Sitting with Original Love: First Love and Bodhicitta

0:00Thank you for listening to UPAI's Dartmouth Podcast, an extraordinary series of talks from some of the finest teachers in the world. I'm Joan Halifax, founder of the UPAI's End Center, and we're happy to make these podcasts available to you. Please consider making a donation so we can offer these recordings freely. You'll find a donation but on our podcast page, and thank you so much. This is Dharmapodcast at thermapodcast.org. This is episode number 2582. It was recorded on February 14, 2026, and it is part five of a multi-part series titled, Sitting with Original Love. This episode is titled, First Love and Bodhichitta.

1:05The speakers for this episode are Henry Shukman and Joan Halifax. So Mahasanga Online, thank you. Welcome back. And our wonderful onsite community here. I'm very happy that I'm very happy we're in a space that is sane and healthy and serene. So I asked a question before you left. And the question was to take a moment and recall the first experience that you had where there was this feeling of love.

2:12And I want to give some background to that question. Because it became an extraordinary practice and process for me in a circumstance that I feel very blessed to have witnessed. It was in 1992. I was in Plum Village. And Ty glided into the Dharman-Ector Hall and said it was June 2, 1992. I always gave the date. I didn't want to know the date or the time or anything. I was in this timeless space. And there was some music. They always sing these kind of gentle, wonderful songs. And then he began to talk.

3:13And he began to unfold the vision. That is articulated in the Avatamsaka Sutra. The flower splendor Sutra is a sort of vast compilation of visionary dimensions of manifestations of the Buddha. Talk about original love. And then 10 years ago I read the whole thing. 1,623 pages of it. It was like, your one poem takes me there. That's like a shortcut to it. But the last third of the Avatamsaka Sutra is this pilgrimage. And it's taken by this young man, Sudhana.

4:18And I'm not going to go into the whole thing. But it's only to say that what Ty did over this month or six weeks long retreat was to unfold this vision of Modi Chita but through the story of him having fallen in love with a nun when he was young. And it's in a book called Cultivating the Mind of Love. And it's a real page turner. I have to tell you. It's like, and what did they do? They touched. Wow. But actually I wanted to say this love story which was particularized in this unusual relationship between a male and a female monastic.

5:24I became the basis for for found teachings on cultivating the awakened mind that you may benefit others. Not just yourself. But before I share some pieces of that story which completely wiped me out. I'd like to just take a few moments to read a first love story of a poet. And then I'd like us to just share some first love stories. So the poet, Eileen Miles, in her memoir After Glow, she writes about a pit bull called Rosie.

6:24Now, who has a thing with dogs? Would you raise your hand on site and online? Okay. You get what is about to happen. Who Miles plucked from a street litter in 1990 and cared for until Rosie's death 16 years later. Miles regarded Rosie as an artistic and spiritual partner. The book Center of Gravity is Rosie's death which governs both of their lives long before it happens. And then Miles writes this. I took such good care of her when she was dying. I relished it. She made me go slow.

7:24I attended my dog's ass, the collapse of her rear legs that I saw as little high heels. I imagined her as a drag queen or a young girl unsteadily teetering, a touching failure. I felt less ambivalently loving than I have ever felt in my life. The poet sees her dog sleep. I had to stare to catch your breathing and then the poet gets on the floor to silently wrestle with their interdependence.

8:28I felt like she was swimming in some fluid and I was in there with her. It was our intimacy. So early I spoke about original intimacy. It is that experience of swimming in the same fluid. And that's the question I asked you. When was the first time with human or otherwise that you experienced swimming in the same fluid? But I couldn't help it. I pulled out. I had to say no. I'm not dying with you.

9:29And then she asks, but who will I be without my dog? And I carried you to bed. So the wheel is in the ends that Henry has been rolling us in and about with. I think he's carried in how this poet conveys her life in the fluid of love. And she swims with her beloved in this most deep and undefended relationship. And for many of us, and I know this to be true of my dog, Dominga, who's buried in the backyard of your pia house.

