What's Love Got to Do with It?
A Conversation with Joan Borysenko
When you meet her, you first notice this incredible PRESENCE—the easy, wise smile, the stately composed way she speaks and moves, and her unflappable manner all hint at the ocean of wisdom she carries. She speaks in complete paragraphs, easily plucking the proper quote or a pithy story to emphasize her points.
I noticed this presence when I interviewed her by phone in 2006 and again when I volunteered to drive her from the airport to a mountaintop resort, where she held a weekend workshop. I will always treasure that two-hour journey each way. She dazzled me with her brilliance while she politely listened to my wild tales, mainly about the mystical history of Pittsburgh and the mountains where we were headed to and from.
Dr. Joan Borysenko is an icon in the holistic health industry and a pioneer of the intersection of science and spirituality. She worked with Herbert Benson at Harvard in the 1970s when he discovered and wrote about The Relaxation Response, the first book to apply science to the study of meditation. She has written over a dozen books since then and continues to write. She is considered one of the towering intellects in the field.
Like any good scientist exploring eternal mysteries, she ultimately discovered that love–Divine Love–underlies everything that can be discovered. As Louis Pasteur once said, “The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God.” Exploring that Divine connection and the love flowing from it, became the central focus of her research. That’s why the title of that workshop and this interview is Tina Turner’s question, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”
A version of this interview first appeared in Point of Light magazine in 2006.
What Is IT?
Sven: The question is, "What's Love Got to do with it?" First of all, what is IT?
Joan: When I think about IT, it depends on which hat I'm wearing. Number one, I'm a medical scientist. Number two, I'm a psychologist. And most important, I'm fascinated with spiritual growth and evolution, both individually and as a world, where we're going. So the answer is, what does love have to do with any of those things? The completeness of our evolution as human beings.
In a nutshell, I would say that growth on every level has to do with a gradual decrease in narcissism and a larger sense of relatedness to the whole. And that intimate relationality, where you no longer see people or the earth or things as IT, or as tools for your use, which is more narcissistic, but you see the essence of them, and you can interact with that in very much the way that Martin Buber would have called an I-Thou relationship. I think that's what love is. And I think that's what we need for our happiness, health, and the health and growth of our children of this world and the diverse cultures within it.
Sven: The whole idea of spiritual evolution seems to be a dichotomy. So many of us on the spiritual path see these signs or feel this deep impulse to help change things and bring about spiritual evolution. And yet, we have things like the war in Iraq and North Korea shooting off missiles. How is each of us changing ourselves going to fix these bigger-picture problems?
Joan: Let me get into this answer by telling a story first. My husband, Gordon Dveirin, and I are working on a book called Your Soul’s Compass about how to live a spiritually guided life.
We interviewed over 30 spiritual teachers from different traditions, including Theravada Buddhists, Mahayana Buddhists, Catholic Monks, people like Father Thomas Keating, Sufis, several Rabbis, and some Shamans from a variety of cultures. We were looking for the Mystic Heart—the underground stream underneath all the traditions that carry the same wisdom stream.
One of the questions we have asked these wisdom teachers about spiritual guidance is, what would they tell the world leaders, how to create a more loving future for all, where the world could be preserved? The answers to that have been absolutely remarkable.
A Theravadan Buddhist named Ajahn Sona is an extraordinary teacher. He said so well what I think we all know in our hearts. The teachers from every tradition have said that there is, in some elegant and completely inexplicable way, a field that is created every time an individual person lets go of their ego and allows themselves to move into that state of being. That state of, I won't say union because most of us are not in a union with consciousness all that often.
But when we let go of our agenda, a magnetism of force draws us in. When we come into harmony with that force, in some very mysterious way—a mysterious and elegant way—the world around us begins to shift. And I do believe that. I think that we need action on several levels.
One of them, of course, is individual action. We also need to understand what diversity is and how important it is. We need to find better ways to resolve conflict and mediate disputes.
Sven: Just how does somebody shift into that, to help create that field, to let go of the ego, and to move into a state of being?
Joan: It depends on the individual. Within the Hindu tradition, it's understood that people peel away the false self and reach a state of being or divine presence in different ways. Some do it through selfless service without attachment to the results. Some people can do that through the intellect; others can do that through devotion.
