4 Ways to Heal Yourself with Love

 

01.29.2021 4 WAYS TO HEAL YOURSELF WITH LOVE The March 2021 issue of Lion’s Roar magazine features Buddhist wisdom on how to use mindfulness and psychology to heal trauma and emotional wounds. Inside, Tara Brach tells the inspiring story of a client restoring her mind, body, and heart, Arisika Razak shares insight on healing the wounds of racism, and Pawan Bareja offers wisdom on how to heal yourself with love.   Bareja, a trauma resolution practitioner, explores the four mind states known in Buddhism as the brahmaviharas, or “heavenly abodes” in her piece “4 Ways to Heal Yourself with Love.” These four emotional states are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. “We can consciously practice these mind states as part of our meditation practice,” writes Bareja, “and use them to help heal trauma.”   There’s much to be gained from cultivating these loving mind states in our practice. Below, you’ll find three teachings on the brahmaviharas and how to integrate them into your daily life.

The Four Immeasurables Leave Nothing Untouched If you don’t want your happiness to impede that of someone else, says Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, practice the four immeasurables. It will help you make space for others in your mind and to see others as yourself. The four immeasurables are variously known as the “abodes of Brahma” (brahmavihara), divine abidings, heavenly abodes, or the four sublime or excellent states. They are excellent because, in their manifestation, they are limitless. They are sublime because they point to the most wholesome, most loving, most affirming way of relating to others and ourselves.

4 Ways to Heal Yourself with Love Loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity — these four loving qualities, says Pawan Bareja, are powerful ways to heal our trauma. The Buddha, in his first noble truth, acknowledges the pervasive reality of suffering in this realm. This suffering can show up as small hurts or large, life-changing wounds, which we sometimes call trauma. For wounds small and large, the Buddha’s advice is the same: to be present to them and release them, so we can fully live our birthright of being in the moment, happy and free. Even 2,600 years ago, he did not pathologize our woundedness, but rather normalized it.

The Four Highest Emotions Ayya Khema on cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It’s very important to develop compassion for oneself, because it’s the precondition for being able to do so for others. If someone doesn’t meet us lovingly, it will be easier for us to give this person compassion instead of love. It’s easier because now we know that this person who comes to meet us unlovingly is angry or enraged, is most definitely unhappy. If she were happy, she wouldn’t be angry or enraged. Knowing about the other’s unhappiness makes it easier for us to summon up compassion, especially when we’ve already done so with respect to our own unhappiness.

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