109: How to Love the World When You Hate the World

Speaker 1 (00:00): 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. 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 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 a podcast where we hone our skills and our wills and our courages to make the things we value. Things like love, like liberation, like collective care. I'm Laura. I'm really glad you're here. And what a month? What a fucking month my friends, what a year so far.

(01:08): How are you? Are your hearts? How are your spirits? I've been checking in with a lot of folks and what I'm hearing is that some of us are feeling really overwhelmed right now. Others are feeling pretty pissed off, others are feeling afraid, others are feeling numbed out. Some are in shock. I think the commonality is things are as bad as we knew they would be and probably going to get a lot worse, and that is a lot to hold. It's a really odd thing to be in the world and have parts of your being in the world that you love and people that you love, and also to be in the world and maybe hate parts of the world or people in it. I'll be really, really honest with you. I teeter pretty often between love and hate days when I'm like, I can do this.

(01:51): I can love this place. I do love this place. I can believe in our innate goodness and the possibility of liberation for everybody. And there are, I'm just going to be really frank, an equal number of days right now, if not more days where I feel rage and hatred and despair about what's happening around us and to us and the people who are doing that, who are causing that, who are exacerbating that, who are choosing greed and violence. I don't know if you can relate to that or not, but this week I'm talking specifically to the people who can, to the people who sometimes feel hatred course through their body to the people who want to love the world and the people in it who want to be the medicine, who want to be sources of healing and who are also sometimes just eaten up by their frustration and their exhaustion and their hopelessness and their despair and their doubt and their rage.

(02:41): How do we love the world when we sometimes hate it, when we feel ire coarse through our bodies, when we wake up to more headlines of violence and erasure, when people disappoint us, when institutions fail us, and when kindness and humanity seem to be losing by giant margins to inhumanity and greed, what does love look like then? What is the practice of choosing love when it's not what we feel running through our hearts? Welcome to a conversation about that sort of making love. Welcome to a conversation about how we love the world and the people in it, even when we sometimes hate the world and the people in it. Here we go.

(03:32): So how do we love the world when we sometimes hate the world? What does that entail? What are the practices? What are the skills? We're going to jump into that today, and I'm going to highlight five different skill sets because again, as I've contextualized over the last couple of episodes, this podcast has always been and is especially now about how we train, how we build our capacities and our muscles and our courages and our skills and our wills to do this work in the face of the very concrete challenges that we're up against, that we've always been up against, but that have a particularly awful flavor to them right now. So we're going to break how we love the world when we hate the world down into five skills today. And the first skill that we're going to dig into is the skill of awareness, of recognizing when we're closing off and as we possibly can, figuring out what to do about that before we can fully love the world and in order to more deeply love ourselves, we need to be able to recognize when we're starting to shut down because struggling to love the world doesn't always look like hate or em bitterment.

(04:31): Sometimes it looks like that, but it can also look like withdrawal, numbness, detachment shutting down looks a little different for everybody, but I think that there are some common signals, cynicism, exhaustion, avoidance, numbness, despair, really intense doubt, and none of those things are bad. They're all really, really human, but they or things we need to be aware of. For me, I know that I'm shutting down when I get kind of stoic, I feel my body start to guard it getting tight, and I kind of feel myself turning into a little bit of a fortress or a wall that is my clue that I am starting to numb myself out and shut myself down. And again, all of that is really human. It's totally normal, totally normal emotions and experiences, but those emotions can be signals that you're starting to pull away from yourself and that's when some intervention might be important.

(05:21): Again, if we are working to stay in the world, to love the world, even when we feel the frustration and the hopelessness and the despair and the hatred, the rage, when you start to feel yourself disengaging, your first task is to catch it. That's the most important skill to recognize it for what it is and see that you're starting to pull away. And a way to do that is to pause. When you start to feel it happening, when you start to notice it in your body and just name it, name it for yourself, literally, you can say, oh, I'm pulling away right now because I can tell this just feels really too big or too awful or just too overwhelming right now for me. Again, I notice my body kind of guarding up and I'll say to myself, oh, there I go. I'm turning into a wall.

(06:05): I feel myself getting guarded. I'm clearly upset or needing or trying to protect something in myself. I just kind of name the situation and name what's going on. If we don't recognize when we're starting to shut down, we can't change it. Now listen, we may not end up choosing to change it. Sometimes we shut down for safety, but we can't have the choice at all if we aren't aware that it's happening. And it can be tricky. Disengagement might feel protective. It might sometimes try to tell you, and sometimes it is, but also it often cuts us off from connection. It cuts us off from possibility. It cuts us off from love toward ourselves and toward others. So naming the moment we start to disengage helps us interrupt the pattern before it jumps onto autopilot because then we can't interrupt it at all. We don't have a choice.

