Why we created the pro love movement and how you can join us
Episode 10
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Love Without Limits by Jacqueline A. Bussie
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
World Without Hate organization founded by Rais Bhuiyan
The World According to Mr. Rogers: Important Things to Remember by Fred Rogers
Learning to Love Yourself by Gay Hendricks
Imagine that you begin to hear whispers of an underground Pro-Love Movement spreading across the world. Like many revolutionary groups, its goal is liberating people from oppression and creating a greater sense of peace and well-being for everyone.
But, unlike political movements, this Pro Love Movement isn’t anchored to a particular ideology. As you keep listening to hear more, you learn that there’s no leader and no flags. There are no speeches and no marches. There are no requests for donations, no conventions, and no gatherings of any kind.
Without these kinds of external symbols, it would be difficult to prove for sure that this Pro Love Movement even existed. But it would also be impossible to deny it … because anyone who was actually looking for evidence of a Pro Love Movement’s subversive influence on the world could see signs of it everywhere.
It would be present in the children running and laughing together, then pausing to help a friend who’d fallen. You’d see it in the friendly smiles of two strangers who meet each other’s eyes while passing through a doorway. It would obviously shine in the eyes of lovers who recently met, but it would be just as evident in the satisfied expression of a woman holding her cat, and the man staring up at the stars.
As you look for subtle signs of this Pro Love Movement, you’d start to suspect the musician caressing the strings of his cello with intimate attention, and the potter whose diligent hands bring her clay to life. And then you’d start noticing likely members of the Pro Love Movement everywhere you look.
Hospice nurses, obviously. And many teachers … and therapists, of course. Bus drivers too, and your postal carrier, and the chatty cashier at the grocery store.
Anywhere you look, from the fleeting encounters between strangers to the professionals dedicated to service to others, you would start to notice signs that this movement perhaps really did exist, in fleeting and more lasting expressions of tenderness, care, respect, and … love.
You probably can imagine a few scenes from your day today that would count. Perhaps the real question is not, does the Pro Love Movement really exist? But rather: would you be willing to choose to join the movement? How you would join, if you wanted to? And … what might change in your life, if you thought of yourself as someone who’s committed to moving in the direction of being pro-love?
At Alchemy of Love, our mission is to bring more love into the world, one relationship at a time. We believe that the best place to start with bringing more love into the world is often in our relationships with ourselves.
As we frequently say, the most intimate relationship you’ll ever have is with yourself.
And it’s often difficulties in our relationships with ourselves that end up manifesting as difficulties in our relationships with others. We’ve seen, firsthand, over and over again, the power of love to heal what has seemed irrevocably broken. And on a personal level, we’ve each experienced how loving ourselves has made us each more capable of loving others.
The truth is that love heals and that there are always invitations in our life to move toward love. That’s what we’re calling the Pro-Love Movement.
Unlike other movements, which draw attention to themselves in opposition to others, the Pro-Love Movement is open to everyone who’s willing to move toward more love, in any area of your life ….in any daily interactions, and in any relationship, big or small.
I (Daniel) have never been part of a clandestine organization, but I always imagined it would be fun to have a sense of invisible, secret camaraderie with strangers. That way, others could recognize in me, and I in them, something shared and unspoken. That’s part of the deep joy I experience when I envision being part of a Pro-Love Movement. When I walk through the world imagining that everyone around me is part of the same movement, working in their own ways to bring more love into the world, I’m able to notice all the easily-overlooked signs that reflect this shared goal of more love. I feel more hopeful when I interpret little gestures and actions as ways love expresses itself, here and now, all the time.
The way we see others influences how we approach them …which influences our interactions with them. There’s something magical even in those uncanny moments when we think we see a friend and our face lights up to greet them and we see the other’s face light up in response … before we even register that it’s not our friend after all, but rather a beautiful stranger.
Of course, there’s the awkwardness of the mistaken greeting, but if we can look past our initial embarrassment, these kinds of experiences show us something true about how much more warmth and connection there is when we’re open to it.
One of our inspirations for sharing our vision for a Pro Love Movement came from our friend Jacquie Bussie’s book Love without Limits. Weaving in examples from her life, the book provides a clear interpretation of Christianity that shows how this religion invites and challenges its believers to put the title into practice—to love without limits.
She writes, “We’re all interconnected, and we can’t live without one another, but only a love without limits accepts this. A love without limits proclaims, there is no me without you, and I vow to live like it.”
When we focus on conflicts in the world at large, it becomes easy to look at the other side as being an enemy. It can be tempting to imagine that the world would be better off, if only this leader or this political group wasn’t in power.
