Love everyone! It's vital that we do - Part III

Part I of this post I described how survival and well-being converge in our ability to love, and in Part II we looked at why practicing love in today’s world is not always easy. In this third and final part, I will share how we might enlist our amazing neurological capacities to maximize our ability to love and feel loved. We need to (literally) let love conquer fear.

Here is how it works.

Our human bodies function like emotional sponges, we literally “vibrate” with each other’s emotions. When we empathize, our body feels what the other feels. In that process, we also automatically want to do something about it, because it turns out that

empathy and compassionate action are neurologically tied responses (how convenient!).

Empathizing, then, requires that we tolerate (or increase our ability of) “feeling with” the other.

So to love is to feel without shutting down; the ability to love is squarely planted in our emotion regulation skills. If we are overwhelmed by feeling another’s emotion, our fear response takes over and we can no longer empathize, connect, or think well. On the other hand, if we are able to sustain the emotion, both parties experience a deeply soothing, meaningful connection.

This means that our difficulty to welcome and tolerate our own internal sensations is the single most central obstacle to experiencing love. Why do we find tolerating our inner sensations so difficult?

First, much of what we are taught and exposed to (not necessarily much of what actually exists) leads us to fear each other. Second, we live in a culture that has perfected vilifying negative emotions and has created technologies to constantly distract us away from them. (And all that even before we consider direct contact with traumatic experiences).

Both problems have the same solution: “practice makes perfect”, as they say, where practice is more powerful than intellectual learning. What does that mean?

If we feel love for each other, what we think has little impact on our actions and decisions. We don’t want to hurt those we love and empathize with, even when we might not like them. We only want the best for them, because, remember, to love is to feel “with”, in our own bodies. While deconstructing misconceptions and biases is always a welcome addition to learning to love one another, without the experience of loving/resonating with one another, intellectual understanding has no hope of making an impact.

In a recent interview, social activist Rev. Jennifer Bailey said that while

“relationships move at the speed of trust, social change moves at the speed of relationships”.

It couldn’t be more biologically true!

So the most important thing we have to learn is attuning ourselves to others and sustaining the activation that that attunment creates in us. How do we do that? Social psychologist Dr. Barbara Frederickson has wonderful resources for the former, and mindfulness practices are an effective option for the latter.

The operative word in both cases being “practice”. Just like the best work out, the best practice is the one you do! Consistency and repetition are the key.

Now, the love and empathy I’m writing about are not dangerous: they don’t imply agreement, or lack of boundaries, or indiscriminate submission to others’ will.

In fact, none of those create physiologically helpful loving moments. While love conquers fear, it doesn’t make us stupid! In fact, it makes us smarter. It allows us to detect more accurately who deserves trust, where to build connections, and where to establish boundaries. Fear, on the other hand, only separates. It compromises our perspective taking, it doesn’t allow us to see context, have nuanced understanding, learn, or act wisely.

Love is not an intellectual experience (of agreement, political alignment, cultural understanding). It’s the momentary, genuine realization by the parties involved of our shared humanity, it’s an experience of interconnectedness. In those moments, no one is better or worse, right or wrong, we simply (and physiologically) “are” together. When that happens, our entire being feels well, good, right. And the added bonus is that we are much wiser as we take action from there.

Love, then, by definition, is a tender spot to be. You have to train for it.

We have to practice fully welcoming what arises within us so that we can be fierce in our capacity to come together and thrive,

both individually and as a species. And learning to love we must: our very survival depends on it!

Love everyone! It's vital that we do - Part II

In Part I of this post I argued that while we physiologically need (and are designed) to love and be loved, in practice that is not always easy to do. The tricky part is that when we were “designed” (many thousands of years ago), our world was quite a bit smaller.

What does that mean? Here is how it all comes together.

The survival of our ancestors depended on their ability to successfully cooperate with each other. But why? As it turns out, cooperation was not needed primarily as a defense against potential enemies (our biological propensity to bond with each other precedes the cultural practice of war). While it is certainly true that we are stronger together when we are faced with a threat, we don’t even get the chance to protect ourselves (let alone exist as a species) if we don’t find a way to grow past infancy! Humans are amazingly sophisticated organisms, but human babies come into the world profoundly underdeveloped (and they take a very long time grow).

In ancient times, the presence of a tight-knit community vastly decreased infant mortality (even more than the presence of biological parents). A long story short,

we evolved to find it irresistible, and physiologically needed for both growth and health, to love and be loved, to care and be cared for.

Especially by those close and familiar to us (as I mentioned in Part I, we default to assuming danger and have to learn what is safe; under favorable circumstances, “familiarity” is how we go from one to the other).

