Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing. From this vantage point, love, compassion, and other deeply moving spiritual experiences become holy states that you can cultivate through your own intentional efforts to be present, grounded, and mindfully aware of both yourself and others.
Learning to trust that your deepest emotions can lead you somewhere good is what my collaborator and American Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg calls faith in her 2002 spiritual memoir by the same name. Faith, or alternatively trust or confidence, is the usual translation of the ancient Pali word saddha, which Salzberg points out literally means “to place the heart upon.” Like Armstrong and Nhat Hanh, Salzberg emphasizes that faith is a verb, an action—something you do—not a received definition of reality or belief system that explains away life’s mysteries. In Buddhism, to have faith is to open your heart to your experiences, or as Salzberg puts it, to be willing “to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.” Faith is a way of leaning in toward your feelings of love and oneness, trusting that—somehow—they will nourish you and lead you closer to your spiritual higher ground. Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience.
From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book, Spiritual Evolution, he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition.
To be sure, casting spirituality as an altered state of consciousness is hardly new. Viewed one way, it’s simply another description of the human practices that yield exalted emotional states in the first place. Descriptions like these didn’t take us very far in the past precisely because they remained on the same “soft” side of the opposition between subjective and objective ways of knowing. Religion has long anchored the subjective side, whereas science anchored the other. Likewise, the languages of poetry and emotions marked one pole, whereas mathematics and reason marked the other. Spirituality, poetry, and emotions were all deemed soft and subjective, whereas science, mathematics, and reason were all deemed hard and objective. Historically, the two poles simply didn’t have anything to say to each other.
But just as borders melt away when you feel that elemental oceanic feeling, today these old oppositions no longer hold water. In particular, the new and amply objective science of emotions allows us—for the first time—to systematically explain transcendent spiritual experiences and unravel their poetic mystery. We no longer need to stop at calling the varieties of religious experiences altered states, ekstasis, or oceanic. We can instead examine them through the lenses of the science of positive emotions.
These new scientific lenses reveal facts that can be deeply moving. Those potent, boundary-blurring and heart-expanding experiences of positivity resonance that you share with others are not merely an academic concept or a poetic flourish. Positivity resonance changes your biochemistry in ways scientists are only just now beginning to grasp. As these moments become more and more typical of your daily experience, they even alter the foundational rhythms of your heart, increasing your vagal tone, resulting in a closer synchrony between the actions of your heart and the actions of your lungs. High levels of vagal tone, scientists have now firmly shown, are linked not only to greater social attunement but also to more efficient self-regulation and improved physical health. In this way, love and health cocreate each other in your life. At the same time, this reciprocal, upward spiral dynamic between micro-moments of love and lasting changes in your health forges a path toward your higher spiritual sense of oneness. It may well be these cell-nourishing moments of positivity resonance that, according to Karen Armstrong, “touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves” and, according to Sharon Salzberg, embody the “active, open state” of faith “to take the next step.”
Love 2.0: The View from Here
I’ve encouraged you, throughout this chapter, to take the next step toward loving all, without borders. I hope that I’ve convinced you that this step is indeed glorious, as Thomas Traherne promised in the opening chapter quote. This is the step that will take you closer to your highest aspirations, your highest spiritual ground. It will open you up to create more and better opportunities for flourishing and for physical health.
All your waking moments give you opportunities to practice opening your heart. You choose the best way for you to do this. It may well be best to meet your new ideal of “loving all” by adopting the more modest aspiration of “loving one more” and then renewing this more achievable aspiration time and again. Your goal can be to see past the borders that traditionally constrain love, and to exclude no one. By nature’s design, your genetic and psychological makeup grant you the capacity to recognize, protect, and cherish your kin and the other special loved ones to whom you have bonded. Just as surely, however, evolution has also designed you to benefit from sharing micro-moments of love with even the most distant and dissimilar other. Don’t miss out on your chance to give love . . . and health . . . and oneness . . . freely, to all.
CHAPTER 9
A Closing Loving Glance
I NEVER KNEW HOW TO WORSHIP UNTIL I KNEW HOW
TO LOVE.
