Love and Obligation

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. All right, so Joe, there's, there's a common pattern that we see when we're working with people that is around obligation or responsibility. And just yesterday, I saw you work with somebody in a rapid-fire coaching session and handled this really beautifully. And I'd love to explore the topic more deeply.

Yeah, that sounds great.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Okay. So I want to start with a 2-minute clip from yesterday's coaching session.

Hi.

Hi.

Yeah.

You know, I seem to be on the cusp of everything I could want and hope for.

Um, oh great.

The patterns of obligation and responsibility, probably intertwined with fear and a scarcity mindset, just seem to get in the way. You know, my specific question would be around, uh, why can't I finish up with a divorce But the same patterns apply sometimes in work and everything else.

And where does obligation sit in your body?

Chest.

Um, great.

Upper arms.

Feel it for a minute. And what happens if you're just like— if you see that as the part of you that never got loved?

Yep.

And love it.

I can get to acceptance. It's hard to get to loving it.

Is that what you're doing every time you accept responsibility for somebody else? You get to acceptance, but you don't actually get to love them?

Yeah, I think that's, that's fair. I can accept myself. I'm not sure I can get to loving myself. Great.

So do me a favor. Get in contact with the love that you once had for your wife. If you— maybe you still have some. Yep. And tell me when you feel it.

Okay.

Okay, now I want you to feel responsible for her happiness.

That's easy.

What happened to the love?

Disappeared, dissipated, retreated deep into—

so you, you You, you stopped loving her to take responsibility for her is what I'm hearing you say. Motherfucker.

I never had it heard it said that way. I guess that's accurate. My first response would be is—

oh wait, I don't want to guess.

I want you to actually feel it. This is an emotional experience, okay? So it's not a guess. It's like every time you took responsibility, acted out of obligation it stopped the love that you felt for her.

Yeah.

Oof. Wow.

Yeah, that's gonna be a great topic. I can't wait to discuss that. For anyone who wants to listen to the entire episode or watch it, there's a link to the full session in the show notes. All right. So tell me, tell me, Joe, about what you've, what you've seen in the pattern that people carry around obligation, responsibility, and how does that relate to love?

Yeah. So, so what I notice is if you have a sense of obligation, then a requirement of that obligation is to stop the emotional experience of love. Doesn't mean you stop loving the person, but it means that your emotional experience of loving someone has to end. The obligation literally constricts the emotional experience of love. And so every time we are acting out of obligation, we're saying, hey, I'm going to trade obligation for love. I'm going to trade either feeling obligation to do something rather than love myself, or I'm going to feel an obligation to do something for you rather than love you.

Okay. So we've talked before about how how we come into this world, how children are born hardwired for love.

Yeah.

And so what, what would cause us to go into this pattern of trading love for obligation?

Yeah. Oddly, it is a, it becomes a strategy to get love. Oh, I've been disconnected. So it, I've been disconnected from you. So now I have to do something to try to get the love back. Right? And so, if you notice what I said, I said that the feeling of love gets cut off and then there's a stagnation of the emotion gets cut off and it kind of therefore creates a stagnation. So, we got obligation and guilt, obligation and shame are like very closely related. So, if I'm going to guilt you, it's to make you feel obligated to do something. If I shame you, it's going to make you feel an obligation to be a certain way. That's the whole idea behind them is to shove this obligation. And we've talked about on the podcast how guilt and shame are the stagnant— they stagnate emotions. And so, it's the same thing here. You're basically— that sense of obligation means that there's been some guilt and shame that is stagnating the experience. But I think the important thing to say here is that one thing we're doing is that we're differentiating between in the moment and we're and over the long term, meaning this experience right now in this moment, I cannot feel obligation for you to do something for you and feel love for you at the same time. It doesn't mean that I can't care for you. It doesn't mean that I can't be generous with you or a whole bunch of things, but I can't do it out of obligation and maintain this feeling of love. However, I could feel a sense of obligation as a strategy to get your love or to feel your— to feel love for you at some point. And so that happens all the time. So that's the distinction.

Got it. It's fascinating. I like how you connected that to shame because in one sense it could be that obligation is like an internal threat of shame.

Yeah.

