Your Spectrum of Love

More than an emotion

Rumi Quote on “Early Morning” Oil and Cold Wax on paper. -Sarah Bush

What’s the first book you read that blew your mind?

Mine was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I was nine years old and I still remember being on tenterhooks through what felt like an excruciating buildup of tension as the main character Meg tries to free her little brother from a force of evil. This force is filled with hate and Meg is filled with loathing for it. As she wrestles to save her brother’s life, she finally realizes, at the climax, that she can’t counter hate with hate, and that only love will save him.

Love your enemy.

This compelling sci-fi story brought what had been an abstract philosophical idea from Sunday school vividly to life—and it rocked my world.

As a nine year old, I literally had no inkling where the plot was going and still remember sitting on my bed being completely floored by Meg’s epiphany about what she had to do, and her courage to find a way to love the shockingly evil being that was “The Black Thing.”

I was genuinely amazed and touched. It changed me. I thought about that moment for a very long time.

Which brings us, of course, to our political situation today.

Loving Perception

It’s really important to me that I approach Trump 2.0 very differently than I did the first time, when I somehow thought that being over-informed + constant vigilance on social media would somehow help keep democracy alive. And sure, I also went to many protests (which I never enjoy) but it was mostly about me freaking out.

So yes, I want to “resist,” but I also want to redefine what that might mean. I don’t want my resistance to simply be a constant reacting to outrageous behavior, autocratic overreach, petty hatreds, and fascist gaslighting—that’s just giving my power away—they act and I re-act. They hate and then I hate back.

No.

I was doing pretty well during week one until Friday night when the misogynistic and completely unqualified Pete Hegseth got confirmed as Secretary of Defense. I flipped out and had to get out of bed and on my computer to anxiously scroll around searching for news and opinions.

That’s when I knew I needed a plan. A love plan.

Now I’m not actually planning on loving Pete Hegseth anytime soon. But I also want to keep an eye on hating him. I mean, I genuinely think he hates women, but if I hate him for that, well, then we have hatred in common. I want to be better than that, even if he couldn’t care less.

But how?

Then I remembered a practice my spiritual community likes to do together called Loving Perception, something mystic David Spangler writes about in his book Journey into Fire.

Not Just an Emotion

People can be hard to tolerate, let alone love. And when people are literally dangerous, it makes it feel impossible.

At the same time, we are one human family. These dangerous people are extensions of me. And I’m an extension of them. Ugh! I mean, yes!

But seriously, I don’t want to just give lip service to love when things are easy. I want to embrace it even when the shit is hitting the fan.

Seeking social justice and general fairness, creating communities of inclusion and perceiving myself as a daughter of my planet give me lots of reasons to focus on love and places to center my love. I don’t have to focus on the hardest people to love and make that my life’s work.

In fact, I can nurture my capacity to love in all kinds of ways that strengthen my love muscle, and give me glimpses of what a giant love might look like, rather than let the worst in someone else bring out the worst in me.

But I also realize that I also can’t shut out those people who are supporting what I perceive as hatred, callousness, and evil as simply “the other side.” They are still a part of me and I them. And I do actually perceive myself as responsible for them as my fellow humans. Ugh. I mean, yes!

So right now, from my own position of personal safety at the start of the Trump administration Week 2, it feels important to turn my attention to my core values and really consider what they mean, and then work to strengthen them.

And the Loving Perception exercise we do in my spiritual community is one of the ways I practice. We use it within a framework we call The Spectrum of Love, which is about perceiving love as a continuum. This exercise helps us broaden our understanding of love beyond the familiar emotion we feel for the people in our lives whom we’ve chosen to love.

Because like joy, love is much bigger than how we experience it as an emotion.

When we think about love this way, as bigger than our individual emotions, most of us start thinking of it as the “unconditional love” idea we all casually bandy about. The giant Jesus kind of love. But since most of us can’t manage to pull that off, it doesn’t give us much wiggle room to grow or explore this concept of big love.

The Spectrum of Love, however, is about perceiving that this bigger love actually exists on a continuum rather than being an on-off switch. Rather than an either/or—I love you/I don’t love you, I can find a way to love you a little just by respecting your existence.

The power of perceiving love as a spectrum in this way allows us to treat love as a practice rather than as an emotion that one feels or doesn’t.

How it Works

To start, we usually practice by connecting to the most mundane objects around us. A spoon. A cheap travel mug. A ballpoint pen.

One of the reasons we do this is because it’s more neutral that focusing on a person, so it helps us feel into the process more clearly. It also helps us expand our imaginations about what love can look and feel like as we explore it as a continuum of five steps: acknowledgement, honoring, appreciation, caring, and affection.

But rather than continue to try to explain it, I thought I’d just share a simple example.