(06:55): It's not a choiceful action, it's a mindless action. So that awareness is the first skill in our training to be able to love something even when we're in deep despair about it or feeling hatred around it, we have to become aware of the moments that we begin to shut down because only in that awareness can we make a choice if we want to about choosing a different path. Okay? The second skill we need to train in in order to love the world more skillfully, especially when shed's tough, is our ability to hold complexity. All of us, no matter where we're at in our current skill levels need to expand our capacity to hold complexity. All of us, there's no arrival point where we've zenned out and perfected the skill. We keep training so that we can hold greater and greater depths of complexity with more and more skillfulness because God knows we are going to need that.

(07:41): Loving. The world isn't about trying to ignore all of the shit here and love it in spite of it. Deep, radical love doesn't ignore anything. It sees stuff clearly and it chooses love anyway. And so for us, this skill involves learning to hold and honor a lot of multiple truths all at once, anger and love, despair and commitment, heartbreak and hope. I've found that learning to hold more complexity has really been a rewiring of my nervous system. That's been a lot of the training, my emotional nervous system, my physical nervous system, because when I want to be in absolutes, when I want things to be right or wrong, it gets very stressful in my body. When I want to prove something is right or wrong, that is a state of stress for me. When I reach for absolution, when I reach for certainty, there's this innate defensiveness kind of posturing in my body.

(08:30): And so training to hold more complexity has looked like really stretching my brain, like rewiring my brain to do that. But it has also looked like combing my nervous system, reminding myself that many things are always true, many conflicting things are always true. Breathing helps me really slowing my body down and learning to use breath work to bring my body back to center. Mental reminders like I can hold this, I can hold this, I can hold. This have helped me in moments where I was really struggling to honor the complexity and the truth of conflicting things in a moment that felt threatening or difficult. Meditation and a practice of becoming more aware of my mind and how it's working has helped me. So practice this skill as often as possible. Practice with your kids or your partners or your parents or at your place of work or with a coworker you often disagree with, really stretch your mind and heart to find inside you where what they are saying and what they're experiencing is also true.

(09:26): Alongside your experiences, work on validating that first inside yourself and then maybe even out loud to the other person. Work on letting your brain break. Seek out confusion, learn to sit with it without racing to escape, all of these things are going to build your capacity to hold more and more and more complexity. Why would we do that? Well, because first, we live in a complex world with billions of people who have had billions of different experiences, and you're simply a little drop in that your opinions are no more or less important than anyone else's in a crowd of billions, your opinions and values and principles and experiences are just a few among billions and billions and billions. I once had a teacher and mentor who I've talked about a ton and who's been on this podcast, Reverend Angel Kid Williams. She said to me, we were on a training retreat and she said, Laura, I dunno.

(10:13): I had been waxing really passionate about something I believed with utter conviction. She said, Laura, for everything you believe so strongly that you'd literally put your life on the line for it. There are millions of other people who believe the exact opposite thing and would also put their life on the line too. They believe it even more strongly than what you believe. And she would remind me of this over and over and over because sometimes I just feel like having the passionate belief is going to get me through and I would cling to it as a truth, as a comfort. And while there's nothing wrong with that, it's not a very strong aptitude. It's almost like closing your eyes and pretending that things are going to get better just because they will, just because. So there's this pragmatic reality that to be alive in this world is to have one tiny but meaningful imprint of what's right and wrong, set of beliefs about what's right and wrong.

(11:05): But there are billions of other truths and lived experiences that are also true, many of which are in opposition to or direct conflict with our truths, with my truths. So one reason we should train here is to better coexist, to more peacefully coexist with that reality that we are one among billions, and that at any given moment, there are millions and millions and millions of people who believe the exact opposite with as much passion, with as much fervor as the things that we believe. But beyond that, when we find ourselves in situations or relationships in the world that are really complex, AKA, like every day, every minute, the tendency is for humans to go into fight or flight to either lash out or to shut down. That is, unless we interrupt it, the kind of evolutionary response system that we have to situations like that, unless we build our capacity to stay present and to choose something else, to calm ourselves, to listen, strengthening our nervous system gives us the endurance and skillfulness to stay open in difficult moments or relationships instead of reacting from fear.