While our genetic make-up is essentially the same as the one of our ancestors many thousands of years ago, our world is not. We live in a much “larger” and exponentially more interconnected world. To love only those closest and most familiar to us might still feel easier, but it is no longer effective. We have to expand our catalog of who and what is safe, because in this new, much larger world, opportunities to overestimate danger (thus actually creating it!) are just about infinite. And living in fear is no fun (nor healthy or sustainable at any level).

So our challenge is to learn to love more broadly than ever. For that to happen, we must allow love to conquer fear.

How does that work? Part III will explain why both happiness and world peace are fundamentally an inside job.

Love everyone! It's vital that we do - Part I

I’m talking about fierce love, love that can cross boundaries of difference, love that can allow for empathy through our own and others’ suffering. We are biologically designed to need such love just like we need oxygen or food. And not just on occasion, but often; and by often I mean daily. With it, we thrive; without it, we suffer (even a great deal).

To be sure, we are not talking about just any kind of love. The love we need like oxygen is the kind activist-scholars such as Dr. Martin Luther Kind, bell hooks, and Rev. angel Kyodo williams have so beautifully and powerfully written about.

While evolution doesn’t primarily care about well-being, but rather survival,

it turns out that survival and well-being converge in our ability to love. Lucky us!

We might be tempted to believe that the instinct to dominate one another is inevitable, or that we are self-made and so others should “pull themselves up from their bootstraps”, or that “one upping” each other is the way to success. Instead, those are becoming our fastest roads to extinction.

But the love we are speaking about is hard work. So what urges us towards it? The good news is that we are designed to find loving and being loved supremely meaningful, energizing, and enjoyable, read: the ultimate road to happiness (that would do it!).

Just in case this is beginning to sound sappy or wishful thinking, let me explain how our need for love is anything but Pollyannaish or lofty (let’s thank modern neuroscience for saving us from ourselves!).

First, the distinction between body and mind, from a neurological perspective, is nonsensical (speaking about the two as separate is starting to sound as accurate as old medical theories based on “humours”). This means that our physical and mental experiences are inextricably intertwined (feeling love/d is a deeply embodied experience).

Second, we are profoundly, biologically interconnected to each other, down to the very functioning of our cells and the very expression of our genes.

Your emotional health and physical well-being are mine, literally, and mine are yours.

This means that we are responsible and dependent on each other for creating the best in each other.

The fact that over the last few thousands of years (the equivalent of a fraction of a second, in “evolutionary” time!) we have become increasingly politically, economically, and environmentally interconnected is not making our need for loving one another any more or less biologically true. Our geopolitical interconnectedness is, however, making loving broadly enough to thrive (individually and as a species) exponentially more urgent and also more challenging (more about that in Part II of this post).

How can love play that much of a role in our health and well-being?

While we are endowed with a threat detection system no matter the context in which we are born, we have to learn who is safe and to what extent (as we cannot survive on our own) before we proceed to develop loving relationships. So the potential (and need) to bond with our fellow human beings is just that, a potential (and indeed a need), but not a guarantee.

The capacity to love is learned in concert with others, through moments of caring connection.

Genuine and caring connections not only teach us how to cooperate successfully with, and take care of, each other (both essential for survival), but also initiate the release of hormones that control all aspects of our mental/health.

Once the learning is initiated, it gains its own biological momentum (in large part thanks to domapine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins): the more we connect to each other, the greater health and enjoyment we derive from it, the easier we find and want to connect to each other, and therefore the more we are able to connect…and round and round it goes.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Lack of moments of loving connection (read: stress) is a toxic proposition. Over the long run, over-exposure to cortisol reduces our health, our creativity (by shutting down our ability to think broadly and contextually), as well as our ability to connect. Each of these, in turn, further reduces our health, creativity, and ability to connect…and round and round it goes.

While this second evolutionary strategy might help us survive short-term in a hostile environment—in the hope that we can wait it out long enough to find more fertile ground to thrive in—it’s not a winning strategy for long-term survival (and certainly not for well-being of any kind).

So the prescription is simple: love liberally! Your health and happiness depend on it.

But simple doesn’t mean easy. In Part II of this post I’ll share why we find it challenging and how we might widen our capacity to love.

The real power of mindfulness

The aim of mindfulness is not relaxation nor a quiet mind. What?!

Mindfulness has become increasingly popular, both within and outside of counseling. With popularity and marketability, the term has come to describe a wide array of practices, which span from affirmations to visualizations and various forms of meditation.

The image usually associated with mindfulness is of a peacefully looking person (often a young white female--which speaks to how the market views the concept, more than to what mindfulness actually is), eyes closed, in a yoga-like position.

For anyone who has practiced mindfulness meditation for any amount of time,

a herd of galloping wild horses is more likely to depict what their minds look and feel like behind those peaceful-looking eyes than the picture of a lotus flower.

To be sure, yoga, relaxation or other visualization/affirming techniques can be immensely useful to soothe our stressed out nervous systems or overly critical minds. But that's not necessarily where the power of mindfulness rests.

If it's not relaxing nor does it clear the mind, what's the point of mindfulness then?!

Our minds and bodies are designed to think and sense at all times. They are at our service 24/7. They collect, classify and integrate an enormous amount of information for our benefit. 

Now, there is a big difference between watching a herd of wild horses gallop and buck, and riding the horses while they do so.

Watching can be interesting, even beautiful; it allows you to see what might be triggering all the action and respond accordingly. Riding wild horses, however, is more likely to be terrifying. Not to mention that holding on for dear life doesn't allow for much perspective-taking.

So back to our minds. They are designed to sort through and categorize information quickly, based on past experiences, and (much of the time) outside of our awareness. This is sometime useful and sometime not. The thoughts that emerge from that process are then a bit like wild horses. They can graze peacefully one moment, and get spooked by a sudden noise the next. Without perspective, we end up believing that our “thoughts r’us” and getting dragged on potentially exhausting roller coaster rides.

By learning to watch what our mind does with the information it receives, we can become familiar with its inner workings and begin to decide what's worth our attention. We can learn to appreciate, be grateful for, and maximize the amazing power it has, and not ride it indiscriminately.

At first, watching closely our minds at work can be a bit overwhelming! But as we bring genuine curiosity to its attempts to support us, and some gentleness when it doesn't fully succeed in doing so,

our whole life becomes much lighter, joyful and effective.

And for that, mindfulness is nothing short of a game changer!

Don't just survive, thrive! Part II

In Part I of this post I described how our bodies are designed for survival, not necessarily well-being. We pay a high cost for that genetic inheritance, as it was not designed for 21st century living.

The good news is that our capacity for well-being is also our birthright and encoded in our DNA. In fact, our capacity for experiencing deep connection (to ourselves and others—read “well-being”) is as much a part of us as our fight/flight/freeze response. The two systems just can’t be online at the same time, they were designed to be mutually exclusive.

So, how do we get to experience more well-being? Just BREATHE!

Is it really that simple? Almost…

While we don’t always have direct control over the stressors we face, we can train to lessen their impact. To be sure, this is NOT so that we can better succumb to them, thus allowing harm to hit us with impunity. Quite the contrary. The only way to have maximum agency is for the wisest part of our brain to remain fully online while we are faced with whatever we perceive as a threat.

That wise part of our brain, however, shuts down when our fight/flight/freeze response kicks in (ops!). Our threat-detection system rushes to save us more often than is needed, and in the process consumes all of our resources (not to mention our health). The fact is that most of us don’t need that much saving that much of the time!

Lessening the impact of stressors, then, gives us the chance to respond in more skilled ways to whatever we are facing in the moment. In other words, our best selves, and therefore our most thoughtful actions, come out of our very experience of well-being.

Ok, so how do we de-escalate our fight/flight/freeze response so that we might feel calmer and think more clearly? We, as human beings, have the amazing capacity to watch our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, rather than just have (which might as well mean be our) thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. Once we learn to watch our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, and to recognize them as events happening in our bodies or minds (rather than as who we are, to the exclusion of everything else), we break the spell that shuts down our capacity to think clearly and broadly. All of the sudden, we have choices!

When we have access to the part of our brain that can take into account the whole context and consider a range of avenues to respond to what’s happening around us, we begin to feel more in control of our lives.

Our threat-detection system is powerful! This means two things.

1.    It takes intention and practice to train our minds not to engage with it. But you can begin feeling a shift in how you approach your daily experiences by practicing even just a few minutes a day for a couple of weeks (to get you started, you might use the MBCT mindfulness recordings or Headspace “Basics”).

2.    We’ll never be able to completely override our threat-detection system, nor would we want to—it does serve an important function at specific times (if you are stepping off a curb and a car rushes towards you, an automatic “flight” action is an excellent life-saving response). It’s when it comes to responding to ongoing daily stressors, even some grave ones, that letting our threat-detection system run the show actually limits our choices.

In case feeling calmer, being physically healthier, being more in control of your life, and making better decisions is not appealing enough, decreasing reactivity also opens us up (physiologically) to the possibility of feeling deeply connected (to ourselves and to others). Much of the love and joy we experience in our lives comes from this capacity. Love and joy are our ultimate sources of energy; they give us an inexhaustible inner sense of abundance, from where life can feel much lighter.

Decreasing automatic reactivity, then, is the portal we must cross to go from surviving to thriving. From there, we can maximize our capacity for connection from which love and joy spring freely.

One of the most helpful lessons I received on this topic is that love is a practice, not a feeling. I will share more about what that means and how to practice it in a future post!