Dear Thay, dear Sangha, can you help me open my heart?

Are you afraid to love?

Probably, perhaps.

When we cannot open our heart, it is because we are afraid. Spring is the time when all flowers have a chance to open. And your heart is a flower. You must allow it to open. And how? In this practice, we say that loving oneself is the foundation for loving another. To love does not only mean to love another person. If we are able to love ourselves, then we can love another person. But if we cannot love ourselves, it will be impossible to love anyone else.

And to love, to love ourselves, we must recognize the presence of suffering, of pain within us. We must listen deeply to our own suffering, our own pain. And this is meditation. We embrace, we try, we train ourselves to embrace our own suffering, our own happiness. We listen deeply. We seek to recognize the roots, the nature of this pain. And this is the basic practice.

With this, the understanding of pain, of suffering, will come. And this understanding will open your heart. You must learn to love yourself. If you know it well, if you understand it well, if you truly know your suffering, then you can accept it. This is because this suffering is not an individual suffering. In this suffering, there is the suffering of our parents, of our ancestors. And in this suffering, there is the suffering of the world. So we must not say that it is only my suffering.

Therefore, by understanding this suffering within ourselves, we also understand the suffering of our parents and our ancestors. And in this way, when we look at another person, we can see the suffering in them very easily. And our heart opens right away. So the understanding of suffering is the key that can open your heart.