I again draw from the ancient wisdom of LKM in this chapter. As does LKM, I gently encourage you to stretch open your heart wider than you ever thought possible. I first invite you to experiment with extending warmth and goodwill to everyone you know and then to stretch that positive vibe even further to encompass everyone you don’t know. Once you set your sights, mind, and heart on these larger aims, you’ll find countless ways to forge tender, loving connections with everyone, without a single exception.
These are not just idle wishes, empty intentions, or a futile form of magical thinking. In wishing people on the other side of the planet to be happy and peaceful, you need not believe that your wishes somehow metaphysically travel the world to change the course of their day. The point is to change your day, by conditioning your heart to be soft, open, and caring toward each new person you encounter, regardless of how remote the prior connection between you may have been. This chapter features both formal and informal practices to help you extend the reach of your love, even in the face of uncertainty or ambiguity.
Redefining love as those micro-moments of positivity resonance you can share with nearly anyone breaks open extraordinary opportunities.
To be sure, extraordinary opportunities pose extraordinary challenges, not only to see the chances for loving connection but also to be ready for them. Micro-moments, by definition, are fleeting. If you blink—or slip into self-absorption—you miss out. Even so, merely seeing opportunities to connect, without being prepared to act, can make you lonelier. To build community and escape painful isolation, you need to teach your heart to be ready. Hone your skills for capitalizing on those life-giving micro-moments so that, as the river of fresh opportunities for love flows toward you, you’ll be poised to jump in.
Try This Meditation Practice: Loving All
Retreat to a place in which you can sit undisturbed. Ground yourself by placing your feet flat on the floor, and adjust your posture until your body feels both alert and open. Lengthen your spine and lift up your rib cage. Since emotional states are deeply embodied, seek out the posture that feels attuned to expanding love.
Start, once again, by drawing a few slow and deep breaths, resting your awareness on each one as it moves through your lungs and through your body.
Next, bring your awareness to your intention for this session. Articulate this intention silently to yourself. Perhaps it’s to awaken yourself to the vast sea of possibilities for love, or to find joy in connecting with all the people you’ll encounter today.
As you practice, remember to lightly bring your awareness to your heart region. Pay attention to any shifting sensations in your body and face. These physical aspects of your experience matter more than the particular phrasings you choose.
Now, gently call forth the image of a whole swath of people. This might be all the people in your part of town or your region of the country. To do this, you might visualize the view you’d have flying low over your stretch of earth. Although you can’t see individual people, you’re aware that they are there, underneath nearly every rooftop, carrying out the activities of their day, perhaps eating, resting, working, worshipping, or simply moving from one place to another. Expand your awareness to encompass this whole community. Know that it includes people you know quite well, those you know just a bit, as well as those you don’t know at all. You can be sure that each and every one, like you, has at one time or another yearned for something more in their life, for happiness, for connection, and for an abiding sense of peace. Let your awareness of this fundamental similarity between you and all others infuse the space between your heart and each of theirs. You share the same wishes, the same earth. You breathe the same air.
With your various connections to all these people in mind, silently say to yourself the following ancient phrases, or your own versions of them, offering these wishes from your heart:
May you all feel safe and protected.
May you all feel happy and peaceful.
May you all feel healthy and strong.
May you all live with ease.
Offer each wish in time with the rise and fall of each of the slow and full breaths that you take. Let your goodwill toward all those in your neighborhood, town, or region infuse and soften your heart.
When you are ready, gently expand the scope of your focus further still. You might choose to visualize your entire country or continent, offering your goodwill to everyone residing there, recognizing again that this includes people you know personally as well as an immense sea of those you do not know. Silently repeat the phrases with this now larger expanse of people held gently within your awareness.
Another way to experiment with loving all is to divide the sum of all people into two mutually exclusive and encompassing categories. No need to bring in heavy analytic thinking here. Simply call up any division that makes sense to you, such as “all children” paired with “all adults” or “all girls and women” paired with “all boys and men” or “all those who suffer” paired with “all those currently free of suffering.” You can bring in your own touch of creativity at this stage, perhaps choosing to focus on “all those who are sleeping” paired with “all those who are awake” or “all those on whom the sun shines” paired with “all those in the darkness of night.” The key is to leave no person out, to encompass all within your consideration. Then, repeat the classic phrases for each subset of your focus, calling forth your heartfelt goodwill.
May all children feel safe.
May all children feel happy.
May all children feel healthy.
May all children live with ease.
As you extend these wishes, gently coax yourself to truly feel the sentiment that underlies that simple word all. Give this one word just a bit more emphasis than the other words, to nudge your heart just a bit wider with each wish you offer.
