It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: Hi, welcome back to the alive and free podcast. Today we're going to talk about, we're gonna talk about love. This should air somewhere around Valentine's day, so this should be a good, it should be an amazing, wonderful experience for you guys as we're talking about this sometime around Valentine's day, maybe just a little bit after that.
Alright. What is love? I, ah, man, for years in inside a pornography, like everything that I trained myself about love, I grew up in a very good Christian family and we had, like, we always had, “Oh, I love you, I love you.” And that's a phrase that we used a lot, but I didn't understand what that meant. It meant like, Oh, I'm supposed to, I'm supposed to say this or I'm supposed to love my, or I'm supposed to feel good about you or, or these kinds of things. [01:16.6]
And I was always confused by it. And then when pornography entered my life and I got confused about what love was and thought that, well, sex was the highest expression of love. And so then if sex wasn't happening in a certain way in my life and that meant love wasn't happening a certain way in my life. And I remember it one year I told Jasmine, I was like, “Jasmine, I don't even know what love is.” And I was really honest with her. Could people talk about love and godly love and charity and all of these things. But when it boiled down to it and I was looking at my experience, I was like, look, I, I feel pleasure. I mean, I feel pain, I feel closeness, I feel the desire to be near a person, but I don't actually know what love is. And that confusion like followed me for a long period of time.
And then sometime a couple of years ago, I had a client who, his parents got divorced and his mom was genuinely harping on him and he was confused because she was harping on him all the time. [02:15.4]
And, and his statement was like, “I just feels like she doesn't love me.”
And typically like in the past I would have gone on the defense of the mom and tried to say, “Well, no, she does love you. She wants the best for you. Can't you see?” that kind of thing.
But I had been through some experiences that opened my mind to what love was.
And so in this particular instance, I said, “Well, what if you're right in those moments, she doesn't love you.”
And it totally threw him back and it, and, and it kind of rattled the situation for a second, but then all of a sudden it helped him open up and see the situation in a totally different new way. And it actually helped him heal his relationship with his mom.
It was really, really powerful. So I want to share this with you. Hopefully it helps. The title of this is “Your Mama don’t love you”. Because I'm sassy, I want you to understand or get a different glimpse about what love is. I'm not saying it's better or worse than what you already think love is, but I want you to have a different glimpse of it. [03:12.3]
When you say you love someone, what does that actually mean?
For a lot of people, they'll say, no, love is a verb. It means a prom or it's a promise of future stuff. Others will say it's a verb, meaning you find it in action. Others say it's an emotion or a feeling. And how you define something is definitely going to affect your behavior around it. So we want to get clear about what love is.
When you love someone, how do you know that you love them?
That's a good question to ask yourself. Oh well I'm, I'm doing things for them. Okay, cool. So that means that if you're miserable doing things for someone and you're, you're ecstatic doing the exact same things for someone else, that you love both of them. Is that correct?
And I think all of us could be honest enough with ourselves and be like, no, I don't always love people, the people that I'm doing things for. Sometimes I resent, like I, my boss could ask me to file some papers for papers and my wife could ask me to file some papers and I could be like, I tolerate my boss, but I don't love him. And, but I love my wife. I could say that, right? But the reality is it doesn't have anything to do with the action. So how am I going to know then, that I love them? [04:24.7]
Well, no, it's a future promise. Well, in the moment that I'm filing the papers, am I making a future promise? Am I making a future promise to my wife when I, when I filed the papers for her? Or am I simply taking and doing an action and it's not the action because sometimes I, I'm doing that for people that I don't experience love for or don't think I do anyway. At least in my mind I don't love them.
So is it a future promise? How are you going to know that you're making that future promise and are you making a future promise of an action? These are all wonderful questions to ask yourself. In the end it's very, very clear that when you're saying you love someone, it's not about the actions that you're doing. It's not about a future thing. What you're saying is a certain level of admiration or veneration or something has risen in you in that moment. [05:16.4]
In that moment your feeling, a certain feeling within you, you've entered a certain state of being as a result of being around this person. You've entered a certain state of being and that's what you're describing when you’re a man I love, I just really love that person. And what's happened is you've taken another human being and use them like a drug to unlock an experience of love within you.