10:36The most undefended relationship most of us have because it's so nonjudgmental, mostly. Except when the dog looks at you because you've got an appointment and she's like, you're leaving me. But it's so nonjudgmental, mostly, that it opens up something inside of you that is not describable. And it's not repeatable. It simply is. And so as we recall, and we'll hear from some of you online on site, an experience where you'll go to essence of your first love.

11:38I ask us not to separate from the body, whatever you're experiencing in the body. I ask for you not to separate from your feelings. Notice what your feelings are. And what thoughts are arising within you. Be aware that we're in a field, as Henry has said, a Sangha in environment on site online. A kind of fluid that we all have generated within through each other that we're swimming together, as Henry has said. And understand, and I love this line from Antonio Machado,

12:39a heart that's all by itself is not a heart. A heart that's all by itself is not a heart. Because the cultivation of bodhicitta is exactly this experience of boundlessness, unconditionality, unmediated presence in the agape and love or original love that we've been exploring together. And again, as Henry said, the thumb of your first experience is in your store consciousness. It's always there. It's just amazing. It is the most, in fact, important and informative experience of your life.

13:44Not that you, not the experience that you didn't get enough love or you didn't get the right kind of love. It's actually that experience where love is present without distinction, without qualification. So what I'd like us to do is just take this, again, going to essence, light to begin in the room and then we'll go to on site. Well, what Ellen Miles wrote, this happened to my domingo. Her hindquarters gave out and she had to be carried outside of the little room where she was dying out to do her business because she was too dignified to do her business in the room.

14:59Yeah. Noah, stop doing that. Would you talk to your husband please? So I'm just going to essence, you know, what was that moment for you, not the description about the moment, was it how your grandmother looked at you? Was it the eyes of your first dog? Was it the peach tree under which you were sitting in the perfume you finally realize you're in this sort of field of nectar? Was it a sunset, whatever, at any age? So just raise your little paw when you're ready.

16:00And yes, and going to essence. Yes. And again, name and. Can you hear is this guy that's right Deborah from Tucson and. My memory instantly or pretty instantly went back to 1948 when I was in a car with my father driving and my mother in the other seat. We had just come down from skiing at Whitefish near Butte Montana where we lived. And I just in Amos and Andy was on the radio. And I remember feeling I must have been sitting either in the front on my mother's lap or in the back with my sister. I just had this wonderful warm feeling of that family love that you talked about. So thank you.

17:01Beautiful. How important that is how informative and formative. Yes, up here. Right here. Little paw in the air, please. Thank you. Lucas and from Central Virginia, although I just started a residency here a couple days ago. I remember kind of a composite of a lot of nights growing up. We had some rough times in my family, but sometimes around sunset my brother and I would be playing outside on the ropes weighing in my dad's truck would come home from work and we would just run at top speed up to the truck to go see him. There's this feeling of everyone being each other's favorite people in the world. Thank you. And also my dad talks about the first day he drove home and we didn't go running up to the truck.

18:03Thank you so much. Yes, here. I came from Santa Fe and what came to me right away was the birth of my first child when I was 30. I had fallen in love with a lot of men and a lot of boys up until then, but it wasn't. That was more like loving falling in love, but when I first held my newborn daughter after a crazy three days of giving birth to her at home in Santa Cruz and looked at her. My heart just opened so much and I knew I would do anything for her forever. And that is what I realize now that's love. Thank you, Dea, so much. One more person in the room. Hi, I'm Sonia from Durham, North Carolina and as I was leaving before I told you Henry that you reminded me I'm a poet.

19:15And so I wonder if I can read this poem, which is that moment. It's called My Mother's Belly. The bread of her waist, a loaf we would need with eight-year-old palm sweaty from play. My brother and I marveled at the ridges and grooves, how they would summit at her navel, how her belly looked like a walnut, how we were one seeds that resided inside. We giggled whenever she would recline on the couch, lift her shirt, unbutton her pants, let her belly spread like cake batter in a pan. It was as much a treat as licking the sweet from electric mixers on birthdays. The angelating of my mother's belly was not a shame she hid from her children. She knew we came from this, seemed grateful. Her belly was a gift we kept passing between us. It was both hers of her body and ours for having made it new, different.