That like the obligation is the threat that there will be shame if I don't do what I feel obligated to do. And there's a way that that threat is a fear and that you have that fear and love spectrum there where it's, it's hard to love something if you're afraid of it or if you feel like it can dominate you.

Yeah.

Or withdraw love from you and hurt you and that that would make you go into shame.

Yeah. And also what also is interesting about it is if you are trying to prevent shame in the future, it means that you think that you would do it, which means there's already something wrong with you, that you're already ashamed. Like, I'm not like, okay, I better not kill anybody, right? Like, that's not how— like, I'm not doing that because I might be ashamed if I kill somebody. The things that we are trying to prevent for shame are things that we think about ourselves as true and that are bad. So it's kind of like this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah. So it interacts with identity there. Exactly. Yeah. If we have the identity of I'm bad or I'm wrong or I'm selfish, and that has been, that has been drilled into us for, for decades, then, then of course we're going to be under the constant threat of feeling shame.

Yeah.

Yeah. Fascinating.

So that's the pattern is that we, we go and we try. Sometimes we have learned that obligation, feeling of obligation is going to get us the love slash approval that we want. And, but if you pay attention in the moment, it actually takes the love away immediately.

Yeah. How does that work? How does it not get us the love?

Well, it might get us somebody liking us or somebody approving of us or somebody maybe even loving us. They're like, oh, wow, thank you so much for the Porsche, honey. And then this person has this feeling, but it actually does work sometimes, which is why we do it. However, there is something like that. It's always kind of a watered-down version of it or a surrogate of it. Yeah, or surrogate. But because somewhere in the back of our mind, we know we had to perform for it, which means we're not getting love for who we are. We're getting love for our performance.

Right.

So it never fully fulfills. It's never like a wholesome meal. At best, it's like a Pepsi.

Yeah. What's interesting about that is that even, even if we act out of obligation in such a way, that we receive unconditional love from somebody, we won't be able to receive it as unconditional because we already placed all these conditions on it.

Yeah, that's right.

And performed for it. So they couldn't possibly actually love our authentic expression. They'd only be loving what we've presented.

Yeah.

And we've already decided that what is lovable in us is the obligated part.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

You don't love me. You love me because I felt obligated. To do something.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is— which the feeling of obligation in some level is also a way to say I'm doing something inauthentic, right? If I feel obligated to do something, it's like that means I'm not going to do it naturally, right? Why would I feel obligated to breathe? I have to fucking breathe.

Yeah. So the obligation is essentially a mask, another layer between us and them that is in the way of that connection, or is just a longer path to connection and the connection is more fuzzy and distant through it.

I think you can equivalently say it's in the way of our connection is it also means that it stops us from loving.

Yeah. Which is very opposite to how it's often viewed. We often, when we're in the pattern of obligation, we see that the obligation is the only thing that's maintaining our connection and we may even internally justify it as it's an intense form of love, you know. Right. I have to do this because I love this person. So much. And so, what would you say would be behind that kind of an inversion?

Again, we were taught as kids that we had to do something to be lovable. That's where that comes from. If somebody was taught that they don't have to do something to be lovable, that they're lovable just the way they are, their chances of feeling that sense of obligation are far reduced. Their chances of feeling guilt are far reduced or shame is far reduced. So, So I think that that's the main component of it. I think the other component of it is it's like this idea that we have, and I know I've said this on the podcast before, but the idea that we have that there's some sort of differentiation between doing what's best for me and doing what's best for you and that somehow or another I have to make a sacrifice to be a good friend or I have to make a sacrifice to be to do the right thing for you rather than finding the thing that says, oh, this is actually what I want. It's actually what's really deeply good for me. And it also corresponds to what's deeply good for you. And that false binary that we have, that it's one or the other, is also, I think, the mental reflection of how people get lost in the idea that I have to do something for somebody I love.

Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm seeing here now is that kind of two aspects. There's the, there's the obligation and there's the threat of shame or the shame in the obligation. And then there's also our, the confusion of our concept of love, which we talked about in another episode called How Love Gets Confused.

Yeah.

And what we think is love is a conditional form of love, whatever kind of love we were given and what we were taught. Would make us lovable.

Yeah.

And so then that becomes the kind of love that we're seeking through the obligation. And again, it's another surrogate form of love. It's something that might feel good on some level, but it's gratifying something to our identity rather than who we really are.

