108: What’s Love Got To Do With It? (Inauguration Response)

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. Faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it, Hey everybody, welcome back to How to Make Love the podcast where we explore what it means to live with courage and justice and humanity, even when the world feels like it's falling apart. And I think we're probably all in that space right now. I'm Laura. Today, I want to talk about what love has to do with it, especially on a day like today.

Speaker 1: So Trump has just been inaugurated, and let's not pretend that this isn't hard, that's not heavy, it's heartbreaking, it's devastating for many of us. This is a truly awful moment and time. Our families, our communities, even our identities aren't guaranteed any kind of safety right now. And I know for so many of us, this feels like a really terrifying backslide from where we have been and the progress that we have made in the past. And again, it's just simply heartbreaking. And yet we're here. We're in this moment. We're navigating a world where by the leaders in the highest positions of power, cruelty is normalized where systemic violence is being emboldened and where it feels like, at least to me, every step forward is met with two or three or 20 steps back. So it's tempting to respond to this moment with despair or rage or by shutting down.

Speaker 1: And I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't. I'm certainly not going to tell you that we should smile through any of this. I think temporarily, at least any of those reactions, rage or despair, numbing out, I think any of those are temporarily fine. This isn't about putting a bandage of positivity over a gaping wound, and I'm here to say that the worst things get out there, the more critical it is for us to turn inward and strengthen our capacity to meet this moment with intention, with skills and courage sets that we have honed on purpose. So I began this podcast years ago for those reasons. It launched in 2018 in the middle of Trump's first term, and it was in giant part a response to the hatred and the injustice and the violence and the vitriol that he was espousing and emboldening. And I believe as much now what I did then that we have to train to become the antidotes to the things that are really upsetting to us in the world.

Speaker 1: Not theoretically trained, intellectually trained, not know our way around stuff. We have to train our hearts and our bodies and our heads and our spirits and our hands to put something else into the world that can go head to head with hatred and fear. And the only thing that I know that's as strong as fear is love, but not fluffy love, not abstract love, not obtuse love, radical love, revolutionary love, fierce fucking love. What makes it fierce and radical and revolutionary? Well, that it's grounded in skill, otherwise it's just fluff and my friends, if we're going to survive not just these four years, but beyond that, I don't know any other way to do it than training to have the skills to meet this moment, to be antidotes to hatred and violence and injustice. This podcast has always held that philosophy, but is recommitted and y'all, I know we're a small podcast with small resources and I'm only here once a month or so, but you have my commitment to keep serving up innovative content that helps you train to be the medicine the world needs right now.

Speaker 1: The inconvenient truth though is that it's going to be really hard. It is hard. It has been hard. It's going to be hard. It's hard to be medicine. It will require your courage. It will require your commitment. It will require your self-discipline. It will require your development. It will require that you shift and change your habits. You cannot stay who you currently are and be the medicine the world needs in this moment because training to be the antidote is emergent. It will ask your heart to change shapes, and I'm not expecting that all of us are going to want to come along and do that work. It is legitimately easier and more energy preserving to simply disregard others or belittle them or call them names or place blame on other folks or conservatives or people who didn't vote. It's easier and less time consuming to harden.

Speaker 1: When we meet people who value the opposite of what we believe. It's easier to believe that we are separate from them. It's easier to other them doing the opposite. Learning to soften, learning to defend yourself, learning to sit there and feel your way through it. Learning to find the humanity and folks that you vehemently disagree with learning to connect rather than separate learning not to take sides. All of that stuff is energy consuming and time consuming and deep fucking inner work. So you've got to decide for yourself who you want to be and why for the next four years. And I'm not here to judge you for whatever your answer is. I say it with passion, but it's not judgment. Only you can decide that for yourself. Who would you like to be? Who do you want to be? Who do you need to be for yourself for the next four years and why?

Speaker 1: Whatever your answer is is fine. What I am going to do is be an invitation and train to be better and better and better and more effective medicine for what our world needs in this moment. The solves and the antidotes to hate and fear and violence and ego and power and extraction and colonization. I will be engaged in that practice. I will be failing. I will be flailing. I will be getting in the dark and bumping into things, but I am committed and you're invited to be in it with me. I will be here once a month with training and I'm going to be holding a free virtual community every month for the next four years as we all get through this together where we're going to practice loving kindness meditation for 20 minutes, and then we're going to have some introspective skill building and skill development.