20:18The belly was an altar of flesh built in remembrance of us by us. What remains of my mother's belly resides in a container of ashes I keep in a closet. Every once and again I open the box, sift through the fine crystals with palms that were once ate. Feel the grooves and ridges that do not summit now but reel through fingers, granules that are so much more salt than sweet today. And yet still I marvel at her once body, even in this form say, I came from this. Wow. Wow. Bye-bye. Oh. Thank you. Wow. Breath. Thank you.

21:32Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And let's hear from a few of us online. Diamond, Tara. I guess I'm muted. Go ahead. Hi. You asked a question. I jotted down a couple of things.

22:33With my parents. But you know, I've never been so shattered except by the loss of my cat about five weeks ago. I had her for 19 years and brought to my knees on that one. I've never been so shattered by it. I've had a lot of loss. So my baby, she's gone. Can you see her? So I don't know what to do without her really. She was my greatest love story. No one's ever stayed, you know, but she always stayed. That said, she was tired of being here. Like that.

23:34She's my girl. She's she's my big love story. Thank you. I'm lost without her. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us into your grief.

24:35Another breath, please. Thank you.

25:36So I'd like to hear from someone else online. Donna, are you on mute, please? Hello. My name is Shoshona. I'm from Connecticut. Roshi, I have to tell you a story. It was about 1998. And I went on my first bearing witness retreat with Roshi Bernie. And you were there. And Frank was there. And it was the year that Roshi Bernie brought his wife's ashes to Birkenau.

26:43And that was one of the biggest experiences of my life. But I now wish that I had introduced myself to you and met you. Because I have followed you for so many years. And now we meet. Yes. And it's my pleasure. It's my great pleasure. Thank you. Are you there in the postage stamp? I am. Where Noah is Shoshona there? Oh, I see. Her video is on and it is grass. OK.

27:48Yeah, I'm sorry that you didn't see me. We've been taken back to the weir. Thank you so much. You know, these very witness retreats that Roshi Bernie fostered in Auschwitz, Birkenau. You cannot quite grasp how this was for us who were in those retreats. I still can't quite wrap words around it. Except to say that we began this exploration about grief being a doorway. To the experience of intimacy. And the kind of fluidness that you swim in.

28:48That the poet and her dog swam in. That we swam in in this death camp. Yes, into such a deep experience of connection. Not only with each other, but with those who had been murdered there. Not those who have died there. Just call it what it is. Those who had been murdered. Reminding me of what happened in Minneapolis around the murder of René Good and Alex Pretty.

29:49People came together. They wept and praised together. They met in this fluid, if you will, of love that was given death by grief by sorrow. And now really through the solidarity of love. That kind of love raised much by music, by the way. Brought together by music because that's another fluid of connection where original love shines forth. Where your personal area disappears. And what arises is the beauty of being in a singular moment.

30:54So thank you for reminding me of that. These are powerful stories and I encourage the wonderful Mahasanga. Maybe you could put into the chat these stories and we'll have them on the resource page for all of us to come alongside you. And maybe at dinner you all will connect with each other in the vessel of these stories. I'd like to tell a little bit of the story of Thai because as I said, bodhicitta is not something that is generated conceptually. It really comes from an experience of breaking open or falling apart. And not being apart, if you will.

31:58And when Thai entered that space and he said, I met her when she was 20. There were two or three hundred of us in the hall, Natalie Goldberg was sitting next to me. We're all there with our little notebooks ready for the Avatamsaka Sutra teaching and we were just, we stopped. The notebooks dropped into our laps and we listened. As I said to the unfolding of this love story that became powerfully enough, the spark that grew the order of interbeing at that time, the School for Social Service in Vietnam, with his endeavor to bring peace in this horrifying war, between the North and the South, primed by history, by our country.

