Practice 7 – Grow the Love, Accentuate the Kind  

Have compassion for everyone you meet … You do not know what wars are going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone. 

Lucinda Williams

Summary: All the practices urge us to attend here to our mental and heart practices intensely, with vigilance, and way past what is seen as normal, or even reasonable. Our heart training, the giving and receiving of love in all its forms, is usually mixed at best. Parents and families and life events can be strong for accessing the fullness of our hearts, but it can also be terrible, haphazard, damaging. And there is everything in between.  Many of us therefore, if we are serious about being the best person we can be, have been making our own heart energy upgrades for decades. Love colors all our thoughts and takes us beyond conceptuality to the lands of deep connection and wise doing. Expanding our heart awareness and heart strength is the essence of this practice.

Love training becomes our job

We have fed our minds our whole life. It has been stuffed actually, and news feeds on our devices want to keep the gorging going. We need to go from mind to heart to balance out this massive stimulation and input.

Our training in loving and lovingness starts at home of course, as we learn how to connect to others. It may have been strong and beautiful training, as stated above. It may have been weak, or even quite negative if the home was very faulty.  School, so focused on mental development, was supposed to keep heart skilling-up/capacity-building going and indeed had something to teach us about our hearts: be considerate and love your school, your team, your country even. And you may have even gotten some advanced training in developing a kind mind/heart life stance through your faith at the church, temple, or mosque, ashram, even peer groups, to love all peoples and all of creation.

Our normal inheritance of well-intended, haphazard and often flawed heart development processes naturally lead most of us, as young and mid-life adults, to take charge of our own heart and love curriculum. If we give it enough thought we attend to the neglected areas, undoing the damage we took on and going past the limits that the culture and family passed on. My formal training was good overall, and I can make a long list of the positives because of my really competent and loving parents. On the flip side, I also inherited a well disguised, hard-work-makes-me-loveable program leading to overwork patterns, a lingering shame thing, with its similarly hidden defenses, and a lack of access to some emotions, to name three of the negatives.

Still, I inherited the white male privilege thing that came with growing up a middle-class boy in my parents’ quite religious Catholic-steeped America in the 50’s and 60’s—(I mention Catholic since we could become priests, not the girls.) These less than optimal features are in the normal range of what good upbringing and good parents still miss and overlook. Do your own inventory if you have not already done so and a book I wrote at the end of my intense re-working of my past decades can help with how to do this—The Power of Your Past: the art of recalling, reclaiming, and recasting. (Berrett-Koehler, 2011.) I often get reports from readers telling me it is practical and useful.

Practice 7 is about helping us all advance in the application of heart energies to our own and others’ lives. Normal lessons from life, adult friendship, loving kids or aging parents, close working colleagues, all keep growing our hearts. Attending positively and responsibly to careers and life does the trick. But here we are not leaving well enough alone. We are adding some juice to the effort. It is too important to let it just happen. If you got this far in the first six practices in our series here, you are ready for more grad-school level work–advanced steps for growing-the-love, accentuating-the-kind.  

Loves Melts Linear Limits

Heart training is less linear than head training, not marked by progress from taking tests and mastering information.  The mental and work/career skill curricula for most of us has some clear steps. The learning to love and be loved curriculum is less step-by-step. And it is about loving wisely. Indian mystic Sri Yukteswar says “wisdom is not assimilated with the eyes, but with the atoms.” All of the practices are about embodied learning and this is no different.  From many angles, some older ones like the wisdom traditions, and some newer ones like the studies of human happiness, emotional intelligence, and neuro-science, it is clear that heart-based know-how is foundational to happiness, joy and the long-lasting goodies of life.

The good news is that paradox like “less is more”, and poetic imagery, like “my love is like a rose”, which mean nothing logically but speak volumes–are two linguistic/thought regions where our heart and intuition can take us to aid in our expression of what is more than logical. Our love and heart energies are where poetry and paradox originate, and they take us past linear thinking limits.

This practice need not diminish our worldly practical view, always useful in its proper place, while adding a less worldly, sacred, love-based view. This is how the love and the kindness enters our lives and expands. A lot of what passes as normal is unhealthy and unreasonable. The purpose here, to remind us one more time, is to make progress on the happiness and life/work effectiveness front. Heart oriented work has showed up often thus far, and is the focus of practice 7 as it impacts everything and takes over where the mind can’t go.

Practice for Growing the Love and Accentuating the Kind

—Choosing Heart: We expand on practice 3 here.All day long we can choose heart. When we wake up, put our hand over our hearts and say a little phrase of intention, like “Today, I add heart to all my activities.”  Set the timer on our phones for 2 hour intervals and as we go through our day we inquire, every time the phone vibrates in those 120-min spaces—“how am I adding heart energy to this activity.” We remember what Mother Teresa said—“it is not what we do, but how much love we put into what we do, that matters.”  

–Building Compassion: think warmly of someone you love, then someone who is more neutral in your life, then someone who bugs you. All that we think warmly of feel it in some unconscious way and you feel it in yourself too. The progression from a loved one to a pain-in-the rear person is classic Buddhist compassion work. But make it your own heart work. Slop your love and caring intention on everybody, especially those you think don’t deserve it.

—Accessing Heart: Our hearts are always with us, so let’s not ignore them. Access heart often; bedtimes, waking and going to sleep, are a start. Then access at lunch and breaks. Then before every conversation, then before email and text sessions (this helps lessen email and text snarkiness and abruptness).  Indeed, we can then provide whole-hearted, not half-hearted, responses and generate the messages we want and others can count on an uplift. Access heart by dropping your attention—just for a second—on zoom calls, in meetings, on a walk–into the heart chakra. We can even put our hands over your heart, like above and in the two-foot drop mentioned in practice 3, and touch our chest when it is inconspicuous and natural.

—Being Heart: this is the accentuate the kind part. Tolstoy said, “Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” We are loved and love. Earlier in life, we may have worked at being loveable. Then we realize it is better to be the one doing the loving, with the good news that love is returned. And there is an advanced step. Past the step of doing the loving is becoming lovingness, attain the state of being in the lovingness vibe as much as you can. Every day, all day, stretch yourself into this state. This is the core of our nature after all, the state we got trained away from.  Get yourself home and then stay there.

—Give up all the habits that pull us away from our hearts, like much that is popular on our screens, social media put downs, so much of what is around us. Another place is normal lazy conversations with friends, filled with little daily dramas—”and then he said, blah blah, do you believe that?!!”.  One big step is not joining in or feeding the conversations that complain, that put down others’ behavior or thinking or politics (it is hard not to sit in on these conversations sometimes, but no need to participate). Change the direction of the conversation if you can with a little twist and most importantly, a new tone.

—Loving it up all day. Smile at strangers, do little favors, create fun transactions with the store clerk, do some deep listening to a neighbor, your family. Service of all kinds counts big here of course as you accentuate and embody what is kind. Some good words to close on from the pop world, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” Paul McCartney

Soon we move on to the last three practices.

If you missed the introduction to this series and the earlier practices here is the link that started the series.  http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/

 And a poetic stimulus from Artie Isaac, on the choice to be happy and love all: