Positive emotions: Love
Feeling more love in our lives and creating and savoring moments of connection
Last post gave examples of how to more easily access Joy, the most frequent of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s 10 positive emotions. Today, we look at Love, that she has come to view as the most important one.
Discussing love can be daunting. We’ll follow Dr. Fredrickson’s approach of focusing on loving-kindness meditation, an effective practice that can easily be incorporated into anyone’s life.
As with joy before, the goal here is to find our doorways to feelings, using tools that are available to us right now without changing our circumstances per se, so that we can more easily access those feelings when we want to. Loving-kindness meditation allows people to find that sensation of caring, of warmth, and holding it more easily.
Introducing Loving-kindness meditation
The core of loving-kindness meditation is beautifully simple:
Think of who we want to feel and send love towards
Focus on a few wishes, such as, May you feel safe, may you feel happy, may you feel at peace, may you feel healthy, may you live with ease
Repeat them, directing the wishes to the person or group you had in mind
That’s it in a nutshell! There are many variations — different phrases, and focusing on yourself, on a loved one, on an entire group, on a stranger even, but the core is always there. When you feel a glow of caring, a rising warmth — you fill yourself with that sensation, hold on to it, and direct it where you want, or expand it towards even more people.
Here’s a 13-min guided practice video that moves from yourself, to a close friend or family member, to an acquaintance, and finally to someone with whom there’s currently a difficulty:
For a shorter-than-2-min practice, you can try this video that focuses on self-love:
Barbara Fredrickson’s website also has several free audio meditations that you can download. I find the voice on these very soothing and pleasant:
This and four more audio meditations on this page, focusing on self-love, compassionate love, celebratory love, and loving all.
Incorporating loving-kindness practices into your life
There’s a solid body of research showing benefits to adding a regular practice of loving-kindness into your life — you can find some pointers at the end of this post. As with many meditative practices, the more we do it, the easier and more beneficial it gets.
However, I find the practice very useful as an isolated tool as well — again, with the goal of being able to access a certain feeling more easily when I want to. And as always when it comes to finding your way to emotions, it works better when you make things your own and curate YOUR own resources. Here, that could be finding what specific phrases work for you — you can find many more examples online, or craft your own; finding teachers or voices that work better for you, if you like guided formats; keeping handy a list of people (or pets!) for whom you already feel warmth to ease your way into the practice.
Images, quotes, memories…
Besides loving-kindness meditation, you can of course also collect other effective doorways that make you experience a feeling of love.
An image:
Again, search for yourself and file the ones that speak to you the most!
And even more when it comes to love: look through your own personal photos and file the photos that most evoke “Love” for you.
A gif:
A movement:
Hugging, cuddling, embracing are all movements that people associate with love. Think whether there are such movements for you, that create a physical sensation of love, and add them to your “love” file.
A memory:
Recall moments in your life when you have either strongly felt love, or felt loved. Try to make the recollection vivid and fill yourself with the sensation of what you felt. If you find some moments that “work” particularly well for you and powerfully evoke sensations that you would like to be able to access again, keep note of what they are, and add them to your “love” file.
Loving-kindness meditations work very well for many people, but you might prefer other simpler, more personal examples, or combine all. Find your gateways and the doors that work best or you, and keep your list somewhere easy to access.
There are a few additional links, notes and pointers below. If you’d like to hear more about some parts of this post, let me know and I will consider it for a future post or part of another free mini-course. And of course, I am always happy to hear any feedback on what you liked / didn’t like / things you’d like to see more or less of. I can’t reply to most emails but I read them all and they are always welcome.
Additional links and notes
Benefits of loving-kindness practice:
In this 2008 paper, Hutcherson and collaborators show that “even just a few minutes of loving-kindness meditation increased feelings of social connection and positivity toward novel individuals on both explicit and implicit levels.”
This 2015 meta-review reviews 24 empirical studies of loving-kindness meditation and show that the practice is effective in enhancing positive emotions. Also on positive emotions, this 2008 paper by Fredrickson and collaborators showed that loving-kindness meditation practice “produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms.”
This 2013 study finds a reduction of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression after 12-week loving-kindness meditation course
This 2017 study by Fredrickson and collaborators showed that both loving-kindness and mindfulness meditation practices increased positive emotions (with no change in negative emotions)