CMASS Community Building Day: What Is Love?

By: Nicole Dotzenrod

On Friday February 27th, CMASS hosted a Community Building Day on the topic, “What is Love?” facilitated by Krysten Lobisch, CMASS’s Graduate Assistant for Student Development, and Chona Lauyan, Assistant Director of CMASS.

“I wanted to open up this idea of love a little bit more, because when we talk about love a lot of the conversations revolve around relationships or romance or getting married. I want to start a discussion about different kinds of love and what other kinds of love look like.”

Lobisch began by showing a series of videos displaying different types of love. After the videos, attendees participated in an open forum discussion about self- love, and ways in which we fall short of our potential to fully love others and ourselves.

One video was of the Free Hugs Campaign, in which Juan Mann stood in the crowded streets of Sydney, Australia with a sign that read “free hugs,” hoping to brighten up the day of strangers. Police and officials banned the campaign, only to be met by a petition with over 10,000 signatures in support of the free hugs campaign.

“I just want to go out and give people hugs now!” said one student after seeing the video.

The second video was from the “This Girl Can” Campaign, urging women of all body types to workout without fear of judgment about their appearance. One student shared that the empowering message of being beautiful and strong while working out is not one that she sees very often.

Next, Lobisch showed “A Pep Talk from Kid President to You,” in which Kid President, 10-year-old Robby Novak, speaks words of positivity and encouragement, telling the people of the world that they “were made to be awesome.”

“Kid President is so motivating because he’s pretty much just telling everyone to get along and do nice things for other people,said one student. The last video shown was Jubilee Project’s “Comfortable: 50 People 1

Question,” in which they asked adults and children the question, “If you could change one thing about your body, what would it be?” While the adults answered by listing off their perceived physical imperfections, all of the children interviewed answered with things such as having a mermaid tail, a shark mouth, wings, or a resounding, “Nothing at all!”

“It never occurred to them to think that there’s a body part they don’t like,” said Lobisch. That gives me hope that we can change the messages. If you showed that video to the adults, how would that change their perspective on what they said?” she said.

One student compared the video to the activity that some elementary school students partake in where they write a letter to their future self about their goals for the future.

“The one thing that I noticed that’s kind of scary is the shift in goals. They begin with ‘one day I want to be an astronaut,’ or ‘one day I want to explore the

world,and then you get to college and you do the same activity and it’s about making money, losing weight and providing for a family. Those can be good things but your priorities change to a point where you’re not living up to your dreams that you had as a kid anymore, but rather what society tells you you’re supposed to do. You can’t really pinpoint a certain point in time where your priorities shifted but it’s more like a gradual erosion of yourself that society does to you.”

After the initial discussion and response to the videos, Lobisch handed out post-it notes and challenged those in attendance to write things that they love about themselves from four angles: body, mind, personality, and achievements.

Most of the people who participated were in agreement that listing things they love about themselves was difficult at first.

“I feel like we’re so often told that we need to be modest and not really appreciate ourselves,” said one student. “You’re supposed to act like you don’t know what’s good about yourself so it’s hard to do these types of things.”

Another said, “Sometimes I think so much about ways to better myself or what needs improvement that I don’t take the time to see what actually is okay the way it is. We sometimes spend too much time focusing on the negative.”

“If you asked me what I don’t like about my body I could go on and on, but thinking about things that I do like was much more difficult. It’s harder to focus on the positive than the negative sometimes,said one student.

One student commented, “In the consumer society we live in we’re constantly being sold the things that are wrong with us and constantly told that we’re not good enough. It’s overwhelming.”

Lobisch then asked the question: How do you practice loving yourselves?

One student responded, “Whenever I start to think a negative comment about myself I’ll try really hard to stop myself and ask why I’m thinking the way I am and what might be affecting my perceptions about who I am.”

In closing, Lobisch asked the group to describe love in one word. They concluded that Love is caring, joy, passion, reciprocity, freedom, home, universal, sacrifice, family, humanity, innocent, friendship, community, powerful, colorblind, blessings, smiley, growth, unconditional, unconventional, life, human, colorful, and faithful.”