Love 2.0 (18 page)

Then there’s another form of positivity altogether, a kind that you put on, like an artfully applied mask. This form of positivity can be well-meaning, to be sure. People often come to it having learned a bit about the science of positive psychology, enough to make them resolve to be more positive themselves. Despite this good intention, this form of positivity can be a slippery form of self-deception. You can sometimes yearn so badly to be happy that you fool yourself into believing that you are.

A telltale sign that betrays this form of positivity as a counterfeit state is that it remains above the neck. It shows up in the channels that you can most readily control—your words, your facial expressions, and your self-talk. But it doesn’t take root in your body or in your heart, and so it doesn’t fully flower into openness. The physical, sensory, conceptual, and spiritual openness that is the hallmark of genuine emotional positivity is simply absent. I call this
eyes-closed positivity
because its outlook on the world is self-protective, not immersive. Indeed, it can be quite narrow and rigid. Although it arises out of your sincere yearning for good feelings, it can also reflect an abiding ignorance about what the full experience of positivity means and entails.

Making matters more complicated, eyes-closed positivity is a double-edged sword. At times it can actually be useful. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase: “Fake it ’til you make it.” At times, that can be great advice. My caveat, though, is while you’re faking your positivity, you’re merely seeking a springboard into the real thing. You are not reaping the benefits of genuine positivity.

The other side of the sword is blunt and causes far more damage. Eyes-closed positivity cuts you off from precious opportunities to access true positivity. This happens when you strive to find bliss in your safe cocoon, mistaking it as the end, not the means.

Although self-praise and other forms of positive self-talk can
seem
like good strategies for increasing your well-being, whether or not they are depends on whether you “walk the talk.” Put differently, knowing whether your self-talk is positive or negative simply isn’t enough. The positivity you harbor for yourself needs to be fully embodied. Indeed, all true emotions
are
embodied. “Wishful thinking” positivity, by contrast, remains forever imprisoned within your mind. It does you little good up there, remaining just talk.

The embodied positive regard in which you hold yourself has all the markers of a truly positive emotion: It opens you, relaxes you, and helps you see the larger tapestry of life in which you are embedded. It doesn’t tempt you to shun negative feedback or failure. Rather, it supports you, like a well of reserved resources, when you need to take a close look at the hard facts of your life. Above all, genuine, heartfelt self-love is flexible and grounded in reality.

These critical ingredients are missing from much of the positive self-talk prescribed in the self-help industry: flexibility, openness, and realism. Absent these attributes, positive self-talk can morph into cold-blooded narcissism. It becomes inner chatter that in fact serves to insulate you from healing connections with others. It drugs you into thinking that while you’ve got your own life together, most other people decidedly do not, and therefore they’re hardly worth your time. Smugness can prevent you from being a true friend to yourself.

The key to knowing whether self-correction or self-congratulations are in order is to assess the degree to which either is commensurate with your actual circumstances. This is where the classic tools of cognitive behavioral therapy can work wonders. What evidence backs up your self-talk? Is any evidence being ignored or distorted? Are there parts of the bigger picture that you are conveniently keeping out of view, whether negative or positive? The idea is to check your self-talk against the full reality of the situation as evenhandedly as you can.

Whatever your tally of self-criticism or self-aggrandizement amounts to, this same number represents the opportunities you have
each day to practice something altogether different: gentleness instead of harshness, openness instead of tightness, flexibility instead of rigidity, an inner smile instead of that all-too-familiar inner scowl. This is what learning to be a true friend to yourself entails.

