Episode 78: Vote for Love

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price, you might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome!

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 78 of the 100% Awesome Podcast, The Political Edition. I'm April Price, and I want to welcome you to the podcast. Somehow you guys this week is Halloween, and then it's going to be the election, and then we are onto the holidays. Though, I know some of you, who will remain nameless, have already put up your Christmas trees, and are already playing Christmas music, right? Hallmark started playing their Christmas movies like a month ago. And I get it right, we're all just trying to feel better. That is what every human being is always trying to do, just trying to feel better. And Christmas feels better, right? So, it makes sense, put up the tree, that'll feel better, right? Yeah, it's safer than heroin at least, right?

Okay, but before we get to Christmas, officially, we have to go through the election. And I thought it would be a really good time to talk about how we love people who are wrong, or at least how we love people who think differently than us, right? Who do things differently than us. Who vote differently than us, who don't agree with us, and even those who hurt us, right? How do we love our enemies, and do good to those that hate us, and understand those who despitefully vote against us?

So, I think this is really timely, and I just want you to know that one of the things that I loved most about coaching was that I felt like I really learned how to love for real, for the very first time in my life. As you know, throughout my life, I have tried to follow Christ. I have tried to be a Christian, and live his way of living, and be a disciple, and follow his example of love. And as much as I knew I was supposed to love, I didn't really know how I knew I should. I just didn't know how to change my heart in a way that would change my feelings. It always felt sort of just like beyond me, right? Like it wasn't an attribute that I would really be able to attain as a human. And so, for me, loving my enemies looked a lot like not being able to love, and then being really frustrated, and hating myself a little bit for not being better, right? For not being able to love in the way I wanted to. And it sounds so easy, right? In the scriptures, "love one another," it's three words, how hard could it be, right? But then, other people made it so hard to love them, and that's where I got into trouble.

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But when I found coaching, I felt like I had been given these really practical tools to be able to apply the ideals that I had aspired to, in a very real way. Now, that doesn't mean that it was always easy. It doesn't mean I'm always good at it. And it doesn't mean that, like, I always choose love, but it does mean that I do know how. And that is such a gift, and it makes my life so much better. And this is one of the reasons that I think you should have a coach to really apply the things that I talk about on the podcast in your own life. To the very real people in your own life that are hard to love. To yourself even, when you are hard to love. And changing the way you think really does change everything else. And coaching, I think, is the most effective way to do that.

A couple of weeks ago, my son hired his own coach, and he sent me a text last week that said "Coaching for the win, this is awesome!" And I'm like, this is what I'm saying, every human brain needs a coach. And I'm just so grateful for my coaches, the things that they've taught me. And I consider it such a privilege to be my client's coach, and help them see their own brain so that they can have the Earth-life experience that they really want, and have more love in it, if that's what they want. It really is the best job in the world. So, to be able to coach more of you, I am starting a small group coaching program, and the applications for that will be opening in November, and it's going to be so awesome! I spent last week with my coach creating the outline for my program, and we are going to do such amazing work in there. I am really proud of it, and the transformation that my clients are going to get, for the things that they are going to create, and do. For the people that they are going to really love, and for the understanding, and compassion, and appreciation that they are going to have for themselves, maybe for the first time. It's going to be so awesome!

So, if you want to join that group, or learn more about it, you need to get on my email list. You can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to my website where you can sign up, or you can just text the word "awesome" to 66866. And that will sign you up, and put you on my email list.

Okay so, on to loving your enemies, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the independents, or whoever you think is making your life hard with their stupidity. Okay, so the first thing I want to say is that you don't have to love anyone. And of course, I know that you know this, but I just want to be sure you hear me say this, sometimes when I say that we can love, that that is an option in our lives. You assume that I'm also saying you should love, or that you will be a better person if you do, and I am not. Love is one of the most enjoyable emotions to feel, right? It feels warm, and expansive, and open, and light, and abundant. Love feels amazing! I like the feeling of love more than any other feeling, right? And so, if you like that feeling, and you like that experience, and you want to have more of that experience, then the things that I'm sharing with you today will hopefully allow you to have that experience more often in your life.

But you certainly don't have to take all of our emotions, as you know, are created by our thoughts. And that means that they are all optional, meaning you get to choose the ones you experience. Now, sometimes, when you hear me say that, you think I'm saying that because they are optional, you should only be choosing the good ones. You should only be choosing the positive ones. And I am not. You aren't better if you choose positive emotions. Your emotions are just giving you your experience, and different emotions will give you different experiences. And there are times, plenty of times, actually, where a positive emotion is just not the experience we want to choose. But I do want you to know that love is one of the options always. We sometimes think like, I can't love that. But in any given moment, in any given circumstance, with any given person, you always have the full platter of human emotions to choose from. I they're all available all of the time. They're all on the table. And if you want to feel the amazing emotion of love, then it is available to you always. And the most amazing part is that if you choose to feel love, you are the one who gets to experience it, and only you.

