#truelove #allowing #dating
Here are 7 stunning spiritual love quotes to help you have a passionate Valentine’s Day:
In a controversial Slate piece, Miya Tokumitsu takes the concept of “do what you love, love what you do” to task for being the “secret handshake of the privileged.” She says that this widely embraced ideal can actually undermine workers by telling them that they shouldn’t work for money, but for the sheer love of it. And that this can cost us all.
Let me tell you straight: It’s wonderful if you love your job, but at some points in your life, yes, you will have some jobs you aren’t crazy about, because you need the money, period. We all gotta live. Obviously, you want more for yourself and so do I. But my fear is that we’ve put all our love in the task basket, instead of where it should be: In our relationships.
Because while it’s all well and good to do things you have a talent for, the thing that could actually make your work even more rewarding and — I’ll say it — enjoyable, isn’t so much the actual work you do but the people you do it with.
I read about this study of emotional culture in a long-term care setting in the Harvard Business Review, in which Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill examined the effect of companionate (non-romantic) love on well-being and performance. They looked at several outcomes (including that of patients and families), but what they also found was that “employees who felt they worked in a loving, caring culture reported higher levels of satisfaction and teamwork.” Arguably the best marker for this: They showed up for their jobs more often.
As you can imagine, working in a long-term care facility is probably a lot less lighthearted, and creative as, say, an ad agency. The stresses are high in both, but very different. And what a great crucible for studying the effect that fellow employees have on each other. Answer: A lot.
One of the best and longest jobs I had was as an editor at a national magazine. That really was the job that people in publishing would kill for, especially those still answering another editor’s phone. I knew it was a good gig and I loved it.
But while that work was incredibly rewarding on its own, you know what made it better? Not the better assignment. Not the cooler interview. It was walking in every day and seeing my friend Sarah who was usually at her desk when I got in and who invariably turned around to ask how I was. It was going with Olessa for tea in the afternoons, or taking the bus uptown with Ana at the end of the day. No one misses late nights, but those nights weren’t so bad when we hunkered down together and ordered in together. The day my boyfriend moved away, it was those people who dropped their uber-creative projects for a while to support me as my mascara streamed down my face.
I’ve long since left that job. I still do work I love — mainly from home, and I do miss the easy camaraderie of having people around. When I think back to my time there, I don’t miss the work, the tight schedules. I miss the people. The connection I felt with them was more real than any deadline — which let’s face it, were all kind of made up.
There’s so much talk about work-life balance and how much time we should spend on this or that, when to walk, eat, or sleep. But the fact is, everything — everything — would be far easier in our lives if we were able to be that kind and connected to each other. If we were that much more willing to go out of our way to be humans instead of employees, and not just coworkers, but friends. (Jan Bruce, co-founder of meQuilibrium, knows this well: Read how connecting something greater eases stress.)
You may have a sweetheart in your life to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year. But that significant other is just ONE of the many people you have the opportunity to give to and love each day. Jobs will come and go (as will partners). You’ll learn new skills and forget others. But what will make you a more resilient, contented person will never come solely from the ego boost of doing a good job. It will come from the people you’ve loved along the way.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Now go hug your cubicle mate.
(Read more about how to shift the tone of your work day.)
Terri Trespicio is a media personality, lifestyle expert, and coach. Visit her at territrespicio.com.
But neuroscientists are coming to a better understanding of the ways romantic and other types of love occur in the brain, which could help us boost our capacity for love and improve our relationships. Research from Yale University published this week found some particularly startling neurological differences between two different varieties of love: romantic and selfless.
“Experientially, romantic love leaves you wanting more — you want that next date, you want the next tweet, you want that next text — whereas selfless love is boundless,” Judson Brewer, director of research at the Center for Mindfulness and an associate professor at UMass Medical School, told the Huffington Post. “All you need to do is drop into it… It doesn’t have that same driving quality to it, where you’re strung out on it. It’s wide open, it’s delicious.”
In honor of Valentine’s Day, here are four things that neuroscience can teach us about the “most powerful emotion.”
Selfless love makes us happy.
The Yale research, published in the journal Brain and Behavior, found that selfless love, which stems from deep compassion and desire for someone else’s happiness without receiving anything in return, activates the same reward center of the brain as cocaine. And it deactivates the reward areas associated with romantic love — for instance, the feeling that arises when lovers see each other.
Romantic love, unlike selfless love, activates parts of the brain associated with habit formation and drug addiction, says Brewer. The researchers also found, most interestingly, that selfless love deactivated self-oriented thinking in the brain — the type of thinking, when something happens, that causes us to ask, “How does this affect me?”
“[Those regions] were not only not activated, but they were significantly deactivated in experienced meditators compared to novices,” Brewer told the Huffington Post. “So this selfless type of love seems to be deactivating brain regions associated with self-referential processing… People were actually not doing things in a self-referential way.”
Love is addictive.
Another big difference the Yale researchers found was that while selfless love is not characterized by wanting or craving, romantic love can be addictive. A great deal of previous research has found that romantic love does indeed cause wanting and craving, and triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as cocaine.
“Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you,” anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, said in a TED talk about the brain in love. “You can’t stop thinking about another human being. Somebody is camping in your head…. Romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.”
The sting of being rejected by someone you love? That response is rooted in the brain, too, Fisher found.
“When you’re dumped, the one thing you want it to just forget this human being and move ahead with your life, but no, you just love them harder,” Fisher said. “The reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving for focus, becomes more active when you can’t get what you want.”
This explains why we kill ourselves and others, start wars, commit crimes of passion, and give up everything for love — we literally just can’t get enough of it.
Intense romantic love can last for a lifetime.
It’s not common, but intense romantic love can last for a lifetime — and neuroscience research has brought us closer to understanding how some couples are able to stay deeply in love for years and decades.
A 2011 study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience looked at which brain regions are activated in individuals in long-term romantic partnerships (who had been married an average of 21 years), as compared to individuals who had recently fallen in love. The results, surprisingly, revealed similar brain activity in both groups.
Psychology Today reported that the brain activity found in people just starting out in romantic relationships can absolutely be sustained.
“The key to understanding how to sustain long-term romantic love is to understand it a bit scientifically,” positive psychology researcher Adoree Durayappah wrote . “Our brains view long-term passionate love as a goal-directed behavior to attain rewards. Rewards can include the reduction of anxiety and stress, feelings of security, a state of calmness, and a union with another.”
Male and female brains respond differently to love.
Male and female brains are more similar than they are different, and we all experience similar feelings when we’re in love. But there are some differences in the way romantic love occurs neurologically in men and women. Another study conducted by Fisher and her colleagues found that most women who had recently fallen in love showed more brain activity in regions associated with reward, emotion and attention, whereas men tended to show the most activity in visual processing areas, including the area associated with sexual arousal. But that doesn’t mean that men are wired to look for sexual gratification rather than more enduring romantic connections.
“Despite stereotypes to the contrary, the male brain can fall in love just as hard and fast as the female brain, and maybe more so,” Louann Brizendine, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, told CNN.
Allowing true love. Books and Subliminal Audios 