Talking truth about "self-improvement" as it relates to health, overall wellness and expressing the truest version of you. This is Marta Mrotek with Something Honest…..

I don’t know many people who aren’t wounded in some way… And I know that at least for me, the deepest wounds, the one’s that open up over and over again, have something to do with someone I love…  But right now, here in this country, we are in the middle of something that applies very specifically to this principle and it applies to all of us. There’s a lot of hate out there. There’s a whole lot of judgement and in my humble opinion a whole lot of pain on the horizon.. And I just have to wonder… what would happen if we all just worked really hard on loving each other more?...

Last week we were really focused on self-love, on how you see yourself, how you express yourself and how to appreciate yourself at a really high level of understanding. This week we’re going to start talking about Love as it relates to other people, how you might judge them but also how you might start to see and appreciate them from that same kind of higher perspective. And thinking about how that work that we did with Humility, incorporating the outer physical experience and that more internal or spiritual experience, and starting to understand ourselves a little more, as something that we can apply to how we love the people around us. And honestly, love really is just one of those words that can start sounding a little tired for us. It tends to get thrown around a lot, it’s misunderstood sometimes and sometimes it’s actually abused, so at least for me, and I don’t think I’m alone in this, love can be a scary thing. Especially when I was young, loving other people was very much intertwined with loss for me from pretty early on. And if I’m being just completely transparent, in some ways it still is… There can be a lot of fear mixed in there, and so much vulnerability and at least what seems like so many opportunities to get hurt when you open yourself up like that. And I know, not just from the work that I’ve done, and that I’m still doing on myself, but also from teaching and coaching so many people on this kind of stuff, that all of the work that we did with Humility and everything that we’re doing to study and improve ourselves is very closely related to the work that we’ll need to do in relationship to other people.

And I think it just makes sense to spend most of our time today talking about the different kinds of love, and that takes us to our first talking point…

TALKING POINT 1: LOVE OF FAMILY

So, I think when we first start talking about love most people drift toward something romantic first but that’s not where we’re going to start. And I’m not going to go along with the standard types of love as identified by the ancient Greeks exactly either because for most of us I think they are often mixed together at different times in life. Sometimes different kinds of love for different people but sometimes a whole bunch of them a wrapped up in just one. I do think it’s helpful for our purposes to start out with familial love, the love between family members, and especially the love that, in a perfect world, exists between parents and their children, because for most of us that’s where so many of our core beliefs about relationships and feelings of belonging and safety are formed. If we’re lucky the love we share with our parents, our sibling and eventually our own children is durable. Maybe not altogether unconditional but it can be… and hopefully it’s at least something that we can depend on.

And I know everybody has their own story when it comes to what growing up was like and their relationships with parents and siblings and they aren’t always very pretty. They do usually have something to do with the way we’ll parent our own kids when and if we have them.. and that can meant that we repeat those patterns established with our own family of origin or that we have at some point learned from what happened there and chosen to make something better for our own offspring..

As a parent I can only express my own feelings for my own children and that is certainly a kind of love that I have a hard time explaining. There are so many things wrapped up in there that always, right from the beginning, had to do with giving them the very best of me. They immediately took priority over all else and captured all of my attention. There is certainly a feeling of duty there, and a desire to protect them, and I suppose, at least in my case, it can be very hard to find the balance between supporting someone and enabling them. And no doubt, for me, even in the worst of times, even when I had to let them fall and let go, I knew there was never going to be anything that could change the way I loved them.

When it comes to my own parents, I’ve got plenty of stories to tell, a couple that you’ve already heard and many more, that proved, at least to me, that the love between parents and children isn’t always necessarily enough to sustain you. I have some pretty deep seated issues that go back to my relationship with my parents, some that weren’t even their fault, and I mean, when I was very small, I really couldn’t have asked to be loved any better, but things change, and even though I do know that they loved me, the support that I needed most wasn’t really readily available for me. It wasn’t really something that I could depend on and honestly neither one of them could be there for me in the way that I needed them to be. And I’m still not exactly sure if that is a fair way to measure the way people love each other, but I do know that it has a lot to do with the way love feels… and I did at least feel love and safety and a sense of belonging with them when I was very young.. and it did show me what I wanted to give my kids and that was a true gift. I did know, I did have a little vault of happy memories to remind me what family should feel like.

I did also have three siblings, but they were much older, they had a different mom and I didn’t actually live in the same house with any of them for very long as a child. So, we’d be what most of you would consider half-siblings. But that’s really not how it felt or what we were. My brother is the one who taught me that the amount of blood you share doesn’t define your connection. He didn’t like it when people used the word half to label our relationship. He always just called me his sister and if anybody said anything different, he’d hug me tight and say, “Remember there’s no half between you and me.”  And he proved that to me, over and over again until the day he died. He loved me all the way, all the time.

