Love 2.0 (22 page)

In the next chapter, I’ll ask you to stretch the scope of your love even wider. Beyond the special people in your life, and even beyond those with whom you interact regularly, I hope to convince you that love’s reach is virtually unbounded. Experimenting with unbridled loving is perhaps the most challenging and rewarding of all.

CHAPTER 8

Loving Without Borders

TO LOVE ONE PERSON WITH A PRIVATE LOVE IS POOR
AND MISERABLE; TO LOVE ALL IS GLORIOUS.

—Thomas Traherne

I
n a world replete with threats, uncertainties, and ceaseless distractions, the urge can be strong to simply look out for oneself. If you’re like most who grew up in Western culture, you’ve absorbed countless versions of this message. I know I did. The messages, both direct and indirect were clear: Be self-sufficient, independent, pay yourself first. You can’t necessarily count on anyone else to look after your needs, so you need to learn to take care of yourself. Indeed, entire economic systems are built upon this premise of self-interest. Many economists have assumed, first and foremost, that people direct all their available rationality toward maximizing their own self-interests. To be sure, a healthy dose of independence and concern for self is no doubt required for success in any culture. Even so, one unfortunate side effect of rugged individualism can be a thick cocoon of self-absorption that all but blinds you to the concerns, gifts, and welfare of others.

Becoming more aware of the inherent value of positivity resonance can help you break free from this life-limiting cocoon. Indeed, study after study suggests that positive emotions, in and of themselves,
unlock your ability to really see other people. When feeling good, then, you’re far more likely to approach each new person as an opportunity for connection and growth. Love, viewed in this way, knows no borders. When love is as modest as a shared interest, a shared inspiration, or a shared hope, you have no reason to withhold it from anyone.

I again draw from the ancient wisdom of LKM in this chapter. As does LKM, I gently encourage you to stretch open your heart wider than you ever thought possible. I first invite you to experiment with extending warmth and goodwill to everyone you know and then to stretch that positive vibe even further to encompass everyone you don’t know. Once you set your sights, mind, and heart on these larger aims, you’ll find countless ways to forge tender, loving connections with everyone, without a single exception.

These are not just idle wishes, empty intentions, or a futile form of magical thinking. In wishing people on the other side of the planet to be happy and peaceful, you need not believe that your wishes somehow metaphysically travel the world to change the course of their day. The point is to change
your
day, by conditioning your heart to be soft, open, and caring toward each new person you encounter, regardless of how remote the prior connection between you may have been. This chapter features both formal and informal practices to help you extend the reach of your love, even in the face of uncertainty or ambiguity.

Redefining love as those micro-moments of positivity resonance you can share with nearly anyone breaks open extraordinary opportunities.

To be sure, extraordinary opportunities pose extraordinary challenges, not only to see the chances for loving connection but also to be ready for them. Micro-moments, by definition, are fleeting. If you blink—or slip into self-absorption—you miss out. Even so, merely seeing opportunities to connect, without being prepared to act, can make you lonelier. To build community and escape painful isolation, you need to teach your heart to be ready. Hone your skills for capitalizing on
those life-giving micro-moments so that, as the river of fresh opportunities for love flows toward you, you’ll be poised to jump in.

Try This Meditation Practice: Loving All

Retreat to a place in which you can sit undisturbed. Ground yourself by placing your feet flat on the floor, and adjust your posture until your body feels both alert and open. Lengthen your spine and lift up your rib cage. Since emotional states are deeply embodied, seek out the posture that feels attuned to expanding love.

Start, once again, by drawing a few slow and deep breaths, resting your awareness on each one as it moves through your lungs and through your body.

Next, bring your awareness to your intention for this session. Articulate this intention silently to yourself. Perhaps it’s to awaken yourself to the vast sea of possibilities for love, or to find joy in connecting with all the people you’ll encounter today.

As you practice, remember to lightly bring your awareness to your heart region. Pay attention to any shifting sensations in your body and face. These physical aspects of your experience matter more than the particular phrasings you choose.

Now, gently call forth the image of a whole swath of people. This might be all the people in your part of town or your region of the country. To do this, you might visualize the view you’d have flying low over your stretch of earth. Although you can’t see individual people, you’re aware that they are there, underneath nearly every rooftop, carrying out the activities of their day, perhaps eating, resting, working, worshipping, or simply moving from one place to another. Expand your awareness to encompass this whole community. Know that it includes people you know quite well, those you know just a bit, as well as those you don’t know at all. You can be sure that each and every one, like you,
has at one time or another yearned for something more in their life, for happiness, for connection, and for an abiding sense of peace. Let your awareness of this fundamental similarity between you and all others infuse the space between your heart and each of theirs. You share the same wishes, the same earth. You breathe the same air.

With your various connections to all these people in mind, silently say to yourself the following ancient phrases, or your own versions of them, offering these wishes from your heart:

Offer each wish in time with the rise and fall of each of the slow and full breaths that you take. Let your goodwill toward all those in your neighborhood, town, or region infuse and soften your heart.