33:05In the name of anti-communism, it's like, whoa. Thai wrote, as a monk, you're not supposed to fall in love, but sometimes love is stronger than your determination. She represented, he said, and he wrote everything I loved. So the cat, your mother, even your father. My ideal of compassion, of loving kindness, bringing Buddhism into society and realizing peace and reconciliation. So what is really important about this story,

34:06for Thai as I understand it, this beautiful young woman, was an art type of guanyin, of the bodhisattva of compassion, of she who holds the willow branch of healing, she who hears the cries of suffering in this world. That desire in me was so strong and sacred that anything like holding her hand or kissing her on the forehead would have been a violation. She represented all that was important in my life, and I could not afford to shatter it. You could imagine the kind of ambivalence that was actually there.

35:06You know, his own anima, this beautiful young woman, was there within inches of him. But something extraordinary rose up in him, which was the kind of restraint not to objectify or to grasp. He goes on to say, she represented all that was important in my life, and I could not afford to shatter it. But he goes to his little monk's quarters to sleep, and he can't sleep. He's completely on fire. I spent a sleepless night basically talking this powerful and visionary talk about how to bring peace to Vietnam.

36:11I was still awake, and I felt a strong desire to be with her, to sit with her, to look at her, to listen to her. During many moments that night, I felt the desire to go and knock on her door and to sit her to the sitting hall to continue our discussion. But he did not knock on her door. He recognized that in this situation, it would actually be not only a violation of his vows, but of her vows as well. Sometimes in this experience of this kind of archetypal encounter and love, restraint is essential. It's not just, you know what I'm saying?

37:11I know that feeling. Restraint is essential, but the restraint is based by a commitment he had made as a monk to protect his vows and the vows of others. So what happened was, and I think, you know, as we think about the cat, your mother, others, what Tiktok Han did was basically to transform this love in the particular to seeing her and everything and everywhere. And I think this is really critical, that the particular kind of love that we associate in, you know,

38:16sort of the Valentine's moment, so to speak, is a threshold. It is a doorway. And in the most powerful circumstances, that doorway leads one to this place where love is, if you will, distributed equally among all beings and things and you are in the distribution itself, if you get that feeling. He says, over time, and this was 40 years later, by the way, my love for her did not diminish, but it was no longer confined to one person.

39:25The importance of bodhicitta, of this, the cultivation of this unselfish heart, which is not transactional, if you will, not wanting to get something for having given something, which is really critical. Norman Fisher talks about awakening as being a manifestation of fundamental unselfishness. I love that, very simple explanation.

40:29But in this field, there is a critical vector. And that is the recognition that Thai had, that I think you have, that our lives are not simply about making our lives better. The bodhisattva recognizes that if there is one person suffering, that they must actually meet that suffering. And I am reminded of the story of Avalokiteshvara having gathered all the suffering that was onto their boat and crossing the great river of life to the other shore and feeling this, saving all sentient beings from suffering. And then they turned to look back upon our world to see the world completely repopulated

41:33with suffering beings and they break into 10,000 pieces in order to arrow suffering beings from the hell of their lives, 10,000 eyes, 10,000 hands. And so in the vow of the bodhisattva, which is the impossibility of that vow, but we take it anyway every night. And we say in that vow, creations are numberless. And we mean not only the manifestations of suffering outside of us, but also in the landscape of our own minds, the fabrications, the narratives, the stories that have been driven into us by our families, our society,

42:36or that we have magnetized to in order to give us a sense of coherency, of ego, of small self, creations are numberless, and then you vow. I vow to free them all. And then delusions are inexhaustible. I mean, you're already exhausted. You've just made this commitment to feel free all creations, and now you get this next problem. Delusions are inexhaustible in your panting, you know, on the wrong side of the shore, so to speak, the wrong bank, so to speak. And you're going, no, I have to take another vow. Delusions are inexhaustible, and you go, no kidding. And the translation, the four vows are the four noble truths, actually,