My point is that family ties can be very strong and the love that you find there can be an incredibly positive force in your life. But we know that isn’t always the case. It doesn’t really have to have all that much to do with the blood you share, and it doesn’t always come from the people that you think it should. Sometimes in life we even get lucky enough to find friends that feel like family and that takes us to Talking Point number two…

TALKING POINT 2: LOVE BETWEEN FRIENDS

Somewhere along the way as we move out into the world we have some people who we gravitate toward and start calling our friends. And some of those friendships can remain somewhat superficial. Some are mostly about having fun, or getting into trouble, or killing time, or people you just spend a lot of time with, out of necessity, at work or school or wherever. But some of those friendships are deep. And I have to say that I have been blessed with a few of those really great really close friends over the years, but not many that are deeply personal. And even though I have so many sweet people in my life. So many co-workers and teachers and students that I truly love. I mean I really do love them and I would say that with many of them, because of the kind of work we do together, it really can be very intimate and deep and personal at times but with most of them, I’m still just a teacher… We do what we do together and then we go our own way. I care about them deeply, I care about their lives and their welfare and I consider them friends but it’s not always lasting. And that’s the thing about that kind of friendship, sometimes it doesn’t last very long just because of circumstance. Things change and everybody moves on… But there are some that stand out, some that are different and special, and some of them really can last a lifetime. That’s not to say that they don’t have their challenges, some have lots of conditions and some have almost none… And if you’re lucky you’ve got at least one that you tell everything. Those are the ones who can make your phone go off any time day or night and you don’t mind one bit. The ones that you’d do anything for and the ones that you know would do anything for you. And every once in a while, if you’re lucky you find one that you really do love deeply… somebody who really does feel like family… And they are really so very special, because they’re the family that you choose. And if you’re really lucky, you might find someone who fulfills all of that friend and family type of love… and you fall in love with them.

And that takes us to talking point number three romantic love.

TALKING POINT 3: ROMANTIC LOVE

Now there are of course several different strains of romantic love and honestly it’s quite common for people to have feelings of attraction, infatuation and even obsession without any of that family or friend kind of love mixed in there. I think it’s always important to at least point out the obvious and say that sexual relationships don’t necessarily have anything to do with love.  Some intimate relationships have far more to do with fulfilling simple physical desires, or even just fulfilling the desire for interaction, or attention or validation from someone in a way that we might end up finding somewhat romantic and might just end up calling love. I think sometimes we might just be filling in cracks or empty spaces or settling for what’s in front of us to relieve feelings of loneliness, or to feel safe somehow, or needed, or important, even if it’s not what we really want.. And what we’re calling romantic love is very complicated because it can take so many different forms.

But it usually does involve at least some form of physical expression.. of desire or affection and that in itself can be very powerful and sometimes an incredibly pure example of the energy that can line up, and move, and merge between two people. Of course, that isn’t always the case, sometimes it’s just something fleeting and playful and because those feelings aren’t always built to last one person can feel far more committed and engaged than the other and that can certainly cause a lot of pain… Sometimes that kind of energy is even abused and that can cause serious, sometimes deep and lasting harm…  In many cases I think it’s more subtle though… more like something that’s unappreciated or simply taken for granted..  but sometimes… just every once in a great while there’s something that happens between two people that is so intense and so wrapped up in all those different kinds of love that it is in fact what I consider a spiritual experience and I think that’s what people mean when they talk about soul mates… and whether you believe in that kind of thing or not, it’s worth at least acknowledging that sometimes there really is just a next level connection between people that’s hard to explain. And that’s not just a physical thing. I mean that usually is part of it, but there’s just something about that kind of love that, you know, transcends the physical.. And somehow you just know that you’re bound to that person without any concern for distance, or space, or circumstance, or time. And you know, if you’ve ever felt that, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that it’s incredibly special… and if you’re lucky enough to find that, you know that those are usually feelings that last for a lifetime. And whether you end up spending your whole life with that person on not there is something especially durable, something that endures in spite of circumstance and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you..  that kind of love really is pretty rare… And you if you do get to spend your life with that person you are truly blessed. But it isn’t always that kind of love that leads people to building a life together and we’ll talk more about a kind of love that grows over time and a kind of love that we can cultivate for even people that we might not think we like very much when we come back from the break.

We’ll be back in two minutes or less with more on the Principle of Love and the challenge question for this week in just a moment.

We’ve been talking about some of the different types of love and so far it’s all been pretty straight forward, exploring feeling that seem to come easily and naturally, but now we’re going to talk a little bit about something a little more subtle and the love that we might have to cultivate and how you can make love grow.

TALKING POINT 4: PARTNERSHIP AND COMMITMENT

Thoughts of making a life with someone do most often go hand in hand with romance but whether you’re talking about a marriage, a friendship or even business partnerships, or any other lasting relationship that didn’t really start out with those strong naturally occurring emotions that we’ve been calling love there is a kind of affection that grows from sharing experiences, common interests and concentrated effort for cultivating feelings of commitment and some kind of . So much of this has to do with the way we invest in other people and the way our lives get intertwined over time. And before we dive completely into the realm of platonic interaction I think it’s worth saying that there are certainly people who have created long term, intimate, committed relationships that feel a lot like family without ever really feeling that intense connection that, you know, lights the world on fire. And especially if you’ve never felt that soul mate, bound forever kind of love with someone, I think there is a whole lot of happiness that can be found here just in knowing that you have a like-minded and caring companion. I think we can find something similar that has nothing to do with romance or physical intimacy in the long-term relationships that we have with people that we work with or choose to partner with in some way. So often it’s a common goal that brings people together. And there are often challenges that go along with having someone in your life like that, and while respect and affection may be immediately involved in that interaction that isn’t always the case. It may take some real effort to start looking at love as something that you intentionally offer through your thoughts, your words and your actions. And that kind of love doesn’t always feel all warm and fuzzy, it’s more about making a commitment to someone, and sometimes those feelings come from a sense of obligation, and that can be short lived, those relationships don’t necessary endure forever but sometimes real love grows and some of those relationships just get stronger over time and some really do last for a lifetime. Making something like that work has so much to do with appreciation. Being able to understand and appreciate another person in a way that supports them and creating something that’s mutually beneficial and rewarding for the long haul. Sometimes that’s just about being able to understand and forgive the behavior or others and not just when they’ve done something to hurt you but even when it’s more like withholding judgement when their behavior doesn’t exactly line up with what we want or expect. Sometimes it’s about being able to apologize for what you’ve done wrong and just trying to do your best for someone and be there for them. But often really, it can be about having boundaries, and maybe not just boundaries to protect yourself but the kind that really protects both of you. Last time we talked about boundaries and how they really can be set for the good of both parties. And some of that does include understanding the difference between enabling and offering real value. Knowing when something is really worth working on together and even sometimes being able to recognize that it might not be. That you really might not be good for that person, that they really might now be good for you, what if it really is what we often call a toxic relationship. That’s a real thing. You don’t have to stick around for that… Or maybe it’s more subtle and you just might not bring out the best in each other or that you might be settling for something less than either one of you deserve. And we’ve talked about this before.. sometimes this kind of love is about respecting both of you enough to let go... sometimes that’s really hard. Love doesn’t mean you have to compromise yourself… it doesn’t mean that you forget everything you’ve learned about loving yourself and taking care of yourself and in some cases that includes really hard decisions, sometimes that means staying away or even saying goodbye… And there doesn’t have to be any anger or hatred in that. That’s just acceptance.

And this is where we start getting into that idea of really being able to see everyone from a higher point of view. And, I mean, that kind of knowing what’s good for all parties involved and doing what’s right is something that can take practice but it can be intentionally grown in relationship to the people in every area of your life. And in time it’s something that can be extended, and I really like the word cultivated here, as a form of almost universal respect and understanding… and that’s our fifth talking point.

TALKING POINT 5: RESPECT AND UNDERSTANDING

Treating other people with respect and understanding doesn’t sound like it should be all that difficult… until suddenly it is…  And the work that we’ll be doing in the next couple of episodes can be especially useful when you’re dealing with people that maybe you don’t know very well and certainly when you’re interacting with people that you might find in some way difficult or challenging. And I will say that we will almost certainly face difficulties in our closest relationships and even with the people that we love most but we can usually find compassion them pretty easily. In fact, at least in my case, I have at times taken that to the extreme and made excuses for other people that in some way actually encouraged unhealthy behavior. But generally speaking, for most of us, finding empathy for them isn’t the problem there, it isn’t usually too terribly difficult, because you already love them!