(12:09): And it helps us take care of the natural stress that's going to arise in our bodies as we sit in the complexity of what it means to be alive right now and what it means to witness the injustices that are occurring right now and to try to love our way through it and the people in it as best we can. Okay, third skill in trying to love the world. When we also want to burn it down, practicing small acts of love, especially when things are a mess, especially when things are a real fucking mess. Love sometimes looks like these big grand gestures or big sacrifices, but typically it's a lot more mundane than that. It's about choosing a soft, open heart, even when it feels pointless. It's about staying in the practice of love in these tiny daily, sometimes hourly ways with people and love with people you don't know, with people you definitely don't love in situations that are tough.

(12:57): Again, the theme over and over and over is choosing to train your heart to stay open when it is much easier to close it off, choosing vulnerability and tiny moments of connection when you'd rather walk away. It sounds obvious, but it's really fucking hard. If we could all do this, we would've a very, very, very different world. So how do you not take this for granted? How do you train towards small acts of love practices of small acts of love? Well, there's a lot of ways. First, you can allow yourself to be moved by the emotions you feel instead of bypassing those emotions or allowing them to get stuck, like the good emotions and the bad emotions. Allow yourself to take things in fully versus just racing right by. Especially if your tendency like mine is to anticipate and brace against tough emotions, you can try to soften and stay with what you actually feel in any given moment.

(13:47): You can also practice taking an extra breath before you react to anything to learn, to create a little bit more space in your body between what you feel and how you react and what comes out of your mouth. Practice loving your partners or your kiddos or your neighbors or your siblings or your parents or your extended family members in moments of discord. Take some soup over or say, I love you, even the middle of a fight or conflict. Tiny moments, tiny gestures become a master of making little moments of love, choosing love in the middle of the mess, not when things are all cleaned up. We do this, we train in our capacities here because justice is a long-term strategy. Healing is a long art. If we wait for these big heroic actions or moments, we're going to miss the daily hourly ways to create micro repair, micro trusts, microhealing, those things build endurance so that love becomes a stronger and stronger muscle that we can use reflexively in moments of acute tension in moments of crisis versus not having the endurance built up.

(14:47): And so running away when the high stakes moments come. It's also true that no matter how awful things get in this world, there's always something to love. There is always kindness stoffer, even if it's to yourself. There's always something beautiful to see, but we've got to train our eyes to look for that. We've got to train our ability to seek those moments out. And then we've got to practice the micro love, the tiny moments so small that happen so fast that we usually don't even catch them, where we get to choose love, where we have an opportunity to practice reaching for love and softness and connection instead of turning away. Two more skills we're going to tackle today to better equip ourselves to love the world even when we really paid it. The fourth skill is learning to love without losing ourselves. This is ultimately a training in boundaries.

(15:32): An open heart is not an unprotected heart. Loving the world, especially skillfully and for the long haul, requires that we learn to prevent burnout in ourselves and that we watch for building resentment and the consequences of it. And the best way to do that is to have thoughtful boundaries that we maintain with love. Sometimes that looks like choosing one new source instead of taking in tons and tons and tons of input about what's happening in the world. Sometimes it looks like scheduling joy for ourselves in our calendar so that we have the maintenance of our spirit in place in order to stay in the works. Sometimes it looks like writing down your depletion points so that you recognize the signals that you're overextending and sharing that with a trusted partner. Sometimes it's getting a therapist to help you learn to really practicing no and resist people pleasing.

(16:16): Sometimes it's staying in for the night. Sometimes it's going out for the night, but whatever it is, boundaries need to be clear and consistent. They are there to honor you and to honor others. And again, if creating and honoring boundaries was an easy thing to do, shit wouldn't be so shitty in the world. So do not overestimate your skills here. Don't be like, oh, check. I know what boundaries are. I get it. This too requires training. It requires purposeful time under tension. That's how we get stronger. What are your boundaries? Who knows them? Do you know them? Do other people in your life know them? How are you working on lovingly expressing them? When and where and how often do you ignore your boundaries? When do you ignore the boundaries of others? Got to dig into this stuff because loving the world doesn't mean drowning in its pain.

(17:01): We are no good for anyone if we are swallowed up in the pain of this mess without boundaries. Y'all just straightforward. We turn bitter, we burn out. That is the reality. It is cause and effect. We get really angry and we will be eaten up by the anger and the resentment and the bitterness and the exhaustion. Healthy boundaries. Let us stay in this work for the long run and boundaries allow us to respect our sovereignty and the sovereignty of others. It's hard to love this world and the people in it sometimes on good days, and it is especially hard to love this world and the people in it when the world is on fire with greed and violence like it is right now and like it is most days and boundaries aren't going to fix those issues. But if we're serious about loving this place, if we really want to be medicine, if we really want to love it, so as to hope to over many generations heal and repair it.

