Deep, loving connections with others are among life’s most gratifying experiences. They also support our mental, emotional, and physical health in ways too numerous to count. Yet deep connections require us to open our hearts — a process that can be difficult and uncomfortable.

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Most security-seeking humans find vulnerability at least a little challenging; when we’ve had our hearts broken, opening them again can feel almost impossible.

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In his Letters to a Young Poet, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke acknowledged this difficulty — yet he also insisted that learning to love well is the most important thing any of us can do in this lifetime. He described it as “the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

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Rilke was right. Deep connections — with ourselves and others — are essential for well-being. In that spirit, we share these five lessons with the intent of helping you learn to love deeply and well.

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1) Learn to love yourself. A story from Islamic tradition describes a man whose garden was overrun with dandelions. He asked neighbors for advice about getting rid of them. He tried everything they suggested, but nothing worked.

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He went to the local gardening club, and their advice didn’t help either. He finally asked the king’s gardener, who thought for a moment, stroked his beard, and said, “There’s only one more thing you can do: Learn to love the dandelions.”

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This advice is good for more than gardens. Many of us believe we first must weed out all our flaws before we can be lovable. Yet this is an impossible task. We can all use a little improvement, but it’s an illusion to think we need to be perfect before we can connect with others. Do your best to love yourself as you are, dandelions and all.

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2) Learn to see the ­innocence in others. We often watch the world around us through a lens of harsh judgment. It’s easy to focus on somebody else’s problem and how we think it should be fixed. Such a rigid perspective can cause us to misrecognize what’s right in front of us. We make assumptions based on little evidence or understanding.

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A simple way to shift the habit of judging is to see the innocence in others. Give folks the benefit of the doubt. This can help pull us out of the cycles of reactivity and negativity that hold us down and keep us apart.

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3) Learn to be ­permeable. True, you don’t often hear people described as permeable. But this description offers a helpful reminder that we are a part of a larger system. In the natural world, healthy organisms cannot wall themselves off from their surroundings — at least not for long.

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We humans are no different. We are in constant interplay with everything around us — a give and take that is essential not only for survival but also for a life of meaning and purpose. We are not designed to be impenetrable fortresses, even if this helps us avoid getting hurt.

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We all wall ourselves off from time to time, often unconsciously, but if we consistently put up a wall, we end up hurting ourselves even more. When we’re shut down, the good stuff can’t come in either.

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Being permeable means we soften our defenses a bit, we let emotions in, we let emotions out. Importantly, being permeable allows us to let in the good. (For more on this, see “The Promise of Permeability.”)

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4) Learn to listen deeply. Deep listening positively affects both those who practice it and those who speak. We build connections with others as we listen to them.

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Poet Marilyn Nelson says that when we listen deeply to one another and ourselves, poetry arises. It’s another way of saying deep listening can allow us to make connections between disparate things we may not have considered before. Deep listening helps us get out of our own way.

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5) Learn to build a house of belonging. Almost all of us have a yearning to belong, even as we resist letting down our guard. David Whyte’s poem “The House of Belonging” speaks to this; in it he describes the house of belonging as a place “where I want / to love all the things / it has taken me so long / to learn to love.”

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Like building a house, building a sense of belonging takes attention and effort. It’s a process that involves getting outside of ourselves to connect with others while learning to create a deeper sense of meaning in our lives. Then we can envision a blueprint and take action.

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What does a house of belonging look like to you? How are you connecting in ways that nourish you, ways that help build that house? How do you feel when you sense that you belong?

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Imagine your house and then take the brave steps to start building.

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This article originally appeared as “Loving Well” and was written by Henry Emmons, MD and Aimee Prasek, PhD in the September/October 2024 issue of Experience Life.