May all adults feel safe.
May all adults feel happy.
May all adults feel healthy.
May all adults live with ease.
As you end this practice session and move on into your day, know that each person you encounter has already been the focus of your loving intention today. Use that awareness to forge new micro-moments of connection.
Unlock Your Opportunities for Focusing
on Others
Outside the formal practice of LKM for all people, it can be heart-stretching simply to notice how much of your attention each day is devoted to your own concerns. There’s nothing inherently wrong with self-concerns. You are responsible, after all, for navigating yourself through your day, and at times doing so can require planning or strategic self-presentation. Problems arise only when you get swept up in swirls that appear to run on indefinitely. It can seem, sometimes, as if you’ve entered a hall of mirrors, completely alone. All you see reflected back at you is yet another view of the same self-concern, and you can no longer find the way out. Redirecting your focus toward others is the way out.
Your intent, of course, matters. Focusing on others comes in many forms, not all of which are generous. It can be yet another selfish act. I spent several years early in my career cataloging the psychological damage done to girls and women who face the message that they can be reduced to how they look. The question an objectifying stance asks is, “What can you do for me?” By contrast, a genuine wish to understand and appreciate who this other person is asks, “Who are you?” and trusts that taking steps to find out will reveal inherent goodness. From this openhearted perspective, caring sentiments surface quite effortlessly.
One way to become more mindful of the degrees of your focus on self versus others is to revisit a typical day—your yesterday—and comb through it episode by episode. In doing so, you uncover the sheer number of untapped opportunities for creating micro-moments of positivity resonance. This added awareness can then inspire you to begin turning toward these recurrent opportunities, rather than let them slip away unnoticed.
Try This Micro-Moment Practice:
Re
construct Your Yesterday to Uncover Opportunities for Love
Here I walk you through how you can adapt an assessment technique developed by a former collaborator and mentor of mine, Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s called the “Day Reconstruction Method,” or DRM for short. You can use it to review and evaluate your daily habits of mind as well as your emotions, both actual and possible.
You should know up front that this activity takes time to complete, up to an hour. It’s the insights from it that you can use in later micro-moments. To get started, you’ll need either your journal, or some other pad of paper, and a calculator. Or, you can register to use the free online tools that you can find at www.PositivityResonance.com.
Once you’re situated—either at your computer or with paper and pencil handy—your task is to remember everything you did yesterday. It can be difficult to recall the details of a whole day. That’s why the DRM exercise breaks this process down into steps. The first step is to record the times at which you woke up and went to sleep. Then, starting from when you awoke and proceeding sequentially throughout all your waking hours, divide your day up into a string of contiguous episodes. Give each episode a number and a short descriptive name, like “1—stretching my body,” “2—out for a walk,” and “3—eating breakfast.” Write down the approximate times each episode began and ended, avoiding large gaps or overlaps in time. You can think of episodes like scenes within a play. Whenever the characters in, or the setting or purpose of, your daily activities change, call that a new episode. You can, of course, skip past small behind-the-scenes moments, like blowing your nose or using the bathroom. Still, the key is to map out your day in its entirety. With typical episodes lasting between ten minutes to two hours, you may find that your day yesterday can be broken down into fewer than ten or as many as thirty episodes.
Now, here’s the variant on the DRM that can be useful for spotting and unlocking opportunities for focusing on others, with the potential that such moments hold for love. For each and every episode in turn, record your responses to the following questions as accurately and honestly as you can:
Name of episode: _________________________
Duration of this episode (in minutes): __________
1. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were other people present, either face-to-face or by phone (do not include asynchronous communications, like e-mails, voice mails, or texts). __________
2. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were you able to focus on the other(s) in respectful and meaningful ways? __________
3. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) were you able to attune to and connect with the other(s)’ experiences? __________
4. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you feel energized by the company of others? __________
5. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you experience a shared flow of thoughts and feelings between you and the other(s)? __________
6. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did your interactions reflect a smooth coordination of effort between you and the other(s)? __________
7. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you experience a mutual sense of being invested in the well-being of the other(s)? __________
As you progress through the first three of these seven questions for each episode, the proportions of time that you identify are likely to become progressively smaller. Questions 1 and 2 capture the prerequisites for sharing micro-moments of positivity resonance with others; first, the presence of others, and next, respectful and meaningful focus on others. Whereas question 3 captures the gestalt sense of connection (first introduced in chapter 5), the remaining questions capture the three key facets of positivity resonance in turn—shared positive emotions (questions 4 and 5), biobehavioral synchrony (question 6), and mutual care (question 7).
