Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit & Be a Whole Lot Happier

Preface to the 2023 Edition

SHARON SALZBERG

A quotation from the Buddha I continually reflect on is the provocative statement, Hatred will never cease by hatred; hatred will only cease by love. This is an eternal law. I’ve often considered the irony of this part: this is an eternal law. Because of the Buddha’s emphasis on change, insubstantiality, the evanescent nature of life, I smile as I imagine the figure one of my friends dubbed Mr. Impermanence saying "this is an eternal law."

Yet both perspectives can be true.

I find this a tremendously compelling exhortation in that it counters my habitual patterns of thinking:

Surely not in this circumstance.

Well, not here.

Quite over the line . . . just not possible.

Of course, the power of this idea and, in fact, its usefulness depend on what we mean by love. If love to us means giving in, it makes no sense. If it means spiritual bypassing, denial of pain, or a forced forgiveness, it makes no sense. If we see it as being complicit, or subservient, then I think it’s not a great idea. But love or lovingkindness can mean something more empowering. This exploration invites us to consider what a deeper sense of lovingkindness is and why it might be helpful.

I often get asked, Why should I practice lovingkindness for people who hate people like me? If someone has hurt us badly or doesn’t think people like us should have agency or freedom in our lives, it causes a lot of pain. But ultimately, why should we suffer even more through abiding resentment or a wholesale giving over of our life’s trajectory to the wrong actions of another? On a certain level, it doesn’t seem right to have lovingkindness for a political figure or family or community member we believe is causing real damage. But how does holding tight to the anger serve us or others?

It’s quite human to feel anger and resentment, but if those emotions overwhelm us, they can be toxic and ultimately end up shaping and limiting our lives. In that sense, there are not only those outside of ourselves we might consider enemies, but there are inner forces as well that challenge us greatly. It may be easy, even joyful, to connect to the parts of ourselves and others that we like or admire. But what about the more challenging feelings, like anger or fear?

A path of love doesn’t mean we disregard or discredit our angry feelings. It doesn’t mean we take no action. We might decide to act strongly, even fiercely, but without being fueled by persistent rage. And at the same time, we may begin to explore an expansive sense of what we are capable of as human beings.

There was an article in The New York Times once about a pilot program that brought mindfulness into a fifth-grade class in Oakland. The journalist asked a student (who presumably was about 10 years old), What is mindfulness? He replied, Mindfulness means not hitting someone in the mouth.

I think that is a great definition of mindfulness because it implies, first, that we know that we’re feeling anger when we’re starting to experience it, not only after we’ve exploded or sent the angry e-mail. It also implies a more balanced relationship with the feeling. If we’re overcome with anger or defined by it, we’re likely to hit a lot of people in the mouth. But at the same time, if we’re ashamed of what we are feeling or if we try to deny it, we get tighter and tighter until we explode. That is a challenging way to go through life.

Mindfulness helps us avoid both extremes and creates some space around the anger. In that space, options for action, for new solutions can arise. I like to think of that fifth grader, mindful of his anger, thinking, I hit someone in the mouth last week. Didn’t work out that well. Maybe this week I’ll try . . .

In practicing mindfulness we get the chance to truly look at our experience. What actually brings us happiness? Is it what we’ve been taught? Is our own happiness selfish and beside the point, or is it a resource we can draw upon to seek change without burning out in the effort? What actually makes us stronger: isolation or connection? Are we as alone, in reality, as we sometimes feel?

This deepening wisdom is the essence of mindfulness. As we practice, we gain confidence being with some very difficult feelings. This doesn’t mean our fear, hatred, or sense of separation totally vanish, but we have a chance to relate to them differently, to have some space and ease of heart, which may allow us to act from another place. We can respect the dignity of every feeling without being consumed by it or pushing it away, but instead being with it mindfully. This can help us discover the nature of our feelings as changing and impermanent states.

My hope is that this book can support you with whatever you’re navigating, whether it’s a big change with lots of uncertainty, a feeling of fear or loneliness, or a call to strengthen your resilience and keep going. May it be of benefit.

Preface to the 2023 Edition

TENZIN ROBERT THURMAN

Yes! Yes! YES! Do thou love thine enemies!

Never were truer words spoken than when Jesus spoke them, so cheerily, and the buddhas confirm them too, with tender smiles! And Kṛṣhṇa, with such beauty! And Shiva! And Yhwh! And the Great Mother, inexpressible in her indomitable, majestic, powerfully tender embrace!

That is the bottom line of this book, and 10 years after its first writing, this message is as true as ever.

