Loving Kindness and Spiritual Development

While safety and resulting emotional security are the most basic human need, belonging is the highest human need. The upward spiral into loving kindness is the path to both belonging and spiritual development. The aspects of loving kindness described here are equally applicable to positive psychology and universal principles of spirituality. A major aspect of spiritual growth is manifest in care about and service toward the well-being of others and purposes outside oneself. It is balancing the care of others with the care of self, sometimes demonstrated by the cheerful sacrifice of one's own desires for a greater good. This places individuals in a higher state of humility, where many of the burdens of self-promotion and self-defense needs can be surrendered.

Many individuals believe that a personal relationship with God is another aspect of loving kindness of such importance that it should always be addressed. God is perceived as the origin and ultimate source of loving kindness that individuals both receive and provide. This relationship is often thought to be based in trust and surrender to what individuals believe His will to be. This often involves the commitment of personal resources to support and benefit other’s in God’s name. This surrender may be similar to the response of a grateful attached child to a perfect care-giver.

Solid research demonstrates that the experience of this type of relationship makes highly significant contributions to the happiness and satisfaction with life of those who possess it. While making this acknowledgement and encouraging relationships with God, this paper focuses primarily on those aspects of loving kind interactions with others that serve as a related medium of spiritual and emotional development. To many individuals this will mean sharing the divine love with others that they derive from their relationship with God. This sharing of loving kindness with others can become an immensely satisfying central feature of an individual’s spiritual practice.

We saw previously that daily intentional loving kindness meditation supports spiraling up into thriving over time. This means that the regular practice of loving kind thoughts builds personal resources that researchers refer to as dispositions. Dispositions are stable traits that exert automatic guidance to our responses to others and life situations. The cumulative research leads to the conclusion that the dispositions of gratitude, compassion and forgiveness are critical components of happiness and meaning in life, as well as loving kindness and thriving in life.

These three spiritual dispositions of loving kindness seem to operate in a systematic way. Gratitude is the most basic quality, and the wellspring for compassion. Compassion is the core of loving kindness, and often demonstrated as altruism and care-giving. From a spiritual perspective, these qualities represent the Path of Loving Kindness. Forgiveness is the spiritual and emotional Return to Loving Kindness when one temporarily falls into blame and bitterness. Since thriving includes spiritual wellness, these qualities serve as the operational definition in this paper for both spiritual and interpersonal development. While they are not all-inclusive, they combine in very important ways with the other areas of thriving.

Living in Gratitude

Gratitude is the focus on what is good about one's life and the people in it. Researchers have examined the physical and emotional health benefits of gratitude. Participants in research studies were required to complete gratitude exercises during the period of a week. Others in control groups were given assignments that had no bearing on gratitude. Measures of both happiness and depression were taken at the beginning of the experiments, at the end of the week, and at intervals up to six months later.

Some individuals completed daily entries into their gratitude journals for a week. Others completed the requirements for a gratitude letter. A gratitude letter is written to another person for whom deep appreciation has been felt, but not fully expressed. The assignment is completed by making an appointment with the person, reading the letter to him or her and leaving it with that person. Expressing gratitude was found to extinguish disappointments, overpower hurt feelings, and promote beneficial compassionate perspectives.

The groups that completed the gratitude letter showed dramatic increases in happiness and reduction of indicators of depression at the end of the week. The groups that kept gratitude journals had impressive changes as well. However, these changes in both groups were gradually lost over a period of months by most participants.

Close examination of the responses of individual participants in the gratitude studies illustrated an important principle. Each person that volunteered for the experiment hoped that participation would be beneficial. About 30% failed to complete the assignment. They understood what they were supposed to do but didn't believe it had sufficient personal value. Most of the individuals completed the assignment and experienced the benefits, but did not continue afterward to intentionally practice gratitude.

Some individuals were so impressed with the results that they committed to the principle and continued to walk in gratitude, consciously practicing the principle regularly. These individuals retained the full benefits, and continued to build on their positive experiences with gratitude. This finding indicates the reluctance many individuals have to adopting beneficial practices, even after having direct experiences with positive results.

We know that appreciation feels good, but Rollin McCraty at the Heartmath Institute has demonstrated that the intentional use of positive emotional focusing designed to enhance states of appreciation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. This places the practitioner in a state of contentment and safety. This condition is described by McCraty as coherent cooperation between the mind, heart and emotions. When accompanied by early situational detection of stress and intentional deep breathing, practitioners of appreciation-focusing were able to place themselves in this state of thriving reactivity over time with increasing ease and effectiveness. It can become as natural and automatic to review the positive aspects of the people and situations in one’s life as the negative aspects. It is a choice
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Responding With Compassion

Gratitude thrusts individuals into thriving emotional states where compassion resides. Some researchers consider compassion to be the desire to ameliorate the suffering of others. However considerable evidence supports a broader view of compassion. In studies of how positive emotional terms are related in the minds of people, compassion is most often associated with love and kindness.