Several years ago, I wrote a book called Seven Paths to God, which expanded on the idea of the four yogas that brought different psychological principles to bear. But I think each of us has a slightly different predilection.
As a scientist, I'm fascinated by brain stuff. Our brains function differently, and we perceive figures in the ground differently. What draws some people is not what draws others. The most important thing for any individual is to find the correct portal that allows them to feel drawn by spirit. I think this is very important because we have to do the work.
There's no question that we must do the work to heal our childhoods. We have to do the work of observing. For example, at the end of each day, what were my patterns? What were the kinds of typical tapes I was running that got in my way? Everyone must take responsibility for that, to recognize and move beyond old habit patterns.
In addition, I do think there's something called grace. There's a magnetism of spirit that can help draw us into our best selves and help the ego to fall away. So it is helpful to have some sort of practice that allows you to form a deeper I-Thou relationship with spirit.
For some people, that's nature. For some people, it's a particular form of the Divine. For other people, even the word Divine is not part of their belief system or part of their experience. But you need something to allow that force to do its thing in you. And that's presence or being.
What is Love?
Sven: A friend once told me, “If you must err, always err on the side of love.” Do you think that's a good policy?
Joan: I think it's an excellent policy. But the question is, “What is love?”
This comes up a lot in my work with women over the years. Of the 12 books that I've written, four have been written specifically for women. There's Inner Peace for Busy Women and A Woman’s Book of Life, which examines the feminine life cycle and seven-year chunks from birth to death and how we develop in terms of our brains, in terms of our emotions, in terms of our spiritual life.,
Another book called A Woman's Journey to God asks if there is a gender difference in how we might develop that I-Thou relationship, which in most religions was created by men for specific sensitivity.
So, when discussing love with women, it becomes obvious right away that love is very different than meeting somebody's needs, which might, in fact, not be needs but habits.
Love is not codependency. Sometimes, sitting with someone and listening deeply to them creates a field of harmony that allows wisdom beyond either of you to emerge. There are other times when sitting, listening, and accepting are a tacit way of letting somebody continue with a self-defeating habit pattern or something injurious to others. Maybe the loving thing, at that point, is to confront that pattern and say, “This is not a good thing.”
It's a little bit like an alcoholic; sometimes, an intervention is going to get you a lot further than sitting there with loving kindness.
So, that always involves discernment. What, in fact, is love? What is loving? As far as I'm concerned, love is something that draws people closer to wholeness, that draws people closer into harmony, where they can step into a larger sphere of life out of their small shell of narcissism, and into something that informs a much more creative, expansive way of being.
It's always informed by kindness and the ability to sit with people to help them sort out and find where Spirit is moving in their lives. There is a word I love for this: the vector of love. That's a word we adopted from another wonderful teacher, Rosemary Dority, who's both a Catholic nun and a Zen Sun science teacher.
It's very clear that what we need to be doing as individuals and as communities is different growth to find the vector of love and helping one another discern what that means, moment to moment, day by day, in our lives.
Often, when you have a deep practice, and you're immersed in that sense of presence, or being, the doing flows out of that seamlessly, your acts or acts of love or kindness.
When someone asked Huxley at the end of his life, “What did you learn? What does it all come down to?” He said, “I guess what I would say is, in the end, it comes down to being a little kinder.”
Simple compassion and kindness are the currency of spiritual guidance and love, which are discussed in every culture.
Loving Boundaries
Sven: This brings up an interesting point. We talk about compassion and kindness, but we're not talking about necessarily being a wimp or turning the other cheek. Like you said, sometimes you need to confront a friend who is in a self-destructive pattern. Sometimes, choosing love is the most courageous choice. Choosing love is not just choosing the path of least resistance; sometimes, choosing love is the path of most resistance.
Joan: It is, and it's a path to having good boundaries. Discerning in any situation, “What’s the loving thing?” means discerning what is, at that moment, most important to serve. Certainly, it's always important to serve the person in front of you, where you are, but in the context of the larger whole.
I’ll give you a pithy little example. One of the great graces and great pains in the neck with what I do is that people always send me book manuscripts to read and, if I like, give a blurb. I have met wonderful people that way and read excellent books, but so many of them come in. If I were to read them all, I wouldn't have any life. And I wouldn't be able to exercise, eat, or do any work of my own and end up doing everybody else's work. So, it's always a discernment, and I must have a boundary.