The crazy part about this is you can do this with people that aren't even alive anymore. People who have passed like my grandfather. I can think nostalgically about my grandfather and some of the things that happen and bring up certain experiences inside myself, but ultimately love is just an experience that I'm having. That's all that I'm having. And when you think about love that way it opens up a whole different possibility for you, in your ability to find love in your life because now it's no longer dependent on people or things. [06:10.4]
When you understand that it's ultimately something you're creating in your own life, in your own experience, and you happen to be using other people as the substance or the materia prima to create that for yourself like an Alchemist, your turning their presence into love. If you were asleep when they were in the room, you wouldn't be experiencing love. You wouldn't even, you're never even conscious. If you were so focused on, on your book, right, that you're reading a book and you didn't even realize they were in the room, then you wouldn't be experiencing love for them. It's only in the moments that you're paying attention to them and then you're using what you're aware of as an excuse to experience love. Guess what? With my wife, I've done that. With my wife I've also used unawareness of her as a, as an excuse to create resentment and frustration as well.
I used her as a key to unlock that misery inside myself. And that's what love is. Love is just one experience that you can create on your own just by how you use your mind in the way you use the things around you, in your mind. That's it. So when we say we love somebody, what we mean is that's a person I have used to create love inside myself. [07:22.2]
Now here's a question. Can you love a person if you're not experiencing that sensation, that feeling? You're not in that present moment, loving anything, you're hating or you're miserable or you're sad. So in that moment, can you say that you love someone? No…you can't. That's not an accurate description of what's really going on. Now I'm kind of the kind of guy that you probably would be really frustrated with, like super pedantic, whatever.
If you were to ask me, “Do you love me?”
I'd have to answer in that moment, “Am I loving you? Am I experiencing love?” And if I answered that way, sometimes I'd say “Yes” and sometimes I'd say “No”, and that would be really, really frustrating. And so it's, you're lucky, right? You're not my, you're not my friend. You just get to listen to me spout and hate, hate on it or love on it afterwards. And you don't have to have that kind of relationship where I'm literally looking at it moment by moment. What am I experiencing? Why do I do this? Because moment by moment I want to have the control or the ability within my life to moment by moment continue to create love and joy and happiness. And the more that I just declare that a thing is something, Oh yeah, I love you when it's not actually true in that moment. That's when I'm like ignoring a problem. [08:38.0]
If I'm not experiencing love and happiness in that moment, why wouldn't I take that moment to turn it around? Instead of saying, “No, no, I'm fine.”
It's like when a guy gets, and maybe it's cause I'm a guy, right? So like when a guy gets hurt and he's like, “ No, I'm fine, I got it. I'll just walk it off. I'm good. I'm good, I'm good.”
He's still in pain, but he's going to push through the pain. “I got it. I got it.”
What kind of idiotic masochistic, macho thing is that where you say, you know what, things aren't functioning optimally but it's a manly thing to can keep functioning non-optimally so that things break down later. It's stupid.
But we've somehow turned it into Manliness to be like, “No, I'm good, I'm good.” Nope. That's not the question, right? Not the question to be asking yourself, “Am I good? Am I good? Can I handle this?” Why handle it? If you don't have to, why continue to move forward and resentment and frustration when you can actually create love inside yourself. [09:30.0]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety, or just anything that's making you feel flat-out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateAMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
So a while back my wife and I, we were talking and you know I was working a lot cause we have a lot of clients and I tend to work into the evening sometimes a couple of days a week and things started to get out of hand. There was a lot of demand for some help and I wasn't paying attention to the clock so I wasn't. I was legitimately like not really present at home for a number of weeks. Mentally like my, my mind was running, trying to create stuff and help people and because of that there was a point where she came in and she was just frustrated. [10:28.4]
She was like, “Look, a couple of weeks ago we talked about you turn it off your phone at seven o'clock in the evening and you didn't even agree to doing it and you haven't been doing it.”
And I thought back and I was like, “You're right.”
