Love 2.0 (19 page)

Love’s second precondition is connection. This is no less true for self-love than for positivity resonance with others. Truly loving yourself requires that you slow down enough to truly meet yourself heart to heart, letting the heart of your
I
resonate with the heart of your
me
. Allow time to reflect on your inherent strivings for goodness. Tune in to the messages your body sends you. You can’t simply rush from one activity to the next, attending forever outward, and expect to fall into self-love. Indeed, you might let rushing about serve as your cue to switch gears.

Self-love, we’ve seen, is not the same as having an inflated,
narcissistic view of yourself or high self-esteem. These often hinge on good outcomes, making you rigidly guard against negative feedback. When bad news crashes through, it sends you into a free fall. Self-love, by contrast, is steadier, more peaceful. This inherent calm arises because it’s not predicated on good outcomes. You can learn to be a friend to yourself through thick and thin, through good times and bad. Indeed, it’s in the toughest times that harboring compassion toward yourself makes the biggest difference. Practice standing by your own side during hard times, with openness and goodwill, and you’ll appreciate the steady security self-love offers you. It safeguards you from plunging into despair.

Self-love buys you even more. It’s the currency in which all other forms of positivity resonance trade. When your reserves of self-love are low, you can scarcely meet the gaze of others, seeing yourself as either beneath or above them. A chasm forms between you and others that slashes your odds of forging true connections. Yet when you practice and bank self-love, you become rich with emotional reserves. You’re more able to recognize sources of goodness in others, to see and fulfill others’ yearnings to connect, no matter their circumstances. The next chapter describes how to do just that.

CHAPTER 7

Loving Others, in Sickness
and in Health

WHAT IS RICH? ARE YOU RICH ENOUGH TO HELP
ANYBODY?

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

L
ove, in its old-school version, seems to love similarity. Study upon study bears this out. People are most drawn to others who share roughly their same level of physical attractiveness, their same degree of financial wealth, their same physical abilities, their same lot in life. Each person, then, tends to have a small, circumscribed set of “loved ones” whose beauty, wealth, health, and ability are not too different from their own. Your attraction to similar others seems to keep the playing field level.

Yet attraction like this also stratifies. Seeking similarity in your companions invites endless social comparisons as you continually size people up, judging whether they’re worse off or better off than you. When you judge others as having it worse than you, you may even feel relief at your own relative good fortune. Or maybe you feel some form of aversion: pity for their plight, fear that their unfortunate lot in life may one day be your own, or unspoken anger at them for bringing
their misfortune on themselves. Regardless of which emotions emerge as you look down on others, the distinctions you’ve already made between you and them—and the judgments that go with it—create a gulf between you, a gulf that erodes your potential for authentic love.

A similar gulf forms when you judge others as better off than you. When you see others as having more than you—more beauty, more wealth, more happiness—you come to see yourself as relatively disadvantaged. This can stoke fires of envy, or of self-pity. In looking up to others in this comparative way you stratify your social world into haves and have-nots. Most poignantly, though, you limit your own opportunities to experience the healing powers of positivity resonance.

For some people—and you may be one of them—social comparisons like this happen constantly. When encountering someone new, without a moment’s thought, you size him or her up, placing the person on a rung above or below you. Although this habit may seem innocuous, it fuels an often imperceptible greed that constricts love’s radius. Greed thrives on the illusion that good fortune is a scarce commodity, that another’s gain is your loss, and vice versa. It leads to a guarded stance toward others that creates and reinforces distance. Greed makes you cling tightly to your own good outcomes, fearing anything that might make you lose a foothold on the rung on which you find yourself. You look down at those below you with pity, fear, or irritation, and up at those above you with envy or desperation. You grab at opportunities to get more “goods” for yourself, with little regard for whom you may be pushing aside or harming along the way. Through the mere act of ranking others, greed slithers in to create a false social topography that utterly denies the inherent sameness and oneness across all people.

The truth is that there’s no such ladder. When it comes to the things that matter most, others are neither beneath you nor above you. Time and again, studies show that the happiest among us are the ones who’ve simply shed this pernicious habit of social comparison. When you learn to see others through the lens of sameness, instead of through
the lenses of downward and upward comparisons, you come to recognize that others’ difficulties are also your own difficulties, either at present, or at some past or plausible future moment. You also recognize that their good fortune doesn’t subtract from your own, and it does you no harm whatsoever to celebrate it. Indeed, you multiply your own riches when you do so.

Love’s boundaries, as we’ve seen, need not be constricted, its vision need not be myopic. Love is both open and caring. While love like this obeys the bedrock preconditions of safety and connection, and is in part defined by some form of shared positivity, it does not hinge at all on you and another sharing precisely the same positive emotional state. Given the many factors that shape each person’s emotions, an exact matching of inner experience would be exceedingly rare and can hardly be expected.

Fortunately, love doesn’t require the absence of unpleasantness or misfortune. Nor does it require the presence of any certain form of pleasantness or good fortune. Awareness of these fundamental truths opens the entire spectrum of human experience as opportune moments to cultivate positivity resonance. Whether in sickness or in health, good fate or bad, love remains possible. In this chapter, I share techniques for accessing two forms of love that may perhaps be less intuitive to you: loving through and despite another’s suffering, and loving through and despite another’s good fortune.