When you are ready, gently expand the scope of your focus further still. You might choose to visualize your entire country or continent, offering your goodwill to everyone residing there, recognizing again that this includes people you know personally as well as an immense sea of those you do not know. Silently repeat the phrases with this now larger expanse of people held gently within your awareness.

Another way to experiment with loving all is to divide the sum of all people into two mutually exclusive and encompassing categories. No need to bring in heavy analytic thinking here. Simply call up any division that makes sense to you, such as “all children” paired with “all adults” or “all girls and women” paired with “all boys and men” or “all those who suffer” paired with “all those currently free of suffering.” You can bring in your own touch of creativity at this stage, perhaps choosing to focus on “all those who are sleeping” paired with “all those who are awake” or “all those on whom the sun shines” paired with “all
those in the darkness of night.” The key is to leave no person out, to encompass all within your consideration. Then, repeat the classic phrases for each subset of your focus, calling forth your heartfelt goodwill.

As you extend these wishes, gently coax yourself to truly feel the sentiment that underlies that simple word
all.
Give this one word just a bit more emphasis than the other words, to nudge your heart just a bit wider with each wish you offer.

As you end this practice session and move on into your day, know that each person you encounter has already been the focus of your loving intention today. Use that awareness to forge new micro-moments of connection.

Unlock Your Opportunities for Focusing
on Others

Outside the formal practice of LKM for all people, it can be heart-stretching simply to notice how much of your attention each day is devoted to your own concerns. There’s nothing inherently wrong with self-concerns. You are responsible, after all, for navigating yourself
through your day, and at times doing so can require planning or strategic self-presentation. Problems arise only when you get swept up in swirls that appear to run on indefinitely. It can seem, sometimes, as if you’ve entered a hall of mirrors, completely alone. All you see reflected back at you is yet another view of the same self-concern, and you can no longer find the way out. Redirecting your focus toward others
is
the way out.

Your intent, of course, matters. Focusing on others comes in many forms, not all of which are generous. It can be yet another selfish act. I spent several years early in my career cataloging the psychological damage done to girls and women who face the message that they can be reduced to how they look. The question an objectifying stance asks is, “What can you do for me?” By contrast, a genuine wish to understand and appreciate who this other person is asks, “Who are you?” and trusts that taking steps to find out will reveal inherent goodness. From this openhearted perspective, caring sentiments surface quite effortlessly.

One way to become more mindful of the degrees of your focus on self versus others is to revisit a typical day—your yesterday—and comb through it episode by episode. In doing so, you uncover the sheer number of untapped opportunities for creating micro-moments of positivity resonance. This added awareness can then inspire you to begin turning toward these recurrent opportunities, rather than let them slip away unnoticed.

Try This Micro-Moment Practice:
Reconstruct Your Yesterday to Uncover Opportunities for Love

Here I walk you through how you can adapt an assessment technique developed by a former collaborator and mentor of mine, Nobel
Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the best-selling book
Thinking, Fast and Slow
. It’s called the “Day Reconstruction Method,” or DRM for short. You can use it to review and evaluate your daily habits of mind as well as your emotions, both actual and possible.

You should know up front that this activity takes time to complete, up to an hour. It’s the insights from it that you can use in later micro-moments. To get started, you’ll need either your journal, or some other pad of paper, and a calculator. Or, you can register to use the free online tools that you can find at
www.PositivityResonance.com
.

Once you’re situated—either at your computer or with paper and pencil handy—your task is to remember everything you did yesterday. It can be difficult to recall the details of a whole day. That’s why the DRM exercise breaks this process down into steps. The first step is to record the times at which you woke up and went to sleep. Then, starting from when you awoke and proceeding sequentially throughout all your waking hours, divide your day up into a string of contiguous episodes. Give each episode a number and a short descriptive name, like “1—stretching my body,” “2—out for a walk,” and “3—eating breakfast.” Write down the approximate times each episode began and ended, avoiding large gaps or overlaps in time. You can think of episodes like scenes within a play. Whenever the characters in, or the setting or purpose of, your daily activities change, call that a new episode. You can, of course, skip past small behind-the-scenes moments, like blowing your nose or using the bathroom. Still, the key is to map out your day in its entirety. With typical episodes lasting between ten minutes to two hours, you may find that your day yesterday can be broken down into fewer than ten or as many as thirty episodes.

Now, here’s the variant on the DRM that can be useful for spotting and unlocking opportunities for focusing on others, with the potential that such moments hold for love. For each and every episode in turn,
record your responses to the following questions as accurately and honestly as you can:

Name of episode:
_________________________

Duration of this episode (in minutes): __________

1. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were other people present, either face-to-face or by phone (do not include asynchronous communications, like e-mails, voice mails, or texts). __________

2. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were you able to focus on the other(s) in respectful and meaningful ways? __________

3. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were you able to attune to and connect with the other(s)’ experiences? __________