Episode 41: Love Unlimited

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 41 of the 100% Awesome podcast. I'm April Price and even though I'm still a little bit congested I am so happy to be here with you.

[03:24]
This week as you probably know it's Valentine's Day.

And so it seems appropriate to talk about love and specifically I want to talk about what is really keeping us from feeling love more in our lives. What is it that's preventing us from feeling love as often and as much as we want to?

And as we do this I'm going to try and have you look at your ability to have love in your life in a different way than maybe you've thought about it before, so that you can see the truth about your capacity to feel love so that you can feel more of it more of the time.

The things that we talk about apply to any kind of love love for your spouse, or your partner, or your significant other, love for your children, love for your neighbor, love for God, love for yourself, no matter who we want to feel more love for or more love from these principles always apply.

So let's start with the basics. Love is a feeling. Rocket science I'm telling you! Rocket science here on this podcast every single week, you're welcome! But love is a feeling, and this is the beginning of understanding love in a different way because what do we know about love? We know it's a feeling. Feelings are always and only created by our thoughts, feelings never exist independent of thought. Feelings are created in the body when neurotransmitters turn the words into chemicals. It's kind of like magic right! We think in language and then our brains send signals to the body and feelings are created.

Now, if you were my daughters you are already upset that I have taken something so beautiful as the feeling of love and turned it into chemistry, but stay with me.

[05:11]
Love isn't magic. Love isn't destiny. Love isn't a result of another person looking and acting a certain way or saying the right words or serving us in a particular way. Love doesn't get felt by one person and then magically jump into the object of their love. Love can't even be shared. This is like shocking I know right? Love isn't a result of anything outside of us it is always a result of a thought we have inside of us. Inside of us, and only inside of us.

So what, right? Even though theoretically we know this, so many times we are waiting for things outside of us to create the feeling of love inside of us. We want other people to be a certain way or say a certain thing or act in a certain way so that we can feel love.

We are waiting on others to feel love. We've already established that love is never created outside of us. And so we're waiting for something that's not actually even possible.

So, let me give you a little metaphor. I want you to imagine that you are very thirsty, you're so thirsty you just want to drink. A drink would feel so good, and it would fill this need you have. And so now imagine that you're sitting outside hoping that it will rain, if the clouds will behave, and the air currents will cooperate, and the jet streams will act in a certain way then, it will start to rain and you could just open up your mouth and get water and quench your thirst.

And you're sitting out there and you're like "gosh I really hope all these things outside of me cooperate so that it will rain and I can stop being thirsty." But what you don't know is that all along you have the power to quench your own thirst. You can just allow yourself to fill the cup with water and take a drink. Now I realize this is not a perfect metaphor but I hope it will show you that when we delegate the responsibility for our thirst to anything outside of us we are completely dependent on those things, the things we can't control to meet our needs.

[07:15]
If instead we recognize our true power to meet our own needs, any time we want, then we can decide what we want to do about it. Many of us are waiting for the people and things in our life to behave in a way, so that we can feel love for them, rather than owning our experience and owning the fact that the amount of love we are feeling is totally created by us, and by what we allow ourselves to think.

The thoughts that we have about other people or about ourselves are the only things that can create love inside of us, and yet we're always delegating the amount of love we feel to other people waiting for them to do something that is impossible for them to do, which is make us feel love.

And I want you to know this is not your fault. This is what we've been taught through movies and books and songs from Mr. Darcy to Jerry Maguire. We have been taught that love is something that just happens to you. If you're lucky and you find the right person, then you get to feel love. If the weather cooperates you get to have rain and then you get to stop being thirsty.

No one has ever told you that there is an unlimited supply of water that you can access anytime you want. You create it yourself. You can get yourself a drink and you can meet your own needs. And this applies especially when it comes to love.

And honestly if you can understand this one thing it can change everything for you. All the love you feel is the love that you have created with your thoughts. That's it! All the love you feel is all the love you have created.

I know it doesn't feel like it and my daughters might consider this the most tragic truth I have ever told, but I tell you this truth so that you could stop waiting and start getting as much love as you want in your life because there really is an unlimited supply.

So, let's talk about what keeps us from feeling love. What keeps us from choosing the thoughts that create the feeling of love? Of course this is gonna be different for each of us, but at the heart of it is fear. When we choose fear instead of love, it is because we have chosen a thought that our brain believes is protective in some way. It believes we need protection, but these thoughts don't actually protect us or serve us. They are actually keeping us from feeling love.

