Love 2.0 (13 page)

PART II

The Guidance

CHAPTER 5

Loving Kindness

LOVE DOESN’T JUST SIT THERE, LIKE A STONE;
IT HAS TO BE MADE, LIKE BREAD;
REMADE ALL THE TIME, MADE NEW.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

H
ere, in part II, I invite you to reconsider love in both personal and practical terms. In your own life, when, where, and with whom do you feel it? What opportunities for love, as yet untapped, can you identify?

In this and each of the following chapters, I get specific. I describe a range of activities that you can use to expand love’s radius in your own life.

Because my own research program has uncovered considerable evidence over the past decade on the benefits of meditation, I offer at least one meditation practice in each of the next four chapters. But don’t worry. If you suspect that meditation is not for you, I’ve got plenty of other practices for you to try. I call these “micro-moment practices” because they describe consequential shifts in attention and awareness you can make within a micro-moment.

You need not like or even try every practice I describe. Indeed, I suspect that you won’t. Yet please be open to experimenting. Take time
to observe how the practices affect you and your interactions with others. Find one or more practices that really resonate for you. Then, identify a recurring daily event that can serve as your cue to engage in each chosen practice. “If I’m walking from my car into work,” for instance, “then I’ll practice celebratory love.” Study after study shows that making concrete “if . . . then” plans like this dramatically increases people’s success at self-change. Consider, too, whether you might benefit from making your self-reflections more formal, by using the positivity tracking tools I’ve made available on the website that accompanies this book, at
www.PositivityResonance.com
.

In any case, be ready to see changes. Your potential for love is virtually unbounded. I see at least two reasons for this. First, positive emotions are ubiquitous. Despite the hardwired human habit of scanning current circumstances for sources of danger and negativity, positive emotions are what most people feel most frequently. This tendency toward positivity reflects the reassuring fact that most moments are indeed benign. Right in this moment, for instance, as you are reading this sentence, I suspect that you’re sitting fairly comfortably and that no one is inserting pins into your eyes. So what’s not to like about the present moment? Relax and enjoy it. Look around and you’ll come to realize that you can increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions even further by becoming more attuned to the sources of positive emotion in your midst, be they a welcomed sense of safety, a shimmer of beauty, or a small gesture of kindness.

The second reason your potential for love is nearly limitless is that social interactions are also ubiquitous. Like bees and ants, we humans are ultrasocial creatures. Your life is embedded within increasingly vast networks of relationships, social ties, and broader communities. Just count up the number of people you see or communicate with on any given day. Your tally includes not only family and friends after all but also team members and other work associates, neighbors, and acquaintances, the employees and fellow customers at any business you
happen to visit, and more. Love can infuse and nourish all of these connections—even whole networks of people—just as it infuses and nourishes your own body and mind.

At the heart of love is a feeling—a feeling with both physical as well as mental components. Physically, your whole body feels relaxed, with a warmth and openness in your chest, as if your heart were stretching open to let in or embrace another being. This is the feeling that makes you want to move in closer, to listen and observe more carefully. Mentally, you yearn for good fortune for others. You wish them well with great sincerity. You also wish to show how much you care, to enact tenderness and concern. We’ve all experienced love like this at one time or another. It’s that warm and tender feeling you have when you first hold a newborn, or greet a cherished friend after many months, or even years, apart. Some of this tenderness, along with its associated impulse to show care and concern, is even released when you come across a kitten, puppy, or other baby animal. Think here of a time when some small creature drew a slow “Awwww . . .” out of you. If you’re like many people, you recognize this tender feeling rolling through you mostly when you’re with loved ones. Indeed, scientists from Darwin to Ekman suggest tenderness like this honors familial bonds. Yet by now I hope you’re recognizing that your potential for micro-moments of love is far greater. Each time you encounter another—or yourself—you have the opportunity to do so with tenderness and warmth, and with relaxed openness and goodwill. The goal of this chapter, and indeed part II of this book, is to provide specific tools for expanding the circle of those with whom you share the warmth and tenderness of love.

Preparatory Practices

As you read through part II, you’ll notice that most of the practices that I recommend to seed love are solo activities. They are activities
you can undertake completely on your own, just by redirecting your attention, or taking time for self-reflection, or meditation. How can these practices work, you may wonder, if love is only experienced in connection with others? Why not dive right into interventions that alter how you interact with others, such as that you smile, nod, or lean in toward them more often, or mirror their gestures?

