Here the questioner defines it as wise compassion rather than compassion that can perpetrate an issue or pattern by not reflecting necessary movement for growth. I’m a bit less clear on the definition given, but the question about tough love is quite pertinent for many people today. The late, great teacher Chogyam Trungpa, who founded Naropa, the Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, used to call upon his students to distinguish between what he called enlightened compassion and idiot compassion, the latter being an ungrounded sense or feeling that comes up in people who do not truly understand compassion.. It’s something they tend to project but it may not be very grounded.

In many ways, people have the same split in terms of what they consider love. What you might call idiot love is a notion that love is only soft and fuzzy and nothing else. In other words, to take someone on about their behavior or their attitudes these people feel is not really love. They call it something else. However, this kind of love does not make for very deep relationships, does it? And if one feels that love is only supportive and is eternally non-confrontive, then we must inquire about the fruits of this kind of love. What has been called “tough love” generally refers to loving someone enough that you would actually risk their rejection of you in order to reflect the nature of their behaviors or perhaps their attitudes. It’s not just being argumentative, as some people have seen it, but it really involves some level of risk on the part of the one who is offering this love.

For example, most parents would prefer to speak to their children in voices that are warm and soft, offering encouragement and support all the time, and they would also prefer nonviolence in their relationships with their children. However, assume a young child, perhaps who is lost in his own internal world of imagining, wanders into the street. Further, imagine that the parent notices that a car is coming down the street. Now his or her response to this critical situation is to fly into the street and grab the child, pushing him or her to the curb on the far side of the street, and perhaps in so doing the parent knocks the child down and maybe even falls on top of the child. Now to the child, this seems like a pretty violent behavior or set of behaviors on the part of the parent. Or perhaps in the parent’s fear for the child, she or he yells at the child or pushes the child roughly to get to the other side of the street.

Once again, this can be seen as pretty violent behavior to the child. In falling, the child might scrape various body parts and maybe gets a bloody nose and some painful bumps and bruises. Clearly in such a situation, simply calling to the child in a loving voice might not spare the child a disastrous complication. Thus the tougher approach actually turns out to be the more loving approach.

In the same way, during the often rebellious stages of adolescence, the more loving stance might be the tougher stance. This is particularly true when the adolescent needs a reality check on their acceptable or not-so-acceptable social behavior, or particularly if there is substance abuse involved. This same kind of tough love, or the approach of tough love, can be seen when people have enough courage to confront other adults, perhaps friends or relatives, whom they love but who may be alcoholic or addicted to drugs. It turns out that an active, direct, perhaps confrontational approach shows more love for the person than does simply sitting by and letting the person destroy himself or herself.

As most of you know, avoidance of the proverbial elephant in the living room doesn’t invite change. Rather, it invites more of the same behavior as well as a silent type of collusion between the parties in whatever the problem area is. Most of you probably know people who are on a spiritual path and sometimes, for their own selfish reasons, want to avoid conflict at all costs. This may feel like the smoother path, but it can also be a pretty costly path. If you are around someone who is engaging in behaviors that you can see are destructive, either to that person or to others on the scene, then you really must ask what would love do in this situation? Indeed every situation must be carefully considered on its own merits rather than generalizing some standard and trying to apply it to everyone else in the form of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.”

But it is important to notice whether your response to another person, particularly one in a precarious place, is coming more from love of the other person or love of your own comfort zone. Indeed, always ask what would love do. Try to look beyond simply what might feel the most comfortable for you, and then apply both love and skillful means, and through them chart your course of action. Yet, try to do so from a point of calm neutrality somewhere within your heart. If you get activated and begin interacting from some emotional charge that drives you, then you're coming from a false notion of yourself. It seems as though we’re talking about that a lot this evening. Actually the self always bears watching. That’s just a given, friends.

Then you might find that there are situations where someone needs to hear the hard truth, and you realize that none other than yourself will offer it to them. So you ask, what would love do? That question is kind of a provocative one, but I’d like to suggest that you let that question be your constant companion and that you look deeply within for the right answer. Don’t just necessarily take a feel-good answer, go deeper than that, and then you’ll have your answer, you see?

I love this question since the questioner actually realizes the answer in the end. But perhaps I can shed some light on the process that’s involved here. Usually when one hears a charge like, “You think too much,” what the other person is trying to say is that you get lost in your mental processes. This tends to keep you or keep one who does this from being truly present in the moment and being off somewhere, either the past or the future, trying to figure out something. Thoughts arise as a way of the mind letting you know you have not yet died. After all, a mind that is perpetually bored thinks it might actually have lost the body or something, and it will go to great lengths to reinforce the fact that you are still living.

The mind thinks that this is what its job is, to stay alive and to continue to give you feedback that you are alive or that you are staying alive. You may even notice at times that the mind can really juice it up with thoughts and feelings it delivers to the whole of you. It can relive a stressful experience, perhaps several times over, and it can recreate all the emotional reactions you felt at the time, and it can do it with such precision and such attention to detail that when you really analyze the process it’s truly amazing.

I mean the mind is really creative at doing that, isn't it? I think all of you  have had those experiences. What generally happens is that you go along as a willing participant, and you relive the stressful episode with all of the physical reactions thrown in. Perhaps your body temperature goes up, perhaps your blood pressure goes up, you may get sick to your stomach or find yourself perspiring profusely, or many other things.

