Love 2.0 (24 page)

This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and
told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, more than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ”

Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.”

As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.” The experience taught him both how and why to be optimistic. He drew on what he learned in TFA and in my course to “overcome probably the most difficult challenge” of his life in ways that have “applicability throughout life.” He called it “incredible” and went on to say, “It is one thing to learn [positive psychology] on paper, and another thing to actually implement it and see real success from it.”

After Jeremy shared his and his students’ stories with me during this interview, I shared with him a sketch of the ideas I’d been developing for
this book, especially my definition of positivity resonance and its preconditions. As he took in these new ideas, he nodded his head in recognition. He too began to appreciate what I’d picked up back in our sidewalk conversation: that the inner changes he’d made in himself—his rekindled hope, his eagerness to savor and celebrate even the smallest of successes, and most especially, his openness to experiment with new ways to lead—created new connections and resources within his classroom. Drawing on what he’d absorbed all those years earlier about the science of positive emotions, together with the values TFA had instilled in him, Jeremy came to see the abstract idea of “classroom climate” as the accumulation of the many real micro-moments of positivity resonance his students created. It was the energy within these micro-moments—the celebrations and the feelings of connection and camaraderie—that sparked newfound capacity and resilience in these previously lowest-performing students. Jeremy admitted that at first “the kids thought it was lame and stupid to celebrate things.” They had to be exposed to the facts about emotions, like he’d been, before they would buy into the new classroom climate he was trying to instill. Even then, their more positive climate was something that they all had to nurture. “It wasn’t anything quick . . . it wasn’t one person, we all bought into this idea, we all were conscious, we all made an effort, and the fruits of our labor were clearly on display. It was just life changing.”

Dear Tisha and Kelly, I’d like to write: Thank you for letting me see how you taught yourselves and your classmates to be so positive. My warmest wishes to you both!

Try This Micro-moment Practice:
Redesign Your Job Around Love

Although positivity resonance can and certainly does unfold completely on its own, without any added thought or intervention, frankly
speaking, quite often it doesn’t. Long-held habits of mind and social interaction often conspire to tempt you to focus on vexing problems or to otherwise judge or hang back from others, perhaps especially at work. The on-the-job changes Jeremy made took courage. He had to make the hard choice to forgo teaching about positive numbers in favor of teaching about positive emotions. Plus, just as he taught math experientially, he also taught about emotions experientially. Teaching in abstractions would surely have taken less time but could hardly have yielded the turnaround results that he sought. So he created games and other means through which his students could open up and connect, and feel safe both to take risks and give their all.

Take some time to do what Jeremy did. Review your own job, your own work routines, your own work attitudes. Which parts of your job do you carry out with, or in the presence of, others? For what proportion of time, during those moments, do you make a conscious effort to connect? Do you slow down enough to really listen and make eye contact? Do you, like Jeremy, allow yourself and others to go “off topic” in ways that build relationships, resilience, and other resources? Maybe you don’t simply need more time, a bigger budget, or higher technology for your work team to meet its highest aspirations. Perhaps you, too, can unlock more individual and collective capacity within your team through positivity resonance. How might you devote more of your energy toward cultivating moments of connection? What new rituals or habits could you create to bring more love into your workday? What metrics would help you and coworkers know whether this investment pays off?

On Love, Science, and Spirituality

I’m an emotions scientist, not a scholar of religion. To date, I’ve written exactly one paper that has religion in its title, and that was merely
a commentary offering my two cents on why religious involvement predicts good health. Yet my own and other people’s efforts to describe the mystical and ultimately ineffable vistas that love opens up is what first drew me to explore how love and spirituality interrelate. So when I was invited by Boston University’s Danielsen Institute to develop a series of lectures on how the science of emotions relates to spiritual development and religious well-being, I was immediately drawn in by the opportunity to dive in further. I delivered those lectures in early 2010. That experience planted seeds in the garden of thoughts and theories that have since grown into this book.