Dasher Keltner at the University Of California-Berkley argues that compassion is an inherent human quality fostered largely through receiving and providing attuned care-giving. He has studied the biological and interpersonal mechanisms of loving kind care-giving and compassion and found these mechanisms to be essentially the same. At a minimum, they derive from the same sources. The receipt and gift of loving kind care-giving are the most important types of positive experiences in life.

The most apparent biological mechanism of compassion is through the function of the vegus nerve, which originates at the top of the spinal cord and extends through the body. It regulates the relationship between slow deep breathing and heart rate, and sets the brakes on heart rhythms that accelerate due to fear and anger. Keltner and his colleagues found that when individuals report compassionate responses to pictures of individuals experiencing difficult situations, their vegus nerve responses increase. In this heightened state, they rate themselves as having greater similarities to many different groups of people, a quality found to promote altruistic behavior.

Keltner's research group identified “vegal superstars” by their high vegal response rates while at rest in a benign situation. Over the next seven months these individuals were found to be higher than other subjects in positive moods, resiliency, optimism, and sympathetic responses to those in need. The researchers also found that individuals do not have to be vegal superstars to be compassionate when situations warrant that response.

The vegus nerve is activated by both receiving loving kindness and extending it to others. It is directly connected to rich networks of oxytocin receptors which promote feelings of safety and attachment. Compassion originates within each individual as a loving kind feeling toward oneself and others. It promotes continued care for the well-being of others the desire to be of service to others. It regulates the non-language communication systems that people use to sooth others through social-emotional support.

The main components of compassion, especially toward others who we find abrasive, are understanding, acceptance and altruism. Understanding and acceptance erode negative bias, making appreciation for others, oneself and situations possible. Acceptance of oneself, others and life modifies perspectives, promoting more constructive responses to distressing experiences. It provides a shift from responding to the way we believe people and situations should be to the way they are. With deep acceptance of the flaws in people and life, we are more capable of empathy. We see how all humanity is challenged by flaws, including those persons that we are holding responsible for the distressing experiences to which we cling.

Altruism is expressed in acts of kindness in behalf of the well-being of others. This even includes wishes and prayers that others will prosper from opportunities or be relieved of distress and illness. It includes gifts of time, financial and other resources. It especially includes the emotional support so central to attuned care-giving. Rather than being experienced as costly sacrifices, truly altruistic acts have an exhilarating effect. Considerable evidence shows that the disposition of altruism has physical and mental health benefits over time.

Mary Eisenburg at Arizona State University has made a career of studying the development of compassion and kindness in children. While many studies had show that attachment to quality care-givers is a critical component to becoming a quality care-giver, Eisenberg found that practice at care-giving throughout life is another important component. Children who took care of pets and siblings were more likely to assume care for other persons later.
Eisenburg showed children a video of a mother and her children who were seriously injured, and measured their biological responses. Children who expressed compassion showed compassion-related heart rate responses. When offered the opportunity to take homework to the injured children during their valuable recess time, those that reported compassion volunteered to participate. Children who responded fearfully to the injuries described in the video declined to volunteer. This demonstrated the way that defensive reactivity and thriving reactivity influence our responses to the needs of others.

Compassionate responses to others have some predictable components. They often begin with a desire and effort to understand the needs and feelings of others. This understanding is acquired through non-judgmental perspectives that allow a deep acceptance of others exactly as they are. Empathy for the feelings and emotional needs of others often leads to acts of altruism, and offers of care-giving.

Much has been made of the positive emotional and developmental benefits to those who receive attuned emotional care. The benefits to care-givers can be just as profound. They also get big influxes of oxytocin, promoting attachment and leading to significant lasting social pleasure and contentment. Also, compassionate care-giving has been found to be one of the greatest sources of meaning and satisfaction in life. This is not to minimize the stress and personal sacrifice that are often endured by individuals providing prolonged critical care.

Compassion has traditionally been concerned with beliefs about, and feelings toward other persons. However, benefit has been demonstrated by extending this quality to include beliefs and feelings about oneself. One pioneer in the study of self-compassion is Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin. She explains that self-compassion entails treating oneself with kindness, recognizing the humanity one shares with others, and being non-judgmental when considering one’s own weaknesses. The research of Neff and others shows that self-compassion provides greater emotional resilience and stability than self-esteem, but involves less self-defensiveness, compensation behavior and self-enhancement. While both are positive qualities, self-compassion is more likely related to thriving in life.

Research on the vegal response, thriving and compassion illustrates several important points. It supports the assertion that thriving in life builds beneficial psychological resources such as compassion over time. It also supports the belief that these resources serve as precursors to personal growth from self-centeredness into other-directedness. As Keltner and others have demonstrated, other-directedness seems to be a universal peak growth state that brings individuals to the highest state of emotional well-being.