We wouldn’t be the first to say that our current political climate throughout the West highlights deep divisions between us. And yet, one of the joys of being a therapist is getting to know others at a deep level, which provides constant reminders that when we get beneath another’s political positions, even those that are wildly different from our own, we meet deeply lovable and loving humans who want something remarkably similar to what we want … even though our ideas for how to get there are very different.
Loving people doesn’t mean agreeing with them or turning a blind eye to injustice.
It’s also true that making a fierce and revolutionary commitment to love everyone as they are, with a warmth or fire that can melt injustice, won’t always make you popular.
Some might misunderstand your motives or question your commitment to justice. And yet at the same time, when we’re deeply connected to ourselves, when we pause to reflect, we know—intuitively—how meeting what we perceive as hate with our own hate only deepens the divide.
By choosing to respond to others with a loving heart, we become part of the Pro Love Movement. Responding with a loving heart reminds ourselves—and others—that another way is possible.
In this, the Pro Love Movement follows the insight of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who said “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up.”
These words, taken out of the context in which Dr. King lived and died, could easily dismissed as unrealistic, pie in the sky fantasy. Yet, this was Dr King’s philosophy that was formed within the crucible of racism, oppression, and violence.
Similarly, the organization World Without Hate was founded by Rais Bhuiyan, who was shot by a white supremacist following 9/11, and then went on to not only forgive the man who attempted to kill him, but also worked tirelessly in an attempt to save his life after he was sentenced to capital punishment.
“Once you get to know the other,” Rais explained, “it’s hard for you to hate them.”
This kind of love that Jacquie Bussie, Dr. King, Rais Bhuiyan, and others embody is a spiritual practice. This is where we see the Pro Love Movement going. But ,if this seems wildly impossible, unattainable, or undesirable in your own life as you consider those you see as fundamentally opposed to your deepest values, we want you to know that you don’t have to be ready, willing, or even interested in unconditional love as a spiritual practice to join the Pro Love Movement.
That might be the direction to aim in, but it’s not where we begin. There’s no need to push yourself in this direction, because force creates inner dissonance. We instinctively push back when we feel forced or pressured. Trying to force ourselves to extend love where we don’t feel it actually adds intensity to conflicts. That kind of inner rupture is contrary to the healing and harmonizing work of love.
And so, while we believe in the Pro Love Movement as a force for revolutionary social change, we actually prefer to focus on the small movements toward love that we can make in our ordinary, daily lives, as something that happens one relationship at a time. This begins with a movement toward more love for ourselves.
At its heart, the Pro Love Movement is an inner movement. it begins within us and then stretches outward.
Here are the five steps of the movement. We’ll talk about each of these in more depth, but here’s the overview.
If you imagine the Pro Love Movement as a dance, these are the steps that make up that dance.
Step one is loving yourself.
Step two is loving what’s easy.
Step three is loving what’s near.
Step four is loving what’s close.
Step five is loving what seems to be far from love.
Just like a dance, we move between the steps. We don’t stay stuck at step one because we haven’t got it right yet. We keep going. We find our rhythm, we get in our groove. We move with the spirit of love.
The theory behind the Pro Love Movement, which we have yet to see disproven, is that in every moment of every day, more love is always possible. Love is the ultimate renewable resource. The more we express love, the more love we experience, and the more love we have to give.
I (Daniel) have been deeply inspired by the work of Fred Rogers, who’s more commonly known as Mr. Rogers based on his work as a pioneer of childhood education on television. For me, he really embodied what it looks like to love without limits.
In his writing, Rogers recognized that “Deep within us—no matter who we are—there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.” When I think about this idea, I always come back to my sense that the very first person I need to allow to feel lovable and capable of loving is myself.
We know, as much as anyone, how truly difficult this first step can be. It’s a step where many people get stuck, believing that they’re destined to spend their lives unable to feel lovable, which complicates their ability to form deep and meaningful relationships with others, because of their own feelings of being undeserving of love.
One resource that we’ve found very helpful is Gay Hendricks’ book, Learning to Love Yourself. Hendricks, who’s a psychologist writing about his own struggle to learn to love himself, recognizes that it’s difficult for most of us to love ourselves. His solution to this difficulty is perhaps unusual
“All we need to do,” writes Hendricks, “is love ourselves for whatever we’re feeling. If we feel dislike toward someone, we can love ourselves for disliking him or her. If we cannot love ourselves at the moment, we can love ourselves for being unable to love ourselves.
Our mistake is thinking that we have to change something before we love ourselves. Hendricks’ brilliant insight is that we can always ask, “Can I love myself in this moment for being unable to love myself?” and by asking that question, we eventually arrive at a point where we can. And that’s our starting point for loving ourselves.
