Give it up!

Sacrifice is an important part of unconditional love

I talk a lot about unconditional love (agape – the love that forms a person) as the practice of paying full attention to another (i.e., using sustained attention) and then, no matter what the person says or does, responding with kindness and compassion, in their best interest.

Implied in this practice (and explicitly in the Christian definition) is the concept of sacrifice.  Our baby wakes and cries in the middle of the night and we give up our sleep to comfort them.  Your partner wants to do X and you want to do Y, so you give up Y to be with them in what they want to do.

These examples are straightforward.  The power of unconditional love to be transformative comes even more from us having to ‘sacrifice’ negative aspects.  My colleague irritates me so to love them unconditionally I must give up getting irritated.

Irritation is our red brain triggering so that giving it up means bringing our red brain more under our conscious control – and that is transformative.

We cannot practice unconditional love in its most transformative form unless we have some measure of control over our red brain already.  At the minimum we need to have recognised that if we take a dislike to someone, then it is our red brain triggering and so we need to try to ‘sacrifice’ that feeling and have some idea of how to do it.

The first step, though, is recognising when negative feelings represent emotions caused by red brain triggering.  Genuine emotions in the moment tend to flicker and then are gone - they are telling our whole organism some important information (there is something to be fearful of, there is an injustice taking place) and that only takes a moment (even sadness comes in waves rather than being constant).

How aware are we of what is happening when negative emotions arise within us?  And, if this is the red brain triggering, what can we do to calm it back down?

Starting three weeks’ ago and continuing for one more week I will be posing a question like this to think about over the coming summer break.

 John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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