It’s a month when we celebrate love and its power to change people’s hearts and to change our world. Love comes in many forms and is, in many ways, the thing that fuels our experiences in this world. When you think about the phrase “power of love,” you may think it sounds like an oxymoron. After all, power in our world is often associated with the polar opposite of what many of us think to be love.
Or you may immediately hear Celine Dion in your head, singing “’Cause I’m your lady, and you are my man” from her hit song by the same title. Or, if you grew up in the ‘80s, Huey Lewis and the News, perhaps. Or Laura Branigan. Even Air Supply.
We are all inundated with the more emotional aspects of love, sometimes exaggerated to an extreme, on a daily basis. In this article we will explore all the ways love is at the heart of the power to change and grow. We’ll draw on research from the scientific and the spiritual worlds, examining the evidence for the power of love. When it comes to your relationship to yourself, your family and friends, and your community, love is the answer to three key questions we will consider and it is the power behind the questions themselves.
How Can Our Love Grow? Cultivating Love
The Beatles asked it in the song “Something” by George Harrison: “You’re asking me will my love grow? I don’t know, I don’t know.” While change is a proven constant in all relationships and the ways we experience love is always fluctuating, the science indicates that we can increase our capacity for love and increase the power of love through greater self-love and self-compassion. Over time, this helps us develop greater empathy.
Meditation and mindfulness practices also help by decreasing the activity of fear-based centers in the brain while increasing the release of chemicals that support empathy and positive emotion. Similarly, the expression of gratitude for those with whom you are in relationship helps both the person sharing his or her gratitude and the person receiving it.
Putting your love in action and cultivating the conditions for love at home or in your community is one sure way to know that you are living a life open to the flow of love. So, while none of us can predict what may happen in the future, we can choose to cultivate the love from within us and the love we find in our lives and the world around us. By doing this, we put ourselves on a trajectory of growth.
How Can I Support More Peaceful, Loving Relationships? Seeing Through the Eyes of Love
You know that feeling you get when you look into a baby’s eyes? Turns out a lot is happening in the brain that moment. Science has found a proven connection between eye contact and emotional connection. We feel connected because that gazing into eyes of innocence reminds us of who we are.
We devote a whole chapter to this topic in Wholly Connected: Five Pathways for the Return to True Community, which explores reconnections along The Spiral Path. The surest way to support healthy relationships is to see with new eyes. It all starts within—with a reconnection to your True Self. As you begin to see yourself through the eyes of love, new possibilities open up and you see the world through the eyes of innocence. “When you change your mindset,” writes True Center founder Eve Willson, “you change your life and open up to new possibilities for True Community.”
Take a moment to consider how you are seeing yourself and those around you. Have you been choosing to look through the eyes of love? Commit to one way you will choose to let the power of love lead you into a focus on the experience of peace and love in your relationships.
How Can I Rekindle the Spark of Love? Allowing Space for Curiosity
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it turns out staying curious about those you love can be a lifesaver. Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds are both psychiatrists who study love on the brain and how love changes in partnerships. They have also been married for almost 40 years and learned a lot from their own experience.
In an article in The Harvard Gazette, the two discuss the ebb and flow in relationships. Schwartz says it’s actually the space between two individuals in relationship in which love can be reborn. Cultivating compassion and staying curious about others powers up the potential for a better experience in all kinds of love.
This is not only true in our closest one-on-one relationships, but it is also true with parents and children, siblings and extended family. Allowing space and getting curious can improve your relationships in the workplace and in your neighborhood, too. The power of curiosity to spark connection is potent. Try it out. Get curious about someone today.
To experience the dynamic power of love in your life, regardless of your primary relationship status, do these three things this month and every month:
- Cultivate love, beginning with your own practice of time and attention for yourself. Focus your love on you and watch love grow in places you may not have expected it could
- See through the eyes of love. Look for signs of love, and start with your own heart. How loving are you being to yourself? Try mirror-gazing. Tell yourself how much you love you. Meet others with honor and grace.
- Create space and get curious. As you see with the eyes of love, begin to notice where love springs up and surprises you. Ask and open up to receive through conversation and other forms of connection.
As you try these three actions that are sure to move you into a fuller experience of love and life, consider how you can bring more love to your self, your family and closest friends, your neighborhood and local community, the natural world, and the global community. Open up to receive more and to live wholly connected. That’s the power of love, and it is the place where life begins.
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