“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to carry.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
A critical mass of love is the minimum amount required in our life and in society after which love becomes self-sustaining, self-spreading and a dominant behavior shaping everyday life.
Can achieving a critical mass of love in our life and in the world change everything? Can it make us happy? Can it end war, violence and hate? Can it end greed, indifference and selfishness? Can a shift into love help us live in harmony with ourselves, each other and with Mother Earth? Were the hippies right after all?
In theory it should work, for if most of us come from a place of love we will find solutions to most of our problems. But how do we achieve a critical mass of love in the first place? In this troubled world love does not come into being thru wishful thinking or by just believing in it. And unconditional love itself is considered by many a utopian or mystical state of consciousness, impossible to attain in this lifetime.
Enter science: In perhaps one of the most significant discoveries you’ve never heard of, a team of scientists at Université de Montréal, Canada, found that unconditional love has its own distinct neural networks and is connected to the brain’s rewards system1. In other words, unconditional love is an ability we all have and it feels great.
The researchers went on even further to state: “As in the case of romantic love and maternal love, the rewarding nature of unconditional love facilitates the creation of strong emotional links between humans. Such robust emotional bonds may critically contribute to the preservation of the human species.”
So there we are, unconditional love is the way to go, and has the blessings of science!
The question now is how do we allow unconditional love to grow in our hearts and integrate with our busy competitive lives while also making the world a better and safer place?
Well, our amazing brain has yet another useful feature called neuroplasticity, which is our ability to learn, adapt and evolve over our lifetime.
Neuroplasticity basically means that we become what we practice. Any skill we practice over and over develops and grows the associated neural areas of our brain. Especially unconditional love because our brain and body actually want us to experience it.
So how do we awaken true unconditional love? Once again, our body-mind holds the answer gifting us an easy way to share unconditional love: Kind touch directly activates our neural love networks. Warm hugs, caring massage, therapeutic cuddles or even just casual holding, are our forgotten language of the heart, allowing us to intuitively communicate with each other while practicing appropriate intentions, respectful boundaries, and ultimately learning more about ourselves thru the mirror of relationship.
As a society we need to understand that love, touch, hugs and sex are not all the same thing, that each one is a legitimate but also separate need. And that as a species we need to come closer if we are to thrive and survive.
Humanity coming closer also means less over-consuming as we invest more in relating and less in stuff, which is good news for the planet.
In a nutshell, unconditional love is a neurobiological personal and community skill we are actually hardwired with from birth, and it is just waiting there for us to awaken.
Looks like the hippies were on to something.
Footnote:
- The original research paper appears here:
Mario Beauregard, Jérôme Courtemanche, Vincent Paquette, Évelyne Landry St-Pierre, The neural basis of unconditional love, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Volume 172, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 93-98, ISSN 09254927, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925492708001881
Access without a paywall: https://institutpsychoneuro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Beauregard2009-Unconditional-love.pdf
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