Compassion: Meeting Suffering with Love

By nature’s design, we all recoil from pain. Suppose you’re cooking dinner with brand-new cookware and mistakenly pick up that fancy, all-metal, oven-ready pot lid, forgetting to use a pot holder. It’s only natural that you drop the lid in a clamor as you yank your hand away. The haste of your recoil probably spares several layers of skin. And so
it may seem with suffering of all sorts. Your first instinct may often be to look, leap, or pull away, or otherwise hang back. Increasing your distance from the source of pain can seem like the best way to spare yourself the added suffering that may come from being too close to it.

Compassion does just the opposite. It moves toward suffering, not away from it. It seeks connection, not distance. Compassion is what rouses the father who, without a moment’s thought, rushes toward his bloodied child after a playground accident, scooping her up in his arms to comfort her and attend to her wounds. It fuels the hospice volunteer, who reads poetry to the gentleman she met just last week who’s facing imminent death from colon cancer. It can move you to gently place your hand on a coworker’s arm, as you absorb her recounting of the difficulties her family is now enduring. Indeed, the latest evidence from studies of primates (both human and nonhuman) suggests that compassionate responding like this is just as natural, just as hardwired, and just as beneficial to our species as is our evolved instinct to recoil from burning sensations and other forms of physical pain.

Compassion
is
love. It flowers when you recognize some kind of physical or emotional pain within the other person. I dare say that no human experience is purely 100 percent good. Life experiences are instead virtually always some rich amalgam of good and bad. Think of it as a vibrant tapestry, in which the gilded threads of love and good fortune are interwoven among the darker threads of pain, sorrow, and loss.

Equally true, no human experience is purely 100 percent bad, nor need it be. Even the heaviest of human experiences—sudden grief or joblessness, natural or human-orchestrated disasters and other brushes with mortality—can be lightened appreciably when you recollect simple truths such as “this too shall pass” or “I’m not in this alone.” Indeed, such braiding of adversity with hope and love, of destructive with more reassuring emotions, is the secret to resilience. Resilient people are the
ones who bend without breaking and who eventually bounce back from even the most difficult life challenges. Instinctually, they can see some form of light in the darkness they face. In study after study, my collaborators and I find that it is precisely this infusion of positive emotions into negative emotional terrain that drives resilient people to bounce back.

Perhaps you come by this sort of resilience naturally. For whatever reasons, you may have little trouble finding the value in difficult experiences, even if it’s only to discover the depths of your inner fortitude or your social support. But maybe resilience doesn’t come to you naturally. Maybe you flounder in the wake of upsets and struggle to regain your footing. Rest assured, people can and do become more resilient in time. All it takes is practice. With repeated practice, you can build new emotional habits that fuel a newfound and well-earned resilience. You, too, can bounce back from the many adversities you endure. And when you do, you’ll also discover a renewed capacity to offer positivity resonance to others, helping others to heal, grow, and bounce back as well. The place to start is with your own suffering.

Try This Micro-moment Practice: Use Your
Own Suffering as a Cue to Connect

Whenever pain, suffering, or any form of adversity weaves its way into your own experience, take that very moment as a cue to practice compassion, to take tender care of yourself. Depending on the exact nature of your circumstances, your self-care may be swift, like yanking your hand away from a burning hot surface, or slow, like taking time to read or write poetry when you feel lost, numb, or otherwise disoriented. In either case, bring your full awareness to your painful predicament, putting a metaphorical (or literal) hand on your own shoulder as you witness your experience of it. The kindness and awareness that you give
yourself draws more of the gilded threads into the tapestry of your own experience. There’s no need to deny or suppress difficult feelings. Simply allow the good and the bad to sit side by side, so that they can inform and influence each other. In doing so you plant seeds of hope: Even as you fear the worse, you yearn for better.

Remind yourself that whatever painful predicament you now endure is—at this very moment—being faced by others as well. When it comes to suffering, after all, there’s scarcely anything new under the sun. While the particulars of your predicament may be unique, the bones of it are not. At one level or another, you’ll be able to recognize the shared elements in your difficult circumstances, whether it’s physical pain, social injustice, uncertainty about your own or another’s health, a crushing influx of demands, rejection, or a disorienting lack of direction. Take a step back from your own suffering and imagine yourself connected with others who suffer similarly. This is the first step toward compassion. No matter who or where these others may be, no matter whether you know them, you’re connected to them through your shared experience of this difficulty.

It’s only natural, when you suffer, to yearn for your distress to pass. Although this wish may already be intense, I suggest you make it larger still. Let that wish expand horizontally, to encompass both you as well as others who suffer similarly. As you do, articulate some version of the following wish to yourself:

Experiment with self-compassion in this more encompassing manner and you coax yourself out of the narrowband focus that all but defines your own difficult passages. As your awareness expands, you become less self-absorbed, more open and attuned to the suffering of others. This broadened perspective often provides the toehold you need to reverse the downward spiral that threatens to drag you into despair or self-pity. It begins to lift you on the warm winds of an upward
spiral. It also conditions your heart to become more oriented toward others, more attuned to their difficult passages. You are no longer alone.

With repeated practice, you un-numb yourself. Your awareness of others’ suffering grows sharper and clearer. Indeed, whenever you become aware that the other person with whom you connect suffers, love and compassion become one and the same. Given the ubiquity of suffering in this world, the appropriateness of compassion is widespread. Even so, when you can trust simple truths like “this too shall pass” and “we’re in this together,” you won’t be overcome by the weight of others’ suffering. You’re better able to offer a steady source of comfort to the suffering person you’re with.