With mindfulness training we are able to recognize when we get lost in our mental dramas, and bring a kind and nonreactive presence to the feelings that accompany them.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

Because we have such a deeply grooved conditioning to reject and condemn ourselves, particularly in this culture, I find that emphasis on the word "acceptance" is central in healing. It brings our attention to the possibility of saying yes to what we are experiencing in the moment, and counteracts the conditioning to push away what feels unpleasant or intense or unfamiliar.

When desire for a certain person's attention becomes an "I have to have" kind of grasping, then identity gets organized around needing that and it becomes very solid and sticky. That causes suffering because we're not inhabiting the fullness of who we are, we're fixated and contracted on life being a certain way.

Most of us grow up with a sense of "I'm not intelligent enough." It's such a sad thing that in the West we worship a certain kind of left-brain intelligence.

The mistake we make is that when we're feeling another person is not treating us in the way that makes us feel secure and loved, we fixate our attention on that person and what's wrong with them. We also fixate on what's wrong with us. Instead, we can bring forward two wings of awareness: the wing of mindfulness (noticing what's going on inside us) and the wing of kindness (compassion to what's going on inside us).

To open in a loving way is to let awareness notice that tightening.