The Unity of Joy and Love

Wise words from Thich Nhat Hanh's book How to Love

True love includes a feeling of deep joy that we are alive.

Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love

We often think of positive emotions such as joy, contentment, and love as separate feelings that are based on different elements of our lives. For example, we may think of ourselves as content when we’re sunning ourselves on a beach during a relaxing vacation; we might see someone as joyful on their wedding day; and we might see love in someone’s eyes as they gaze at their partner or child.

But based on my study of Stoicism and other wisdom traditions—such as the Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh that we’ll be discussing below—I increasingly think that pretty much all truly positive emotions are simply different expressions of the same underlying mental state (eudaimonia). If you look closely at the roots of joy, contentment, love, and any other extremely positive emotion, you will find they are very similar. Of course, we may have different opportunities to express this positive emotional tenor based on what’s happening in our lives. When spending time with loved ones it will manifest as love. When facing hardship it will manifest as joyful acceptance of what must be done and appreciation for what we still have. Whatever we do and whatever we encounter, life will give us opportunities to express this emotion as joy, gratitude, respect, contentment, or love. But at their core they are the same.

Joy and Love

The unity of joy and love jumped out at me when I recently re-read Thich Nhat Hanh’s lovely little book How to Love (published in 2014). This book is more of a collection of wise sayings than any sort of prolonged exposition on love, so it’s quite different from most philosophical writings that I cover here at Stoicism for Humans. But to me that doesn’t make it any less valuable. As many people know, Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk who lived his philosophy through his teachings, interactions with others, and leadership of several residential schools/monasteries around the world. He was someone who not only thought about and talked about how to live well, but who actually did it. We all know how difficult that is and how rare it is to find such a philosopher.

That’s one reason I find this book, How to Love, extremely valuable. With its short lessons of one or two paragraphs, it describes a life of love and joyful acceptance, showing us how to cultivate beautiful relationships and shine our light in an often dark world. And while there are many important teachings here, the one that stood out most strongly to me is the connection between those strongly positive emotions. If you want to know how to love, Thich Nhat Hanh says, you must also learn to be happy. Just as in Stoicism, the type of happiness he describes is not a fleeting feeling based on external things, but a deeply-rooted happiness that Seneca describes to his friend Lucilius as “born in your own home”:

Do this above all, dear Lucilius: learn how to experience joy. Do you suppose that because I am removing from you the things of fortune and think you should steer clear of hopes, those sweetest of beguilements, that I am taking away many pleasures? Not at all: what I want is that gladness should never be absent from you. I want it to be born in your own home—and that is what will happen if it comes to be inside of you.

Seneca, Letters on Ethics, 23.3

Thich Nhat Hanh (known to his followers as Thay) uses the same analogy of home:

You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person. (p. 17)

Once you know how to come home to yourself, then you can open your home to other people, because you have something to offer. The other person has to do exactly the same thing if they are to have something to offer you. Otherwise, they will have nothing to share but their loneliness, sickness, and suffering. (p. 64)

Many of us want to do good in the world. This is an admirable desire, and one that we should nourish and pursue. However, teachers from both Buddhism and Stoicism suggest that our ability to help others will always be limited when we ourselves are struggling. In Epictetus’ classic abrasive style, he says,

We want to live as wise men all at once, and bring benefit to others. What kind of benefit? What are you up to? Have you been able even to help yourself? And yet you want to convert others to a good life? Have you even converted yourself? You want to be of benefit to them? Show them through your own example what kind of men philosophy produces! Give up your empty talk. By the way in which you eat, bring benefit to those who eat with you, by the way in which you drink, bring benefit to those who drink, and by yielding to all of them, by giving way to all, by putting up with all, be of benefit to them in that way.

Epictetus, Discourses, 3.13, 22-23

This is not easy to hear for most of us, because we all know that living as good, happy people ourselves is the hardest thing to do. It’s quite easy to go around giving advice to other people—anyone can do that (and many people do). It’s so much harder to lead by example.

And yet, the sages tell us, the best way to bring true benefit to the world is to live as a wise and loving person every day. Instead of going around yelling at everyone, criticizing them for not being moral people, we should be moral people ourselves. And the way we do that is to cultivate eudaimonia, that deep mindset of love, joy, and inner peace. Once you are able to find that peaceful happiness within yourself, you can share it widely with others, everywhere you go and in everything you do. As Thich Nhat Hanh says:

When you know how to generate joy, it nourishes you and nourishes the other person. Your presence is an offering, like fresh air, or spring flowers, or the bright blue sky. (p. 20)

If you have enough understanding and love, then every moment—whether it’s spent making breakfast, driving the car, watering the garden, or doing anything else in your day—can be a moment of joy. (p. 44)

For true love to be there, you need to feel complete in yourself, not needing something from outside. (p. 97)

This mindset of joy is a true rebellion from our guilt-based Western society, where we’re constantly cudgeled over the head with messages of guilt and responsibility for everything that’s wrong with the world. If you’re not out “fixing” the world, the thinking goes, you are a bad person. Much of what passes for morality advises us to fix other people’s actions, which of course is something we can never actually do. Therefore we are locked in a perpetual state of failed morality—feeling like failures ourselves because we have assigned ourselves a task that is not actually within our power, and also feeling like the world is a failure because it doesn’t fit into our prescribed vision of the way things should be.