So how does the mind do all this? By giving you thought feelings, and I use this term because the thoughts and feelings are coming so quickly in one of those instances that it’s impossible to tell them apart. So in the case of thinking too much, generally speaking, perhaps those who are around you are saying that they feel you are caught up in your own mental processes and are not really relating to or with them. Your mind may be dominating the moment so much that it leaves no room for others to be connected to you in a way that is meaningful for them. Now this, too, is the result of a false notion of self, perhaps the notion that you can somehow get all the answers you want or need from your mind. Maybe the mental body has begun to feel a little superior to the other bodies, the physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies. And maybe it’s gloating a bit about its power to kind of take over all these other levels. So those who are close to you can actually feel something is going on when that mental body is taking over, and in some cases it may feel to them as if you, or the you to whom they are relating, just left.

So the solution is here really to watch your thoughts, just as you suggested at the end of your question, but to not be fooled by thinking them real or right in some way. If you can observe them with a sense of curiosity, you can learn a lot about the way the mind works. When a thought arises, ask yourself, “So where did that thought come from,” or maybe you ask, “So how is it that in a sea of thought possibilities, I came up with this one?”  Just ask the question and then drop the whole scenario. It’s important to give the mind the message that you’re watching it, and that you have the power to disengage from its projections at any time you choose. Then disengage.

Now the place to practice observing your thoughts is probably first in meditation exercises. This way you don’t have to worry about whether someone else is feeling pushed away by your mental processes when you start observing your own mind. Find each thought that arises as interesting or perhaps amazing, but don’t get lost in the thought stream, just notice and let it go. Then when you get facile working with the mind in this way you will discover that you can observe your own mind while you are relating with other people, and this gets quite interesting because you learn to identify projections arising both in your own mind and those arising in the mind of the other person or persons.

I should give you one word of caution here. Be careful not to let judging mind come into the picture and get to chewing on the relative rightness or wrongness of either your projections or those of the other person. Just learn to be a good observer and a curious one at that. That will take you a long way.

This is a question that probably many of you can relate to in one way or another. Indeed, as one grows spiritually one becomes more aware of the powerful consequences of any impulse, whether acted upon outwardly or not. Then sometimes a level of self-judgment arises that complicates the matter even further. So as one grows, it is natural to expect a higher level of functioning from one’s own self. However, while just about every spiritual aspirant would like to avoid the mental afflictions of negative mind states, they do serve a purpose. Our questioner asks if these negative states or mental states are necessary, and that’s an interesting way to approach this area, by looking at what might be necessary.

In a perfect world or even in a perfect scenario, it would seem as if such states were not necessary at all. If they have any necessary meaning, it will lie in the fact that often it seems to take an experience of a negative mind state to demonstrate the areas in which one is not yet clear. Know this:  episodes of anger, irritation, frustration, guilt, depression, hostility, blaming, etc. all come from the same root, and it’s the root that should always be in focus for dealing with them. These, and other negative or afflictive mind states, arise from a false notion of oneself. They can’t come from anything else. In the moment of their arising, the ego is simply carrying an emotional charge, and it is that charge that is felt in moments of eruption or even in lesser states of frustration.

Thus, when any of you have an episode, say, of becoming irritated with someone else, it is wise to examine first of all the emotional charge. How do you feel it? And how does it move through your body? Second, inquire within as to why, when the charge arises, you have a pattern of reacting in a specific way. Perhaps you snap at the other person or become critical, or maybe your ego uses ridicule in such situations. Become completely aware of your patterns so that when you next feel the charge arising you can intervene before the habitual pattern takes over. This is kind of the secret to ironing out the wrinkles here as we move along spiritually.

In reflecting on experiences that have triggered, let’s say, the eruptive pattern in the past, try to remove your focus from the other person and investigate deeply how it is that this false self got into the mix in the first place. How did it cause you to lose your grip on your beautiful nature, your true nature. This kind of investigating inwardly will lead you to experience probably a number of things, but mainly compassion for others who may have similar patterns. Eventually you will discover that the compassion also extends toward yourself. When you can hold a field of compassion, you will find it is a forgiving field that is very vast and also very healing. Believe it or not, this is your natural state.

You know, one of the things everyone has to learn is how to let the past be the past. When your mind drags up old events wherein you are not your best self, what good does it do? It may raise a critical nature or it may raise a tendency to demean yourself, but these, too, are reflections of a projecting non-clear ego. Of course it’s important to have remorse for those instances when or where and for whatever reason you slipped a bit. Remorse is a type of purification. I suppose there’s several ways to do remorse. You could just talk to the person and say you’re sorry, but if you really want the purification, you might visualize yourself doing some prostrations to the person at or on whom you erupted.

If you can, try to see the other as a Buddha who is in your life to help you learn to curb inappropriate reactions or perhaps just help you see where you are not yet clear. As you learn to clear these areas, you associate more with your true nature rather than the false self who was careless with an emotional charge and perhaps took aim at another person.

As you learn to internalize and ultimately identify more with your true nature, the false notion of yourself begins to dissolve. In this case, the false notion was seeing and believing in the part of your psyche that got careless in a stressful moment. I realize that when one first begins to wrestle with such concepts, the object of focus, that is your false self, becomes pretty slippery. You will find it’s difficult to get a firm grasp on the part of your psyche that you are trying to heal. However, with practice you will ultimately see through the false self and you will see into or into the greater self or your own true nature. It will take some practice of course and maybe some ruthless scrutiny as well, but I assure you it will be well worth your efforts in the end.