What Is Love and How Does It Transform Us?

Love is a word that we commonly use in our day-to-day lives, but we don’t take enough time to thoroughly reflect upon it.? We say we love our family, we love our spouse, we love our friends, we love the weather, we love the food, we love being in nature, we love the planet. What do we apply love to? Who is worthy of our love? How does one love??

Yet, we know love because we can experience it. What emotional experiences occur when we love? Whether you are by the sea alone or at home with your life partner, you experience joy and fascination with the person or object that you love. Whether the feeling compels you to write a poem or a blog article or start a club of like-minded souls interested in doing the things you like to do, you are transformed by the experience and demonstrate love when you engage in a creative activity that has some level of impact in the world.?

Why Talk About Love??

As a scholar and author on leadership and social innovation, I have been fascinated with this notion of love and its ability to drive change on the planet. Whether it is a simple dinner recipe that we make for our family or a large-scale social movement concerning a critical issue of our times, love empowers us to try things that we would not otherwise try.? Mothers often facetiously say that a key ingredient in their recipes is love. However, I have also seen love in the way my wisest friends put love into the design and organization of their homes. The work is not painfully done, but with a certain sense of satisfaction and ease.

Love does more than fuel our work, it brings us together as people. With love, we are able to see one another’s vulnerabilities with clarity, and we come to treat each other with compassion and civility. We appreciate each other; we co-create together.??

Those of us that are in helping professions—such as education, counseling, nursing, coaching, medicine, social work, and nonprofit management—innately know that we need love to do our jobs. We need to love ourselves, the people that we serve, and, most certainly, the work that we do. When I am filled with love, there’s a will within me to get the job done. There’s a drive within me to help people. If I don’t have love, it is hard for me to do my very best work. I believe the seemingly impossible becomes possible with faith in the end result and the passion that comes from love.

Love is fundamentally important to our professional success. We ought to understand what love is and how we leverage it in a way that empowers us to make the greatest possible difference we want to make in our lives and in the world.

Loving Versus Caring

In order for us to understand how we can harness the power of love, we need to first define love. In bell hooks' All About Love: New Visions, the author draws a sharp distinction between the notion of loving and caring. Often, we conflate the two. It can be difficult for some of us to admit that we might have been well cared for but not well loved. To help us to understand the difference, I will direct our attention to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs categorizes human needs into 5 levels and places the most fundamental needs at the bottom and the most aspirational needs at the top.?

At the very bottom level is the physiological level. These needs pertain to our biological well-being and survival. They include food, water, warmth, and rest.

At the second level are our safety needs–safety and security.?

Children are generally well cared for by their parents or caretakers. Parents make sure that their children receive food, and water, have a bed to sleep on so that they can rest, and have a warm snuggly blanket to keep them from freezing. They work hard to provide a roof over the child's head. They seek to protect the child's life and keep the child safe from various forms of harm. When we are talking about caring, we are talking about a relationship that satisfies the very first two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.?

However, when we are talking about loving, what we are talking about is our relationships that satisfy the third, fourth, and fifth levels. The third level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is belongingness and love needs, which includes intimate relationships and friends. These relationships are not required for our own physical survival, but they are nonetheless an important need for us as humans. We are emotional and social creatures like many other animal types after all. The fourth level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is esteem needs. We need to feel prestige, a sense of accomplishment, and a sense of value. Finally at the very top level, there is self-actualization. This is about achieving one's full potential. That may include creative activities. It might mean becoming an Olympic snowboarder, a professional surfer, an accomplished chef, a dazzling classical pianist, a medical doctor, or a university professor. Loving relationships may provide a sense of belongingness and love needs, support another’s?esteem needs or support another person's self-actualization.

I will now turn to a different but similar definition. M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, calls love “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In other words, we form relationships or partnerships to help each other to grow and self-actualize, to go to the very top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.?

What is important to realize is that we simply do not undergo spiritual growth or self-actualization without the help of others. We are defined in opposition to that which we are not. When we transform and grow, we expand ourselves so that we incorporate more of that which we are currently not into the person who we already are. However, we don’t know what we don’t know. We only know how to be ourselves. We don’t know what more we can be without the help of others to show us. Every person that we encounter represents a unique possibility for us to embody. Each person acts as a mirror for ourselves. Through others, we see our potential, our fresh possibilities. Love unlocks those possibilities. In my next article, I write more about how I experienced love and spiritual growth living on the island of Bali.?