It’s not just Woodstock and Valentines Day
How to use Love to live better
For the second issue of his Love & Profit Blogazine, my friend David chose “Love as a strategy” as a thematic. The editorial guideline invited us to write “about applying love to counter-intuitive areas of our life to solve problems, get through challenges, and create transformation”.
Wow…Instant writer’s block :)
I closed my eyes, relaxed, loved the uncertainty unconditionally (more on that later), let the the creativity flow…and heard “What is love?” by Haddaway.
Out of the many meanings of Love, its connection to Pain (“Baby don’t hurt me”) was the first to pop up. Bringing LnP#2 in BDSM territories would have been pretty cool but I didn’t feel bold enough (sorry, maybe in LnP#3, stick around).
Still, Haddaway has a point: before sharing stories on how Love can help You solve problems and live better, we need to define it.
So…What is Love?
What do physical love, romantic love, family love, community love, life love, self-love and unconditional love have in common?
Depending on the context, I can feel Love toward my Son, my Wife, my Mum, a perfect stranger, a gym session, a past trauma or toward the very existence itself.
The common denominator of all is an energy, an intense feeling of connection. That’s what I’ll call Love here.
This Love is one of the main forces that make our world go round. The main inspiration of Art, one of the 2 great purchase triggers, and a strong foundation in societies since their inception: it’s no secret that Love is powerful…but do You know how to channel it to your advantage?
“From the Bottom of my Heart”
When he converted to Islam, my Father received much criticism from his colleagues at the Faculty.
One of those well-educated college professors, in particular, was attacking him regularly. “I bet your beard itches, haha”, “You must be sweating like a pig under this turban, hihi”, the guy was full of awesome jokes (if you’re an 8 y.o.). My Dad ignored it and continued his daily duties as best as he could. One day, however, following a particularly nasty remark in front of the whole pedagogical team, he responded.
He stood up, walked toward the joker, grab him by the shoulders and gazed into his eyes. After letting an uncomfortable moment pass, he smiled and said: “Despite all the bad things you keep saying, I love You from the bottom of my heart”.
Then he walked back to his chair, leaving the joker and the rest of the team speechless.
He never received a negative comment regarding his appearance after that. In fact, he ended up becoming one of the university most influential and popular professors.
I like this story because he literally “disarmed {the other guy} with a smile”.
Those simple but powerful words completely throw through the window all the negative comments. More importantly, it took the motivation away from the opponent: why would he try to hurt somebody who loves him ‘from the bottom of his heart’.
Wanna try?
I don’t know if my father meant it, but I know for a fact that he got results from it…And so can you: next time someone is unpleasant to You, instead of looking for something witty to say, answer with Positivity.
Let’s say a cashier shouts at you because of a non-weighted celery. You could try to outsmart her or shout louder to “win” this argument. You could also look at her with kindness and tell her “I understand you’re having a bad day, I care for you, let’s forget the celery”. She probably doesn’t hear something like that often and you have good chance to get positive results (in addition to making her day).
You don’t necessarly have to go full “From the bottom of my heart”…but on the other hand, why not giving it a try?
Loving by Default
My Dad looks like a badass in the above story (and a few others), but we don’t exactly have the greatest relationship.
Actually, we haven’t had any relationship since 2012.
I grew up without him. During my mid-20ies I felt the need to meet (“I have a Dad, some people don’t, I might as well…”). I reached out and traveled to Morocco to spend time with him and his family.
There were several trips and it went quite well, despite the cultural differences…until one day, he wasn’t there during my visit.
He’d gone on a tour in India to promote Islam. Supposedly he didn’t know I’d be coming at that time. I spent the stay with his wife and my 3 half-brothers who were lovely to me.
I’ve never returned there since.
As much as I’d like to for the narrative of this article, I don’t feel Love toward my Dad.
I don’t feel hate either: just a sort of numbness concerning this relationship. I guess I could feel like he doesn’t care about me or love me enough to reach out (I was always the one initiating contact), but I don’t.
So I’m “loving by default”.
I love every human. I never cease to be amazed at the beautiful stuff we’re able to do as humans, how adaptable we are, the heart-warming things we do sometimes.
If I can’t love my Dad as a Dad, I can at least love him as a human.
The criteria to fall into this category is pretty inclusive: be human and act as such. Murderers, rapists, human-traffickers, child-molesters and other people doing inhuman stuff are out. I can try to understand and hope that they get the help they need to become human again and repair the Bad they did, but that’s about it.
For the rest of us, you’re in: I love You.
Wanna try?
Maybe there’s someone you “should” love (because of blood, context, etc.) but somehow you don’t.
You don’t hate that person but you don’t feel the intense feeling of connection we mentioned earlier. Or you don’t feel it as often as you’d like to.
It might trigger some guilt in you (“what’s wrong with me, he’s my {Dad/Bro/Son/Pizza Delivery Guy}, why don’t I feel anything”) or make every encounter with that person awkward.
If that happens, try to remove the pressure and “love by default”. This person deserves your Love simply because he’s part of our wonderful species. If you can’t feel it, at least you can know it.
I bet that some of you are thinking: “Yeah, well, humans are not that awesome: we do horrible stuff all the time. What’s in us to love?”.
‘Glad you ask.
Humans are Love-Worthy
I like The Philip DeFranco Show because I believe it’s trust-worthy and presents the fact in a funny way when possible…But it’s because of what it does when it’s NOT possible to be funny that I LOVE the PDS.
