Loving and becoming tender ...
While there's a literature among Quakers about loving and becoming tender that goes back centuries - in Friends' journals and writings - I'm curious as an anthropologist how Friendly discourse or culture can generate love, care and tenderness - both among Quakers and more widely - and when it's also not there. Quakers aren't by any means solely focused on becoming tender as expressions of love and care, but softening in response to hardened positions is something that may emerge for Friends out of Quaker Meeting itself. For example, Friends' social witnesses in prison reform can raise tensions, as can witnessing to peace / non-harming, but Friends have also sought to open to these witnesses by learning from Quaker Meeting itself, and thus perhaps to become tender in the process, and in so doing perhaps seek to connect with others (who may not at first be tender or caring) to effect change.
I appreciate the distributedness, as well as fluidity, of Monthly Meetings among Friends - it's a very decentralized process which can lead to the emergence of new meetings - forms of troop bonding in an evolutionary sense, so connecting within a group - which can also open ways to becoming tender and loving, for example, when a Monthly Meeting has tensions or has gotten into some "hard" places.
While the language of love and becoming tender come out of Quaker history and trajectories in specific ways, and thus are a kind of generator as discourse (a good definition here for me of culture) already, it's partly the "meditation" (for me a kind of relaxation response) in Quaker Meeting itself, which facilitates this becoming tender in unfolding ways, as human primates who identify as Friends ... and this can also spread - meme-like (as replicating cultural units), and it's this too that is one kind of a generator of love and tenderness.
In seeking for these ways of becoming tender and loving to open in the ecology of human social life (and communicatively especially), I seek a kind of light through discernming to lead to such openings in connecting with people. (Urban life, cities, modernity can all, in my experience, influence kinds of hardenings, or lack of connecting communications, leading to the kinds of easing I'm writing about here).
In my ongoing interest in eliciting loving bliss neurophsyiology, however, for which there isn't an abundance of Quaker language, for example, or much other language in science or in other discourses that I'm aware of, it's exploring this Loving Bliss generation {and as biology}, in different languages eventually even - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Loving_Bliss_(eliciting_this_neurophysiology) - that is one approach to its further generation, which I think will help a lot of people if much better understood.
Here too is the "Caring and Loving" wiki subject page - http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Caring_and_Loving - at World University for open teaching and learning and planned in many languages.
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In what other ways will the universal! education of Friendly-informed World University and School - with STEM, enjoyment, excellence and careers' foci - also help facilitate becoming tender and loving, while also facilitating great learning in hopefully ever growing flourishing ways?
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