It’s very different when you start talking about difficulties with people that might just be acquaintances and even more challenging when you’re talking about people that you really already just don’t like. And this gets really tricky when we’re talking about deep seated resentments and anger that stems from not only another person’s behavior but our own triggers and thought patterns. If we start just by looking at the people we don’t know all that well and the way we judge them and the way they might irritate or even infuriate us we don’t usually have to look to hard to find examples. Some people get extremely angry at complete strangers in everyday circumstances, my favorite one for this is always traffic.  I personally don’t really experience much road rage but I know that it is a very real thing for some people and honestly that is a kind of anger that does absolutely not one bit of good. While they may or may not be putting you in real danger the point is that they don’t know you! They probably aren’t out to get you personally and no matter how angry you get you’re not teaching that person a lesson. They might be able to see you but unless you’re really loud they probably can’t even hear you and outside of a few choice words that are you know, easy for lipreading, it’s lost on them. It probably doesn’t even really make them feel bad and they drive off feeling perfectly fine while you sit there and stew in it.

And that gets even harder when you’re dealing with someone that you do know that you have any kind of negative feelings for already. If you’ve already decided you don’t like that person and especially if you’ve had a history with them and you feel justified in your, you know, annoyance or contempt, it can be extremely difficult to forgive that person. And so much more difficult to respect them, and probably something like impossible to extend anything that could even be loosely labeled as any kind of love.

If we go back to the intro, just for a moment and taking a look at everything that’s happening in our society right now.. without talking about politics because I just won’t do that, because I just don’t think that would help here… THAT’S one of those things that separates us. I mean if that’s not incredibly obvious to you take a second to think about it. It doesn’t matter what side of any issue you’re on… It doesn’t even really matter if you think you’re intentions are pure and your viewpoint is right, or you think you’re fighting for something you believe in.. You can still believe in and support and fight for and do ALL of those things without judging the people on the other side of that issue or thinking there’s something wrong with them or that they’re bad people or that they’re not worthy of you love, forgiveness or respect because they something differently or believe differently than you do. Most of that comes from fear, most of that leads to anger and eventually that leads to being offended and feeling resentful. It leads to this really strong desire to be right… And in that sense of righteousness we end up making the other person wrong and that almost always leads to some amount of anger and hurt and sometimes real danger and in some cases even violence… That’s what we’ve been seeing out there in the world isn’t it? So how do we see that differently? How do we start turning that around? What can we do, you and I, right now to start the healing process and make love grow?

TALKING POINT 6: HOW TO MAKE LOVE GROW

So with all of that said and still processing it’s probably pretty easy to start thinking of all the things that annoy and offend you personally, and all of the ways that you feel like you’ve been harmed and all of the ways that you’d like to hold the whole world to your own personal code. But we do know that’s just not the way it works.. that kind of judgement and expectation just sets you up to hurt you, most of that is self-destructive. So, some of this work that we’re doing on what we’re calling loving other people is actually not just self-realization but in many ways self-preservation. Anger is poison, hate is poison, all of the ways that we torture ourselves over the behavior of others, most often, ends up impacting us more than it affects them. And usually we just get more and more agitated is they don’t respond the way we think they should to anything that we might say or do to try and set them straight or prove our point to them.

So, if you can start looking at other people from that higher view point that says you know, oh yeah, I just got done looking at all of my flaws, at all of the things that I’ve done wrong and all of the things that I need to change and all of the ways that I make mistakes or feel like I fail… and I’ve decided to forgive myself and love myself anyway. And I worked on looking at and really connecting with that part of me that really is good and worthy of respect and compassion. Even if it was hard to see at first, I finally recognized it and acknowledged my true nature. And I can appreciate that, all those good things about me, even though somehow, at least sometimes, that part of me gets covered up.. Sometimes it’s hidden, sometimes there’s some healing that needs to happen before it really shows up on the outside. So, how could I apply that to someone else? How could I start thinking about the absolutely certain fact that everybody has their own story? Maybe very different than mine. Maybe that’s the reason why their flaws might look different than mine and why I don’t understand what they do and why they do it. Knowing that everybody has their own challenges, their own reasons, and that some of them might be good reasons that I don’t even know about, and that they probably have their issues with making excuses, they’ve got their own work to do and a whole bunch of baggage that can obscure, or cover up, who they really are… How could I start to withholding my judgement and work on understanding that this is just another fallible human being who might be struggling in a way that really isn’t all that different from the ways that I sometimes struggle?

