How to Love

True love is made of four elements: loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Very often, our mistakes come from our unskillfulness, and not because we want to harm one another. I think of our behavior in terms of being more or less skillful rather than in terms of good and bad.

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen. That person may be our partner, our friend, our sibling, or our child. You can ask, “Dear one, do you think that I understand you enough? Please tell me your difficulties, your suffering, and your