“Be present to &pay attention to things, feel the basic, rudimentary love. Let it feed you & your life. Imagine it is easier than you think!”
Article: The easy way to love more
Two parts of awareness
If you look at your experience of awareness, you may notice that you can kind of divide it into two parts:
- The part that can observe, that can register or be aware the object that it looks at
- The feeling that comes with the awareness like a ‘touching’ or ‘embracing’. This part is almost sensory
You might basically say that there is a ‘watching’ and a ‘feeling’ dimension to each moment of our awareness.
Love as the basic feeling or emotion
Continuing with our train of thought here, you could regard the ‘watching’ dimension of awareness as the basis of our mind and thoughts. With regard to the second, ‘feeling’ dimension of awareness, this then acts as the basis of our emotions and feelings. Awareness divides up into these two dimensions of mind (thought) and emotion/feeling.
When we value something that we meet or see, our awareness pays attention to it, we ‘give it’ our attention. You might say that this giving of attention is the basic emotion, love. Because we give somebody or something a value, we pay attention to it. That attention is basic love.
You will know this from your own experience, when someone else listens to you, pays attention to you, considers you, acknowledges you, then you feel valued by them, which is a really simple way of feeling loved.
Loving is easy
Sometimes it can feel like it is difficult or hard to love. Sometimes we feel exhausted by the demands of others and the world. We don’t feel we have the capacity to love. Sometimes (maybe often?) this is because we are trying to hard to love, we think it is something more difficult than it is. If we understand that all you need to do to love something is to rest your attention upon it, we discover it is not as difficult as we thought, in fact it is easy!
Different domains of practice
To discover experientially how easy loving is in this basic sense, we need to practice. Becoming basically present, perhaps smiling very gently, practice bringing attention to, and therefore extending love towards:
- Yourself, or a part of your inner-self
- Your body, or a specific part of the body
- Other people, those you know, like, dislike, don’t know
- Things in nature, plants, animals, trees, the ocean
- In-animate objects, paintings, ceramics, anything you like
Don’t over think it!
On way in which we can sabotage ourself here is by trying too hard. We think we must have to pay attention and think a certain way, or really try and feel affectionate. By doing this we can miss the total simplicity of what is going on here.
Attention = valuing = love
That’s really it! And it is a wonderful gift that you can give to yourself, your body, other people and the world around you. One thing to understand is that, in this context, love is the thing that happens before you think about it. Sure, sometimes we love others after we have developed a way of thinking about them and what they are/do/stand for, but attentional love is more basic, more simple, easier than that.
Sit/stand/walk. Be present to/pay attention to things, feel the basic, rudimentary love. Let it feed you and your life. Imagine it is easier than you think!
Related reading: Lazy compassion (compassion & care through awareness)
© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
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