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So, that is the second thing I want to say. Sometimes, we think we are loving the other person for their sake, that we're doing something kind, or nice for someone else if we love them. But all of our emotions are always only felt by us. They are created in our bodies, by our thoughts. They cannot jump out of our bodies, and be felt by someone else. If that was possible, we would all lose our agency. But whatever we feel, we feel inside our own bodies. And so, if I love someone, I am the only one who feels that. Loving is an experience that you create for yourself. And sometimes we think that loving someone who has wronged us, or hurt us, just isn't fair, right? That they'll be off the hook somehow if we feel love, but we're wrong about all of that. We hurt ourselves, and we are the only ones that feel love. When we choose love, we are the ones on the hook when we choose not to. All of it is happening inside of us, and that's just good to know. You love for you, so that you can feel better.

Okay, with that said, I want to talk about how how do we love our enemies, or the people with absolutely inconceivable political ideas, right? How do we love people that seem unlovable? So first, I want you to remember that your brain doesn't care about feeling good, right? Not really. Like sometimes we think that if love is always an option, and if I could feel love all the time, then why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I choose to feel good if I could? And the reason is that your brain cares more about your safety than feeling love. And one of the ways it keeps you safe is by being right, your brain hates to be wrong. At one point in our evolutionary history, being wrong meant death, right? If you were wrong about where to find water, or what berries you could eat, or when that storm was going to hit, you would die. And that instinct against being wrong has not gone away. And so, when someone on Facebook has the exact opposite opinion of you, your brain freaks out. It says, wait a minute, if that person is right, then I am wrong, and I can't be wrong. And it puts up its dukes, and it gets defensive, and it goes into action proving just how right it is so that you won't die. Notice, for example, how charged that phrase is, "I could be wrong." It feels sort of vulnerable, doesn't it? I could be wrong, but that is only because we think it's wrong to be wrong, or that we're not supposed to do it wrong, or that it's dangerous to be wrong.

And this need to do it right, or at least never do it wrong, is one of those 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, that's just good to know you have a brain that wants to be right, and so does the person you are talking to. So does the person on Facebook, so does the person on the other side of the aisle, they want to be right. Their brains want to be right as much as yours does. So, when you feel your defenses go up, it is an invitation to ask yourself why it bothers you. Why does my brain think this is dangerous here? Why is my brain worried about being wrong? I like to tell myself, I could be wrong, or ask myself what if I'm wrong? But if that's too hard to get to, another question you can ask is, what if we're both right? And the point I want to make is, how would we know?

How would we know who is right? There isn't a definitive answer book out there in the universe with the final answer on what's right, and what's wrong, there is just thought. There are just different ways of thinking about the very same circumstances, and every human brain is going to have different thoughts, and interpretations of what is happening. What if these are just thoughts, just two possible ways of thinking in a world of a million possibilities, and that they are just choices of how a particular brain decides to see the world? And what if that's not dangerous? What if it's not even a problem? What if someone else's being right doesn't make you wrong? I like thinking they could be right. We could both be right.

Okay, the next thing I want to remind you of is that brains were built to judge, right? Without a whole lot of conscious thought, our brains are constantly judging the world around us. Like evaluating it for dangers, constantly assessing what might hurt us, they were built to judge. And when we see other people doing it differently than we would, or thinking differently than we would, our brain tells us this is very dangerous. It judges it as dangerous, or bad. So, on the way to my chiropractor's office, there's this sign that somebody has put up, and it says, "Socialists will enslave us with fear, envy, and hate." Right? And as time goes by, sometimes the sign gets rained on, and it gets blown off, and it gets ruined by the weather. And somebody comes back, and puts up a new sign over it that says the same thing, "socialists will enslave us with fear, and envy, and hate." And where it's posted, you can see all these old remnants of the sign with the new ones pasted on top. And like somebody really, really, really wants me to know that socialists will enslave us with fear, and envy, and hate, right? They are not giving up on this message.

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Their brain has judged the socialist to be very dangerous see. And notice that they in that fear are using the same tactics that they're accusing the socialists of. They're using fear, and hate to point out the great danger that we're all in from the Socialists. And I use this example just to point out that 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. Then in some way, if someone else's ideologies are laws are running the show, and so many times in relationships, or in politics, or in regular life, we find ourselves acting from fear, all because our brains, which are so good at judging and assessing danger, are producing a lot of thoughts about how dangerous our lives are. And those thoughts are what are creating all the fear.

