The Practice of Love

I grew up in Hong Kong. 

Over a decade ago, I went back with my husband and children to visit, and we stopped by the apartment building I grew up in.  We had lived on the 8th floor and knew a family who lived on the 12th. 

As a way of respect, and insinuating a more familial kinship, Indian families use the terms “Aunty” and “Uncle” to refer to friends of their parents. “Upstairs Aunty”, as we fondly called the gentle elderly woman who lived 4 floors above us, was still alive during our Hong Kong visit, so I took my whole family to see her. 

As we sat with her, she fed us and gave us tea, and then magically pulled out various gifts from hidden spaces for my kids.  From somewhere behind the sofa, she pulled out a huge plastic doll – but think more horror movie than something that inspired cuddling - and while her intensions were the most generous and filled our hearts, that doll never made it back with us, except in our conversations and memories. 

One other thing we always remember were these words she said (imagine this spoken in broken English with an Indian accent); “Love.  Love is the only thing.”

Meaning, love is everything. 

I’ve thought about this for a long time now, and the older I get, I realize it is true.  I would, however, modify it in this way: 

The PRACTICE of love is the thing.

Love as a practice is the key piece.  We tend to think of love as a feeling, which it is, but the problem then, is we see it as something we either feel or don’t feel. As if it is something that happens to us or within us, but out of our own control.

Love, however, is not just a feeling, it is an emotional muscle.  As a muscle, it is something we can grow into a strength through practice.  And it can weaken without practice.  As a muscle it is also something we can decide to engage or not engage in any circumstance.

Let’s explore.

LOVE AS A PRACTICE: 

Anyone who has been a long-term relationship (family, partner, friendship, etc.) understands the challenge of different perspectives, needs, wants, values, expectations, interests, priorities, even simple preferences, on those relationships. Even if aligned in these areas most of the time, humans are imperfect, and so not every experience or interaction within any relationship will be a perfect positive one.

While you might love someone, it can be hard to come from love in moments of challenge. It’s harder still if we did not experience that kind of secure and constant sense of love within our primary relationships growing up. 

Coming from love even when it’s hard, however, is that muscle we can build, and I believe it has the power to transform not just our relationship to others, but our relationships to ourselves. 

How do we build the muscle? 

You know when you are trying to read a dry and technical textbook, and your mind wanders?  Or when you are trying to meditate, and your mind goes to your to do list or to what you are going to eat for lunch?  The key in both situations is to just bring your attention back to the present.   It’s like that with love. 

We can build the emotional muscle of love, by practicing bringing ourselves back to love. 

So, let’s imagine for a moment. 

Say you are at an impasse within a significant relationship where you just see something very differently. In the moment, that impasses, the difference, can feel like everything.  Perhaps you start to worry about what it means about your relationship, about your future together.  Your mind wonders to all the possible negative consequences.  It feels uncomfortable and scary. Your partner’s convergent opinion in some way feels like a threat to your connection. 

Take a moment to think about what happens when you feel a sense of threat, especially a threat to a relationship.  Sense it in your body.

Can you feel it?  The tensing, the tightening? 

There is a theory that suggests negative emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness narrow and focus, i.e. they have a narrowing and focusing effect on our attention and thoughts toward the problem, or threat at hand.  It is often associated with the “fight-flight-freeze” response and is thought to serve the adaptive function of mobilizing our energy and resources to help us respond to immediate threats, adversity and challenges.

However, flight, fight, freeze, the body’s threat response, has a cost.  As our perspective becomes narrowed & focused, we become inflexible and defensive. Research has also shown negative emotions not only narrow our focus, but they heighten attention to negative stimuli in our environment (we become more attuned towards negative information scanning for further threats) and enhance our memory for negative events while reducing our memories for positive or neutral ones (so we can learn from and avoid future negative experiences).  All of this is our body’s way of keeping us safe, but if we tilt our minds toward paying attention to the negative and remembering the negative over the positive, you can see how that can lead to a downward spiral in relational connections.

But what if we came back to love?  What if we remembered, this is a person I have loved and who has loved me for so long.  We may not always agree but there are so many wonderful and positive things about my partner.  What if you reminded yourself of your love.  Of the things you love about the person.  The positive qualities.  What happens then?

Can you feel it?  No longer in threat, our body calms and opens.

Love is a release valve. 

Barabara Fredrickson calls it the broaden and build theory of positive emotions.  While negative emotions narrow and focus, positive emotions, especially love I imagine, expand our focus, our thoughts, our mindset, allowing us to think more flexibly, openly and creatively.   This means we see more possibilities, our problem-solving capacity is expanded, we are better able to access our internal resources including our capacity for connection, as well as different potentials for action.  Overall, it means we are more resilient and able to remain connected.

The more we practice coming back to love within our relationships, any relationship, the more we build the capacity and tendency to come from love. Given what we now understand about neuroplasticity, the brain’s lifelong capacity to rewire and change over time based on what we practice, we can likely change the actual wiring of our brains to lean more easily toward love, and love becomes the thing that can help us open and grow our resilience as well as our connection to others. 

THE SELF-LOVE MUSCLE:

Now imagine the same practice, but applied to ourselves. 

One of the arguments we often hear against self-love or self-compassion is that it will make us weak.  It is the idea that we need to push ourselves, be hard on ourselves, to become better and stronger, and if we are too compassionate or kind toward ourselves, we would become lazy and never improve or meet our goals. 

I don’t believe, and nor has research borne out, that laziness results from self-love.  I believe “laziness” (I wouldn’t use that term myself) comes from self-doubt, from fear of failure or discomfort, and likely a host of other internal and external barriers.  Instead, I have witnessed, and experienced within myself, the transformative power of self-compassion. 

Even when directed towards ourselves, love broadens our thoughts, our flexibility and possibilities for response and action, and builds our internal resources and resilience.  It means we have more options for how we show up, it means we are capable of more and can do more.  Hate instead constricts, and self-hate turns us into an enemy of ourselves. 

So, love is also the thing for us.

LOVING WHEN IT IS HARDEST: 

Part of building the muscle of love means we can as a result, always choose to come from love in any given circumstance. 

There is a lot I can talk about here, but the piece of this that I keep coming back to in my life of late is choosing to act from love without an expectation of anything in return. 

This can feel hard. 

There are some deeply important relationships in our lives, it can be with a parent, a sibling, an in-law, maybe even a friend, or most painfully a child, where either the other person is not capable of loving you back in the way you would like, or maybe there has been a disruption in the relationship (no relationship is perfect remember?) and the other person is emotionally turned away from you.   

In this situation, it can feel very painful to keep loving, to keep our hearts open, and so for many of us, our natural self-protective instinct is to turn away as well.  And that can be an appropriate choice.  But this is where I say we can choose still, to act from love.  What if instead of turning away we continued to turn towards the other person? Even if it doesn’t change the relationship, or the other person, it changes us.

Love does not in the end, require being loved back.  We tell ourselves it does, because again we want to protect ourselves.  Nevertheless, if we choose love, even in this most difficult of circumstance, our hearts open. 

Also, I’ve learned this: Giving love, feeling it deep within our core and and acting from that love, can fill us even more than receiving it.  It can be enough. 

Love.  Love is the only thing.