What an ethic of love and joy does instead is allow us to succeed at the only type of morality that is truly within our power: loving others. As Thay makes clear, when we actually love others we do tangible good in the world:

Joy and happiness radiate from our eyes, and everyone around us benefits from our smile and our presence. If we take good care of ourselves, we help everyone. We stop being a source of suffering to the world, and we become a reservoir of joy and freshness. Here and there are people who know how to take good care of themselves, who live joyfully and happily. They are our strongest support. Whatever they do, they do for everyone. (p. 66)

Which obviously brings us to the main question: how do we learn to love others? Not superficially or unthinkingly, but how do we truly love others?

How to Love

In this short and sweet book (and obviously throughout many of his other teachings), Thich Nhat Hanh offers many suggestions for learning to love. Some of them are very practical and basically common sense, like learning to listen respectfully to your partner during an argument rather than trying to win the argument and prove you’re right. But he also offers a few taxonomies and plans that I think are very helpful. For example, he says there are four traditional elements of true love (loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity), followed by two subsidiary elements (respect and trust). I think this layout is helpful in breaking down the sometimes vague mindset of love and helping us to consider how to reach it step by step.

He also follows the Buddha in describing the nourishment needed for love:

The Buddha said that nothing survives without food, including love. If you don’t know how to nourish and feed your love, it will die. If we know how to feed our love every day it will stay for a long time. One way we nourish our love is by being conscious of what we consume. Many of us think of our daily nourishment only in terms of what we eat. But in fact, there are four kinds of food that we consume every day. They are: edible food (what we put in our mouths to nourish our bodies), sensory food (what we smell, hear, taste, feel, and touch), volition (the motivation and intention that fuels us), and consciousness (this includes our individual consciousness, the collective consciousness, and our environment). (p. 75)

This is really good advice, which I have found to be true in my own less-skillful practice of love. Marcus Aurelius said that the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts, and I find it absolutely crucial to feed my mind healthy and beneficial thoughts. Whatever we put into our minds is what our minds run on. If we fill them with doomscrolling and trashy tv shows, that’s what we will think about and ultimately become. But if we choose instead to fill them with loving thoughts and positive intentions, we will become loving and positive. It’s a pretty direct correspondence. And fortunately it’s something we can all do with enough practice:

Each of us can learn the art of nourishing happiness and love. Everything needs food to live, even love. If we don’t know how to nourish our love, it withers. When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. (p. 9)

Thich Nhat Hanh also places a huge emphasis on acceptance, which again is one of the cornerstones of any successful relationship. People are individuals with their own history, quirks, and foibles, and we can’t expect them to be someone else. We can hold people accountable for good behavior, and we can have high expectations for them, while still forgiving occasional blunders and cheerfully accepting their unique personality. Here’s some excellent advice from Thay on this topic:

True love includes a sense of responsibility and accepting the other person as she is, with all her strengths and weaknesses. If you only like the best things in a person, that is not love. (p. 49)

Thich Nhat Hanh sounds very much like Epictetus here:

If you have the impression that you know the other person inside and out, you are wrong. Are you sure that you even know yourself? Every person is a world to explore. (p. 85)

And my favorite:

A true partner or friend is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you’ve been seeking. (p. 43)

I especially love this last one because it’s both incredibly rare and incredibly true. More than any time before in human history, we are bombarded by external images of how people should look and act, what they should wear, say, do, be, become. So many of us fall into the trap of subconsciously thinking our partners or loved ones should match up to these external representations. Of course they will automatically fall short of such unrealistic (and essentially inhuman) prototypes, and then we become dissatisfied with them and unhappy in our relationships.

A truly loving friend or partner, on the other hand, appreciates what is special about their friend as an individual, seeing what’s good in them without reference to anyone else. Instead of hoping their partner will be like X Famous Person or Y Stereotype, the wise partner enjoys the other person for who they are and sees the beauty within. Even more important, they encourage their friend or partner to see their own beauty. What an incredible gift!

Concluding Thoughts

I hope I’ve successfully made the case here for the unity of joy and love, as well as the idea that in order to cultivate the one we should also be working toward the other. In How to Love, Thich Nhat Hanh offers many more suggestions than I’ve been able to cover here, so definitely check out the book for yourself. It lends itself to short, reflective readings, which would be perfect for morning meditations or as journaling prompts.

I’ll just close with one of the “Practices for Nourishing True Love” that are offered at the end of the book. They are all wise and beautiful, but I particularly like the Six Mantras which Thay recommends practicing with your partner. Two of these mantras (from pp. 113 and 116) are especially poignant, and I’d like to share them here with you in closing. I hope you will share them with your loved one(s) and experience a beautiful flowering of your own ability to love.

“I know you are there, and I am very happy” is the second of the Six Mantras. When I look at the full moon, I breathe in and out deeply and say, “Full moon, I know you are there, and I am very happy.” I do the same with the morning star. When you contemplate a beautiful sunset, if you are really there, you will recognize and appreciate it deeply. Whenever you are truly there, you can recognize and appreciate the presence of the other, whether that is the full moon, the North Star, the magnolia flowers, or the person you love.

The fifth mantra is, “This is a happy moment.” When you’re with the one you love, you can pronounce this mantra. It’s not autosuggestion or wishful thinking; it’s waking up to the conditions of happiness that are there. Maybe you’re not mindful enough, so you don’t recognize them. This mantra is to remind us that we’re very lucky; we have so many conditions of happiness, and if we don’t enjoy them, we’re not wise at all. So when you’re sitting together, walking together, eating, or doing something together, breathe in mindfully and realize how lucky you are.

---

---

Photo credit: Anneliese Phillips on Unsplash