Episode 78: Vote for Love

Our brains hate to be wrong and they’re always on the lookout for potential threats to our safety and happiness. These instincts make it hard to love people who disagree with us or think differently than us.
You don’t have to love anyone, but feeling love is an experience that most of us want more of. The good news is that feeling more love is always available to you, no matter what other people do or say.
Love is one of the skills you came to earth to learn and this election season has given all of us an opportunity to practice it more. In this episode, I’ll show you that despite the protests of your brain, love is always an option—because love is a choice that you always have the power to make.

You don’t have to love anyone.  But love is one of the most enjoyable emotions to feel.  It feels warm and expansive and open and light and abundant.  Love feels amazing.  If you like that feeling and you like that experience and you want more of it, then the things I am sharing with you today will hopefully allow you to have that experience more often in your life.  

Foundational Principles:

1.  All of our emotions as you know are created by our thoughts and that means that they are optional.  You get to choose the ones you experience.  And love is one of the options.  Always.  In any given moment, in any given circumstance, with any given person, you always have the full platter of human emotions to choose from.  And if you want to feel the amazing emotion of love, then it is available.
2. Whatever we feel, we feel inside our own bodies.  And so if you love someone, you are the only one who feels that.  Loving is an experience you create for yourself.  All of it is happening inside us.  

Okay, with that said, I want to talk about how.  How do we love our enemies?  Or the people with inconceivable political ideas?  How do we love people that seem unlovable?

Your brain gets in the way of love

1.  Your brain hates to be wrong.  At one point in our evolutionary history, being wrong meant death.  And that instinct against being wrong has not gone away.  And this need to do it right or at least never do it wrong is one of the instincts getting in the way of feeling more love.

Our brain is so concerned about being right, it would rather feel defensive than love.  It would rather feel contempt or outrage than curiosity or understanding.  

So when you feel your defenses go up, it is in invitation to ask yourself:

• Why does this bother me?
• What does my brain think is dangerous here?  
• Where is my brain worried about being wrong?  
• What if I’m wrong
• What if we’re both right? 
• What if someone else being right doesn’t make you wrong?

I like thinking, They could be right.  

2.  Brains were built to judge.  And when we see other people doing it differently than we would, our brain tells us this is very dangerous.

Often when we disagree it is because our brain has judged someone else’s opinion to be dangerous.  We are often motivated by fear—fear of what other people will do if they get into power, fear of what will happen if certain policies get put into place, fear of how our lives will be negatively impacted or less than in some way if someone else’s ideologies are running the show.  

So when you notice yourself getting upset or angry or scared, ask yourself: 

• What does my brain thinks Is dangerous here?  

Once we are aware of the way our brain works against love, how do we overcome that? , How do we love?  How do we love our enemies?  The people that hate us? The people that mistreat or use us?  

How do we love?

Understand that every feeling you have is created by your thoughts and ONLY your thoughts.  This really is the idea that changes everything else.  Because if our feelings, like love or hate or fear, are created by our thoughts and only our thoughts—then it means that loving or hating or fearing is entirely up to us.  It means that we’re in charge of whether or not we love.  

The other person, no matter who they are or what they do or how they treat us, is never in charge of whether or not we love.  They are never in charge of ANY of our feelings.  Other people, other people’s action, other people’s opinions can’t create feelings inside us.  And the deeper we understand that, the more we understand that loving is always 100% up to us.

The only thing that prevents us from loving anyone is our thoughts that other people should be different, that they should do it the way we do it, that they should think the way we think.  It’s powerful to know that our thoughts and only our thoughts are the only things between loving and not.

The work of love is always ours to do.  It is always personal work.  Getting to love is never about the other person’s choices but about ours. 

So if you want to love someone, ask yourself:

• What thoughts are preventing me from loving them?  
• In what way do I think they need to be different?
• What conditions have I put on loving them?
• What conditions have I set up for them to perform before I can allow myself to feel love?

Our work on earth, as spiritual beings having a physical experience in a body with a brain, is to overcome those natural instincts and choose how we want to think on purpose in order to love.  And Christ was the ultimate example of this. He was able to so manage his mind that no matter what other people did, he could always get to love.  And that is our ideal. Those of us that are trying to follow him, this is what we are practicing, this election season and every day of our lives.

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