Philosophers, religion scholars, and psychologists alike have long pointed to the gulf that inevitably exists between your embodied experiences and the words that describe them. Your emotional experiences, in particular, can be unspeakably extreme, sweeping you away on free falls into hellish abysses or flights to exalted peaks. At either altitude, the air can get so thin that words turn back, no longer able to reassure you. Words pigeonhole your experiences, yet words are at times your only way to communicate what you’ve been through to others. They offer up reassuringly fixed concepts and categories that become the basis for our shared understandings, our cultures and institutions. Words are the planks in the bridges that cultures have built to span the chasm between individual, spiritual, and emotional experiences and our shared belief systems. Through the further application of words, rituals, and decrees, some of these shared beliefs evolved into organized religions, cultural institutions that claim to explain—and create—those profound and indescribable spiritual experiences, like love, that visit us all from time to time.

I’ve been particularly drawn to religious writings that shine a spotlight on experiences of oneness and connection, because those are part of the signature of love. In these moments, borders seem to evaporate and you feel part of something far larger than yourself, be it nature, eternity, humanity, or the divine. This is the “oceanic feeling” that Sigmund Freud dismissed as a regression to the infantile sense of being
merged with your mother, but that William James and many others have held up as the bedrock of people’s embodied experiences of spirituality. Following in James’s footsteps, I take spirituality to revolve around expansive emotional moments like these. Consistent with the idea that words fail to capture the essence of spirituality, in his 1902 classic,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, James wrote: “Feeling is the deeper source of religion, and . . . philosophical and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.”

More than a century after James equated spirituality with emotions, Karen Armstrong opened her 2009 book,
The Case for God
, with a vivid and harrowing description of what it feels like to make your way down some sixty-five feet below ground level—at times crawling on your hands and knees in complete darkness—to explore the ancient caves on the border of France and Spain where you can view the elaborate paintings created by our Stone Age ancestors some seventeen thousand years ago. She concludes:

To Armstrong, religion is doing, not belief. It’s the effort you put into repeatedly cultivating such peak, unbounded epiphanies that stretch open your heart and mind, and make you more attuned to boundless possibilities.

As Armstrong notes, religion isn’t the only path to expanded modes of consciousness. Back in
chapter 4
I drew on that age-old metaphor about swinging open the doors of perception, first used by William Blake, and then more than 160 years later by Aldous Huxley. Your own commonplace experiences of positive emotions can open those doors as well, expanding your outlook on life and setting off spiritual experiences. At times that expanded outlook is hardly noticeable at all, whereas at other times it can take you by surprise, like a powerful gust of wind that clears away debris and allows you to see things with fresh eyes. The point I wish to make here is that your experiences of love and connection need not overwhelm you to open your perceptual gates. Scientific evidence now documents that far less intense positive emotional experiences reliably open those same doors and raise spirituality. By regularly engaging in the kinds of formal and informal practices I offer throughout part II of this book, you can learn to infuse your day and your life with more of the expanded and spiritual modes of consciousness of which James, Armstrong, Huxley, and countless others write.

Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book,
Living Buddha, Living Christ
, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing. From this vantage point, love, compassion, and other deeply moving spiritual experiences become holy states that you can cultivate through your own intentional efforts to be present, grounded, and mindfully aware of both yourself and others.

Learning to trust that your deepest emotions can lead you somewhere good is what my collaborator and American Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg calls faith in her 2002 spiritual memoir by the same name. Faith, or alternatively trust or confidence, is the usual translation of the ancient Pali word
saddha
, which Salzberg points out literally means “to place the heart upon.” Like Armstrong and Nhat Hanh, Salzberg emphasizes that faith is a verb, an action—something you do—not a received definition of reality or belief system that explains away life’s mysteries. In Buddhism, to have faith is to open your heart to your experiences, or as Salzberg puts it, to be willing “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” Faith is a way of leaning in toward your feelings of love and oneness, trusting that—somehow—they will nourish you and lead you closer to your spiritual higher ground. Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience.

From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book,
Spiritual Evolution
, he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition.

To be sure, casting spirituality as an altered state of consciousness is hardly new. Viewed one way, it’s simply another description of the human practices that yield exalted emotional states in the first place. Descriptions like these didn’t take us very far in the past precisely because they remained on the same “soft” side of the opposition between subjective and objective ways of knowing. Religion has long anchored the subjective side, whereas science anchored the other. Likewise, the
languages of poetry and emotions marked one pole, whereas mathematics and reason marked the other. Spirituality, poetry, and emotions were all deemed soft and subjective, whereas science, mathematics, and reason were all deemed hard and objective. Historically, the two poles simply didn’t have anything to say to each other.