I need to ask myself what work needs to be done this day, this month, and what is spirit moving me to do. I need to serve that to serve that commitment to serve that gift that I've been given.
The most loving thing is to say no. In many situations, no is the watchword of the day, and you have to firm up those boundaries and take a stand.
Sven: That raises the question of balancing not wanting to be narcissistic with our boundaries and sometimes having to say no. I know there's an impulse, deep within many spiritual people, that says if I'm not the most kind, compassionate, and giving, or if I say no, I'm not a good spiritual person.
Joan: There's a word for that. It's called the spiritual superego. And it's no different from the part of you that hits yourself over the head about anything you think is less than perfect. The work with that inner critic goes on for many of us for our entire lives because it's the interjected voice of the parents that was hard to please.
And so we set up for ourselves all through life some sort of ideal of what we think a perfect person would do. On the one hand, we try to live up to it. And on the other hand, we can become very self-punitive if we don’t.
I think it is a point of spiritual maturity when we're more willing to say, “There's not a blueprint for this, and I have to truly be able to inquire deeply in any situation where the loving thing is and let go of this blueprint or this ideal or this menu and realize that life is much more much deeper than that.”
Are we sometimes willing to sit with a question and simply ask, “What is loving in this situation? Is it loving to give all my money to charity and not have security in my old age?” That’s a very simplistic question. But we should give ourselves a chance to be open, to sit with something, or to sit with another person and say, “Here's what I'm thinking about this.”
Oftentimes, we're not very good dissenters by ourselves because we have our habit patterns. We've got our points of view. That is why it's so helpful to have other people to bounce it off of. It can be extremely useful.
That, of course, is traditionally what a spiritual guide or a soul friend does: sit with you and say, “Where is the vector of love truly moving in your life? Where is Spirit moving? Where are the openings here? Where are they leading? Where are the portals that you've gone through? Or might go through? How do you find your alignment with the source?”
I do believe that most of us need some help in that direction.
Knowing Internal Voices
Sven: Knowing our true heart’s desire seems to be the big challenge. What is spirit calling us to do in love? And what is the voice of fear within us? Or what is the voice of our habit patterns?
Joan: What's the voice of fear and habit? One of the questions we've asked many diverse spiritual teachers is, “What are the obstacles to listening to guidance?” Of course, everyone mentioned fear because that gets in the way, but also the sense of urgency. I must know. Because often, things take time to unfold.
One of the great wisdom teachers of our time, Cynthia Bourgeault, said, “When it gets into this whole thing about divining our purpose and what God wants from us, maybe, maybe we just get too highfalutin. Maybe God wants to taste a hot fudge Sundae!”
Sven: Do you think sometimes, Spirit leads us into situations which, by many standards, society would say are immoral? For example, choosing love in a particular situation might mean cheating on a husband or a wife.
Joan: I don't think that's ever choosing love. Truly, I think that's choosing the desire nature. That morality is there for a reason. Let me say that my original tradition is Judaism, and I'm pretty well steeped in that. But I've been studying the world's religious traditions since I was 10 years old, and have done a fair amount of study in a variety of them. It's interesting that although I teach universal wisdom, I can see that unless you have steeped in a particular tradition, going right for the universal can be difficult and possibly dangerous.
One of the good parts of the wisdom traditions, as we know them, is that they all have particular guidance around moral precepts. And that guidance around the moral precepts is there for a good reason. That is because self-delusion is endemic; it's so easy to rationalize to excuse ourselves, but there are just some things it's better not to do.
Don't kill, don't lie, don't shield, cheat, don't, don't, don't cheat on your spouse. Most of us are certainly not morally perfect. We all make mistakes. And, of course, we learn from those mistakes. But it's better to say there are specific loving guidelines given for good reason. It's because we'll suffer less and create less suffering in others.
Sven: So if we feel what we think is spiritual guidance, and it's in conflict with some of those basic precepts, the basic foundations of all religions, then we should have a pretty good clue that maybe that's not the highest spiritual voice speaking to us.
Joan: Exactly. I would say that's a good voice that you're out of order.