When you commit to learning how to truly love yourself, without needing others to confirm or prove that you’re lovable, you are free. No one else has the power to keep you from your inner knowing that you are lovable and loved.
Once you discover that you have your own connection to the source of love, that it’s within you…and that loving yourself is never more than one step away from where you are right now, it will change your life.
The second step in the pro-love movement is loving what’s easy.
Each of us has some beings in our life who are easy to love. For me (Angela), no matter how anything else is going in my life and in my relationships, it is always without fail easy to love my cat Moses.
He is warm, he is furry and soft, and he is nearly always happy to be held, cuddled, and petted. It is also easy for me to love my dozens of houseplants, my sister, my favorite chair, the smell of jasmine, the grandfather spruce tree in my front yard, and a warm cup of coffee.
That’s what we mean by this second step of moving toward what’s easy to love. Babies often tend to fill this role nicely. Sometimes romantic partners do as well … though not always. Sometimes siblings and friends do … though not always. Sometimes our children do … and parents. Pets are nearly always in the category of what’s easy to love, though again, not always. It’s very individual.
The point is to find what’s easy for you to love and to intentionally move toward that feeling of love, to savor it, to remind yourself that love can flow easily and naturally as an expression of yourself and who you are at your core.
Step Three is Loving What’s NEar.
If you start your day by loving what’s easy, it’s easy to generate an abundance of love that can flow out from you in little ways, which you can bring into step three: loving what’s near. You can think of step three like carrying a cup of coffee that’s filled to the brim—it’s almost impossible not to spill a little as you go.
Step three is like that. You move through the world with an overflowing cup of love and you spill some as you go about your day. Angela and I move through the world with the intention that anyone who interacts with us will be better for it.
Of course we hope this is the case for our clients and class participants too. But we also want this to be equally true for any other person we interact with, from customer service agents to grocery clerks and restaurant servers to those we pass near with during our daily walk.
Almost everyone has had a moment where they’ve felt the grace of a stranger—someone who has brightened your day, let you feel seen, recognized, appreciated.
Though many of us believe that we don’t enjoy talking to strangers so we avoid it if at all possible, researchers have found that our moods are brightened by casual interactions with strangers, even for those of us who say we don’t like talking to strangers.
I (Angela) identify myself as a true introvert, so I was surprised by how much I missed these kinds of everyday encounters with others at the beginning of the pandemic. I keenly missed the casual chitchat with cashiers at my local food coop and brief interactions with acquaintances before and after yoga class, even though I’d never stopped to appreciate the sense of connection I got from these interactions.
If we can remember how these kinds of interactions have lifted our mood, we can be intentional about giving back in these ways too. These sorts of moments of feeling connected and seen can make it seem like the weight of the world has been lifted.
Even though these sorts of interactions are brief, they can also serve to remind us that difficult times pass and people do care. It’s a small gift of love in a concrete and meaningful way that can change the course of someone’s day.
Of course, when you’re aware that your love freely spills over and blesses everyone around you, you’ll often find that your love is mirrored and returned.
You’ll be even more attuned to the presence of other people in the Pro Love Movement around you—people enjoying a moment of laughter together, or reveling in the sunshine, or joining in a community food drive.
Step three is about being open with the world, allowing more of yourself to affect, and be affected by, others around you.
Think about it like your hand. Your palm and fingertips are incredibly sensitive to touch, texture, and temperature. The back of your hand is not. When you make a fist, everything sensitive gets covered up.
Moving about through the world like a closed fist limits your ability to experience pleasure. With your hands closed into fists, you can’t be engaged with the world outside yourself—so you’re left empty handed. When we’re open, we’re able to give, receive, and share far more with others.
Step four is loving what is close.
The time you spend practicing and cultivating your ability to love what’s easy, in step two, and to love those who are near (including strangers) really translates into being able to love you’re closest with even more fully.
And while we might imagine that these should be the people whom it’s easiest to love, of course, we know that those we’re closest with are the ones who sometimes challenge us the most when it comes to being generous in love.
It’s most accurate to say that it’s both far easier to love those we’re closest with … and far more difficult. The deep intimacy that’s possible in long-term relationships, which includes partners (as well as close friends, siblings, and parents) means that we often have a lot of occasions for hurt. This love can feel complicated, because the consequences matter so much more than passing interactions with strangers.
Sometimes in close relationships, it can be really tempting to overlook the things we don’t want to see, idealizing the other person and avoiding paying attention to any less wonderful realities. But doing that makes it easy for the switch to suddenly flip, where instead of seeing the best parts of the other person, all you see now are the things that are challenging for you to love about them.
When we’re close, we must work to see the full picture with compassion, empathy, and understanding … both for ourselves and the other person.
