How to Expand Love

A few years ago, the Dalai Lama wrote a book titled, How to Expand Love, that is filled with wonderful meditations to deepen this practice in one's life. His Holiness noted, that everything is always in a state of change. Nothing remains stable - not even our feelings towards our loved ones or friends.

I re-read portions of this book late last evening, and while all the meditations and practices are of great value, I will highlight one that caught my eye. I highly recommend however, reading the book in its entirety to benefit from the systematic plan that is laid out in its pages for expanding our capacity for love...

• Consider that during the span of this lifetime, there is no certainty that specific individuals will always be friends, enemies, or neutral. Consider examples of this from your own life - a neutral person who became a friend; a neutral person who became an enemy; a friend who became neutral, or an enemy; an enemy who became a friend.

• Visualize that a friend who has helped a lot in this lifetime brought harm to you in a previous lifetime and was neutral at other times.

• Imagine that an enemy who has harmed you in this lifetime was neutral in some other life and brought repeated benefits in another.

• See that in the longer perspective of many lifetimes, friend, enemy, and neutral observer have all equally helped and harmed you or your friends, so it cannot be concluded that they are solely one way or other.

• Realize that in terms of the long course of beginning-less rebirth, none of us could decide that someone who helped or harmed us in this life has been doing so for all lifetimes.

• Decide that it is not right to single out one for intimacy and yet another for alienation.

While I realize that not everyone reading this blog subscribes to a belief in reincarnation, I do feel you can still benefit from this practice. You can imagine the lifetimes as being different stages or epochs in your life. Or, you can visualize these situations as hypothetical ones, or resort to an the understanding that at the very least, the concept of rebirth resides in the "collective unconscious" so eloquently described by Carl Jung. Whatever path taken, we must all realize that everything changes - including those relationships that may seem changeless. For everything, there is a season.

During the coming season - sacred to so many traditions - let us all re-commit to expanding love and making this world a better place!