I remember vaguely having that conversation and I didn't…. I don't remember agreeing to doing it and I certainly haven't been doing it right. That's a really good idea. As she was telling me this stuff, most people would look at this and be like, it would feel like it's an attack, right? Cause she's telling me all these things that are problematic with, with me and our relationship.
I was actually super happy in that moment. I felt so at peace and so loved. And so like I just felt so much joy in that moment that as she was telling me this stuff, I didn't have anything in my heart that said, why? Why should I feel bad like that? Me feeling bad isn't going to solve this. It'll just get a relationship where two people feel bad and that doesn't make it for a better relationship. So I then went and I was like, fine, I'm just going to hold onto this happiness and continue to look at the situation. [11:26.9]
And I was like “Yeah, you're right. You know what? I'm going to turn off my phone at seven. I think that's a great thing to do.” And she kept going…you know and she kept saying, “Look, I want to know.”
She said this, “I want to know that you love me more than you love your clients and the people you work with.”
Now that seems like it would be a low blow, except that I was in a state of total joy. And it's not that I didn't care, it's that I didn't see how me becoming miserable or feeling attacked or feeling low about something was actually going to fix that. So I sat there in my joy paying total attention to my wife listening to this. And when she asked that question, I didn't know how to answer. So I sat there for a moment just without an answer because if I don't have an answer, then what's the point of making one up and then, and then I looked at her and I realized that her, her demand didn't make sense to me. [12:17.1]
She wanted to know that I loved her more than I loved other people. To me, love is something I experienced. When I am experiencing love, I smear it on everything around me. I treat everyone differently. And you've probably had this experience too in your life when you're joyful, when you're loving, when you're, you're grateful, like you treat everybody differently and when you're miserable, you treat everybody differently. When I'm miserable, I treat everybody differently. So in the moment that I'm feeling intense love...I do love her, but I love her with all of me and the moments when I'm feeling hatred, I do hate her because that's what's coming off of me. It's not that I'm, sometimes I'm using something else as an excuse to have hatred in me and I'm using a work scenario or a friend scenario or a church scenario to feel hatred or something. And that's, I'm smearing that on her. So how could I say I love her when I'm smearing hatred on her? [13:06.7]
So in my mind, love is a state that I enter. And so when she's saying, “I want to know that you love me more than someone else”, it didn't compute. I didn't know how to like sit there and say, “Excuse me, young, kind sir, I need to love you a little bit less so than my wife gets the majority of it.”
Cause it wasn't a quantity. It's just a state of being that I'm striving to be in all the time. And the times when I've really fully entered that have been some of the most powerful moments of my life that have shown me just how deeply love can transform me and other people and just how powerful it can be to enter into a state where my mind and my body and my energy and my emotions and everything is aligned in a certain way where I'm just throbbing with love.
That has brought me so much joy, so much peace, so much clarity of vision, so much ease into my life that I want to be there all the time. And so when she made that demand and I totally understood where she came from, she wants to feel like she's worth paying attention to. [14:06.3]
You know how often does a mom go into being a mom and ask their kids for things and talks to them and sacrifices so much time in their day and in it by sacrifice. Maybe we'll redefine that word a really briefly here. Sacrifice means to make Holy. You can't make something Holy by being, by smearing your misery over it. You can make something Holy by smearing joy over it, doesn't matter what it is. A lot of people think of sacrifices, giving up something if for something else. But if you give it up with misery and you haven't made it holier you've just given up something.
Moms often are literally sacrificing. They're literally making their time holier. They're literally making everything around them holier by the amount of love and the amount of devotion they give to their kids and how many mothers are sitting there talking to their kids, asking their kids things, even making demands of their kids. And it feels like nobody listens to them and nobody pays attention to them and they're not worth paying attention to. And they go under appreciated by many reasons and there's a lot we could dig into with that. But like how many mothers do that? [15:09.2]
So that's what I was seeing come from her and I didn't want to dishonor that at all. So I simply asked the only question that came to mind, even if I did love her more than anyone else, I didn't see how she could see that.