As to those great beings who rightly speak these words—love your enemies—we may say easy for them. They have discovered that reality itself is eternal and timely, inevitable and inexhaustible, an infinitely and concretely powerful flow of love, pure transparent shadowless light, omnipotent and imperceptible energy without source or outcome. It effortlessly fills all voids, empties all solids, tolerates no deficit or excess, soothes all stresses, heals all pains. Amazing, gracious, ever-present, completely quiescent and unobtrusive yet fully responsive to need, neither imposing nor failing—inexpressible in dualistic terms yet unexpectedly, overwhelmingly constitutive of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But the great-souled beings do not feel differently from us. Knowing that we too are made of love’s bliss, they see with compassion through our miseries. They know that we can and will overcome our not-knowing of ourselves, since our misknowing of this nirvana as a vale of tears is itself only a kind of illusion; it is an illusory reality less real than the real reality of infinite life, diamond light, and all-embracing love.

When we misconceive our illusory relative reality as a really real, everything-separate, obviously inadequate, disconnected absolute reality, then that reality itself seems to be our enemy. It seems absolutely separate from our absolute selves, and the inanimate things and living beings it contains will pose to us an endless danger so we will fear and hate it as a danger and a source of pain and suffering. Enemies will be things and beings that have actively injured us in some way—people who have harmed us and who we fear will bring more harm, things that have fallen down upon us and crushed or hurt us and so must be avoided or destroyed. We end up in a war with all other, which we will obviously lose.

The thing about living enemies is that they are just like us. They are just as afraid as we are of any reality other than themselves. So they fear us and wish to destroy us in some way or in all ways, depending on how strongly they feel we stand in the way of their happiness. And this is why it makes absolute practical sense—practical, not just spiritual—to love them. This means wishing them to be happy, really happy, so happy that they do not consider us (or anything else) to be standing in the way of their happiness. Such loving as this begins by giving up escaping into concepts of absolute otherness, and instead gently but bravely reaching out toward your enemies and being interconnected with them, interbeing with them.

My hand is not me, but it is connected to me so I must love it, since I do not want it to be hurt. My enemy is not me, but he or she is connected to me. He or she has hurt me, so I fear and hate him or her. Even so, we are actually connected. And since he or she did hurt me, he or she must have felt connected to me in a negative way—must have felt I was a danger and that my very existence was a hurt to him or her—and so he or she tried to hurt me ahead of time.

Loving that enemy means I acknowledge our connection, and I recognize I must change the disconnecting fears and hates by simply wishing him or her to feel free of fear and hate and to be happy and unafraid. I cannot change my enemy’s attitude in any forceful way; I can only go beyond the opposition from my side.

This is when the wondrous, miraculous nature of reality shows itself. Now that I am no longer imprisoned by my fear and hate regarding at least this one enemy, I begin to feel more happy. To love my enemy, I must first imagine him or her as happy. Imagining any happiness makes me feel some happiness, since when I am happy myself, I have imagined myself being happy first. Then an intuition emerges that happiness is possible, and I become open to being happy about other things. I maybe, a little tiny bit, forget about my enemy.

I have stopped focusing on myself and have focused on another, even an enemy, imagining them as happy, which also means at least mentally free from their fear and hatred of me. Once I have chosen happiness over fear and hatred, my intuition finds happiness in lots of other things. The courage to be open to them combines with love overcoming hate.

I am following the great Zen master Dogen in fulfilling my self by forgetting about myself. In this way, my enemy has actually helped me by hurting me. My anger at them made me think more about them, wishing them ill, thinking of what they would not like to happen, thinking how they would hate having what they wanted to happen not happen. My obsession with my enemy made me unexpectedly identify with them, and I found myself wishing them to be happy so I would no longer need to fear and hate them. Then I started thinking about what would make them happy, and so naturally I imagined for them whatever would make me happy. Last, I chose to be happy myself, getting rid of my obsession with the enemy by sending them imaginatively off into whatever would make them happy—so they would no longer bother to get after me!

At the end of this progression, I have found courage in place of fear, love in place of hate, and joy in place of frustration, and I have noticed that thinking more about others lets me be more free of worrying about myself.

One last small point: It may be best to avoid the particular enemy while shifting your feelings about him or her. Your own love and growth in happiness are the best armor against someone else’s hangups, and your own cultivated habit of cheerful courage is the best weapon against any future negative encounters.

So this, indeed, is the bottom line of this book, and I am happy that my dear friends at Hay House, and my beloved Sharon, have decided to bring out another edition for this 10-year milestone.