All of the work that we’ve done so far, especially with Humility and becoming self-aware and recognizing our true nature relates directly to working with Love and becoming more and more aware of not just the flaws but the good, those redeeming qualities and brilliance that does in fact exist in the true nature of others. Understanding that most of what we’re calling flaws are really just conditioned behavior and thoughts… patterns that come from all of our experiences and all of those eventual filters, just coming to the surface as pointers to show us that we’re not always lined up with that very best part of ourselves. Can you remember that if that’s true about you it’s almost certainly true about everybody else too? Most of the time there’s no way to know why people act the way they do. We don’t know exactly why and how they’re wounded? And we usually don’t know whether the things they do have anything to do with us or not. So, what if you could just remind yourself that their actions are just about them and your response really is just about you?

And in time, with practice… the more self-aware you become, the more you respect yourself and understand and forgive yourself the easier it gets to do that same thing for everybody else. And even if none of this is new to you it’s worth repeating, I know for me it’s worth repeating over and over again, I’m not just saying it to you, I’m saying it all to myself too. It’s something we all have to work on. And when we start working on discipline and perseverance, we’ll talk more about how to turn this whole thing into one seamless ongoing practice. It’s easy to forget what we know. It’s easy to forget who we are… It’s easy to forget that even though we might express ourselves very differently… at our core we aren’t really so different… that in many ways we’re all one and that we can’t really help or harm another without helping or harming ourselves. We don’t lose anything by choosing love or forgiveness. It doesn’t cost us anything or make us weak to do the right thing. Whether it’s about making amends for our part in what’s gone wrong or simply accepting what we might see wrong in someone else, choosing love and respecting the simple fact that everybody… absolutely every single person out there… has their own work to do can only help and heal in any situation.

And back to the first words I said in the intro today…? There was a time when I thought of Love as a double-edged sword, and the really destructive cutting edge, the really sharp one, was always pointed at me. There have been times when I really was afraid to love anyone too much, even if it felt good, because it seemed way too dangerous. And I did a good job of shutting that part of myself down because it felt like eventually something would happen and I’d hurt them, or they’d hurt me. Like, I’d just be opening everybody up for more pain…  and I wasn’t entirely wrong about that. I wasn’t. All of our expectations, our hopes and dreams and really good intentions can feel really fragile when they depend on someone else’s response. I was right about that part but I was wrong to bury that part of myself… Even though it might be hard sometimes, even if it hurts sometimes, even if we don’t get exactly what we want and even if we lose people that we love along the way it’s worth it. It took a whole lot of time and a whole lot of pain for me to become entirely convinced that love is the healer and that maybe in that really big picture, love is all there is… you know? Maybe that’s the most important part of this whole thing… maybe we all just need to think about that a little bit more.

So, let’s go over the talking points again before we go:

·      Most of what we learn about love in our family of origin sticks with us as we move out into the world.

·      And the relationships that we form with the people that we call friends sometimes include a kind of love that feels like family.

·      Sometimes we get really lucky and experience all of those things with another person in a more romantic kind of love and sometimes in a spiritual connection that lasts a lifetime.

·      We can even cultivate something that includes at some part of what we’re calling love in the partnerships and commitments that we choose.

·      We can use all of that information to start extending love in the form of understanding people that we don’t know very well and even those people that we disagree with or don’t even like very much.

·      And with practice, in time, if we really give it our attention and keep working on growing in self-love and self-awareness, we can make love grow in every circumstance, in relationship to every person in every area of our experience.

Now we’re ready for this week’s challenge question.

CHALLENGE QUESTION

The question for working on Love is, “How can I turn my judgement into understanding?” Just starting to look for opportunities to ask yourself that question throughout your day. Paying more attention to your thoughts about other people and special attention now, not so much to their actions, but to how you choose to respond. Considering all of the different kinds of love, knowing that they don’t all feel like fireworks and they’re not always warm and fuzzy. Accepting that sometimes there’s some pain involved and that sometimes it even includes making hard decisions. We’ll spend the next couple of episodes learning more about how to apply what you know about understanding yourself to understanding other people a little better and how you can start seeing love as something that really can be applied to anyone.

Come find us out there on social media, hashtags for this week are Something Honest and Love Challenge. Make sure you’re all set up to get notifications for future episodes, next up, you’ll want to check out the Love Study Journal for even more about the benefits, the indications for practice and a little bit more about how apply this principle when it feels hard to do. Don’t forget to check out all THREE Love episodes to bring a little more love and more healing energy into every relationship in your life.

Thanks so much for listening. Check the links in the description to find what you need or go wellnessmeetings.com for show notes, details about this season’s drawing or to find out more about the Wellness Meetings Method….. Something Honest is a Wellness Meetings production with original music composed and produced by James Mrotek at Mrotek Media.

This is Marta Mrotek sending out all the love and so much gratitude. Until next time, let’s get to work on being well.