The first thought I think that keeps us from feeling more love is the thought that "I'm gonna get hurt and I need to protect myself." And usually we do this by withholding or withdrawing emotionally. So first of all let's just look at the logic of this. We have a thought that we're going to get hurt, so in order to avoid getting hurt we decide to feel less love...which hurts. When we withdraw and stop feeling the feeling of love and choose another feeling instead like resentment or anger or coldness or apathy, we are choosing to feel less good, and in fact hurting ourselves and we do this to not get hurt.

[10:19]
Do you see? We hurt ourselves so that we don't get hurt. It makes no sense! The result is exactly what our brain was trying to avoid in the first place. Not only that, but I want to point out that it is actually impossible for other people to hurt us, when we think about other people hurting us we associate that hurt with negative emotion. We think they're going to do something and then we're going to feel bad. Remember, we only feel things because of our thoughts, and so indeed if we do feel hurt it is just because we have hurt ourselves with our thoughts, with the thought we chose to think, so on both levels this thought that "I might get hurt so I need to protect myself," doesn't make any sense.

We can't be hurt by someone else's actions and feeling less love doesn't protect us. Rather it is the thing that is hurting us right now. It's the equivalent to someone doing something or saying something and then you hurt yourself with those words or actions, in effect kind of punching yourself in the face and then you say "Hey that hurt! And as a punishment I'm going to punch myself in the face again!" Our fear of experiencing negative emotion keeps us choosing negative emotion rather than love.

We're saying, "Look I'm not going to get a drink and quench my thirst just in case I get thirsty later. I don't want to know how good a drink feels just in case I can't get more drinks." But what we've forgotten is that we always have access to water. We always have access to love, there is an unlimited supply. We are only ever limited in our ability to quench our thirst by ourselves not taking a drink. And there is only a lack of love when we choose not to feel love.

So let me give you a real life example. I have a friend who didn't get invited to a wedding and she found this very hurtful because she had the thought "they must not like me as much as I thought they did. We must not be good friends" and this was a painful thought because she made it mean that there was something wrong with her, and they didn't like her. And so she hated that feeling and so she decided to distance herself from the friend. She didn't call or text them, she didn't reach out to them, she just felt upset, and angry, and hurt. She stopped feeling love so that she could feel upset, angry, and hurt instead.

In a sense, she stopped feeling good so that she wouldn't feel bad. So, let me give you the play by play. Someone didn't invite her to a wedding and then she punched herself in the face. Effectively, she hurt herself with the thought that they didn't like her as much as she thought they did and there was something wrong with her. Well she hated how that felt, and so to take away the sting of punching yourself in the face, she punched herself in the face again by withdrawing her love. She stopped feeling love for her friend and felt hurt instead. Do you see what happens? happens? We hurt ourselves and then to protect ourselves, we hurt ourselves some more by not allowing ourselves to just feel love instead of anger or hurt.

[13:16]
Now, I'm not saying this is logical and I'm not even saying it's easy to see it. This is why it helps to have a coach. But something that could help you is to notice that when you're no longer feeling love, that is the signal, that is the clue. Not that they have hurt us, or wronged us, and that we need to be careful, but that is the clue that we have stopped feeling love and we are hurting ourselves.

My friend was punishing herself on two levels. She was the one making the lack of invitation mean hurtful things and then she chose to feel less love moving forward. Meanwhile, the other people in the story were just planning a wedding. Other people are just living their lives and we're busy punishing ourselves, by feeling less love. And even if they weren't just planning a wedding, let's say they actually had negative feelings towards my friend. She never has to feel that negativity unless she chooses to stop thinking loving thoughts and chooses other thoughts instead. Not loving never protects us from anything, not loving hurts us every time.

So in order to increase our capacity and the opportunity we have to feel more love. You can try asking yourself these questions: In what way do I think feeling terrible is protecting me? In what way is feeling terrible actually doing the opposite? How is feeling terrible hurting me? What feeling would be kinder to me? What feeling would feel better to me? I'm saying like it actually might help you to think about it in a selfish way. How can I feel better? I can feel better by choosing to feel more love. What can I choose to feel that's going to feel better to me? Remember that love is always a gift we give ourselves every time. When we feel love we're the one experiencing it. It's a gift we give us!

Don't punish yourself by taking that away in an attempt to punish someone else or in the misguided attempt to protect yourself from feeling bad. You are making yourself feel bad by denying yourself love.

[15:24]
Another thought that prevents us from feeling love is that we think that other people need to be different or change in order for us to love them. There's this fear that if we love them like they are then they're always gonna be like they are. So what is happening here is that we are feeling worse, as a means of changing them as a tool to get them to be different. So let me be clear, when we do this they don't feel worse you feel worse and they were hoping that they will just magically change because we feel worse.

