Some People are Easier to Love
Reflecting on another person's happiness is easier than controlling your own feelings about it.
This is the first installment of a three-part series about feeling whatever we feel as we reflect on our shared humanity.
Some People are Easier to Love
Mindfulness is commonly associated with developing focus and relaxation, but there are many related practices designed to nurture other valuable qualities, such as empathy and gratitude. Some of these exercises can feel like an effort to force feelings rather than preparing the ground for them to emerge naturally. It’s a common experience. Many people give up when their emotions don’t match what the teachers describe.
Over time, I’ve adapted traditional exercises to better suit my personality, and I encourage others to do the same. For instance, rather than trying to radiate love from my heart, I focus on stoking my curiosity about the feelings that arise as I picture the people I care about thriving. Of course, if you’re able to beam love out into the world from your chest, please keep doing it. Some of us just need other ways to get into the project.
I discovered loving-kindness practice more than twenty years ago, while training for my first marathon and preparing for my first silent meditation retreat. You could say I was trying to emotionally reboot. After a decade as a social worker, I realized how little I had left to give those I was supposed to help, and how little satisfaction I was getting from trying. Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?
Professional helpers would probably call what I experienced burnout. From my perspective, however, it seemed more like holding myself to the same elusive goal I had so often tried to convince my clients to pursue: gaining insight into the inner stuff that was leaving me feeling empty and defeated. Whatever you want to call it, it was clear I needed to change how I was approaching my life.
I learned a traditional version of loving-kindness by listening to Sharon Salzberg’s audiobook.1 The instructions guided me to imagine the well-being of myself and others—starting with myself, then my supporters and those who loved me unconditionally, followed by close friends and family, acquaintances, and eventually the difficult people in my life.
As my running mileage increased, I used those long stretches to picture the safety, health, and happiness of various people. It was pleasant—and I quickly noticed that some people are simply easier to imagine thriving. This practice made the miles go by more smoothly, providing a welcome distraction from the constant urge to stop running.
But I also noticed that many of the emotional responses generated by the exercises weren’t necessarily pleasant. Imagining the well-being of someone who had died or was no longer in my life made me feel sad. Acknowledging that some of the people I care about most won’t be around forever made me feel joy, tempered by an unpleasant pang of inevitable grief. Some people sparked smiles and even laughter on some days, but very little emotionality on others. Was a flat emotional response a sign I was doing something wrong?
With so much time to reflect, I experimented widely—eventually settling on a customized approach that truly fits the contours of my emotional experience, even if it doesn’t perfectly align with traditional instructions. The key difference is that, for me, loving-kindness is no longer about trying to generate warmth on command. It’s about reconnecting with our shared humanity—a deep sense of relatedness that’s easy to overlook in the rush of daily life.
Rather than trying to micromanage other people’s safety and happiness from within my own mind and body, I like to sit with the complicated reality that, beneath our many differences, we all crave the same basic things: safety, health, vitality, connection, and ease. We really are in these challenges together, whether we remember to acknowledge it or not.
Instead of forcing loving feelings, I use the practice to notice how love unpredictably surfaces in my body as I contemplate the well-being of others—and myself. The results aren’t always pleasant or easy to describe, but they feel more genuine and more alive. I remind myself to feel whatever arises, rather than trying to manufacture a particular experience.
This approach works best when I let my emotional responses unfold naturally, without forcing them to match any preconceived idea of what love should feel like.
I try to attribute equal significance to four distinct feeling tones that might arise:
pleasant
unpleasant
mixed
neutral
This takes practice. We instinctively misread unpleasant feelings and emotional neutrality as being out of bounds. What if love turns out to be more complicated than we imagined when we were younger?
Here are three tips I’ve found helpful. Maybe you will, too. I’ll share more tips like these in the coming weeks as we explore how to imagine the well-being of people who are a little or a lot less easy to love.
Start Where You Can
Personalize this practice by starting with any category of people that feels natural to you. This flexible approach works for any mindfulness or attentional exercise. If you don’t practice, you can’t experience the results. So do what you need to do to nudge yourself to keep showing up. The benefits will eventually inspire you to continue.
Get creative and stay curious
The more frequently you explore this, the more sense it makes. Especially when it comes to the people you care about the most. Over time, you begin to notice subtleties and shifts in your emotions, without feeling the need to turn every variation into a problem. There’s a certain freedom in having a neutral reaction to someone you love, rather than feeling guilty if today’s feelings aren’t as intense as they were yesterday.
Ignore the Censors
Feel free to tailor the imagined well-being of the beloved, imperfect people in your life based on what you know makes them happy. Let your best friends and supportive family members smoke, read romance novels, and eat French fries in your mind. They won’t suffer the consequences of any behaviors you imagine them indulging. I promise. Instead of policing what makes the imagined activities of other people happy, savor your actual responses to their happiness in your own body.
Today’s exercise is designed to set the stage for exactly this kind of invaluable inner experimentation.
What might shift if you stop grading yourself by the amount of warmth you feel, and instead simply notice whatever arises—without evaluation?
Exercise
This exercise invites you to cultivate affectionate feelings and immerse yourself in their rich, nuanced complexity.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
When you’re the only one awake in the house
Over coffee or breakfast
As you settle into bed
