Sure! Here’s the passage with the line breaks removed and spaces added where the breaks were:
In 1976, researchers Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin conducted an experiment, giving houseplants to two groups of nursing home residents. They told half of these elderly people that the plants were theirs to care for: They had to pay close attention to their plants’ needs for water and sunlight, and they had to respond carefully to those needs. The researchers told the other half of the residents that their plants were theirs to enjoy, but that they did not have to take care of them; the nursing staff would care for the plants.
At the end of a year, the researchers compared the two groups of elders. The residents who had been asked to care for their plants were living longer than the norm, were much healthier, and were more oriented toward and connected to their world. The other residents, those who had plants but did not have to stay responsive to them, simply reflected the norms for people their age in longevity, health, alertness, and engagement with the world.
There were other day-to-day events where some of the residents were given choices and some control over decisions and others were not. The study has usually been described as being about choice and control. From the first time I heard of it, though, I thought of it as being about the enlivening power of connection, of loving attention, of caring.
It seems that plants and people share similar traits when it comes to surviving and flourishing. You can go into most any plant store and ask for plants for your home that will survive with very little attention. Spider plants, aloe vera, ZZ plants, and many succulents famously survive a great deal of neglect. People go on long vacations and find these plants living when they return, while all the others have died off. Of course, if you do decide to give these plants some attention, they will not just survive. They will flourish.
Connect By Letting Go
I most often think about love as an embodied knowing of connection—with ourselves, with one another, with life. At times it is expressive, at times wordless. Love is a resonance of the soul, lifting us out of the confining circumstances of the day, charging the moment with energy, and reinforcing our sense of belonging.
I see it as a connection that is alive and responsive: Our hearts tremble or we have a clear intuition as to how the conversation may look from someone else’s perspective, or we recognize for a moment that this person wants to be happy just as we do, that they have their own story and hopes and fears and dreams. We’re naturally moved to wish they could have happiness and the causes of happiness (which are not necessarily what we have been taught they are), that they be free of suffering and its causes.
Expansion is when we feel connected to a bigger world, we see options, we have more perspective, we have openness.
I’m trying to steer clear of the word responsibility, though that word would commonly be used in the story of the elderly taking care of their plants. Responsibility, for me, can get confused at times with codependency, with trying to be in control of what we could never control, with leaving ourselves out of the possibility of freedom. Sometimes we mistake excessive sacrifice for love, or martyrdom for generosity. Caring for ourselves is not in the picture. Then what we are feeling is more a distortion of love—maybe obligation, or over-idealism, or pressure—even as we yearn underneath for the genuine freedom and openness we sense we are capable of.
That reminds me of the Disney animated movie Encanto, where one of the characters, an older sister named Luisa, has Herculean strength. For a while in the movie, she’s seen lifting pianos in one hand, dragging around houses, lifting groups of donkeys as though they were feathers. After a series of events, Luisa admits that, inwardly, she is breaking under the pressure. Because she was so strong, she shouldered more than her fair share of the burden and felt responsible for keeping things the same as they had been for everyone else. I considered her depiction later in the movie, when she could barely get off the couch, the breakthrough of the inner Luisa!
Don’t you find the phrases feel responsible for and be in control of can get mixed up, much to our sorrow in this out-of-control world?
Breathe In Love
Please remember that the way I’m using contraction refers to when we’re fixated or have tunnel vision, when we’re clinging or grasping or deeply afraid. Expansion is when we feel connected to a bigger world, we see options, we have more perspective, we have openness. The poet Rumi describes it this way: “There is one way of breathing that is shameful and constricted. Then, there’s another way: a breath of love that takes you all the way to infinity.”
When we use the word love, though, we might mean many different things. I recorded a podcast with Omid Safi, a teacher in the Sufi tradition of radical love, and the founder of Illuminated Courses and Tours. He is a professor at Duke University, specializing in Islamic spirituality and contemporary thought. Here is some of what he had to say about love.
Radical love is a love that covers all, right? The snow doesn’t say, “I’m going to fall on the house but not on the tree. I’m going to fall on the road but not on this bush.” No, it generously covers everything. Everything looks beautiful covered in it and we can go out there in the crisp air and take a breath. As the breath enters us and fills our hearts and our lungs and our chests and then returns to the open air, we feel a sense of communion. That we are not cut off from nature, that at least for that moment, we’re able to experience the sense of being at one with this air of love, this ocean of love we’re walking in, swimming in, breathing in.
Just as we don’t want love to become so individualized, so sexualized, so restricted to the realm of the physical that we are cut off from that vastness, we also don’t want compassion and love and tenderness and mercy to be purely individual acts. They are also communal. This deep love, this compassion, radiates out like the sun. It has to.
Which connects me back to that radical love notion. The word radical originally had to do with being rooted. I love the idea that every tree needs to have roots that anchor it, that help it draw up nourishment and sustenance. We are like that tree, and we also grow and we expand our branches, heavenward, and we might provide shade and fruit far beyond where our roots are. There’s something to that metaphor of remaining rooted, while reaching far beyond that original site.
This deep love, this compassion, radiates out like the sun. It has to.
Omid Safi
One summer I was sitting with my newborn in that sacred place where the waves of the ocean were coming up to the sand and then receding. I held her in my lap very carefully and let the waves come and wash from our toes to our knees to our thighs, and then go back into the ocean. I wanted her to experience that.
