Warmth: An Emotion of Welcome

I had a speech and drama coach in high school named Mrs. Bertrand. She must have listened to hundreds of instructional speeches on how to make chocolate chip cookies and motivational speeches on being a blood or organ donor. I remember her as patient, clever, intuitive, and warm.

Mrs. Bertrand’s room was always open. She wrestled alongside us through our undying perfectionism or extensive apathy, easing us toward the middle once again. She gave intense feedback. There was no half-ass in Mrs. Bertrand’s world, but somehow the feedback came cloaked in so much love and grace that it was never offensive. You never left conversations with Mrs. Bertrand feeling less than, lower than, or pushed aside. She had a way of seeing through the muck and mask to your core self, and leaving behind small particles of belief that nothing in life was unmanageable and that you were entirely capable, and perhaps most importantly you were not alone on the journey.

Mrs. Bertrand, more than anyone I’ve know, taught me the value of cultivating warmth.

Warmth is what we call a social emotion. It’s something we experience together as humans, rarely individually. Even when I feel a kind of hygge while nestled in my home on my own, those feelings of warmth are generally fed by associations of the people who have loved me well and the places I have felt most valued.

Warmth is relate to connection, intimacy, and attachment, three hyper-loaded words that likely make us feel vulnerable simply reading them.

Because of the vulnerability, warmth can feel like work. Warmth is energy going out from our person and permeating another, threads of small kindnesses - a smile, a gesture, an open posture, curiosity, non-judgment - that weave us together and build the safety of a relationship. Warmth can be momentary, brushing past someone in the grocery store, or it can be a building block within the walls of our home or workplace, a culture of trust and inherent value.

Again, warmth might come natural, and it is an emotion we can cultivate. Imagine warmth like the sourdough starter of relationship: I believe in my inherent value, created by a God who loves and sees me. I let that grow and bubble up and reach out to other people in my interactions with them.

Warmth might outgrow its bowl on the counter. It will need reminders that to be warm doesn’t mean to give up that inherent value in order for others to experience it. Our boundaries in life compliment our warmth. It’s important for boundaries to be projected alongside our warmth, partners, co-pilots. Boundaries protect that sense of our own inherent value so that warmth can grow without dying or mold or imbalance.

Here are three benefits as well as ways to build warmth in your life:

Warmth is an invitation.

Warmth, even when friendships seem far away or the calendar seems overfilled and exhausting, keeps us from feeling isolated. Warmth has physical sensations along with our cognitive or affective experience of it. Some fascinating research revealed that physical warmth can instigate psychological warmth in some circumstances (ta-da hygge) and psychological warmth then also had an impact on our internal body temperature. * Other research shows their relationship to energy.* With more warmth, we can reach out more. More warmth invites others to reach in to our lives.

Action: tiny invitation - give an awkward compliment to someone every day this week. Compliments, without false flattery, say “I noticed you.” Over time they can serve as bids for connection to deeper relationship.

Warmth keeps us from “other-izing.”

I’m not sure you can fake warmth and truly get by with it, but warmth has a way of transforming us from the inside out. Because sharing warmth is about sharing the value of another human being, as they are in front of us, it keeps us from pushing people away based on their preferences or our own. In present Western culture, we are almost rewarded socially for turning against people who have a different opinion or belief structure. Warmth is not cultivated when it is discriminatory. Warmth tends to die on the vine when we don’t allow it to be connected to inherent value and connect it instead to earned value or sameness.

Action: when you are in a conversation with someone you disagree with, take a deep breath, expand your chest, feel the air fill your lungs, and imagine warmth filling them as well and flowing out to the person in front of you. Let the somatic awareness of the physical warmth inside you fill the space between you and the person to whom you are talking.

Warmth shares a part of our soul rather than keeping ourselves protected with the armor of surface connections.

The number one drawback (and likely barrier) to warmth is its vulnerability. Thank goodness for the Gospel. Our own value doesn’t have to be dependent on the person in front of us and their actions. Like the woman in Luke 7:36-50, our love going out to the world is dependent on what we have been given not on what we receive.* Mrs. Bertrand held us accountable, but never withheld warmth. It is a vulnerable thing to let that warmth from our deepest places of pain, heartbreak, human suffering, and forgiveness go out preemptively. What if it doesn’t return? What if coldness is what greets me? And what if there is more to this story than talk of the weather and living with a heart closed up tight to keep us “safe.”

Action: practice a day of warmth - you don’t have to feel walked on or discarded for someone else to feel warmth, yet try one day when you walk out the door and set your face toward bringing warmth to the people you encounter and the spaces you inhabit. Let it be a mystery, don’t try too hard, simply focus on bringing warmth. Breathe in an awareness of the vulnerability it takes and breathe out warmth from the place where the Holy Spirit rests in your soul.

Find more on the Gospel for our full range of emotions in Emotions & the Gospel: Created for Connection.

Footnotes:

*Bargh, J. A., & Shalev, I. (2013, February 1). The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life. PubMed Central. Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3406601/

*Siepkamp, P. van de. (n.d.). My warm and cold emotions - gentle teaching. Retrieved September 26, 2022, from https://www.gentleteaching.nl/gentle/en/method/caregiver/my-warm-and-cold-emotions

*https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+7&version=ESV