The experience of love tends to have two sides. The first side says that love is the most beautiful, powerful, and meaningful experience on the planet. This side is bolstered by research that says humans are literally born for love: we are social beings, we thrive on social connection, and we need to feel a sense of connection and belonging just as much as we need food and water. In fact, one of the biggest and longest studies on happiness by Harvard University found that above all else, good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
The other side of love emphasizes that actually, people are kind of a pain. There is the Sartre quote, “hell is other people” as well as the old platitude, “familiarity breeds contempt”. We may want social connection but then have to deal annoying coworkers and people who rub us the wrong way. Reality TV shows demonstrate just how much drama gets created when a dozen strangers a forced to live together. In an increasingly polarized world, anger and hatred around democracy and politics demonstrates just how hard it is for us all to get along. Even during COVID while extroverts are struggling, introverts are having a jolly good time at home away from all the social pressures to conform and get along with others.
There is also the very intense reality of pain and heartbreak that comes with almost all intimate relationships and the heartbreaking stories of abuse between spouses and families. Our most intimate relationship tend to be the container for the most joyous experiences in our lives as well as the most challenging.
There is the ecstasy of falling in love, followed by the sorrow of having it unrequited. There is the ease of meeting someone who you feel you have met before in a previous life, followed by the intense work of making the relationship actually work.
The Struggles of Love
I was thinking more about this dichotomy while debating whether or not to take on a new client for love coaching. He was a young man struggling with love and had a number of false starts to relationships. At the same time, he was so desperate to find a girlfriend that he held a contemptuous view of women and nihilistic view of the world. He was short tempered and angry at society, considering himself to be the victim despite coming from a privileged background.
At one point he asked me, “Why do you think no one wants to be with me?” and while I didn’t express it out loud, the first thought that came to me was, “Well, have you listened to yourself?” How could this person be so unaware of their behavioral patterns that sabotage them from getting what they say they want in life?
Then, I thought, have any of us truly listened to ourselves? Have any of us actually sat down for five minutes and listened to our own mental chatter to see how it really is and what our reactions are? Have any of us noticed how often complain, judge, criticize, wish ill of others? Have any of us actually sat with and noticed our habitual reactions, emotional rollercoasters, and mental conditionings? that occur on a daily basis?
I have and let me tell you: the mind is the worst. Like wow. When I first started a meditation practice, sitting down and breathing for just five minutes was the most excruciating task I had ever been asked to do. As soon as I took a few deep breaths, my mind would race. It would tell me how much time I was wasting and how many things were still on my to-do list.
One second it would say I was a terrible meditator, and the next it would say I was the best meditator that has ever lived and should go to India to meditate on the Ganges. One minute it would be thinking about what was for lunch, and the next it would imagine a situation where I tell my boss that they’re a jerk and receive a round of applause from my coworkers as I walked out of the office.
One minute the mind would be jealous of a famous yogi or author who is way more successful than I will ever be, and the next minute it would deride the exact same person for being bad at what they do. One minute I would hate myself, the next I would love myself, the next I would sit pondering where belly button lint comes from.
That is the mind, that is how it works, that is what it does, and anyone who has meditated will tell you the same: sitting with ourselves is hard.
So the question that begs to be asked to pretty much anyone who is struggling with finding and maintaining an intimate relationship is, “Well, if you can’t sit with yourself for five minutes, why in the world would you expect somebody else to be able to sit with you for 50 years?”
The Promise of Meditation
This is why every couple should meditate if they want to be together. We have to become aware. We have to look within and see how the complex interplay of thoughts, fantasies, images, emotions, desires and aversions inside of us really get in the way of finding peace and happiness outside of us.
We need to see how often we create stories in our head about how great we are and how terrible everyone else is, how justified we are in our beliefs and how attached we are to our own ideas and being right all the time. We have to see just how much we resist the world and the way things are, how much we put ourselves at the center of our own universes, and how much we expect the entire world to change for our own benefit.