So, I don't watch a lot of TV, but sometimes we watch college football. And I noticed on Saturday how almost every political ad was created with fear as the primary motivator, right? It's not just the socialists using fear. Like really these political ads are preying on both of these things I just talked about, right? Like they're either painting the other candidate as, like, so reprehensible. You must be wrong for liking them, or they talk about if they're elected, then these terrible things will happen. And you should be very, very scared. Now, I say all of this to help you see that if you are finding it hard to love someone, right? Maybe your neighbor who doesn't pick up after their dog, or maybe your mother in law who thinks that being a vegetarian is ridiculous, and makes comments about it under her breath. Or maybe it's your brother who won't stop posting about Trump or Biden.

If you find it hard to love these people and you want to, it's good to notice that your brain has judged them, and their behavior as dangerous in some way. Your brain thinks that who they are, and what they do is threatening to you in some way. And so, it's just good to remind your brain that they actually aren't. So, when you notice yourself getting upset or angry, it's usually because you're scared, or threatened in some way, and it's good in those moments to be able to ask yourself, wait a minute, what does my brain think is dangerous here? So, I had someone in my life that my brain had judged as hard to love, right? They would say, and do things that, like, made me so mad, and upset. And the thing that changed it for me was the thought, "Isn't it interesting that my brain thinks this is dangerous?" Right? Like she would make comments, and my brain was sure we were at risk in some way, and I just started watching it, right? Like I was watching a movie. Look how bothered my brain is by that comment. Isn't it cute that it thinks this is dangerous to me in some way? I'm telling you, this changed my relationship with this person.

I just watched my brain, and I wondered about why it felt it was so dangerous. And by doing that, I was able to see that it wasn't just me not liking them, it was my primitive fear response kicking in, telling me that I was in danger in some way. And it's the same when it comes to politics. Something that some person said, or did, has triggered a fear response, and our brain has judged them as threatening. And it's easier to get to love when you can look at that fear response curiously, and notice that there is no real danger here. You can ask yourself, "I wonder why my brain thinks this is so dangerous." And that can help you see that what your brain has judged as life threatening probably is not.

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So, I wanted to give you a little example of this that I was thinking about the other day. So, the other day my son came home from school, and he is in an AP U.S. history class. And so, there at the part in their curriculum where they're studying about the great enlightenment in America, right? That happened in the 1920s and 30s. And so, there is a section in this studying about Joseph Smith, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, which is the church that we belong to. And so, the teacher had my son get up and explain some of the history of the church to the class. And when he finished, the teacher asked him, and he asked the rest of the class why they thought that the members of the church were so persecuted in the eighteen-hundreds, right? Why they had so many people that hated them so much, and eventually killed their profit, and drove them out of wherever it was that they had settled. And as we were talking about at that dinner that night, and now, of course, I think there were a lot of reasons for that persecution. But fundamentally, I think it came down to these same things, right? Because if what Joseph Smith claimed was true, and he was right, then on some level it made other people feel wrong, and that was very threatening. And for some people, the members of the church also represented a political threat, right? They were a community of people with similar beliefs, and if they voted as a block, then they could maybe sway elections, which felt very threatening, particularly in the years leading up towards the Civil War.

So, all of this probably felt very dangerous to the other humans who lived around the members of the church. Now, this does not mean that these fears were founded in reality, but I think these same primitive human fears of being wrong, and being sensitive to the danger of threats were at the heart of what was driving this persecution. So, it's just good to know that those are the instincts that we're up against, right. That this is the programming that we're all operating with as humans. We're worried about being wrong, and we're scared of potential threats to our lives or our lifestyles. But once we are aware of these, how do we love? How do we love? And particularly in this episode, how do we love our enemies, the people that hate us, the people that mistreat us, or use us? How do we love them? So, the most powerful thing I can tell you is that every feeling you have is created by your thoughts, and only your thoughts. If you have listen to this podcast for any length of time, I know you already know that, but it 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 by 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, or hate, or fear the other person, no matter who they are, or what they do, or how they treat us, or how they vote. They are never in charge of whether, or not we love, they are never in charge of any of our feelings. And again, sometimes people make this mean that I'm blaming them in some way if they don't love. But there is no blame here, I don't think you should love, or you shouldn't love, that is up to you, and the experience you want to have. All I'm saying is that if you want to love, it is entirely up to you. And you don't have to wait for anyone else to be different first, you don't have to rely on other people in any way. You get to have the experience you want, whatever that is.