Choosing Forgiveness

Forgiveness can take three related forms: avoiding blame, surrendering blame and returning to loving kindness. When we have distressing experiences we often believe the cause to be the situations in our lives, including the actions of other persons. Most distress can be resolved automatically or intentionally in short order. But, holding persons and situations responsible for our continued distress during and after the related events inflames and prolongs the feelings. Embracing anger fosters a sense of justification for and power from retaliating against others or life, if only in our minds. At this point is easy to fall into a negative bias, discounting good features of others, ourselves or situations to focus only on negative features.

Consistent or dispositional compassion sets the stage for what researchers refer to as dispositional forgiveness. This is the tendency to rely on loving kindness to avoid taking or maintaining offense with people and situations. Fred Luskin, with the Stanford Forgiveness Project, describes dispositional forgiveness as the affirmative ability to remain at peace when one is unable to get what one wants. This often comes from the realization that our expectations have been unrealistic. By maintaining dispositions of gratitude and compassion in times of distress we avoid falling into blame.

The research and development of the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, the most prominent measure of dispositional forgiveness, indicates that there are three areas that make independent contributions to a person’s overall reluctance to cast blame. These are forgiveness of others, of oneself and of distressing situations. The practice of dispositional forgiveness is more often found among persons that aspire to forgiveness as a spiritual quality. There is ample evidence that forgiveness is highly related to most areas of physical health, mental health and overall well-being.

It seems as if blame is a seductive and prevalent coping response for many people. Blaming others and situations negates our personal responsibility to solve problems. Prolonging emotional wounds can be a defense against constructive changes that need to occur in ourselves and our lives. Anger can create a false sense of control over others and situations. But blame can play many unconscious self-defeating functions. It is a major contributor to spiraling down emotionally. It depletes physical and mental energy Maintaining bitterness through persistent thoughts of retaliation and misfortune toward even one person can interfere with an individual’s access to loving kind thoughts and feelings toward others.

Surrendering blame is one of the most beneficial forms of emotional resolution. It basically follows the same course described in the section on managing stress and distress. One step is to establish beneficial perspectives based in compassion, with greater acceptance of persons, situations and the pain we all endure in life. Beneficial perspectives might also include affirmations that the threats that are or have been experienced were exaggerated or are in the past. Another might include a deep understanding that blame has been used at great personal cost to maintain a sense of power and control. Another step is to substitute wishes of well-being for wishes for punishment and restitution.

Surrendering blame might require a therapeutic process for emotional resolution. This involves re-exposure to stored painful experiences from the past and defensive themes that are still quite active through writing and/or discussing them. The goal is to extinguish stored distress through social support that provides feelings of safety, beneficial perspectives and closure on previously upsetting stories.

Researchers have documented that forgiveness may go beyond the surrender of blame to the restoration or increase of loving kindness. Frank Fincham at the University of Georgia and a team of other researchers have determined that complete forgiveness results in a state of “benevolent motivation” toward others and situations. Everett Worthington at Virginia Commonwealth University has concluded that it involves the prevention and alteration of blame through love-based emotions and behaviors.

The extent of forgiveness with another person required for emotional resolution often pertains to the depth of relationship held with that individual and disconnection that has taken place. Giacomo Bono and others at the University of Miami examined the role that closeness with others plays in the relationship between forgiveness and well-being. This pertains to the effects that blame and forgiveness have on meeting the human need for belonging. The adverse effect of blame of another with whom one has a relationship is proportional to the previous supportive quality of the relationship. Emotional distance from persons who have been relied upon for social support produces considerable anxiety, disrupting feeling of closeness and one’s general sense of belonging. Bono found that forgiveness contributes to well-being by restoring closeness and belonging. Forgiveness is easier in situations in which the other person has made bids for reconnection through apology or other means. Persons with high well-being find it easier to forgive, supporting the contention that instances of forgiveness build dispositions of forgiveness.

The antidote for blame is to cultivate or return to compassion for others, oneself and situations. Understanding and acceptance bring significant relief from blame. But they may not be sufficient for complete resolution. The other component is acts of kindness tward others. Treating another, or ourselves, with kindness and love after holding them in blame completes the Return to Loving Kindness. For individuals with whom a continued relationship is unwarranted, this might simply involve shifting one’s wishes from those of harm to those of well-being. For persons with whom significant relationships will be maintained, resolution is completed by returning to the disposition of cheerful compassionate service. Surrendering blame and bitterness is one of the primary means of resolving distressing experiences.

Acts of Kindness

If fifteen minutes of loving thoughts each day about the well-being of others can have a beneficial effect on our lives, actually living in loving kindness on a daily basis would be expected to have a profound effect on thriving. Positive psychology research has demonstrated that it does. Here is how that works. The dispositions of love (personal resources) create the impetus for acts of kindness (thriving practices), and acts of kindness build the dispositions of love. This cycle is the basis for what is termed loving kindness in this paper.