Speaker 1: The harder the external conditions, the more we need to train internally to build the concrete muscles of love and courage and justice so that we can show up in the world with clarity and with purpose. That's the practice of making love, not feeling love, but the deliberate creation of it as a force for change, as a force for healing. Love that can withstand heartbreak love, that can hold complexity love that becomes the bedrock for collective liberation. Love that can stand in the face of the fear and the grief of this time and have a skillful, skillful response that doesn't weaponize itself against others. So that's my invite. Keep showing up here and if you want, join me once a month for the next four years to practice love and kindness and skill building and reflection. And whether you join me or not, again, I recommend that you decide who you want to be for the next four years and decide how you want to feel for the next four years and start cultivating and practicing those feelings and those orientations somewhere in your life.

Speaker 1: It could be with chosen family or at church or at SGA and school buildings, wherever. It doesn't matter where. What matters is that you can look in the mirror at the end of these four years at the end of your lifetime. But let's just start with these four years and say, I was who I wanted to be on purpose, and ideally I was who the world needed me to be with the skills to really work toward healing. I hope that for all of us. So today we're going to explore what it looks like to make love in the face of violence and fear. How do we train ourselves to respond not with hardening, but with radical openness? How do we do that? What does it take to be rooted in love when everything around us is trying to tear us apart? We're going to start that conversation today and continue it in different ways with different skills and different angles over the next four years. So if you're with me, my friends, let's jump in.

Speaker 1: Today I want to talk about the foundational skill and orientation that I think we're going to need for the next four years, which is a stance of open-heartedness. Now, I know some of you might hear that and think that's the skill we're bringing up against Trump supporters and the hatred in the world and the violence in the world. And my response is yes, without apology, open-heartedness is one of the most impactful and also extraordinarily difficult skills in orientations to cultivate. How do you remain openhearted when your values are fronted? How do you remain openhearted when laws are enacted against your safety, against your liberties? How do you choose openheartedness when your family might be under threat or your identity is under siege? And why would you do that? I'm going to answer those questions or I'm going to give you my answers to those questions, but I want to define open-heartedness before I do that for our purposes of this conversation.

Speaker 1: Open-heartedness is about staying emotionally available, is connected and compassionate even when the world around us feels hostile or unjust. It's not about denying reality or pretending that everything is okay. It is not about martyrdom. Instead, it's about choosing to remain present and engaged despite the discomfort or pain. And giant surgeon general's warning, I'm not asking you to make your body unsafe or your family unsafe. I'm not asking you to stay someplace where violence is being hurled against you. You have to make the decisions for yourself. But we often confuse safety and comfort and there are a whole lot of conversations and moments and experiences that need to be had in this country that will require wild discomfort to be a part of. And that's the open-heartedness I'm talking about as a practice, staying emotionally available, connected and compassionate even when things feel incredibly uncomfortable, maybe even a bit unsafe or unjust.

Speaker 1: So why would we do that? Why? Well, first I think because we deserve it. I deserve it. You deserve it. We deserve the agency to respond with love. The next four years is going to bring a host of most likely horrible policies and people and laws and systems that institutionalize more violence and control. I can't really change that. Trump is going to trump hate is going to hate, but I can take a personal stance that I refuse to allow that man and those policies and that hatred to harden my heart. I can refuse to allow him to deny my joy. I can refuse to allow him to steal my ability to love this world, to love myself. But when I am in a stance of closure and resistance to him or to the world, when I stay in this stance of anger, when I stay in a stance of reactivity, instead of allowing the feelings to move through me to return to open-heartedness, my life for the next four years might be spent just constantly reacting in a tremendously heightened state, stress and anxiety and worry and fear.

Speaker 1: A practice of openheartedness breaks that cycle of reactivity, and it helps us ground in what we love, what we choose. It allows our bodies to soften. It allows our central nervous system to calm down. So the first reason you train in opening your heart is because, A, you're going to need it to survive the next four years, and B, you deserve it. We all do. In times like these, when systems of oppression and cruelty are emboldened, it's so easy. It's really understandable to harden in self-defense. But hardening comes at a cost internally. It isolates us. It feeds cynicism. It fuels a cycle of emotional violence. Sometimes that hurts us most because we're just caught in this reactivity externally. It can lead us to replicate the very dominance or dehumanization that we're actually really working hard to fight against, that we're working hard to heal. So when we close ourselves off, when we numb out and we shut down, we lose our ability to connect first and foremost to ourselves because we've gone numb and also to others and to the larger purpose and work in the world.

