Healthy Spirituality – The Focus is Love: Why is Love So Hard?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  – Luke 10:27

Part 1 

Healthy spirituality grows the capacity to love. Not just the capacity to love those who are easy to love, but to love those who are hard to love. The Thrive Center seeks an expansive vision around what is possible. We hope to cultivate a sense of what could be, what should be, and maybe even what will be. The world needs a visionary love that takes us out of our tribes and connects us beyond our immediate circles. We need to love our friends, strangers, and even our enemies. Both psychology and spirituality provide tools that we can use to develop more love for ourselves and others. 

Most spiritual traditions recognize that humans hurt each other and suggest pathways for reconciliation and forgiveness because humans depend upon love. Humans cannot survive without love – we build bonds and rely on each other for safety and procreation. We build communities so that we can feed ourselves and take care of those who can’t take care of themselves. For humans to survive and thrive, we need love, and we all have roles to play in loving each other and helping others live into the fullness of their lives.

Why is love so hard? 

Spirituality that helps us believe that we are loved and lovable has the power to motivate the best of human capabilities. If truly embraced, a love-based spirituality works to create a more peaceful world. If most of us agree that love is necessary, why don’t we see love practiced in spirituality and religion more than we do?  

We don’t always love ourselves. Many of us have grown up in situations where we didn’t get the right messages about love and didn’t develop a sense of ourselves as beloved. If we don’t love ourselves, which might be evidenced by negative self-talk and rumination over mistakes among other things, it’s hard to love others. The individualism, perfectionism, and achievement orientations inherent in our culture profoundly influence how we think, feel, and behave. These influences reinforce self-judgment, and this lack of love makes it hard to give others grace, especially when we judge our own mistakes so harshly.  

Another answer is that while humans are naturally empathetic and build strong bonds, we are also prone toward our in-groups. We make snap decisions, often based upon subtle cues, about who is in our group and who is not. It is very easy to put people into an out-group when we perceive them to be different, disgusting (or threatening), and it’s harder for us to love outsiders. We see this kind of othering around religious beliefs, especially when we believe that we know the truth and that our beliefs are superior. Although these instincts served the human species in earlier periods in history, they are no longer effective. In fact, growing capacities to love requires that we learn to override these natural instincts.

More subtly, it can be difficult to take the perspective of others, so important for loving those who have different points of view. While perspective-taking can be cultivated with practice, many of us find it difficult to walk in the shoes of another. Some of us find it challenging to “read the room” for cues and the quiet feedback that others provide. These types of capacities can be particularly difficult for people with “neurodiverse” brains, but imagining and trying to accept that others see the world differently from ourselves is extremely important for conflict resolution. 

Quite honestly, we might not even be aware of how our behaviors come across to others. Many of us rush through life, too busy to look up and clue into what’s going on around us. In our impatience, we dismiss people, honk our horns, and don’t make time to be kind. We often are completely oblivious to our own feelings, or want to deny our feelings. If we aren’t aware and don’t slow the pace a bit, we miss opportunities to see the people who need our love and offer it.

Finally, it is hard to forgive. When people hurt us, our natural inclination is to hurt people back. We tend to hold grudges and resentments can become part of our identities.  Yet, forgiveness is a powerful spiritual practice to help us live out love (and it has many health benefits). Not only is it good for physical health – it has been shown to reduce anger, anxiety, depression, and is good for self-esteem and hope for the future.  

When Jesus told his disciples in Matthew 5:38-39 to turn the other cheek, he was offering something profound. It’s interesting that modern psychology illuminates Jesus’ brilliance about the struggles we face as humans and the benefits we might gain from learning to forgive.  

Learning to forgive and those who are hard to love requires personal transformation, but no matter what our age, we can learn.  Recent research on neuroplasticity -…the brain’s ability “to adapt based on the environment, stimuli or experiences” shows that our brains change and develop even when we are older. According to the Mayo Clinic’s Prashanthi Vemuri, Ph.D., we can retrain our brains to tap into new skills and behaviors throughout life. Note that we have to learn these skills, and the way we learn is through practice.  Spiritual practices have the power to transform, but we want practices that lead to love and address our own particular limitations. Communities committed to love can provide a great source of support, and visionary leaders can use the personal transformation of their community members to promote social change.  

In Part 2 of this post we discuss the role of leaders in developing loving spiritual communities and offer a list of practices.