People seldom just decide to be more grateful, compassionate and forgiving. These dispositions are built through acts of kindness. Think back about the research on gratitude exercises. The exercises required the participants to do something. In the case of the gratitude letter they completed an act of kindness by reading their letter to another individual. In the gratitude journal, they made written expressions about whomever they felt grateful.

While it is impossible to catalog all types of kind acts, this paper describes four broad categories that cover a lot of ground. These four types are engaging others with affection, providing mindful attention, speaking words of affirmation and encouragement and completing acts of service. Engaging others with affection begins with loving thoughts and feelings toward them. These dispositions are then expressed automatically through the social engagement system when we interact with them. The care for and value of others is expressed in our facial expressions and eye contact, our body language, the tone of our voices and the ways we touch others. Another potential form of affection is sharing humor.

The quality of the attention we pay to others is mindful when we are focused on our affection for them and our desire to care for and be with them. This involves listening to them compassionately and demonstrating understanding and deep acceptance. The greatest gift of attention occurs when we suspend our own thoughts and agendas for a period to let another person completely direct the interaction with their agenda. At other times we gift attention through quality time together. This happens when we share an activity, primarily for the purpose of being together, that is important to another person and acceptable to us.

Acts of kindness also include speaking words of affirmation and encouragement and completing acts of service for others. Words of affirmation demonstrate that we value the recipients and are grateful for their presence in our lives. Opportunities to do this abound in most days with people that we are close to and even others with whom we have casual interactions. Cheerful acts of service show others that they are not alone in their lives and will be taken care of when the need arises.

Compassionate Communication

Communication is the exchange of general and personal meaning through words, non-verbal expressions and actions. General meaning conveys information outside the realm of interpersonal interaction and relationships while personal meaning is primarily about interpersonal interactions and relationships. The closer the relationship, the more personal meaning is conveyed with each word and action.

Attunement to the presence of another in our lives conveys two important personal messages: “I value you” and “I consider and respond to your well-being when I speak and act”. In this sense, attunement is central to compassionate communication. Compassionate communication goes beyond the sharing of general information into interpersonal connection. By seeking to understand and accept another, it validates their value and opens doors for acts of kindness that might otherwise remain closed.

We make choices with whom we are going to be attuned, and keep the remainder of our interactions with others on a business basis. When we hold others in blame for our own negativity, we communicate on a punishing basis. Each interaction has emotional consequences, with compassionate communication contributing to spiraling up and punishing communication activating and sustaining negative moods. Thriving individuals realize from experience that attuned attention to each person with whom they interact gives them more than it takes from them. It just becomes a happy way of life.
Spiritual Growth and Upward Spiraling

The thesis of this section is that spiritual growth in gratitude, compassion and forgiveness acquired through acts of kindness is the primary path to loving kindness and an important ingredient in upward emotional spiraling. This contention is equally valid from faith-based and science-based perspectives. From the faith perspective, gratitude, compassion and forgiveness are spiritual qualities. From the scientific perspective, they are thriving dispositions and positive personal resources.

In the case of personal spiritual growth, thriving upward psychologically occurs through the cyclical interaction of acts of kindness and the dispositions of loving. Gratitude, compassion and forgiveness are called dispositions or traits because they are the stable tendencies to respond to life through these spiritual practices and thriving emotions. In a series of studies, Alex Wood at the University of Warwick and his colleagues found that gratitude responses are based largely in stable higher appraisals of the benefit the individual receives from the actions of others.

This same research demonstrated that dispositional gratitude and individual expressions of gratitude interact in a cyclical way to produce upward thriving. Each promotes the other. This can be seen in the prolonged benefits to those who followed the instructions of researchers to complete gratitude exercises. These individual instances increased the disposition of gratitude and thriving, a change that represented both spiritual growth and resource acquisition.
The same relationships exist between the dispositions of compassion and forgiveness and individual experiences of compassion and forgiveness. Intentional acts of loving kindness result in dispositional changes. The more compassionate and forgiving we act, the more compassionate and forgiving we feel and become. The resulting emotions become personal resources and dispositions toward thriving in life. Loving kind actions can be learned, practiced and become nearly automatic ways of engaging others and situations.

Like any area of personal growth, we make the greatest gains in spiritual growth through acts of kindness in the most challenging situations. Avoiding blame to engage others and situations with compassion when they provoke our distress has profound effects on spiritual growth and self-efficacy. Spiritual strength gained in one such situation is available for the next situation. And there will be a next situation.

One method of spiritual self-examination is to make a statement in the morning to guide each day: Give more, take less. Another is to ask ourselves a question each night: Whose life have I blessed today?