An Example: My Reading Glasses

Here’s an example of how I did this process recently with my reading glasses:

• Acknowledgement. A simple genuine witnessing.

  • As I took the time to perceive and acknowledge my glasses’ existence in the world, I really observed and felt their shape, their lightness, and their plasticky smoothness. Because I’ve designed and helped produce many objects, I also imagined how many similar glasses had been punched out at the factory, that this pair was one of many. Many thousands at least. I thought about the machine that was designed and built to manufacture these glasses and hundreds of other styles as well.

• Honoring: Witnessing + respecting the right of another to exist.

  • As I meditated on my glasses’ right to exist—and be different from me—I thought about how often I drop them or casually shove them in my pocket with my keys. How I often let the lens get scratched because I’m careless about how I treat them because they don’t cost very much.

• Appreciation: Experiencing their inherent value.

  • As I moved into appreciation, I thought about how comfortable I find my reading glasses, how they help me see and how empowering that is. How bummed I feel when I forget my glasses when I’m at the supermarket or trying to read a menu. I need them!

  • As I began to more consciously appreciate my glasses, I felt into their constant ability to magnify and help me read, whether I’m using them or not. They are built to serve and are inherently useful. A skilled human being probably designed these glasses with the help of a computer program. By owning and using these glasses, I am also connected to the humans who designed them. To the person who created the computer program that the designer used. To the computer itself.

• Caring: Being invested in their well-being.

  • I thought about how much I like the style of these glasses, which is why I picked them. And because they are plastic, they don’t get tangled in my hair when I prop them on my head, which I love. I remembered how much I really like these glasses and how glad I am that I bought them. I want to treat them better.

• Affection: Feeling a Kinship.

  • These glasses are my constant companions—my eyes are so important to me as an artist, and I love that these glasses help me see the world with the clarity I took for granted when I was younger. They constantly serve my needs without a peep.

  • In addition, as I was meditating on my affection for these glasses, I realized that it partly stems from the fact that I find them attractive. Which made me conscious that their attractiveness is not what justifies their existence. I’ve bought other pairs of glasses online that I didn’t like for various reasons, but they still functioned perfectly well.

  • This led me to think about how we perceive the value of so many things differently depending on their appearance—for instance, fearing or loathing spiders, say, but loving butterflies. Or how we live comfortably side by side with squirrels in our yards and parks in ways we’d never do with rats, for instance. How would we treat squirrels if they didn’t have such fluffy tails and perky ways? How much do I reject what I reject because I don’t ‘like’ it or am repulsed by it?

The Important Part

When I hate something or someone, I deny their existence. I make no room for transformation or evolution. Plastic for instance. I often get overwhelmed and saddened by the existence of billions of plastic bottles littering the land and clogging the ocean, choking and killing fish and wildlife.

But the plastic didn’t ask to be a throwaway water bottle. Plastic itself isn’t evil. A lot of plastic even helps save lives. Plastic was created in this world with worldly materials and chemicals. It’s our human thoughtlessness about plastic that has made it such a problem.

Which brings us to the next challenge of practicing “Big Love” on a spectrum—ourselves and our fellow humans.

Humans

What I love about starting the Loving Perception exercise with “inanimate objects” is that it keeps the stakes low and helps me focus on the getting comfortable with the steps themselves. It also heightens my appreciation for everything in our living universe and creates the space for me to consider more challenging subjects of my attention—like myself and my fellow humans.

I recommend, when doing this exercise on humanity, to not pick the person you find most evil on the planet and jump into this process. Start with the irritating cashier at the grocery store. Or your overreaching boss.

Also, the point isn’t to reach the “affection level” for each person or thing you try this with. It’s about exercising even your smallest willingness to consider anyone or anything in a loving way as an embrace of the sacredness of life on earth.

It’s also not about forgiving them their trespasses or making allowances for bad behavior or truly heinous activity. That’s the “Big Love” part of this practice and what’s so rich and complicated about doing it—that we can love another without forgiving them. It’s more about perceiving and experiencing love as a law of the universe—an intrinsic part of the nature of reality itself—and the role we play as humans in its existence.

Because our job as humans—just by being alive—is to tap into that “capital L” love and learn about it, learn about it, learn about it—until the day we die—all the while spreading it around as best we can.

A Guided Meditation

I find this Loving Perception practice expansive and it helps me connect more deeply to my empathy and sense of interconnection with the world. This feels especially important right now.

If you’re also struggling in these fraught political times, I hope you give it a try.

Because I generally get more out of a meditation type practice when I listen to it, I’ve made a simple recording (with David Spangler’s permission) of the Loving Perception exercise for my paid subscribers.

If you’re a paid subscriber—thank you so much—you can access the recording below. (And if you’re not—it’s all good! But if you’d like, you can become a paid subscriber by clicking below.)