And I was like, “Look, this the home we have, I did that because of you. I wanted you to have this home. The reason that I'm, I cleaned the countertops and the kitchen every day is because I know that you like a clean kitchen. The reason we're doing these massage trades, you know, frequently with each other and stuff is because I want you to feel supported. And the reason I invited you in the other night was because I wanted to spend some time with you while we were watching a movie and we can just snuggle and just kind of spend some time together and these are all things I'm doing because I do care and I want to spend time together and I want to pay attention to you and I do love you in that sense.”
And I told her, I said, “Look, I get it. If none of those things count, that's totally cool but I just want to know how are you going to know that I love you more than all of those?” [16:03.2]
And she didn't have an answer for that. And my wife is one of the most incredible people that I know because she's really honest with herself more than maybe even more than I am at many times. I'm really honest with how she feels and what's going on. And she didn't have anything to say. She just, tears just started coming. Because I think she realized the futility of I need you to love. Like I need to have a certain external thing happening in my life for me to feel like I'm loved more than other people. As you went into the bathroom and she cried and I just stayed there in the room, I gave her a space. I wasn't going to fix it for her because if I go fix it for her, then I'm the problem. And I'm also the solution and it's still external and I don't want her to, to ever be a burden burdened by me.
And by my, well I happen to enter hatred and now she has to feel bad, you know? And so I just stay there in the room, tooling around. And then when she came out I just said, “Hey, do you want a hug?” and gave her a hug. And we've had an amazing experiences and nothing was resolved. Something just simply needed to be spoken. But in that moment there was a definite shift in our relationship because there was a recognition…that love is something that is really difficult to measure except in your own experience. [17:24.5]
And so yeah, parents, when you are hating on your kids in that moment, you don't love them. It doesn't mean that you don't want the best for them or anything else like that. It just means in that moment you're not experiencing love. So how could you possibly pass it on? You can't.
In the moments when you're frustrated you're not loving. In the moments when you're sad, you're not loving. I mean, we're saying stupid things that you could cross stitch on a pillow and people would be like, “Dude, that's dumb. Why would you put that there?” When you're sad you're not happy, you know. When you're angry, you're not loving. When you hate, you know you're, you're not kind. These are duh like duh, but really open it up into your life. [18:02.2]
Do you actually love this person? Ask in this moment, do you love them? Because this is the moment you can change that. And this is also the moment you can free yourself of the negativity instead of like tolerating it for a long time because society has taught you that you're supposed to say, I love you, dude. If you just said I love you in the moments when you experienced it, it would change a lot of things.
And if you own the fact that you're the one creating love, using their actions as a means to do it, then you could also change the times when you're the one creating hate and you're the one creating resentment and stress and frustration because then you could see, look what I created. And right now I'm stressing myself out, right now I'm creating hate in myself and I apologize. Let me, can you give me a couple minutes so I can stop doing that? And that way we can have a conversation where I'm not busy turning the beauty that is you into an excuse for me to poison myself on the inside.
So love is something that's tremendously powerful. And today really my motive was to try and give you an opportunity to explore something, deeper and deeper levels of it. Because even in on a spiritual vein, if you're going to consider that God loves the world, that's a constant state and that itself is a superpower. [19:18.7]
If you can hold that even just for 24 hours straight to be loyal to love, like a flower is loyal to its own fragrance, that even if you step on the flower, it still smells like a flower. It doesn't change its fragrance no matter what anything else is happening around it. If you can be loyal to love that way, your entire life will change. Your relationships will change, your creativity will change. Your ability to find opportunities in life that you never could have imagined before will change. If you can be loyal to love by understanding that love is something that you're creating in you and it's a description of your present moment experience.
Now, if you want a practical way to start training that this is something we have our clients do, with a lot of deeper training tools that would be on the side of it. Well, one simple thing is set a reminder for yourself, a little alarm clock that every hour goes off and asks you simply “How are you feeling right now?” [20:11.0]
And second question, “How long do you want to stay that way?”
Those two questions send an alarm clock every hour and do that for a couple of days. See how that takes you to where you start to become aware of the emotions and experiences you're creating in your own life so that you can actually love another person on purpose because you can take what they're giving you and turn that into an excuse to love them.
And that's it for today's “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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