(17:52): Boundaries are a necessity for not getting eaten alive by resentment and despair and anger boundaries. Yours and mine are practices of love for the hope of love. So write them down and get to work on expressing them more clearly and consistently and skillfully. Okay, last skill I want to shine a light on for the work of trying to love a world that we might also want to run away from is learning to expand instead of contract Learning to be flexible and emergent like our brains, our bodies, our hearts. Being alive in the world as it is right now is it's a pretty powerless experience for a lot of us. We're watching violence after violence. We're watching institutionalized power, revoke and destroy agency and humanity. And when we feel powerless, the natural human reaction response is to shrink or to retreat or to disengage.

(18:40): That just makes sense, but it tends to pave the path for giving up. Love on the other hand, asks us to stay open and stay in it. It's such an asshole in that way. It asks us to choose openness, not in a way that crushes or depletes us, but in a way that leads to more resilience in a way that allows us to stay engaged. How do we train in that kind of emergent, flexible, expansive love versus the tendency to contract and back away? Well, with all the skills we've talked about today, the first place to train is to look at where you do this in your life in little ways. Where do you contract when expansion is an option? Where do you tend to back away instead of lean in? I'm not asking you to change anything. I'm just asking you to have an honest look and a good conversation with yourself about it, because whatever your answers are, that's often the best place to do the training to go to work on being really curious about what it is inside ourselves that's causing us to behave in those ways.

(19:40): I find that when I contract or back out, there are a few contributing factors. They tend to be my thoughts and my habitual tendencies. So when I think about thoughts, a way to look at this is like when are you in situations where you tend to think, I can't take this anymore, or I'm ready to piece the fuck out, and can you try to practice the thought? This is really big, but I can stay with it. Or I don't know what to do, but I can keep trying. It's like swapping those thoughts out. As always, never stay someplace you aren't safe. But I'm not talking about when your safety is in jeopardy. I'm talking about the places where there's a lot of uncomfort, a lot of discomfort, and so one of the places where it's ultimately safe, but really, really uncomfortable. See if you can play with your thinking.

(20:26): Notice what you're telling yourself in your head about how much longer you can stay there. My tendencies also tend to be culprits for when I quit or walk away. One of the primary problematic tendencies I have right now is isolation. I can honor the ways that I've needed this strategy in the past for my survival, and I also see that in no uncertain terms. I have a tendency isolate when shit gets hard. What are your tendencies when things are a mess and when you want to walk away? What habits do you use to do that? Can you play with the opposite? So if you never ask for help, can you play with asking for help right now? If you go to despair and aloneness like I do, can you work on practicing creating connection for yourself instead, if you tend to shut down and withdraw again like I do, can you see if you can engage your creativity, like write or sing or dance or stretch or walk or just move the energy out of your body by examining our thoughts and our tendencies in these moments of I'm ready to piece the fuck out.

(21:21): We can start to interrupt even the most well-built self-protective habits in order to allow our hearts and our minds and our creativities and our skills and our wills and our courages to expand instead of contract. When we retract, we cut ourselves off from the very thing that sustains us. Community movement, breath energy, connection, love, care. Expansion is how we resist despair. It's how we remind ourselves that we're not alone, that love is still possible, and that even when the world feels unbearable, we can bear it together. But again, it requires training. It is not automatic. It requires really skillful, really purposeful training. It requires that we all increase our capacity to leverage each of the skills we've talked about today instead of take them for granted and assume that we'll have them when we most need them. These are weird, tough times. I know. And these are also the moments that we have.

(22:16): This is the training that we have, learning to love the world and the humans in it when it all feels sometimes just legitimately impossible when we want to say fuck everything and fuck everyone when we feel hopeless. Love is unfortunately not typically about ease. It's so much more often about endurance and these micro choices and again, and again and again to choose to be open instead of close, to choose to stay in instead of leading out. So here's my challenge. Pick one of the skills that we highlighted today. Just one. Do some reflection around it about how you describe your current capacities and skillfulness, how you currently practice strengthening your skills in that area. And then creatively commit to some opportunities to keep growing your skills, to train on purpose, to deepen your capacity, to either love with expansion better or set stronger boundaries, or choose to see complexity more often or whichever skill you want to take on. Choose what feels doable, but commit to growth because this is how we train to love when we don't feel love and the world needs us to stick with it, to grow our capacities, to create love in a sea of violence and despair. So keep training. Thank you for being here, my friends, for choosing love, even when it's hard and for being a part of this practice with me. I'll see you soon. Bye for now.