Speaker 1: Hardening leads to fractured relationships and movements where it can, and it makes it harder to build the coalitions and the solidarity that we need. These relationships that we need for lasting change. Open-heartedness. On the other hand, it's a counter practice. It's a refusal to let oppressions steal our capacity for love and connection. It keeps us grounded in our humanity. It reminds us why we do the work that we do, what we're fighting for. It sustains relationships even in moments of really acute difficult conflict. And it allows us to show up in high stakes environments with as much integrity and purpose as we can muster. So again, the first reason to choose open-heartedness is because we deserve it. So the next reason I think we should all choose an open heart and train. Again, this is about training in it, not just value in something, not just wishing for it, not just intellectualizing it, but training in it is because there's a whole lot that's going to feel disempowering the next four years, at least I suspect.

Speaker 1: So I don't have a crystal ball, but that's my hunch. It's already feeling disempowering for me. It's day one. An open heart is a stance of choice and consent and agency. An open heart isn't just countercultural. It's a really difficult practice. It is an active practice. And the thing about an active practice is that it implies choice. It implies purpose. I already know shit's going to feel disempowering. It's going to be disempowering. But I refuse to hand over my power, especially my power to create love on purpose. I refuse to hand that power over to hatred. I just do. Open-heartedness is it's not just a concept. It is a daily fucking practice. It shows up in the way that we choose to listen, the way that we hold space for our others or for ourself, the way we offer ourselves compassion. When things get really tough, when we make mistakes, it's staying engaged with our values.

Speaker 1: Even when we're tempted to shut down our feelings and our bodies to the overwhelm, to the hopelessness. It is choosing to be wide open to life and possibility and love and my friends. It's choosing to be open to the heartbreak of all of it when so much is working against those things, possibilities and life-giving opportunity and love. And that is going to have to be an act of daily and maybe even hourly choice in practice over the coming years. It's a choice you get to make no matter what else happens. And I find that really empowering. The final reason, I think we should all choose it well if we want to be medicine to others or the world, and maybe you don't, but if you do, if the work that you do aspires to be that, if the organization that you work for aspires to do that, if you aspire to do that at home or in your church or in your family, then you have no business doing that without deep training.

Speaker 1: You likely wouldn't go to a chiropractor and ask them to alleviate your back pain and twist you around and push on you and crunch on you and mess with your spine had they not trained in their craft or any other kind of doctor for that matter. If you want to care for the world right now, it takes more than a desire to do it. It takes more than a proclamation. Otherwise, we'll promise people refuge and healing and actually unintentionally probably create damage because we're not actually equipped to help. The forces of hate and violence are really well trained. They have strategies, they have practices. They are institutionalized. They are deeply ingrained. So if you wish to be an antidote like I do, you are going to have to train just as hard. In fact, you're going to have to train harder to hope to show up and offer healing or hope or care that is skillful and grounded.

Speaker 1: So how do we do it? How do we train in the skill sets and in the heart sets and in the courage sets of opening up our hearts in the face of inhumanity and dehumanization, in the face of fear, in the face of violence, in the absence of hope? Well, in some ways, every single episode of this podcast is a part of the response to that question, openheartedness. It's a tapestry of a lot of interconnected, complicated countercultural skills. It is a very, very, very difficult thing to do skillfully. And over the coming months, we're going to keep digging into specific skills that you need to move openheartedly through the next four years. But I have found that there are, I think four foundational aspects to having an open heart to moving through the world with an open heart to having the skills to choose an open heart.

Speaker 1: So I'm going to go over the four of them, and they're all deep practices, each one of them in and of themselves. So first I think the ability to bear witness. We've had other episodes on this topic and you might want to go and give them a listen after this episode. But bearing witness means allowing ourselves to see and feel the reality of the world around us just as it is without turning away. So it's holding space for the truth, our own pain, the pain of others, the systemic injustices we're up against. It's bearing witness to those truths, to those realities. It's not a passive thing. It's a radical, radical act of presence. It is a willingness to not turn away. It's a willingness to feel all that comes with seeing these things face to face and to not walk away. It will ask you to bear witness to violence and the consequences and heartbreak of it.