—Henry Ward Beecher
After spending months building the case for this book for why it’s worth upgrading your view of love, I’ve become convinced that this simple call opens the door to an endless process. The work of science, after all, is never done. Even though the latest discoveries about love’s impact on your body, brain, behavior, and future prospects can fill volumes and fill you with amazement, it’s equally humbling to recognize how little we actually know about love’s full impact. New discoveries about love’s power will continue to unfold. As they do, you and I alike will be called to upgrade our views of love, time and again, to reimagine this life-stretching experience from the ground up once more. Whatever your prior beliefs about love, my hope is that I’ve piqued your curiosity to begin to see love as your body experiences it, as positivity resonance that can momentarily reverberate between you and virtually anyone else. Before these reverberations fade, they initiate biochemical cascades that help remake who you are, both in body and in mind.
It’s also worth considering whether you’ve unwittingly placed constraints on your own experiences of love by following cultural norms. These constraints may have been holding you back from reaching your full potential for health and happiness, and from making deeper contributions to the lives of others. Beyond sharing the latest science on love, my aim in this book has been to release you from these constraints. The task of upgrading love remains incomplete without self-reflection and self-change.
Years ago, when I sat in a silent meditation retreat sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute held at the retreat center cofounded by my friend and collaborator Sharon Sa
lzberg, one of our teachers shared a joke with us. It went something like this: On learning of a friend’s new (or renewed) devotion to meditation practice, an observer quipped, “Practice, practice, practice! All you ever do is practice! When’s the performance?” After a muted wave of chuckles rolled through the meditation hall, our teacher went on to say that there is indeed a performance scheduled; it’s called “Your Daily Life.”
This is the mind-set about the practices in part II that I urge you to adopt. Whether you choose to shift your focus with formal meditation or with the informal micro-moment practices I’ve offered, I can guarantee you that merely dabbling in them one or two times will lead to no appreciable changes. You well know that engaging in one bout of vigorous physical exercise, or eating one stem of broccoli, will not do anything to improve your health. Your path to physical, emotional, and spiritual vitality is no different. So find activities that speak to you, and identify the recurring cues that might trigger you to do them. Let the micro-doses of positivity that these activities bring draw you to practice, practice, practice. Let these practices help you build new and life-expanding habits, habits that little by little remake you and the course of your day and your life from the inside out.
Love 2.0: An Emotion Is Born?
Even as I have been writing this book, the equivalent of a scholarly earthquake has been shaking the foundations of the science of emotions. The question at the root of this rattler is ages old, yet repeated most cogently now by my fellow emotions scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett with the force of considerable data. What Barrett and her collaborators (including one of my newest Carolina colleagues, Kristen Lindquist) have asked is simply, what is an emotion? William James himself devoted considerable attention to this very question back in 1884.
In the current era, a typical scientific answer to this question describes a momentary emotional state—like anger, fear, or joy—as an organized set of responses to some new circumstance you face—like an insult, a clear danger, or sudden good fortune. These coordinated responses show up as discrete and identifiable changes in your facial movements and cardiovascular activity, in your subjective experience and action urges, and so on, all presumably orchestrated by discrete and identifiable changes in your brain. A hidden assumption is that the unique states of anger, fear, and joy are given to you by the basic design of your body and brain, as sculpted over millennia by Darwinian natural selection.
Barrett’s answer to the question, what is an emotion?, equally compatible with the premise that you inherited your basic emotional architecture from a long line of human ancestors, is that your experiences of anger, fear, and joy are not, in fact, biological givens, handed to you, preformed, by specific hardwired locations or circuits in your brain. Instead, she argues for considerably more flexibility in what makes for an emotion. Posing an assumption-shaking challenge to the field we share, Barrett contends that your brain comes preset only with the capacity to represent what she calls core affect, the more amorphous pleasure or displeasure of your bodily states, along with some degree of arousal. What makes for a specific experience of anger, fear, or joy, then, is your ability to weave together your appreciation of your body’s current state of pleasure or displeasure with your conceptual understanding of what’s happening to you in that very moment. In other words, higher-order mental processes—like memory, learning, knowledge, and language—are the more basic “ingredients of mind” that combine together with “core affect” to create the various recipes for states like anger, fear, or joy. Although aspects of Barrett and colleagues’ “constructionist” view of emotions can be traced back to earlier scientists, theirs is the first to be backed by modern neuroscientific evidence.
What does this mean for love? What does it mean for you? Plenty. For millennia, your ancestors felt energized by markedly good feelings when they interacted and connected with others. Those were the moments that made them feel part of something much larger than themselves, more energized, alert, and alive than they felt in other, more ordinary moments. Piecing together the commonalities across the many and varied situations that gave rise to such powerfully energizing good feelings led your ancestors to come up with words, rituals—and indeed whole religions—fashioned to represent and cultivate those longed-for feelings, in themselves and in others.
Having such words and rituals makes a big difference. Research coming out of Barrett’s lab and other labs, including my own, demonstrates that even the particulars of people’s bodily experiences hinge on the labels and ideas each person holds about emotions. For instance, inspired by Barrett’s work, Lindsay Kennedy and Bethany Kok, working in my PEP Lab, were drawn to test whether the bodily effects of anger depend on whether the person experiencing it believes anger to be an emotion, as is typically the case, or whether he or she is led to believe that anger is not an emotion, but instead “an instinctual response to an imbalance of resources.” Fitting with Barrett’s view, people’s understandings of the unpleasant state that they were just then experiencing shaped their bodily response: Those who took anger to be an emotion showed the typical jumps in heart rate and blood pressure, whereas those for whom the idea that anger is an emotion was debunked had an appreciably more muted cardiovascular response.
This means that the mere act of reading this book may well have added a new and powerful emotion to your repertoire of interpersonal experiences. How you come to think about love actually stands to reshape the way your body experiences it. A global poll, released on Valentine’s Day, 2012, revealed that most married people, or those similarly coupled, identify their significant other as their most important source of happiness. Likewise, nearly half of all single people say they yearn to find their own happiness by finding their own special person to love. While these numbers certainly varied culture by culture, they strike me as a worldwide collapse of imagination. Thinking of love purely as the romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive from micro-moments of positivity resonance. Put differently, your beliefs about what love is become self-fulfilling prophecies. If, for instance, you think love can in fact also bloom between you and the utter stranger with whom you connect for only a few minutes at the airport, then it more readily can. If, by contrast, you think love can bloom only between you and a special, predesignated one, then you’ve severely limited the prospects for yourself and that kindly person at the airport. Think of the old-school view of love as pouring a thick layer of cement over a garden that has been planted with a thousand flower bulbs. Although any single flower might still push its way through cracks in the cement and bloom nevertheless, the odds are severely stacked against it. Yet by upgrading your view of love to recognize its full scope, you break up and remove this cement to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Positivity resonance exists, whether you adopt a new view of love or not. It remains the ancient life-giving, soul-stretching state that your body craves. The difference you get with an upgrade is whether you are awake to the thousands of opportunities that surround you for fulfilling this craving. When you awaken to this new understanding of your heart’s potential, a new and life-changing emotion is born within you.
Do-It-Yourself Gene Expression?
Also in the span of time that I’ve written this book, my research team and I have been making new discoveries about how your experiences of love may be either amplified or muffled by the expression of certain genes within your cells. As sketched back in chapter 3, we’ve already discovered that people with higher cardiac vagal tone somehow extract a larger and more immediate positive jolt out of their efforts to practice the style of mediation, LKM, that I’ve featured prominently in part II. Even more inspiring, we found that practicing LKM actually raises people’s vagal tone such that positive feelings and higher vagal tone feed each other over time.
In our most recent experiment, we obtained blood samples from study volunteers before they tried out meditation for the fir
st time. By the flip of a coin, they tried either LKM or a different style of mediation, one that does not aim to cultivate loving feelings. Before and immediately after their assigned guided meditation, we asked them to rate the extent of their positive feelings. We then processed the blood samples in my collaborator Karen Grewen’s lab at Carolina, and later shipped them to my newest collaborator, Steve Cole, the director of UCLA’s Social Genomics Core Laboratory. Using sophisticated computational techniques, Cole analyzed each person’s RNA to determine whether any differences in gene expression uniquely predicted whether people had especially positive reactions to LKM.
A compelling pattern of differences emerged. While it’s too soon to say exactly what this pattern of differences means, it is consistent with the more general hypothesis that my team has been testing: that certain biomarkers, like cardiac vagal tone, inflammation, gene expression patterns, and perhaps even body mass index, can either amplify or muffle the good feelings you get when you try to cultivate love. To the extent that love in turn reshapes these biomarkers—a prediction we’re poised to test in the coming year—upward spiral dynamics ensue, in which love and health dynamically cocreate each other. How, then, your DNA gets translated into your cells next season may to some degree be up to you. By practicing healthy patterns of emotional expression, you may be able to sculpt healthy patterns of gene expression. Countless times in this book I’ve suggested that your body was designed for love’s positivity resonance and indeed cries out for it. My team is currently homing in on ever more precise statements about which of your genes, differentially expressed in your cells, contribute to this cry the loudest.
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