43:36but they're the retranslations, the four noble truths by the great Tendai monk, Zee. The actual translation goes, I vow to put an end to them. I said to Bernie when we were working on the translation of the four vows of the Bodhisattva, because that's what we're talking about here. He said, you can't translate. I said to Bernie, I mean, you can't stock them. That's stupid. That's not what we do in the charnel ground, from God's sakes, Bernie. I said, we have to transform them. You know, we've got to deal with it. He said, well, that's not what the translation is. It's not the correct translation. I said, look, we're in the 21st century. A lot of problems. We can kind of bring this up today. You know what I'm saying? So we said, we vowed to stop them, put an end to it, and said, nah, I vowed to transform them.

44:38I'm going to work that edge, because again, what Henry and I and you've been showing us some vego or this encounter with samsara, with duku, with suffering. That's the edge, the charnel grounds, that we are called to dance in. And then the third one is reality is boundless. And this is what Henry talks about in terms of original love. And I've been kind of jelling with original intimacy. Reality is boundless. And I often say, why, you know, do we have this kind of tendency? And this is one of our vows. Do not cultivate a mind of poverty in yourself and others. Reality is boundless. Don't be dull and bored. Dang. Look at the gift of where we are.

45:40Karan, thank you for those chocolates. The mountain views as the sun is beginning to move into the western direction. The clouds having almost disappeared and you thought we'd be in rain all week. Reality is boundless. And then you make this promise, I bow to precede it. I mean, let's get down. And then the last vows, I or the awakened way, original love, the awakened way is what? Honest or passable. And then what? Get down. Like Henry says.

46:42This is not about, woof. You know, being in the Slimy Lamby. What was that? No, this is embodied life now in this. The most important thing really is right now. It's not other than right now. What is your right now? And the vows point to exactly that. The awakened way is unsurpassable. I vowed to embody it, to live it in this medium in this moment. So bodhicitta. It is this extraordinary gift that always resides within us as a deep and inexhaustible spring.

47:45And some of us have put a hard stone over the great well. And the practice and coming together in the way that we are is about lifting off that, well, the heavy stone of our defenseness, of our defenses, of our need to describe things. And as we conclude, I can say as someone who is moving into her 84th year, I feel deeply about this more and more every day as my life becomes shorter and yours does too. At the end, we chant those vows at the end of the day, at the end of a practice day,

48:46and then there is another vow we take. And we say, life and death are of supreme importance. Time passes swiftly, and opportunity is lost. And awaken, awaken. And then the line always hooks me. Do not squander your life. Don't miss the opportunity. No matter how hard it is to take, when Rosie, the dog, is dying or the gurney is being run away from the recovery bay to the big operating theater, or the bite flips you on your head,

49:49and you realize the mind is expressing itself in another way so the heart can open. The world needs brave and tender people. Don't squander your life, please. So we will take a breath, and there will be practice at 5.30. I think Henry is going to be in this endow. I'm going to go back to my little place and do my thing, which is called lay down until 7.40, but I'll step back in. But as you sit or wander in this beautiful little forest that we have made,

50:49sit with the question of how I can actually not continue to spawn, but to give as deeply as possible, because the value of unselfishness cannot be measured. Thank you for your presence. Thank you, Henry. Happy Valentine's Day. And I want to say big love to the residents. Oh my gosh. Big love to Manny, Deborah, and Codo, and David, and all those under the hood, Bodhisattvas.

51:49You know, one of the things behind that incredible walk of peace that the monks took, I only read it early this morning, was one young woman holding all of the planning, the housing, the feeding, the appointment. One young woman was the master heart, without which that walk could not have happened. And I look at our little team here in that way. I'm so grateful for you all. And I hope to discover her name, maybe one of you will discover it, because I'd like to name her name this evening, because so much is done that is hidden. Thank you very much.