Sitting there, I felt so connected to the ocean. It is made out of water, and I’m made out of water, and the water that makes me has also come from the ocean. All of a sudden, death was not so frightening. There was a time that the water in me came from the ocean. And now it has found life inside of me, and there will come a time that life will go back to the ocean. And there was a time that the dust, the soil, the clay of my body, came from faraway stars. Every mineral in our bodies comes from the stars, and reminds us that we are also celestial beings. And the time will come when it will go back there, star to star, earth to earth.
At this point in my life, maybe sitting by an ocean is when I experience radical love and radical amazement most. For somebody, that experience might come in meditation, or in prayer, or in reading Rumi. I suggest we find whatever practice nurtures us at the most radical level, the most rooted level, and return to that practice again and again and again, until it becomes a habit.
Love Comes With Boundaries
We went on to talk about how radical love might not have many conditions and strings attached—such as, I will love a child so long as they grow up to fulfill my dreams for them—but it rightfully has boundaries.
Growing up as an immigrant child, I have found that considering the strings that can be attached to love is not an abstract exercise. We are raised with a massive amount of sacrifice and love, and also the culture of guilt and shame of “your parents sacrifice for you, so you’d better be a doctor.” The question of the difference between conditional and unconditional love is really important, then. And the purest of loves is a little bit like sunshine, or rainfall, or snowfall—simply covering.
There is a caveat, though, something that in this new decade of my life, I’m learning to sit with. And I’m curious about where it’s going to go, because it doesn’t come from my beloved Sufi books. It comes from listening to my friends and learning from their lived experience and wisdom. A lot of it comes from women, who talk about how during much of their life they’ve scattered their heart energy by giving of themselves and giving of themselves for others without necessarily being cared for in return. So, in this new phase of life, I’m also learning to value not so much the conditional nature of love but the understanding that love does come with boundaries, and those boundaries are also really important.
My Sufi sources took certain boundaries for granted, living in a world where social boundaries and etiquettes tended to be universally practiced, so they didn’t feel the need to articulate them. In today’s world, though, sometimes it can be a protection that needs to be explicitly pointed to. Radical love cannot be imposed, either. You constantly have to make space for people to explore their own reaction to the teachings you’re sharing with them. It’s important to have each person explore—whether through journaling, or sitting in silence, meditation, and reflection—what is it that feeds their soul.
In some cases in the Buddhist tradition, something might be implicit that we may need to make explicit, so that someone doesn’t try to twist themselves into becoming something they’re not to conform. In some cases, though, the teaching provides explicit instruction that can be a tremendous aid. For example, in formal loving-kindness practice, you begin by offering loving-kindness to yourself before offering it to anybody else. The underlying principle is that we do that practice in the easiest way possible, and you yourself are considered to be the easiest, the nearest at hand, and are as worthy of your own loving care as anybody else. And that serves as a foundation.
Clearly, loving-kindness for ourselves is not always the easiest, by any means, and I always urge people to go back to that underlying principle and just switch the order. It’s not a problem. Though we may need flexibility, the loving-kindness instructions are quite explicit. We have to include ourselves at some point. Even as we may be cultivating enormous care and compassion for others, there needs to be a part of us that is not abandoning ourselves. There is a kind of profound equality of us and other people.
Even as we may be cultivating enormous care and compassion for others, there needs to be a part of us that is not abandoning ourselves.
A greater understanding of the quality of equanimity, too, brings a kind of healthy boundary: I will help you, my friend whom I love. You’re having such a hard time, and I will do anything. But I’m actually not in control of the universe. This is out of my hands, ultimately.
That attitude is in no way cold or withdrawing. Through the wisdom of equanimity, it describes a natural boundary that needs to be there, which I think is the very boundary Omid is pointing to. Otherwise, we may end up acting not from generosity of spirit but from a kind of martyrdom, which is a very different kind of action.
Watering the Seeds of Radical Love
More than anything, I think of love as an intentional practice. For me, that means every day, not out of compulsion or the need to fulfill a duty but for deepening joy. I work on paying more full attention; feeling and showing appreciation; recognizing someone’s pain and responding to it with presence, even—and maybe especially—when I don’t have a clue as to how to fix it. You might consider taking some time and experimenting with loving-kindness meditation. As bell hooks has said, “Love is a practice, and like most things we practice, it is difficult. That truth contrasts with everyone thinking love is easy, but what about when we encounter people we don’t want to love? There are times I get up in the morning, and I think, ‘OK. Who am I to love today?’ That is not a choice based on who I think is cute, or who I want to spend time with, but it’s the recognition of the hunger we all have for love.”
In a way, this journey from a narrow place to expansion and freedom lies outside of time and space. We can traverse that seemingly daunting distance with a thought. We can travel that length without accruing any mileage at all, with remembering right now what we really care about, or recollecting right now the source of our deepest happiness, or coming back right now to our essential selves. We can explore the terrain of awe, or gratitude, or self-respect, or love. We needn’t be fooled by the layers of fear and craving and shame and confusion covering over that light. We can remind ourselves the light is never more than partially covered, and while it may feel remote, it is accessible, always. Because it is always accessible, we are here, now.
It’s upon this seed of radiance that we turn toward the good, we nourish it, we cultivate it. It’s not up to the nursing staff, or our forebearers, or anybody else. As with the hardy plants I discussed earlier, the latent luminosity within can endure neglect, but it can also thrive when it receives care and attention. Left on its own, the light will survive—half-hidden, quiescent. Nurtured, the light can blaze forth.
Excerpts from “The Light Within” from REAL LIFE by Sharon Salzberg. Copyright © 2023 by Sharon Salzberg. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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