Try This Micro-moment Practice: Narrate
Your Day with Acceptance and Kindness

Your inner voice narrates your experience—your days, and indeed, your life. Your self-talk can feel unbidden and completely outside of your control. Yet truth is, it isn’t. Like any habit, with awareness and effort, you can change it. After you’ve witnessed your own self-talk for a day or two, and perhaps tallied instances of your inner harshness or inner Pollyanna, try countering any unfriendly or rigid tendencies with a more accepting, kind, or loving tone. When you notice a shortcoming, instead of berating yourself for it, try gently reminding yourself that other people also struggle with that same shortcoming. Like them, you’re human, you’re learning. Like everyone else, your aspirations and shortcomings are all intertwined in one jumbled skein of experience. This skein will never be all goodness and light, without imperfections or darkness, either now or in some distant, yearned-for future. At the same time, wallowing in your shortcomings—or defensively hiding them out of view—distorts reality. Simply accepting them, allowing them to exist and inform you, can be a radical act of self-love. Meditation teacher and clinical psychologist Tara Brach’s phrase “radical acceptance” can be a useful touchstone for this. Embrace all aspects of yourself, especially when your first impulse is to either turn away from or scold yourself for them. Put differently, experiment with leaning in toward your shortcomings, with eyes and heart open. Find a way of rephrasing your self-talk such that you become a friend to yourself.

It can help to imagine how someone more practiced in love and compassion might respond to you at this moment. My own touchstone for accessing love and acceptance has become an experience I had upon the tremendous honor of first meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I’d been invited to participate in a scientific discussion with His Holiness as part of the grand opening of Richard Davidson’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’d been briefed on the ritual aspects of the event: Following Tibetan custom, on parting, His Holiness would greet us each individually in turn. We were each to bow when he stood before us, and then he would drape a
khata
, a ceremonial white silk scarf, around each of our necks. I knew all this, and indeed I’d witnessed this ritual countless times. And yet, when the Dalai Lama stood before me, I froze. I simply stared into his eyes and absorbed the warmth and benevolence of his demeanor. I did this for too long. I’m sure it was only a few seconds too long, but it was too long nonetheless. What happened next was an exquisitely subtle and loving nonverbal gesture: a slight movement of His Holiness’s face that gently moved me along, as if to say “You’re doing this [ritual] wrong, but I love you anyway.” It was an experience completely new to me. I was simultaneously corrected and loved, and in a public setting, no less. What was especially new to me was the silence of my inner critic, that part of me that would typically scold myself for such a public gaffe. Instead, I gently thought to myself, I bet this happens from time to time. Some people become awestruck in the presence of the Dalai Lama. It happened to me. He’s experienced this before and helped me along without judgment.

This last piece is key: without judgment. That’s what full acceptance feels like. It is loving connection without judgment, without the unreachable conditions of perfect actions or perfect speech. Acceptance—full, radical acceptance—does not hold out for some improvement in your character or your abilities. However you find yourself right here and right now is enough. However broken you feel,
however incomplete, however inadequate. No matter which of your aspirations yet remain out of your reach, you are worthy of your own kindness, your own acceptance.

Who better to practice this level of acceptance with than yourself? You know yourself better than anyone. You know all about your own unmet aspirations and your own shortcomings. To narrate your day with acceptance and kindness means keeping those unmet aspirations and shortcomings in full view, while also taking in your noble qualities. For you—just like everyone else—are a unique mixture of good and bad, of success and failure. Being a friend to yourself means accepting all those parts of yourself, without judgment or harshness, and without sweeping the unsavory aspects of yourself out of view.

When I shared my “frozen khata” experience with an audience at the Environmental Protection Agency some months later, someone voiced “I wish all bosses were like that!” She longed to have a boss who could point out her mistakes while also maintaining full acceptance of her. That is a nice image to uphold, especially when thinking of the times when we are responsible for pointing out someone else’s missteps—whether those of a child or an employee. Yet how does your inner boss treat you? If you find that you boss yourself around with a harsh tone, remind yourself that there’s another, more loving way to treat yourself. As Walt Whitman reminds us, you exist as you are, and that is enough.