TENZIN ROBERT THURMAN

Introduction

SHARON SALZBERG

We all want to be happy, but there is such confusion about where genuine happiness is to be found. All around us we see people in conflict, acting out of an Us-versus-Them mentality. This feeling of separation and alienation leads us to think that the way to happiness must lie in triumphing over others or repressing parts of ourselves. We often end up seeing others as enemies; and when things don’t go our way, we become enemies to ourselves.

Our personal and collective conditioning can lead us to think of strength as something quite different from kindness and compassion. Therefore, unless we are making an enemy of some person or situation, we may feel as if we are giving in or giving up, acting in a way that is foolish or weak or self-destructive. I believe this sense of enmity and separation, this sense of division from others and within ourselves, is at the heart of our confusion about where true happiness lies.

The premise of this book is that we all have enemies, even though—spoiler alert—Bob will throw you a curveball in that regard (see page xxvii). But then, inspired by Buddhist teachings, we will lead you on a journey through the four kinds of enemies we encounter: outer enemies, inner enemies, secret enemies, and super-secret enemies. Outer enemies are the people who harass or annoy us, as well as life situations that frustrate or confound us. Inner enemies are the habits of our reactive mind—particularly anger and hatred—that enslave us to and play havoc with our lives. Deeper still we find our secret enemy, the self-absorption that cuts us off from others and from our own loving nature. And finally, there is the super-secret enemy, the deeply entrenched sense of self-loathing that keeps us from realizing our kinship with all beings. The teachings and meditations in this book help us to draw on our own innate wisdom and compassion in order to transform our relationship with our enemies, both inner and outer.

When most of us hear the word enemies, we probably think immediately of all the people who have actually hurt or harmed us. But there are also tricky adversaries that we all have to contend with—our own inner enemies. Together, in this guide, we will uncover the subtleties of working with these enemies, for this is where real victory lies.

When we encounter an enemy, whether outer or inner, we tend to go around and around in the same kind of habitual thinking that has failed to resolve the situation in the past—thinking that leaves us feeling frustrated and angry and unfulfilled. It is an act of audacity to step out of these familiar but flawed ways of dealing with our enemies and seek another, better way. It takes courage to be willing to try approaches that shift the enemy dynamic of Us-versus-Them. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to the strategy of shifting our rigid, entrenched, same-old thinking as stepping outside our moral matrix. When we refuse to return anger with anger, when we reject the belief that revenge is our only option, we step out of our moral matrix into a limitless world of enlightened choice.

Our society tends to dismiss kindness as a minor virtue, rather than the tremendous force it can truly be. Although the Dalai Lama is revered the world over as the embodiment of kindness and compassion, his refusal to see the Chinese who have overrun Tibet as enemies is incomprehensible to many people. But overcoming our enemies requires being able to step away from our assumptions and regard kindness and compassion as the strengths they really are. Among the practices we introduce in the book is one of the most powerful for dissolving enmity: lovingkindness meditation.

Lovingkindness is a translation of the word metta, from Pali, the language of the original Buddhist texts. Metta has also been translated as love and friendship. Lovingkindness is a deep knowing that every individual’s life is inextricably interwoven with all life and that, because of that connection, we need to take care of one another—not out of sloppy sentimentality or a sense of obligation, but out of wisdom that recognizes that when we care for others, we are really caring for ourselves.

Lovingkindness isn’t just an abstract ideal; it’s a hands-on, practical path to realizing a transformed life. As a meditation method, it opens our awareness so that we pay attention to ourselves and others in a different way. Instead of being distracted and fragmented, we learn to gather our attention and become centered. Instead of fixating only on what is wrong with us and feeling defeated by it, we learn to see the good within ourselves as well. And instead of reflexively categorizing people as bad and dismissing them, we pause to appreciate that, just like us, they want to be happy, too.

True happiness, as the Buddha saw it, is a form of resilience, an inner resource that allows us to care about ourselves and others without feeling depleted or overcome by whatever suffering we encounter. The perspectives and practices we describe in this book are ways of getting in touch with that resiliency and allowing it to guide us in all our relationships. Including our enemies in this process of transformation may seem impossible at first, but ultimately we come to realize that it is not only practical but liberating.

Introduction

TENZIN ROBERT THURMAN

Let’s get one thing straight: ultimately, we have no enemies. We think of an enemy as someone—or something—that blocks our happiness. But no other being can block our happiness; true happiness comes from within. Therefore, ultimately, we have no enemies.

Right about now I can hear you saying, "What gives? Here’s a whole book about working with our enemies and turning them into friends that starts out by telling me I have no enemies! That can’t be right. I know I have enemies. Just yesterday I found out my co-worker is lobbying for the promotion I deserve. And what about my neighbors who blast music late into