Speaker 1: It will ask you to bear witness to other people's fears and hurts and the way that they act those out. Open-heartedness is a stance of courage to stay put, and that requires the skill of bearing witness of learning to open your eyes when you'd rather not see what's there and be willing to see the pain or the hope and everything in between all around you. The second foundational aspect of openheartedness is a practice of compassion, of radical compassion. This is both an inward and an outward practice. So inwardly, we extend kindness and patience to ourselves when we feel overwhelmed or afraid or exhausted. And outwardly what compassion means is that we practice seeing the humanity in others, choosing to see the humanity in others, even those it's really hard to do that for especially the people that it's really hard to do that for. Compassion doesn't mean excusing harm.

Speaker 1: I want to be really, really, really clear. But it does mean refusing to dehumanize the people you are holding accountable, and there is no practice of true open-heartedness without it. The third foundational skill, I think, is that we need to be able to embrace daily acts of openness. In other words, we train every day in softening, in opening in unending. And this could look like starting each day with a reflective question like, where am I closing off? Where am I closed off? How can I soften? It might involve small, consistent choices to stay present in challenging moments, whether it's through deep listening or offering kindness or simply breathing through discomfort that you see or feel or that's in your body. But it's this stance of awareness, like a heightened wise awareness that you need to train in the skills required to be the sort of medicine the world needs right now.

Speaker 1: If you can't teach your body and your heart to open up, even if it's a long, long road of training, and it will be for all of us, be a lifetime of training. But if we can't do that, it's really hard. It's very, very, very hard to embody open-heartedness. I think the last foundational aspect of open-heartedness, you're probably not going to be surprised to hear me say this, is that we commit to grief, to grieving. Grief is an essential part of staying open-hearted. It allows us to process loss. It allows us to process disappointment. It allows us to process our fear so that those emotions don't calcify into bitterness or apathy or indifference or numbness. Grief clears the way for love to flow again in our bodies, in our hearts. Grief honors the loss and it weeps for the loss and the pain that's present.

Speaker 1: It opens up our hearts to the universality of fear and of hope, and it is required for bearing witness. We cannot bear witness if we cannot grieve. So as we close today, here are a few questions I want to leave you with to reflect on our journal about. Number one, where in your life right now do you feel your heart hardening? What would it look like to begin to soften in those places even just a little bit? But also, what would it look like to wildly radically soften in those places? What would that be like? Number two, when was the last time you practiced sparing witness, like actively practice with intentionality and skillfulness, staying present with someone's pain or with your own pain? And what might it mean to cultivate that practice more intentionally? And number three, think of someone whose values or actions deeply oppose your own.

Speaker 1: How might you start practicing compassion toward them without excusing the harm? Maybe you don't start with Trump just yet. Maybe there's a neighbor. Maybe there's someone you butt heads with in your life or at your church or in your family. Maybe start with them. But what does it look like to hold a stance of deeper compassion toward them? Okay. Finally, consider this your homework assignment for the week ahead. Each morning, I want to encourage you to take a few minutes to sit in silence and ask yourself, what does my heart need to stay open today? And we don't have to put the pressure of the world on our shoulders sometimes. The question is just for myself, for my wellbeing, what does my heart need of me to stay open? Again, let's not let this human steal our personal ability to touch into love. The next four years is going to ask a lot of us, but I truly believe this, that cultivating an open heart is one of the most courageous and impactful acts of resistance that we can offer, and one of the most difficult, rigorous practices there is as well.

Speaker 1: It's the foundation to our ability to make the things that we value, to make those things in the world, to make the medicine that we need to make the anecdotes to hatred and violence and control and extraction and injustice. I will be here each month fumbling in the practice, and I will be holding space to teach and cultivate the skill of metta, of loving kindness every month for the next four years. So if you're interested in learning Metta, the practice of loving kindness meditation, or if you're looking for a space to deepen your tools of medicine and go toe to toe with the world for the next four years, you can sign up to get the ZoomInfo by joining my private email list. These calls are not going to be recorded. They're not going to be made public. The only way to do this is by coming along the journey and being in relationship with me. So you can do that at my website or I've put a little link in the show notes where you can sign up. Chins up my friends heart's open. There is a lot of love to make. Thank you for being here for your commitment to love and for your willingness to train in whatever way you do. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.