So if we go back to our metaphor we're kind of saying like "I refuse to quench my thirst until you behave in the way I want you to." And then we blame the other person there are thirsty. It's not super logical, but it is super painful. When someone else acts in a way that we don't agree with as a way of changing that behavior, our brain tells us we should move out of love into another emotion like frustration, or annoyance, or anger, or resentment. The trouble with that is that it never works.

People are who they are, and we only end up feeling less love and more terrible. So it's like being irritated that it's snowing. "I'm gonna be mad until spring comes." Which never make spring come faster, it just feels terrible until it comes. The people in our lives do things that upset us. They snow, but that isn't the painful part, what is painful is how we feel when we stop loving them and start feeling something else instead.

So let me give you a little example. As you know one of my goals for the new year was to get more sleep and so I've put all these systems into place so I can reach my goal. Anyway last night as usual I went to bed at 9:00 and I fell asleep. An hour later Auggie our dog started barking like crazy, which woke me up, and I was like slightly irritated but I rolled over I went back to sleep. 5 minutes later Auggie starts barking again waking me up and suddenly, I realized he was barking because David was still up watching TV and our dog likes to bark at all the dogs on television.

And so I walked in the other room, and I saw David looking at his phone while Auggie is losing his mind at the Collie on television and in that moment I stopped feeling love because I thought David should be different than he is in some very fundamental ways. Number one, he should go to bed earlier like me. He should do it like I do it. Number two, (there is a long list bear with me.)

[17:57]
He should stop the dog from barking. If I was out there and Auggie was barking I would have stopped him. So David should do it like I do it. He should stop Auggie.  And most importantly obviously he should love and respect me enough to let me sleep. That is what good spouses do. He should be different than he is. And as I stood there I felt less and less love, because I thought David should be different and then he should be doing things differently, at least in that moment.

But what really happened is this because my brain thought David should be different than he is. I punished myself. I felt anger and resentment instead of love which hurt me, and here's the important part.

When that happened when I made the choice to stop feeling love and opted to feel anger instead I was certain I was feeling anger because David needed to change. I blamed him for my loss and feeling love for the appearance of the anger I was feeling, but it was always my choice.

Remember anger and love are both created inside of me, because of my thoughts and not outside of me, because of David's actions. What felt terrible in that moment was not that the dog woke me what felt terrible was the anger I was feeling and I was only feeling it because I had a thought that my husband should be different than he is.

The terrible part for me was the anger that I had created with that thought. Notice that I want David to be different so that I don't have to feel terrible but I don't ever have to feel terrible. I was blaming him for what I in fact created.

Now I'd like to say I turned it around but it actually got even worse for me. We put the dog to bed. David came to bed and in about two seconds he was snoring. And then I proceeded to lay there for another two hours fuming, and angry, and upset, that my husband should be different, that he should care ironically about my sleep. Do you see? There I was, not sleeping, and not caring about my sleep, because I thought David should.

[20:07]
Meanwhile, David is not feeling any of it, I was feeling it. And the whole time my brain was telling me that I needed to feel angry, and frustrated so that he would change. I need to feel terrible so he will be different. It's like saying "I need to be thirsty so he will be different. If only he would care about me enough to quiet the dog then I could get a drink." Which is all just a lie. Do you see? I only feel terrible because I'm thinking he should be different, and feeling terrible doesn't change anything but me.

So how do we turn this around? We always want that other person to be different, when the truth is we are the only one who has to be different. We have set up all these conditions to us being able to feel love. Conditions that have to be met before we allow ourselves to get a drink. Conditions that are dependent on things outside of ourselves and those conditions that we've set up are blocking us from feeling love.

Remember who sets up the conditions—we did! In this case I did, so in a sense I was saying "I cannot feel good until these arbitrary conditions that I've set up are met until you come to bed or you stop the dog from barking or you apologize. I'm not going to feel love. I refuse to feel love until you decide to behave right. I refuse to get a drink until you do it the way I think you should."

Or we could just choose to drop the conditions and get a drink. We could just choose to drop all the things we think the other person should do and feel love. We use our love as a carrot to change them, but it doesn't work because we're the ones not feeling the love, we're the ones being punished. In this sense we're saying, "If you behave the way I think you should, I will stop punching myself in the face." And they're like "Okay great, I'll get right on that."

When you think someone else should be different so you don't have to feel terrible, so you don't have to feel angry or frustrated or irritated, ask yourselves what conditions have I put on loving this person? What conditions have I decided are more important than feeling love? I would also offer you the idea that when we think the other person needs to be different in order for us to love them, in a sense we are denying ourselves the feeling of love while we wait for the other person to be a different version of themselves. A version that we can accept and approve of.

