Practicing to have a pure motivation

We want to be people that can love unconditionally, without any inhibitions or selfish intent. However, in reality this is difficult to do genuinely with passion and to feel this level of love. But the key point to remember is that such a motivation can be cultivated through practice.

How do we practice to become a person of altruistic love? Through investing in others. In doing so, selfish thoughts and inclinations may nag at us, but regardless of these, if we choose to simply invest continuously without giving into these inclinations, eventually we will find a genuine motivation of selfless love welling up within.

Just like a great Olympic athlete must practice the same move thousands of times, undergoing great difficulty and pain in the process, eventually the move becomes natural and is done with comparative ease from when she first started. It is the same with selfless love. Through continuous practice what was unnatural and foreign at first becomes an essential part of our character such that we feel uncomfortable in not practicing it.

Spanish Lakes, Gallatin National Forest, MT - June 2013