Now comes the scoring. While the online tools take care of this chore for you, if you’re completing this exercise on paper, here’s when a calculator comes in handy. First, add up the total number of minutes across all your recorded episodes. This number should come close to representing the total time you were awake yesterday. Then, for each episode, convert your responses to questions 1 through 7 into the unit of minutes. Do this by multiplying the number that represents each episode’s duration (in minutes) by the proportion of time you indicated in your response (in other words, 20 percent would mean multiplying by .20, 5 percent by .05). Next, add up the total minutes, separately for each question, across all episodes. That is, for question 1, find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours, during which you were surrounded by others. Likewise, for question 2, find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours, that you meaningfully focused on others, and so on. Odds are the gap between these two numbers is large. This gap represents your untapped potential, in a typical day, for creating conditions conducive to positivity resonance.
Next, continue on to find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours yesterday, that you sensed either the gestalt sense of positivity resonance (question 3) or one of three facets of it (questions 4 and 5, followed by questions 6 and 7). The gap between each of these numbers and your total number of minutes spent in the presence of others (question 1) represents your untapped potential for love, a number likely to be quite large. By contrast, the more modest gap between each of these numbers (for questions 3 through 7) and your total number of minutes spent with respectful and meaningful focus on others (question 2) represents how easily you were able to convert these opportunities into micro-moments of love.
With this rundown before you, consider now the opportunity costs for self-absorptions like surfing the Internet. That kind of behavior is normal and inevitable, and at times even rejuvenating. But think about what other kinds of experiences you are crowding out. What do you miss out on? More love?
Jeremy’s Story
In my home office, I have three framed letters—two from my own sons and a third from a couple of children whom I may never meet. The two from my boys are cherished Mother’s Day gifts. Each lists what it takes to be their mom, ranging from “make the best pancakes” and “cheer me on” to “enjoy talking to me” and “teach me about what she teaches.” The third is written in blue marker on green construction paper and decorated with glitter glue and cartoon drawings. It reads: “Dear Dr. Fredrickson, Thank you for teaching Mr. Wills to be + [positive], [heart] Tisha and Kelly.”
Mr. Wills is Jeremy Wills, one of my former students. A few years back, he’d enrolled in an upper-level undergraduate seminar of mine, on positive psychology, before which he’d never given a second thought to positive emotions.
A few months ago, as I was thick into crafting part I of this book, I ran into Jeremy as I was walking across campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was back in town for a short stretch between jobs. He’d been a wonderful contributor in my class years back, so open and thoughtful, and I enjoy catching up with him when I can. It was during this sidewalk conversation, which stretched into what must have been half an hour, that Jeremy told me he had a letter to pass on to me from some of his own former students. Having heard just a little bit about those students, and his experiences as their teacher, I knew I needed to hear more. I asked if I might interview him for this book and he agreed. His and his students’ stories, as it happens, provide a clear and poignant illustration of why and how positivity resonance matters, and how you can tap into it, even in the most difficult of group circumstances.
After graduation, Jeremy had taken a coveted position at Teach For America, the nonprofit modeled after the Peace Corps that enlists thousands of future leaders, just out of college, to bring low-income communities fresh teachers for two or more year
s. Jeremy had been drawn to Teach For America because he yearned to make real differences for social change. A few years earlier, as a volunteer classroom assistant in the struggling city schools in neighboring Durham county, he’d become keenly aware of the irony of sitting in “ivory tower” classrooms in his own elite university, discussing in abstract terms how, generation after generation, social inequalities get replicated through entrenched inequities in education and wealth, when just down the road sat a middle school student who struggled to read “Go dog go.” Getting to know one of these kids in particular, and noting the poignant gap between his aspirations (for example, “to design video games”) and his academic ability, Jeremy discovered up close and personal that “the problem had a face.” As he put it, “Someone somewhere did something to him that prevented him from learning or didn’t give him the opportunity and that’s a problem that no one should have to deal with.”
Teach For America (TFA) offered Jeremy the chance to roll up his sleeves and help to close the achievement gap by working directly with struggling kids in low-income classrooms. After a few months in TFA’s teaching training, and a short stretch into his first placement in a poor rural county in North Carolina, his assistant principal took note of his extraordinary patience and high expectations for even the lowest-performing kids in the high school. She offered him his own math class. He’d take charge of about a dozen chronically failing “special ed” kids, some with IQs in the fifties or with behavioral problems so severe that if “you look [at them] the wrong way, you could have a desk flipped.” He was excited to take on this challenge. His idealism ran high. He admits that at first he thought he would simply “waltz in” and fix the problem of social inequality, one classroom at a time.
Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become Page 17