[22:33]
But they are them, they aren't our version of them. And when we put conditions on others we are not loving the version that they are, we're loving some fantasy version of them, not them. Now I know I've told you about how one of my daughters went through a period where she was always sad, and I wanted her to be different, I wanted her to stop being sad, I wanted her to stop snowing. Then I could really love her and enjoy her and I stepped out of love with the version of her that was in front of me waiting to feel love until a different version of her showed up, and she could sense that. And more importantly I could feel it, and it felt terrible.

When we love all of the person the one that is actually in front of us without needing them to be different, then we just get to feel love. Withholding love doesn't change other people it changes us, it makes us feel less love which hurts, we're hurting us to feel more love we are the only ones who have to be different and we do that by thinking different thoughts.

Another fear that keeps us from really feeling love is the fear that maybe people don't love us. Maybe they don't love us like they should. If they really loved us then they would do X, Y, or Z. In this version of punishing ourselves and feeling less love we are trying to keep score, and we've assigned points to what they do or they don't do to determine if there are enough points to allow ourselves to feel love. We're just tallying the score all the time. Did you know that there isn't even a scoreboard anywhere? There isn't a score and you just get to feel love, if you want to.

So I'm going to give you kind of a silly example that I hope will help. So for years when David did the grocery shopping he would bring the iceberg lettuce home without putting it in a produce bag. This drove me crazy! And I would say like "Why didn't you put the lettuce in a bag?" And he's like "It's in a bag." Right? cause the iceberg lettuce is like all wrapped up tight and plastic." And I was like "You have to rip it to get to the lettuce, and then there's no bag, and then I can't put the lettuce away in a bag."

Like I have been grocery shopping a lot. I know that lettuce goes in a bag. So like years of this went by and every time he would buy lettuce he wouldn't put it in a bag. And I was like he just doesn't listen, he doesn't care about me, he doesn't love me, because he doesn't put the lettuce in the bag.

[25:02]
If he really cared about me he'd put the lettuce in the bag. And here I am, I'm keeping score. The score says he doesn't love me, but when I think that it only causes me pain it doesn't change the score. You don't win in fact, you lose. So we've been married for twenty five years, twenty five years go by, and the last couple of years I'd say that he remembers a lettuce bag like 90 percent of the time but any time he forgets there I go back and I conclude "Well, he must not love me." Then I choose to stop feeling love in those moments.

So I have to tell you, like a couple of months back I ordered my groceries so that I could just go through the pickup. And I didn't pick out the lettuce, I didn't pick out the groceries, I just ordered them online and they drove up to the thing and the guy loaded them in the car. And I took everything home took all the groceries home and I pulled the lettuce out and the lettuce is not in a bag. And it was loaded by somebody who works for a grocery store. Somebody who should know that lettuce goes in a bag.

And I looked at that lettuce and I was like "Oh my gosh!  What if lettuce doesn't go in a bag? What if I'm wrong about that? What if David's been doing it right this whole time? Wait a minute. What if he loves me? What if I'm wrong about this? And what if he actually loves me?"

Now I promise you, no matter what David was thinking or not thinking in the produce section, it wasn't about whether or not he loved me and deciding to send me secret coded messages through the lettuce "I'm going to let her know I really don't love her today. No bag!" But our brain loves to tell us that. Our brain wants to tell us that the things they do or don't do mean something about their love and then we choose to feel less love when we see the score.

Our brain wants to tell us that love is dangerous or scary in some way, or that you're making yourself vulnerable in some way when you feel love. And then it goes to work interpreting the actions of the other person and trying to determine whether or not they love you and if you should love them.

But what I want to say is that not only is this a waste of time, but also your brain is biased. It's a biased referee. And it always sides with fear.  And more importantly, our brain is completely misinformed about how we get more love. It's not from lettuce bags, it's not from clean closets, or bedtimes, or the time they get home from work. The actions of the other person never determine how much love we feel.  However they feel literally doesn't matter in terms of how much love you get to feel. What you feel is determined by what you think. Whether or not the other person loves you, doesn't determine ever how much love you feel. How much you love them, determines how much love you feel.

And love I want to tell you always feels good, always.  when we feel vulnerable or scared it is because we have stopped thinking thoughts that produce love and we've chosen thoughts that produce fear instead.

[28:28]
So one question that I asked my clients when they're struggling with this is, "Is there ever a time when love isn't a good choice? Is there ever a time when love would make things worse? Is there ever a time when love would make you feel worse? Is there ever a time when love isn't a good choice?"

