Tenzin Palmo Jetsunma is a Tibetan buddhist nun, author, teacher and founder of the Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in Himachal Pradesh, India. In this video she explains the misconceptions we have about love, she says: “The problem is always that we mistake the idea of Love for Attachment. We imagine that the grasping and clinging that we have in our relationships shows that we love. Whereas actually, it is just Attachment, which causes pain. The more we grasp, the more we are afraid to lose, if we do lose, then of course we are going to suffer.”
Tenzin Palmo highlights that genuine love is wanting to someone else to be happy, whereas attachment is wanting someone else to make you happy. “Any kind of relationship which imagines that we can fulfill ourselves through another is bound to be very tricky. Ideally people would come together already feeling fulfilled within themselves and just therefore appreciating that in the other, rather than expecting the other to supply that sense of well-being.”