We have to learn the true meaning of the quote by the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…”
When we look within, we see those good and bad parts of us too. We see how quickly our love can turn to anger and how we protect our own self-image at the expense of judging or hurting others. We see how sometimes we can be kind of a jerk too sometimes, or that we are bad at keeping promises. We see our own obstacles to loving others, including our desire to change them.
We must see the judgement, hatred, greed, ill-will, envy and whatever else gets in the way of happy and loving relationships, in order to first become aware of them. Then we can get to the work of disciplining the mental chatter and living more from the heart. This is the essence of meditation, and if we give it some time, it will improve every relationship in our lives.
How Meditation Really Helps
There are many perspectives on exactly what meditation is and how it benefits us. Some say it is a mental exercises to strengthen the mind and focus our attention. Some say it is a kind of purification or clearing of the mind. But the perspective of meditation that I resonate the most with is that meditation is a kind of familiarization.
The Tibetan word for meditation is Gom, which means “to become familiar with”. In sitting with ourselves for twenty minutes a day, we become intimately familiar with the nature of our mind. We look at how the mind works and how it functions; where our thoughts and emotions come from and also where they go. We notice our mental conditioning and how past patterns of thought continue to influence our current behaviors. We realize that we are not who we think we are.
Noticing and knowing our mental and emotional reactions to things is the key to success in any relationship. If we aren’t aware of them, we will constantly blame our partner and think every problem is their fault. Meditation requires honesty—real honesty—to look within and gain the self-knowledge of recognizing that what we see in the world is actually a reflection of ourselves.
It was the spiritual leader Ram Dass who described meditators as those intent on becoming “connoisseurs of their neuroses”. We notice our childhood wounds, narcissistic tendencies, and our sexual trauma. We notice what comes up in us when things do not go our way.
The more we meditate, the more we notice our own patterns and are able to go beyond them. The more the take responsibility for our own actions and role in the relationship, and forgive our partners for the actions they do because of their conditioning too.
It is important to have this self-knowledge in our intimate relationships in order to help someone else navigate our reactions with ease. We are more able to notice our anger arising and will be more likely to take a break to calm down. We notice when we need quiet time or alone time and are more likely to set up an appropriate boundary and express our needs.
Love, Like Meditation, Is a Practice
Ram Dass also came to the conclusion that even after many years of practice, nothing ever really goes away:
Even after many years of psychoanalysis, after teaching psychology, working as a therapist, after taking psychedelics for many years, being in India, being a yogi, having a guru, meditating for 18 or 19 years now – as far as I can see I haven’t gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one. The only thing that has changed is that while before these neuroses were huge monsters that possessed me, now they’re like little shmoos that I invite over for tea.
This is why our meditation becomes a practice, just as love is a practice, just as our spiritual practice puts us on the path to unconditional love. As meditators, we learn growth is a process we must be committed to. As partners in a relationship, we learn that commitment, kindness, and intimacy are practices too, as is overcoming our natural tendencies of ill-will and judgement.
This brings us back to the original question from before: is hell other people, or is connection the reason we are here on Earth? The answer is this: hell is other people who have not disciplined their mind; who have not looked within and taken responsibilities for their own reactions.
Love on the other hand is the answer, the salve, the training ground for overcoming these patterns and being able to come from a place of love.
Even the quote “hell is other people” is often misunderstood to mean that social connections are hellish. In reality, as Sartre later had to clarify for those misunderstanding the phrase, hell is the constant gaze of judgmental, critical eyes of people intent on “othering” you to an object rather than opening their hearts with life and validating who you are as a person. Hell is other people’s egos and the realm of a mind unfamiliar with its own conditioning. The heart, on the other hand, is heaven.
If you want more love in your life, calm the mind. Meditate. Truly see yourself with an open and kind heart. Be real and authentic with yourself first, so you can be real and authentic with someone else.