Two reasons, actually. The first concerns sincerity. I suspect you’ve encountered people who, in the course of doing their jobs, have been told to “smile at the customers” or “act cheerfully.” While they (and their superiors) may have the best intentions, what emerges on these workers’ faces and in their gestures from following these decrees often feels distinctly forced, or “put on.” Your gut tells you that they don’t really mean it, that they don’t truly care about you, personally. It’s easy to become cynical about such gestures. You wonder, what are they trying to sell me? Your suspicion puts you on guard, bracing to avoid any unwanted influence. Studies have indeed documented clear differences between genuinely heartfelt smiles and the so-called social or unfelt smiles that these workers put on like a uniform. Beyond the fact that genuine smiles uniquely activate the cheek-raising muscles that create (or deepen) crow’s feet at the corners of people’s eyes, genuine smiles also differ in timing from forced or insincere smiles. Sincere smiles tend to arise and then fade away in the span of a few seconds. Insincere smiles, by contrast, are either flashed more quickly, in less than a second, or worn for longer durations, like makeup or a mask. Basically, you, like most people, are not altogether good at putting on a smile in the absence of genuine positive feeling. You are, however, exceptionally good at detecting insincere smiles in others, especially (as discussed in
chapter 2
) when making eye contact.

So one reason to begin with love-seeding activities on your own, rather than in social interactions proper, is to avoid the predictable boomerang effect of trying too hard to adjust your nonverbal actions. To be successful, you’ll need to cultivate genuinely positive social
sentiments from the inside out. People familiar with “method acting” know this well. Instead of mimicking the outward emotional gestures of the character he or she aims to portray, a method actor works to recall and then relive an emotional event from his or her own life that corresponds to the emotion the character is intended to experience. This makes the resulting portrayal appreciably more organic and genuine.

The motto of my home state of North Carolina is: “To be, rather than to seem,” or in Latin,
Esse quam videri.
This aspiration comes from the first-century
BCE
musings of Cicero, the famous Roman philosopher and statesman. Writing “On Friendship” Cicero made the case that without virtue, friendship is impossible. True friendship, as Cicero saw it, was actually rather rare “for there are not so many possessed of virtue as there are that desire to seem virtuous.” Strikingly, the definition of friendship that emerges from Cicero’s writings bears resemblance to positivity resonance as I’ve articulated it throughout this book (especially in
chapter 2
). Friendship, to Cicero, involves complete sympathy in all matters, together with goodwill, affection, and kindness. This sort of heartfelt connection with others is not possible without sincerity. Flattery, or “false statements . . . framed purposely to satisfy and please,” according to Cicero, is inherently damaging. Contemporary science concurs. Feigned positivity resonance creates a toxic insincerity that is damaging perhaps most severely to the person who initiates it. To
be
loving rather than to
seem
loving is an aspiration truly worthy of your time and energy.

The second reason that most of these practices begin in solitude is that genuinely positive social sentiments take time to cultivate. There’s often quite a thicket of self-absorption that needs to be cleared before the fragile shoots of loving tenderness can emerge. Solo activities are vital for this. While these activities do not directly create positivity resonance, they can set the table for an eventual feast of love. I call these practices preparatory. They condition your mind, heart, eyes, and
ears to be more prepared for positivity resonance when true connections become possible. With these practices, you become poised to capitalize on opportunities for love when they arise, rather than remain oblivious or blind to them. Intervening off-line, prior to your interactions with others, may in fact be the best route for creating positivity resonance in its most natural form, guided by your own open heart. As Cicero phrased it, “Unless you see an open bosom and show your own, you can have nothing worthy of confidence, nothing of which you can feel certain, not even the fact of your loving or being loved, since you are ignorant of what either really is.”

Reflecting on Social Connections

The first tool for experiencing more moments of love is one that we discovered completely by chance. It entails simply reflecting, at the end of each day, on the three longest social interactions you’ve had that day, and asking yourself how “connected” and “in tune” you felt with the people with whom you spent your time. These people could be family, friends, coworkers, or completely new acquaintances, and it doesn’t matter whether the same person shows up in more than one interaction. Merely reflecting on whether your potential moments for positivity resonance were in fact realized seems to serve as a gentle reminder about your ever-present capacity for love.

My students and I first included a brief nightly reflection task like this in one of our many longitudinal studies a few years back. We’d originally included it to track group differences in our participants’ experiences of social connection. We expected that, compared to the people in our wait list control group, those who were randomly assigned to learn loving-kindness meditation (LKM) would report more day-to-day social connections alongside more day-to-day positive emotions. They did. What we didn’t expect was that our control group—those
who simply completed the daily surveys yet did not learn LKM—would also show increases over time in both social connections and positive emotions. We’d never seen this before. Across several past longitudinal studies in which we’d asked people to provide daily reports of their emotions, we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings. But in this study, we did. The only difference was that we’d added the social connection questions. With these two questions added to the very end of the daily report form, upward spirals emerged for our control participants as well.

Even more remarkable, increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone. If it weren’t for this pronounced effect, we might have dismissed the result as mere wishful thinking or the possibility that our study participants simply got wind of our interests (in social connection and positive emotions) and told us (through their daily reports) what they thought we wanted to hear. Yet the fact that reflecting on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look.