Thursday, June 3, 2021 (Day 154)
Meditation Music for the week: In the Fields of Peace: Liquid Mind (8:06) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiUnxwRh1iw
Question: What do you think of when you think about love?
Answer: See, I knew the questions would be hard in this section. So, I’m going to start with this definition from Wikipedia:
Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love of food. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment.
Love is considered to be both positive and negative, with its virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection, as “the unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another” and its vice representing human moral flaw, akin to vanity, selfishness, amour-propre, and egotism, as potentially leading people into a type of mania, obsessiveness or codependency.
With this explanation, I would say that my love for my daughters is different than my love for Rebecca (my wife), than my love for Laci (our dog), and many of the people in the Life Design Catalyst Tribe. But my love for these people and groups are much, much stronger than my love for pasta, pizza, for working out, and for things like golf and tennis. For example, I would give up playing golf or tennis if I knew that one of my peeps needed me for something. So I believe there are different levels of love, some where the experiences are much deeper than others. I was listening to one of my favorite philosophers, Brian Johnson, who talked about Love 0.0, Love 1.0, Love 2.0, and Love 3.0; he briefly described each this way:
- Love 0.0 – Love for yourself. If you don’t love who you are, it’s going to be hard to give out genuine love to others.
- Love 1.0 – Love for your family, friends, and intimate groups.
- Love 2.0 – Love for other human beings and of humanity.
- Love 3.0 – Love for everyone and everything.
So, based on the chart above, the question is, do you at least love who you are? If “no,” then that’s a great place to start, then you can move up accordingly. Of course, I don’t think you could every “master” love, but it’s something that could get better moment to moment to moment.
Going back to the question, when I think about love, I think about the joy, the kindness, the passion that I share with others and that others share with me. What would happen if each and everyone one of us showed up with love and kindness, instead of with anger, rage, sadness, anxiety, and other negative emotions. About two months ago, I decided that I would approach things in my life with kindness – and when the sarcastic, nasty side would come up, I would tell myself to pause, take a step back, and let the thought go by (aka Tony Robbins). Although it’s a work in progress, I do feel much better about things.
Wow, I guess I had more to say about this than I thought! I guess it helped that I was already thinking about this as I watched a Brian Johnson Master Class video this morning. Thank you Brian for your wisdom; even though we have never met, you are a true friend.
Other Stuff
I haven’t posted many Brian Johnson videos…so today, I decided share one, where he does a review of Barbara Fredrickson’s book, “Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection.” It provides such a great complement to what I shared this morning. You can find it here:
- PNTV: Love 2.0 by Barbara Fredrickson – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij1FUExCC7k
Most important message? We each have the capacity to share micro-moments of “positivity resonance.” Don’t know what it means? Watch the video.
The Dream Dean 