You’re right, we humans do horrible things sometimes, most of it is aired in the daily news: shooting, corruption, torture…inhuman stuff.
Whenever that happens, Philly D states the facts as a good journalist, his opinion as a good youtuber…then he tries to show that for each horrible person, there’re many wonderful humans. These heroes are as much worth of our attention as the tragedy they’re linked to. Here’s an example concerning the Parkland shooting:
Regular people sharing their home during natural disasters, keeping the mob from destroying properties during protests, giving their lives to save strangers…The deeper we go on the dark side, the brighter the resistance gets.
During WW2 (arguably one of the darkest time in history), a prefect named Jean Moulin wasn’t satisfied with France being occupied. He went all the way to London to meet DeGaulle who gave him the assignment of unifying the Resistance movements in France. Jean parachuted in the South of the country and worked his ass off to create what became the MUR: the unified movements of resistance which was instrumental in the liberation of France and the end of the War.
Jean was betrayed, got caught and tortured by the Gestapo…yet didn’t let any of his important intel slipped. He didn’t say shit. Instead, he took his own life. He died for the Life of others, he died for the Love of his Country and its freedom.
The darker the Story gets, the more heroic, beautiful, supra-Human the Good guys get.
I never met Jean Moulin but as I’m writing this, I feel Love for him and what he represents. I’m not the only one:
Every day, each of us gets to take small decisions to make things better or worst. And every day, most of us choose to make things better. I don’t know why we do this. But every time I need to remember that People are Good and Love-worthy, that ‘Loving by default’ make sense, I bring this to my mind and I feel Love in my heart.
Actually, I think that’s why we made it this far (as a species): there are more Good people, caring about Peace and Love than Villains who express their own suffering in the destruction of others. We thrived because most of us want to make it.
Unconditional Love
Yet, as humans, we’re not perfect and sometimes I fail at applying what I just described.
The very day I completed this article, I went shopping for groceries. I was already in a bad mood (deadline, tax season, bad night, etc.). The butcher shop I went to had closed less than 5 min before I reached it. I could still see the employees inside, but they didn’t open. The supermarket was out of sweet potatoes and didn’t have the meat my wife wanted. I got into a fight with the cashier over a frequent buyer card (sic), forgot to weight the celery and had to go to a third store to finish the shopping.
Giving Love to the unpleasant cashier didn’t occur to me.
Loving by default didn’t help.
In this moment, I didn’t care about the awesomeness of our species.
I felt increasingly angry and un-loving. On top of that, as most people in cold countries, Winter depresses me. It felt so hypocritical to write about Love that I almost canceled the whole article.
Then I remembered Unconditional Love and as usual, it changed everything.
This concept found in Michael Brown’s Presence Process is the most powerful use of Love I know. It can turn anything into a growth opportunity.
Here’s how it works: whatever happens, we accept and love it by giving it our full attention. We don’t “think about something else”, we don’t dismiss it, we don’t numb it with drugs or binge-watching Samurai Champloo. We just give love by acknowledging and “being with” anything that shows up. That includes sadness, anger and all “negative” feelings we can experience.
Concretely, after the Celery incident, I left the store and felt guilty that I got angry at a cashier who’s just trying to live her life.
I accepted that Guilt, looked for it in my body (if I feel it, it must be somewhere) and Loved it unconditionally by giving it my full attention (“I feel unconditionally”). After a few moments of focusing on this uncomfortable feeling, it got away…and was replaced by the Anger I built up earlier.
I accepted that Anger looked for it in my body and Loved it unconditionally by giving it my full attention. After a few moments of focus, the Anger was less strong. I would have continued to love it unconditionally but I reached the other celery store.
When I arrived home, the Anger was there again. Instead of throwing it at my family, I isolated myself and Loved it unconditionally again.
I do this every time a powerful “negative” emotion gets a hold on me (almost daily). The positive effects are numerous but the main one is that this Love beats the Fear of feeling bad. It’s really empowering to know that, no matter what you feel, you can integrate it simply by giving your full attention.
Wanna try?
If you want to try Unconditionnal Love, I recommend starting with mild discomfort and increasing progressively the ‘difficulty’. Ideally, you’d stop what you’re doing when the feeling arises, isolate yourself and love it unconditionally.
It can happen however that you can’t pause your current activity. In that case, you can give a little love (a few seconds, minutes) to the feeling and store it for later integration. Then when the time is right, go to a quiet place, recall the feeling and give it your full attention.
Conclusion
Love is beautiful, magic, incredibly powerful, it runs the world, it’s more powerful than any weapon…but ultimately, the reason why I use it so often is that it simply works.
The hippies oversold Love and made it difficult to digest, almost ridiculous and overwhelming.
Because of that some of us (past-me included) have some resistance toward Love. I hope this article helped separate the romanticized version (Woodstock, Valentine’s day, Love Actually) from the practical use you can make of Love.
You can Love your opponent
You can love by default
You can remember that Humans are love-worthy
You can Love unconditionally
I wrote about another practical use of Love, but somehow it didn’t quite fit in the structure of this article. Because you’ve made it till the end of the article, you won the right to read the “missing chapter”. It’s about an experience I had at work which really affected me because I wasn’t looking at it with enough Love. Here’s the link to the article:
I’d love to hear what you think about all this and mainly how you applied it in your life.
Peace!
