You don’t have to like people to love them - Looking at the challenge of expanding our exprience and expression of love.

The challenge for those wishing to grow their love.
One of the common goals that we are set in any path of personal inner growth is to grow the scope and unconditionally of our love. We are asked to try and extend our love beyond the limited parameters of ourself, our family and friends, and adopt an experience of love where all living beings are included within the warmth of our embrace. In order to develop love for others, we instinctively try to like them first, we look for reasons that other people are likable, and on the basis of observing this likeability we then try and love them.
The problem, particularly with human beings, is that very often they insist on doing things that are really not very likeable! For example I am trying to develop a feeling of warmth and affection for the human race, but then I look at what we are collectively doing to the environment, the Earth, the seas, fish and other animals, and I think ‘This is not only not likable, it is positively horrible, human beings are disgusting!’
Similarly on a more everyday level, we may wish to try and like everyone in our office, but a certain proportion of any work group is always going to be behaving in ways that are not fundamentally very likeable, just not that appealing.
So the basic problem here is that if we rely on people being likable before we love them, then we are going to have our love-development blocked in many ways!

Reversing our usual way into loving others.
So, as stated above, we usually try and expand our love first by liking others, and then this gives us a way into loving them. This method has basic problems attached to it.
So, here is one solution that you can try; Choose to love others first, and don’t worry too much about them being appealing or likeable!
How can we choose to love others even if we don’t particularly like them? By coming up with a good reason to do so. Here is one:
‘If I can recognize that I am a small interconnected part of a much larger whole or being that I might call Gaia, or the Planetary Being, or the Planetary Self, then I can recognize that I should love others because they are really just an expanded part of my own higher or deeper Self. In the same way that My hand naturally pulls out a thorn that is in my foot because it is part of the same body, I in turn should cherish others and consider them worthy of respect because they are really a part of me.’
So, this is a logical, internally consistent piece of reasoning that we can use to extend our sense of consideration and care to others, and not worry too much about how they are behaving, or whether we like them personally or not! If people mis-behave, we just remember, ‘I don’t need to like them, but I have made a choice to love them!’

Allowing emotional love to gradually follow the clarity of our reasoning.
Initially when we try and put this into practice, the type of love that we experience for others is not a heart felt, emotionally-based experience. Rather it is a clear and lucid space that we have created in our mind that provides the room for an experience of love and consideration for all others to gradually grow and bloom, without being continuously sabotaged by their bad behavior! Over time this clear lucid space in our mind will start to fill with an emotional and spiritually felt experience of love, but it is a different form of love from that which is simply based around liking others.
This technique is a way of using our ‘head to lead our heart’ or our rational/cognitive intelligence leading our emotional intelligence toward a stable experience of love for others. The curious thing about working with this technique is that, when you stop needing to like others in order to love them, it seems to become 110% easier to find them likable! We start to see all sorts of good things in even the biggest rascals that we simply could not get in touch with before!

Applying these principles to your relationship with yourself.
In the above article I have talked about a way of developing love for others without being dependent upon finding them likable, This principle can also be applied to ourself. Many people experience problems in their relationship to themselves because they don’t like who they are, or feel guilty about what they have done or do. Because they do not like who they are they continually with hold love and warmth from themselves. Understanding that we can choose to love ourselves even if we seem to be very flawed is a way of starting to deal effectively with the problem of self dislike or self loathing and provide an inner ‘safe space’ within which we can then start to improve our relationship to ourself over time.

© Toby Ouvry January 2010, please do not reproduce without permission.