Love Acts « Modern Love: Sex & Relationships

How to cultivate love in your life.

by Steven C. Hayes, Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada Reno, and author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life and Psychology Today’s Get Out of Your Mind blog.

You can look at a flower in three different ways.

Photo: Flemming Christiansen

You can look at it the way a judge at the county fair might, comparing it to an ideal to see if it measures up. It rarely will. This petal is wilted. That leaf is brown.

You can look at it the way an artist might, taking it in with attentive appreciation. There is a beautiful totality to a flower. Its wholeness speaks in a resonant mix of tones, including even the wilted petal, and browning leaf.

Or you can look at it the way that a gardener might, noting what it needs to prosper, and taking careful steps to support its growth.

If you want to cultivate love in your life, foster the gaze of the artist and the active care of the gardener. And begin with the person in the mirror.

Science teaches us that love is an action, not just a feeling. When we accept people for who they are, we are doing something loving. When we see through our normal habits of judgment and criticism, and attend to others as whole human beings we are doing something loving. When we step forward and serve the deep purposes of others we are loving, one moment at a time.

If you think of times you felt truly loved, see if it isn’t the case that those times had such qualities. You were accepted, noticed, and actively treated as worthy by another.

But if that is the essence of a loving stance, it needs to begin at home. When we allow our deepest feelings, thoughts, and memories to be subjected to the critical skills of the judge within, we begin to believe that we are neither capable nor worthy of love.

It does no good to try to fix what we see, pulling off a petal here, and spray painting a leaf there. We know what is underneath, and if we fool others by such methods, we will simply devalue the love of the fools we have created. That is why the love of others rarely batters its way in. We have to invite it in, by doing love as an action – with others, for others, but first and foremost, with yourself.

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Read more by Steven C. Hayes on Psychology Today’s Get Out of Your Mind blog.