Mental Fitness Now™

I was listening to a woman called Marilyn Schlitz the other night talking as a guest speaker at an ongoing series of free online seminars on “The Future of Love” . The perspective that she was bringing to the discussion was basically what current scientific research has to say about the development of love. She was asked what her research had revealed the most important factors for the development of love were. She gave five basic qualities or factors that she had found to be most important for the development of any form of healthy love. What I am going to do is list them, giving a brief sentence of my own indicating what is meant.

1) Intention – If you want to develop love, you have to first have the intention to develop love, and then you also have to be willing to focus on developing the different forms of intention that are found in the practice of love itself. For example we need to practice holding the intention to be caring and kind to ourself and others even when we can feel fear and agitation arising in our mind.

2) Attention – Where you focus your attention during the day will create the way you feel. To develop love an essential practice is learning to focus on ourself and others in a way that stimulates love and affection, not agitation and friction.

3) Repetition – Once we have some basic hands on practices for developing love, an essential factor then becomes simply repeating those actions again and again. We need to become familiar with them so that they become second nature. I think this is really where we need to adopt the tortoise and not the hare attitude: Gradual, regular, consistent repeated practice.

4) Guidance – You want to develop love? Plug into those who have already got some! Read books, attend seminars (like the free one mentioned above), attend classes on love, and hang out with people who have love and who can share both their love and their loving know-how with you. Surround yourself with (to use the Buddhist term) a “love-sangha” or love community!

5) Surrender – Love is always available to us one way or another, but it seems we have many (conscious and unconscious) barriers and defences to letting it in. Are you prepared to surrender to love, in the sense of allowing yourself to be vulnerable and sensitive enough to really feel it deeply? This is a challenge for all of us, but one that we need to meet!

Actually it seems like you could apply these five factors to any inner quality that you wish to develop, the most interesting thing to me is that they are an answer from a contemporary scientist investigating love, so it is not just a subjective opinion.

May you love and be loved!

© Toby Ouvry 2010 Please do not reproduce without permission