For example, let's just say that someone posts something political on Instagram, and I feel outrage. I have created that outrage, by thinking they shouldn't think the way they do. They should think the way I do, they should see the world the same way I do. My thoughts, and only my thoughts that their thoughts should be different, are creating my outrage. The reason we know that it's my thoughts creating my outrage is because I'm the one feeling it. And someone else who looked at the exact same post may have felt something completely different, right? Like appreciation, or agreement, and you might be saying, so what April, right? But this is the best news ever for those of us who want to feel less outrage, and want to feel more love, because if we want to feel more love, we don't have to change people, or their opinions, or their posts. We just have to change our own thoughts about them, because other people, other people's actions, other people's opinions, other people's posts can't create feelings inside of 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 they should be different, that they should do it the way we do it.

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That would it would be easier to love them if they would do it our way, that they should think the way we think. And it's kind of powerful to know that our thoughts, and only our thoughts are the only things between loving them, as they are, and not. And I don't say that to blame you, or tell you you should be doing it differently, or to excuse, or justify other people's quote unquote, bad behavior, I tell you that so that you know that if you want to love, the way to that, the way to love, is through your own mind. Okay, so let me give you just one little example. One of the thoughts that comes up for a lot of people, for a lot of my clients, for me even, is the thought that other people should be kind. Other humans should be kind to other humans. We think that people should think kind thoughts about other people, that they should be kind, and decent, and reasonable towards other people. But notice, first of all, how subjective that is. What is kind, and decent to you, is not kind or decent to someone else. What is reasonable to one person, is ridiculous to another.

What we are really saying in those moments is that we think people should act like we act. We think they should think like we think. And of course, you can see the problem with this thought, right? It's going to leave us frustrated because other people don't agree with us. Some of the best work I've done to be able to get to love has come with switching the thought people should be kind, to people should be exactly as they are. Then I know that the work to get to kind thoughts is mine, and mine alone. As soon as I think other people should be kind in any way that I am kind, there is a part of me that is not being kind to them. 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 in order to be lovable? What conditions have I put on loving them? And one way to think about this question, that can be even more effective, is to ask what conditions have I set up for them to perform before I can allow myself to feel love, right? Because we are preventing ourselves from feeling love when we withhold love on conditions that we've set up for other people.

Okay, now let me just give you a little disclaimer, when I say it's just your thoughts preventing love, I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Like it's just your thoughts get over it already, right? I mean, it's just your thoughts as a way to show you the source, and the solution to loving if you want to. So, I tell you, it's your thoughts, so that you can know that your feelings are created by you, and you do not need the other person to be different. If you want to feel differently, you have all the power to create any amount of love you want to feel. So, sometimes instead of saying it's just your thoughts, my coach will tell me this is something your mind does. This is something your mind has decided to believe, right? It's the same idea, but we're kind of approaching it from a different angle. So, when your brain gives you thoughts that create hate, or judgment, or resentment, just like we said in the beginning, it's usually from a fear of being wrong, or that your life, or lifestyle is being threatened, and so, your brain has produced these protective thoughts for you.

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Notice what it's doing, and try the phrase, this is something my mind does, this is something my mind is offering me. My mind thinks I'm in danger, and so has offered me these thoughts. But what else is available to think now as a human? This is difficult work, right? This is, in fact, the work you came to learn to do. We didn't come pre-loving, we didn't come with these skills already built in. That is why we are here, to acquire skills, to love, to learn how to love. And to do that, we have to rub up against a lot of people that think differently, and believe differently, and vote differently than us. We came to learn our power to choose love any time we want, but that doesn't mean we have to have that mastered already, right? Jesus wasn't calling all the people who already knew how to love, he calls the people who want to love, who want to have the experience of love in their life. And he asks us to try again, and again, and again to follow him in loving.

So, as you know, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, in a body with a brain. And our work while we're here in that body is to overcome the natural instincts of our brain, and choose how we want to think on purpose. And Christ was the ultimate example of this, which is why I follow him, which is why I am in awe of him. He was able to so manage his mind that no matter what other people did, he could always get to love. 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.

Okay, my friends, that's what I have for you today. Love is always an option, even for the Republicans, even for the Socialists, even for the people who mock you, and spit on you, and crucify you. It is always a choice that is available. This is an incredible week to practice making this choice, because regardless of anything that happens outside of you, love is a choice you only make with the thoughts you choose. And learning to make this choice with flawed, broken, unkind, uninformed, unreasonable people is exactly why you came. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome. I love you for listening, and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today, if you want to take the things I've talked about and apply them in your life so that you can love your earth life experience. Sign up for a free coaching session at aprilpricecoaching.com This is where the real magic happens and your life starts to change forever as your coach. I'll show you that believing your life is 100% awesome is totally available to every one of us. The way things are is not the way things have to stay. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome!