Chapter 7: Cup 2: Attune: Attune to Love

Attune to Love

Kindness, compassion, warmth, peace, empathy, patience, and generosity. The feeling of being seen, understood, and valued. A big hug. Self-sacrifice. Your favorite comfortable sweater. Kind eyes. A warm smile.

All of these represent love.

I wonder if you can remember your strongest experience of love. Take a minutes and go back to that point in your mind and remember what it felt like to be in that relationship, in those moments. Warm? Life-changing? What did that feel like for you?

Here is another example of love. Take a few moments to watch this short video, even if you have seen it before.

Like the person recalled, or the young man on this video, many of us have tapped into love and gone the extra mile to care for someone else. It fills you with warmth like nothing else.

Love is unique in that it is revitalizing to both the giver and receiver.

An Early Experience

My family went through many challenges when I was growing up. My parents tried, but had a number of limitations. We were not a family that valued education and we lived in a rural area so there were not a lot of pathways out. This was pre-Internet. I worked very hard to address some of these challenges, but there was scant access to expert help or information.

I turned to religion to get help. My sister started going to a youth group in Leominster, MA. Leominster felt like a BIG city even though it only had a population of 40,000 people. There was a youth pastor there name Pastor John. We called him PJ. For one of the first times in my life, I had someone believe in me. He didn’t do anything that required significant effort. He greeted me with a smile, noticed me, and asked me questions. One summer he wrote me a letter telling me that he had confidence in me and knew that I was going to do well. Nobody had ever really cared for me like that before. No one had helped me see that I had a deep goodness in me. To PJ, there was never even a question. It was clearly evident to him. His confidence gave me the courage to believe in myself.

PJ opened a door for me. Like the guy in the video did for that little girl. He saw value that other people did not see. He knew that love was not just an abstract idea, but was also real, immediate, and powerful. PJ knew that love changed things.

Love

People have been thinking about love for thousands of years. The Greeks and ancient religions categorized different types of love. For our purposes, we are focusing on love as a virtue. A virtue is a positive trait or quality that helps us achieve individual and collective greatness. The virtue of love is expressed as compassion, kindness, and affection.

The Chinese character for love illustrates this well. From Wikipedia:

“Ai,” the traditional Chinese character for love (愛) consists of a heart (心, middle) inside of “accept,” “feel,” or “perceive,” (受) which shows a graceful emotion. It can also be interpreted as a hand offering one’s heart to another hand.

Love occurs in real life and also has a biochemical impact on the brain. When we think of things that impact the brain, we normally think of drugs. Love makes legal and illegal drugs look impotent. Drugs simply can’t compete with love.

Drugs are normally valued by how much of an impact they have, how long they last, and their side effects. Think of alcohol for a second. Alcohol boosts your mood, helps you relax, and can help you feel more confident. The effect lasts for a few hours. Then, the effects gradually wear off. The next day you experience the side effects in the form of a hangover. Not awesome, but, still very popular.

Let’s contrast this with love. Love has a WAY bigger impact. It makes you feel good, fills you with warmth, and helps you open to life. It also helps you overcome challenges you are facing. It doesn’t stay in your system for a few hours; it stays activated for weeks, months, and sometimes years. There are no negative side effects! No love hangover. Love only brings benefits. Drugs tend to mask pain, love heals. It’s effects, big or small, are life long.

If drug companies could make a love pill, believe me they would. It’d be a blockbuster.

It isn’t just drugs that can’t hold a candle to the experience of love. I don’t know of anything in life that can compete with love. The Beatles said it well: “All you need is love.” Love is unparalleled by any other experience, object, or drug.

Imagine if we had a way to increase the amount of love we experience in our lives, societies, and world. Think about that goodness you felt when you remembered that person that loved you or watched the above video. What if you could increase that feeling in your daily life by 5-10%? How would that impact how you feel about yourself and others?

Now, imagine if everybody in your country tapped into love and increased it in their lives by 5-10%. Can you imagine what a difference that would make in your country?

This can sound very pie in the sky. However, it is much more pragmatic and way easier than many of the big changes our governments attempt to make. We are not talking about overhauling a social system or even passing a new law. No, we are talking about very small changes. Simply noticing when someone is kind to you. Deliberately being a little extra kind to someone else. These small changes, across all of us, would have enormous positive effects that we cannot even begin to imagine.

This is not news to us though. We know this. We’ve experienced love and we’ve seen its impact on others. We watch it in movies all the time. We sing and talk about it. We can’t get enough of it. Why, then, do we not have more of it in our lives? Why does it seem so elusive?

The idea of love is very popular. We hold it up as the ideal. We call this conceptual love. It happens out there. We talk about it or read about it, but the words do not leap off of the page and grab us. Conceptual love is common and tends to overshadow the more rare experience of love or what we call experiential love.

The movie you watched at the start of this chapter triggered experiential love in you. It feels real, immediate, and personal. That short clip fills you up with a warm sense of goodness. It is the same feeling you have when someone gives you a big hug. Experiential love is not something you can read about. It is something you have to connect with and feel.

As a society, we’ve done a good job of spreading conceptual love around the world. Most people understand it. We’ve done less well at spreading experiential love around the world.

Experiential love is big like the sun. It is all around us. It warms us, feels great, and is a renewable resource. We are just now figuring out how to tap the sun via solar panels to convert it into electricity. I suspect we are in a similar place with love. We know it is real. We know it could have a huge impact. We just need to figure out how to tap into it.

The Rabbi’s Gift, from Scott Peck’s Book The Different Drum, is a nice story that illustrates the emergent power of love.

The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once a great order, as a result of waves of antimonastic persecution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth, all its branch houses were lost and it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house: the abbot and four others, all over seventy in age. Clearly it was a dying order.

In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. “The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again” they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery.

The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. “I know how it is,” he exclaimed. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.” So the old abbot and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. “It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years,” the abbot said, “but I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?”

“No, I am sorry,” the rabbi responded. “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”

When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, “Well what did the rabbi say?” “He couldn’t help,” the abbot answered. “We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving --it was something cryptic-- was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.”

In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that’s the case, which one? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that Thomas is a man of light. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Elred! Elred gets crotchety at times. But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people’s sides, when you look back on it, Elred is virtually always right. Often very right. Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Elred. But surely not Brother Phillip. Phillip is so passive, a real nobody. But then, almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn’t mean me. He couldn’t possibly have meant me. I’m just an ordinary person. Yet supposing he did? Suppose I am the Messiah? O God, not me. I couldn’t be that much for You, could I?

As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect.

Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate. As they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed the aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place. And their friends brought their friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while one asked if he could join them. Then another. And another. So within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and, thanks to the rabbi’s gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm.

Understanding Love

Love means different things to different people and that is actually a beautiful thing. Love does not have to be defined and put into a black and white box that we all agree on. No, instead, love can be whatever it is to each of us.

This is how it is with many of the best things in life. If you see a photograph you really like, it’ll mean something different to you than it does to me. There will be something about it that speaks to you. It could be the light, it might be the angle, it can be how the different elements come together. It might remind you of something or trigger an old memory. It might be one or all of these things. The key is that it you experience that photograph differently than I do. The image itself is the same, but the way we both make meaning of it causes us to view and experience it differently.

The same goes for music. The notes, lyrics, or beats are objectively the same. However, some aspects of it just hit your ear differently. Sometimes a chorus will just grab you. It’ll hit you at a deeper level. That song will stick with you for a while until your brain is done with it and then you’ll let it go. For that time, however, that song means something to you that it doesn’t mean to anybody else.

I believe that the same goes for love. Nobody would force us to interpret a photograph in the same way. Similarly, it’d be ludicrous to suggest that we all must agree on the best music or what a particular song should mean. In the same way, I don’t think we have to agree on love.

Love can mean whatever it means to each of us. This makes love extraordinarily flexible. It can mean different things to different people. Similarly, we can experience love in a variety of ways during different parts of our lives.

This is how it is with many of the best things in life. If you see a photograph you really like, it’ll mean something different to you than it does to me. The image itself is the same, but the way we both make meaning of it causes us to view and experience it differently.

Beyond this, I’d also like to suggest that love is ultimately a mystery. It is above what our little brains can completely understand. Love belongs in the category of the indescribable. And, from this vantage point, it’s a little more clear why it is so important to open up and listen to someone else’s experience of love. The love that they have experienced, is available to you also. We can learn about love from each other.

With all of that said, there are common ways that people point to or attempt to define love. Some people see it as a human process that is best understood as altruism. Other people see love as a higher level of human consciousness that connects us all. Still others view love from a spiritual or religious framework.

Some of the common themes across all of these different ways of understanding love include benevolence, compassion, mercy, kindness, validation, encouragement, generosity, and consistency. These words can feel abstract or distant, but understanding what they mean to you can bring them to life.

To get a better feeling, try this exercise:

Get another piece of paper and a pen and draw an experience of love. You might draw an image of yourself and another person or moment when you felt deeply loved. You might draw a different experience. Don’t judge your drawing; just try to sink into the feeling of compassion, kindness, and benevolence.

Noticing Love

However you conceive of love, if you view and experience it as on your side, actively working toward your good and the good of all of us, and able to bring a greater purpose from your pain, you get better faster. Growing and overcoming difficulties is, in large part, about taking risks and facing painful challenges. If you feel that the universe holds a certain amount of safety for you, you are more willing to take those risks. And, if you are looking for love, you are much much more likely to find it!

You do not have to force love. It is not something you can make happen. Love is already happening all around you. The first step is simply learning to notice it.

We have 144,000 bits of information that hit our brain daily. There are constant pulls and pushes for our attention. Additionally, many of us have well worn thinking patterns that cause us to focus on things that make us worry or seemingly confirm our fears. These patterns can feel automatic or like they happen outside of conscious control. These stressors are real. The good news is that we do have control over our attention and we can choose to focus on more uplifting things.

Many of you can remember when you or your family bought a new car. One of the first things you notice is how many people have the same car that you have. It wasn’t that a bunch of people went out and bought the car right before you. No, you just didn’t *see* them before because you were not looking for them. Now that you have the car you notice them.

That is often how it is with love. Many of us have lots of love reveals in our life, but we cannot see them because we are not looking for them.

At the end of the day, before going to sleep, quickly write down all the ways love reached out to you. You don’t have to go into detail. Even one word descriptions are fine. You just want to start to notice how love is impacting you in your day to day life.

Love is Cup 2 for a reason. You start with Cup 1 (open and share what is on your heart) which bridges you to Cup 2 (attune to love). All of the other cups are connected to and branch off of Cup 2. You can work on a different Cup, but to access another cup you have to pass back through Cup 2. Why?

Because love is central.

Love is at work in your life. It is patient, kind and compassionate. It works through your relationships and the events that surround you. It does not rush you. Love believes in you. It will strengthen you and help you face challenges each step of the way. Love has your back and your life has a purpose.