I am 60 years old, and I've lived a fascinating life. Certainly, I can say that life is full of temptation. What person isn't tempted to fall in love again? Even though they're in a relationship, the question always is, when that temptation comes, you can't push it under the rug because it becomes like a pack of dogs scratching at the door. It'll want to get in.
But anything like that is a reason to inquire: What is it? What is it really? What am I hoping to get from this? How do you ultimately look at yourself and your relationship and say, “Is everything good here? Is there something to learn? Is there something that needs to be adjusted without just going with the impulse to cheat?”
After a lengthy inquiry, you might say, “Aha, the truth, for me, at this time, after really inquiring into this, is that, for whatever reason, this marriage is not suitable.” That's another thing.
Then you could leave the marriage before you take up with someone else. But that's just it. These are aspects of what Father Thomas Keating would call the false self, the ego.
These also concern the various life force energies in the body and the chakras. We have that desire nature, and the idea is not to push the desire nature away or to label the ego or the false self as bad. But to recognize that it's always giving us an indication that you could look further into that, you could learn more, or you could become wiser, you could have a deeper relationship with yourself and a self-understanding that will allow you to understand and relate to the world in a fuller way.
Joan’s Focus
Sven: What are your main areas of focus these days?
Joan: I'm fascinated with the effect of love on the brain, love on the heart, love on health, and what that does for us. I'm also a licensed clinical psychologist and am fascinated with the new field of positive psychology. And then one of my greatest interests is spirituality. So there is always a delicious stew of brain science, spirituality, and psychology, with lots of experiential work, inquiry, and being present to ourselves and one another. There are always various questions about the nature of love.
Sven: I have one last question for you. One of my favorite gurus is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who runs an organization called The Art of Living. He says, "Love is not an emotion, but it is our very existence.” That sounds like what you are teaching.
Joan: It really is. You can't confuse it with sentimentality. It is the essence. It's the divine manifesting.
Digging Deeper
Perhaps during this discussion about love, you sensed the vast ocean of wisdom that Dr. Joan Borysenko brings to profound conversations. She integrates science with medicine, psychology, and spirituality, providing endless insights on essential topics. When asked, “What’s love got to do with it?” she revitalizes us with definitions of deep, transcendent love—much more a source of life than merely an emotion.
Her books possess a similar quality—profound wisdom that envelops and nurtures you on multiple levels. While I encourage you to appreciate her wisdom in that way, I also suggest exploring the sources of inspiration she mentioned here:
When Harvard professor Herbert Benson wrote The Relaxation Response in 1975, most of the medical community considered mind-body medicine fringe—lacking scientific proof. They fiercely opposed his work even though his science was solid and repeatable. Today, the love that binds mind and body is recognized as accepted science.
Martin Buber’s classic I and Thou (1923) defined two ways to engage with the world. “I-It” relationships are person-to-object, one-sided, shallow, and based only on a need to use the object. “I-Thou” relationships are person-to-person and two-sided, which allows more love, growth, and meaning to blossom. When we treat others as IT, love dies, but when we truly listen and engage with equal respect and reverence, the love of the Divine can shine through into both lives.
Influential theologian and prolific author Father Thomas Keating is often considered the father of contemplative Christian prayer. He believed prayer and meditation can deepen and enrich a personal relationship with the Divine—the source of Divine love. He is best known for the Centering Prayer, which opens the door to that Divine love.
A student of Father Keating, Cynthia Bourgeault states, “I practice and teach the Christian spiritual arts.” She has authored two books on Centering Prayer (The Heart of Centering Prayer and Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening) and warmly encourages people to seek a Christianity with more substance. She imparts “spiritual knowledge and practices that ‘put teeth’ in Jesus’s radically transformative teachings.”
Abbott Ajahn Sona, from the Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery in the woods of British Columbia, embraces an ancient Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism. The monastery is built and maintained with the latest eco-friendly technology, allowing it to function entirely off-grid. The staff warmly teach both timeless Buddhist wisdom and the most effective green technologies available today.
These luminous teachers of loving wisdom inspired Joan immensely. Their presence and teachings encouraged her to become a guiding light herself. Being in Joan’s company, and even rereading these words I wrote nearly two decades ago, sparks my enthusiasm to explore the more profound mysteries. Discover more on her website: joanborysenko.com.