This brings to mind another quote from Mr. Rogers: “When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the façade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way.”
When we look for opportunities to participate in the Pro Love Movement, we can always begin the day with a step toward loving and accepting ourselves, and then watch for opportunities through the way to practice with others we happen to meet, and then bring that same sensitive, compassionate openness to the people most precious to us.
If Step Three of the Movement means we look at strangers in ways that gives us a window into “what is lovely, strong, and true” in the words of Mr Rogers, then Step Four means looking at those we know best and see them as whole, complex, and beautiful people. And giving them the same love that we give ourselves.
Think of this as a way of really starting a generative cycle in your most important relationships. As you pour more love into your world, you’ll feel yourself supported by increasing amounts of love that’s returning to you because generosity in giving begets generosity in response.
While we so often tighten up with the fear of not being loved in return, speaking from experience, the art of loving ourselves opens us to receive love freely without needing others to prove to us that we are lovable. And when you freely express love with those you’re closest with, they have more low to share with everyone else they meet.
And now we come to Step Five: loving those who seem far from love.
This is where we began our conversation today, with the spiritual principle of love embodied by Martin Luther King. For this step, it’s helpful to remember that loving a person does not mean agreeing with what they’re saying or how they are behaving.
And it doesn’t mean being close to this person or allowing them into your life in any significant way, because that wouldn’t be loving toward yourself. To love those who seem far from love is a spiritual practice.
This may mean practicing extending the spirit of love to politicians whose platforms and policies you deeply know to be wrong. It may be people in your workplace or community you experience as unkind, unloving, or hostile. It may be former friends or lovers who’ve wounded you without ever recognizing or acknowledging their wrongdoing to you.
This isn’t an easy step, even for those who’ve practiced for a while.
Before even thinking about doing this, it’s important to become really saturated with love. And to really, really practice step one of loving yourself, learning to love the parts of yourself that you perceive as imperfect or unkind, impatient … or judgmental.
When you learn how to love yourself in your own struggles, it becomes a little easier to recognize that those who express hate in the world are engaged in an inner war with themselves and are in desperate need of love and compassion.
My entry to love as a spiritual practice began several years ago, when I (Angela) discovered that while it wasn’t possible for me to find love in my heart for a family member who’d hurt me severely as a child, it was possible for me to find love for this family member’s child self.
Being the parent of three sons, I am intimately familiar with the sweetness of little boys. When I meditated on my family member’s child self, I found that I was able to extend love and compassion with an open heart, that also felt sorrow for the pain and disconnection he’d experienced in life.
Another saying from Fred Rogers that I really appreciate in this regard goes like this: “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like 'struggle.’”
What I like about this quote is that it lowers the threshold for what it means to love. Love isn’t about getting it right, or being perfect or saint-like. It’s often a struggle—within ourselves—that relies first on the other steps in this movement of love.
When your daily environment is really loving, because you’re loving yourself, you’re loving where it’s easy to love, you’re loving those who are near you and close to you, you can eventually begin to wrestle with the challenge of loving those who are far from love.
Here’s something that we believe that’s made it easier to practice this form of spiritual love. We only seek to cause pain to others when we are in pain ourselves.
Our natural state is to love. we can see that in babies and young children. Their hearts are wide open to love. We are each born full-fledged members of the Pro Love Movement.
Rather than use any more of our own words to talk about Step 5 of loving those who are far from love, we’re going to return to where we began today, with Martin Luther King Jr.
While he’s widely recognized as a powerful orator and leader of the civil rights movement, we also recognize him as a spiritual master of love.
And he said everything we’d like to say, but far better, so we’re going to end this episode with a few quotes from Dr. King about love.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love with have the final word in reality.”
“Hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.”
“Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
“Everyone can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
“Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos.”
“I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems.”
“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
“Hatred paralyzed life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonized it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
We’re publishing this post on the eve of Pride Month so we want to give a shout out to all the folks in our Q-munity. We love you so very much. ❤️
For more information on how you can join the Pro-Love Movement, please go to prolovemovement.org.
What’s your relationship archetype?
about angela Amias & Daniel Boscaljon
We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection. It’s been known for a long time that painful childhood experiences, including trauma, affect adults at many levels, from physical and mental health to emotional well-being to relationships. While the impact of early trauma on adult relationships is frequently noted by trauma experts, there’s been very little in terms of practical, useful advice or programs that adults with childhood trauma can use to improve their own relationships.
Our programs are designed to fill that gap—to help you understand how your own past experiences influence your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others.
Healthy relationships are an essential part of living a good life and yet, many of us (perhaps even most of us) have core wounds from childhood experiences that affect our ability to have the kinds of intimate relationships in adulthood that we long to have.
