gems are everywhere in the cosmos and inside of every one of us.
I want to offer a handful to you, my dear friend. Yes, this morning, I want to offer a handful to you, a handful of diamonds that glow from morning to evening.
Each minute of our daily life is a diamond that contains sky and earth, sunshine and river.
We only need to breathe gently for the miracle to be revealed: Birds singing, flowers blooming.
Here is the blue sky, here is the white cloud floating, your lovely look, your beautiful smile. All these are contained in one jewel.
You who are the richest person on Earth and behave like a destitute son, please come back to your heritage.
Let us offer each other happiness and learn to dwell in the present moment. Let us cherish life in our two arms and let go of our forgetfulness and despair.
Ethical Living 