So a couple of months back I was talking to a client and she said, "Yes! My boyfriend cheated on me and if I hadn't loved him then I wouldn't be hurt right now." And I showed her that the feeling of love never hurts. When we stopped choosing to feel love and we choose hurt or anger instead that feels terrible.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't choose it. She gets to choose how she wants to feel.  But it isn't love that makes her feel terrible, it's the other emotion she's choosing hurt and anger that feels so bad. It's the other emotions we're choosing that create pain. Love doesn't create pain. We have to step out of love and feel something else in order to create pain.

So when I was in college I had the privilege of working for Dr. Terry Warner who was a philosophy professor, and he's written several books over the years including a book called Bonds That Make Us Free. And when I worked for him one of my jobs was to type up stories that were submitted by people about their relationships and where they were struggling.  And essentially Dr. Warner believed that we lie to ourselves that our brains are lying to us and those lies are keeping us in what he called "bonds of anguish" instead of being in bonds of love with each other.

And that our brain is kind of telling us this story that creates all this pain and anguish for us.

I still remember typing up a story from this young wife, and she talked about how her husband wouldn't brush his teeth, no matter what she did. No matter how many times she asked, no matter how kindly she asked.  She even bought new brushes and put like cute notes on them and little jokes on them so that he would brush his teeth, but he refused to brush his teeth. He wouldn't brush his teeth. So she's writing this letter to Dr. Warner and she's like "Obviously my husband doesn't love me. He doesn't love me enough to brush his teeth and I don't know what I'm going to do." She's like, "I'm married to a man that doesn't love me enough to do the simplest thing of brushing his teeth."

And I remember like being appalled at this like "Oh my gosh. He doesn't love her enough to brush his teeth. Like this is a tragedy."

[31:01]
And I just remember thinking like this is crazy, right? Surely this is not about her brain right? Like this is a problem. A husband should brush his teeth. And I remember talking to Dr. Warner about it and being like so upset about it. Like what kind of a husband doesn't brush his teeth? And surely this wife was right to be upset. And he tried to explain to me how the wife's interpretation of her husband not brushing his teeth was the lie, that was what was causing her pain. The fact that she made it mean that he didn't love her was the problem, not the teeth brushing.

And I remember just like staring at him like "What are you talking about?" And I said "So it's her fault?" Right? "She's wrong? How can that be? He's the one who won't brush his teeth. How can she be wrong?"

And I remember he said "She's not wrong and she's not right. She's in pain. It's not about right and wrong it's about the pain." And that I didn't understand then. But I do now. We fight so hard for our painful stories. We try so hard to interpret other people's actions to make it mean that it's okay and safe to love them.

But what I want you to know is that it's always safe to feel love. When you feel love you just get to feel love. And you can feel it as long as you think the thoughts that create it.

So Dr. Warner in his work used to quote a little passage from one of T.S. Eliot's poems. And it went like this: "The only hope or else despair lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— We only live only suspire consumed by either fire or fire." Meaning we either sacrifice all of our stories, and expectations, and score-keeping, and our rightness, or we sacrifice our ability to feel more love.

If we're willing to burn all our beliefs about how other people should behave, and how they should brush their teeth, and provide for our families, and put lettuce in bags, and what time they should come home from work, and how they should help—if we're willing to burn all that on the pyre—all those beliefs those things that tell us whether or not we're loved, then we can just allow ourselves to feel as much love as we want, without being encumbered by all of those conditions, and expectations, and rules, and interpretations of love.

Now here at the end I just want to speak to why we want to do this, why we want to choose love. And I hope one of them is very obvious because it just feels better, when we choose love it always feels better for us. We give ourselves a gift every time we choose to feel love.

[33:47]
And I also want to offer that this is the skill, love, that you are on earth to learn. Learning to choose love is the way to the higher version of you. God doesn't have the ability to love because he is God. His ability to love is what makes him God. His capacity to create the love he feels is what makes him God. Notice also, that his ability is completely independent of the people he loves. His capacity doesn't change for different people with different personalities. His love is perfect because of the way he loves, not because of the people he loves or who he is, but because of the way he chooses to love. And this is what he is saying is available to each of us when he says "Come follow me. Come love like me."

How much love we feel is a choice, a choice that we make with our thoughts every time. If I don't feel love, it's because I have chosen thoughts that don't produce love. And that's just good to know it doesn't mean you have to choose thoughts that produce love, but it does mean that you're in charge of it. It does mean that you're responsible for how much love you feel.  No one else determines how much love you feel—no matter what.

We don't realize that getting love is our choice. That feeling love is a choice.  That there is an unlimited supply, and you get all you want...and that my friends is 100% awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!