Four Highest Emotions

The excerpt this week is from an article in Lion’s Roar on cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity by Ayya Khema and excerpted from “Visible Here and Now: The Buddha’s Teachings on the Rewards of Spiritual Practice”, published by Shambhala Publications.      
“When we think of love, we have ideas that are purely personal and, on the whole, quite fanciful. They are based in general on our desire to be loved, from which we expect fulfillment. In reality love fulfills only the one who loves. If we understand love as a quality of the heart, just as intelligence is a quality of the mind, then we won’t deal with love as people customarily do. As a rule, we divide our hearts into different compartments, for lovable, neutral and unlovable people. With that sort of divided heart, there’s no way we can feel good. We can be “whole” only with a heart united in love….”