Erika’s Story

I see a powerful reminder of how self-acceptance is foundational for positivity resonance in the stories that my good friend Erika has shared with me about her experiences as an amateur musician. For the past few years, she’s enrolled in a summer camp to expand her musical abilities under the tutelage of some of her favorite professional musicians.
She’d learned about this particular camp from a friend who’d attended it himself, a fellow Deadhead she’d jammed with for years. True to his forewarnings, the camp experience was not only immensely rewarding but also immensely challenging. Although she’d played guitar for years, she felt self-conscious in the presence of so many great musicians. She was sure she was among the least skilled students at camp, some of whom were actually career musicians themselves. She reinforced her insecurities by ruminating on certain facts: She’d not been classically trained; she only played a few hours each week; she’d only picked up music theory on her own; and so forth. Although she absorbed the wondrous experiences that the camp offered, she fretted periodically about how she’d be able to solo in front of all those brilliant musicians when she was called to do so. I’m sure you can recognize aspects of the classic imposter syndrome script here. We all read from it when we take up the challenge to push ourselves to the next level.

The camp was designed to be a safe haven for musical exploration. Campers were encouraged to place their full trust in others and to create an encouraging and supportive atmosphere for everyone. In light of inner self-judgments, however, this is easier said than done. Any form of self-consciousness can rob you of the chance to fully immerse yourself in learning something new and can derail peak flow experiences. Erika knew that if she wanted to get the most out of this camp, she’d need to let go of her self-doubts and self-judgments. She credited her longtime meditation practice for helping her keep such thoughts at bay, and for reminding her that her ultimate goal—in both music and life—was to be ever happier, lighter, and more playful. As she described it, it took her both radical self-acceptance and radical presence to “let go” and “lighten up.”

Having worked hard to cultivate a more accepting and lighthearted attitude toward herself, when she was called up to solo on that last day of camp, Erika thoroughly enjoyed it. She also played differently from that day forward. She became “truly open and ready” to take her music
to the next level, to learn how to listen deeply to other musicians as they played together, and to improvise with them in fresh ways. Building on these experiences, when Erika returned to camp the following summer, she had what she called one of the “peak musical experiences” of her life in a small workshop on “Chemistry.” The band member who led the workshop emphasized that musical chemistry didn’t come from musical skill alone. Even two great musicians can completely miss out on it. Hearing Erika recount the take on musical chemistry she’d absorbed here, I couldn’t stop seeing it as an amplified form of positivity resonance: The bodily vibes that resonate between and among people during micro-moments of love could be amplified and made audible by musical instruments. After the band member’s brief discussion of his own experiences and observations of musical chemistry, each student in turn took a chance to improvise with him as he played the drums. While some musical connections emerged, they were all getting the sense that true chemistry is hard to predict. Then Erika took her turn. She started off introducing an idea by playing a few notes in a particular way on her guitar. Her teacher responded on drums. They each listened, they each responded, and eventually they started playing, playfully, together at the same time. It was immensely enjoyable “the way a good conversation would flow, we were on the same page and could finish each other’s ideas.” They played together like this for only three to four minutes, yet when they finished and looked up at each other the teacher pronounced to the class, “Okay, now that’s chemistry.”

Full self-acceptance is what allowed Erika to make the most out of the safety that the camp created. She’s found that lightening up on herself has been essential for getting the most joy out of her music, which comes especially when she’s jamming and improvising with fellow musicians. It’s a lesson that she finds applies to the rest of life as well. Truth is, however much they may try, other people can’t make you feel safe. Only you can do that. When you do, you spring open countless
opportunities to forge fresh instances of that elusive state we call chemistry.

Love 2.0: The View from Here

Loving is a skill. It takes practice. When you set the goal of learning to love yourself, you’ll find ever-present opportunities to practice this new skill, because you’re never further than arm’s reach, or perhaps better said, heart’s reach. Just like all forms of positivity resonance, however, self-love first requires safety and connection. Beating yourself up with the continual harshness of self-criticism is no way to make yourself feel safe in your own company. Likewise, if your self-assessments are unflappably sunny, unhinged from reality, or otherwise blind to your ingrained bad habits, you can hardly feel safe either. A true friend, after all, is the one who tells you the truth. He or she affirms you realistically and often, and yet does not abandon you or grow silent when a negative assessment is prudent. Creating a sense of safety within your own skin is just the same. To access self-love, disengage from harshness in your self-talk, but not from reality. Affirm your positive qualities, but refrain from delusion and self-deception. Be your own compassionate truth-teller.