Yeah. And, and just to be clear about this, I, I'm, I'm imagining somebody listening right now and they're thinking, oh my gosh, have I— I have to not feel obligation for somebody, or I can't act out of obligation for— I'm not saying that. I'm like, feel free. I feel free to act out of obligation. Just notice that you have to cut off your love to do it. Just notice that you have to stop loving the person to do it. Yeah, that's all.

And so when, let's say, somebody does this exploration and they start to notice the places that they're cutting off love, what are, what are some of the places that this might show up for them? Like, how does this work in, like, business or with money?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or action sports or in the rest of the podcasting. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, let's take money, for instance. Like, if somebody feels like they have an obligation to make money, it doesn't allow you to love money. And there's like probably 20 heads that just went like, love money? What the fuck are you talking about, Joe? Right? Like, and that's how much it entrenches, like how much money becomes like an obligation. Because one of the things about obligations in general is they're oppressive. Right? Like most people aren't like, oh, it would be awesome for me to have 20 new obligations this week. And the reason is because that feels like oppressive. And the idea that money is an obligation/oppressive is so prevalent that the idea of loving it is so confusing or so foreign. It's like, but I can love everything else, but just not money. Right? And so then since you can't love the money, then like, why do you want it in your life? Like, if money is this oppressive obligation, like, that doesn't really motivate you to make it. Like, you might say, oh my God, I want money, I want money. But you're not going to actually make it if it's an oppressive obligation thing that cuts off your love.

Like, what?

Like, we're not wired to feel obligated and cut off from love. That's not like, that's not our wiring. So, Yeah. So it's inadvertently pushing money away. And that's what happens with almost all forms of obligation is that sense of obligation at some level pushes it away. It pushes away the love that we want. It pushes away the money if we're feeling obligation towards that. One of the things you said in podcasting, so if you feel an obligation to perform a certain way on this podcast, it's going to take away your love of doing the podcast. It's going to take away probably to some degree, your performance on this particular podcast, because part of what we're here doing is being in a certain way. It's not just talking words and making some sort of sense out of them. And so that's another thing that it does. And in jobs, one of the places that I see it the most is with managers or owners, and they just feel like the sense of obligation, like, oh, I have to do this for this person. I have to do this for the customers. I have my boss that I have to do this for. I have the board that I have to do this for. And it just takes their love of the business away. And when you look at the entrepreneurs that are just wildly successful, one of the things I notice about it is they don't have that sense of obligation. They have a sense of like, we're going to get this done and we're doing this, but they don't feel that there's a feeling of I get to, I want to, I want to build this business. There's not this feeling of I have to keep the customers happy.. And so it also marks a certain level of success because you're getting in touch with what inspires you to move forward instead of what oppresses you to move forward. And you get to stay in touch with yourself. You're not stagnating your emotions. You're not stagnating your love of the experience. And so you can go through a— you have a lot more resilience. If you love what you're doing, you have a lot more resilience when shit goes sideways. Than if what you're doing is an obligation, then shit goes sideways and you're like, fuck it, I'm out.

Yeah.

And any entrepreneur who's been really successful, they will tell you there was this moment when I was going to quit, when it all looked like shit, you know what I mean? And I kept going. And it's because they didn't feel that. They did feel a want.

They were connected to their love of what they were Yeah, something fascinating here also is you describe— so if the obligation is cutting us off from love, and love we've often described here as a deep welcoming, it's allowing, a letting in.

Yeah.

Then we're also not letting in the thing that we feel obligated to get. So if we're obligated to get money, we're not actually allowing ourselves to have the money.

That's right.

And then that leads to the craving. So often if you have somebody who feels obligated to help everyone around them, they also often feel totally unsupported and they're not letting in the love and support of others. And the same with money. If I'm obligated to make money, then I'm also setting myself up for feeling really scarce around it and craving it. And then, you know, feeding the resentment cycle that it is, that it is some force in my life that I don't have in some sense control over or like whatever the, whatever the story or the feeling is there.

Yeah, it oppresses you. Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing just to know about that. Obligation is in its essence a form of management. So, there's not only a not letting it in, there's a pushing away of it, right? Things don't want to be managed. You know, like, wow, I really like my wife because she manages me. You know, like, it's not something that you hear very often. You might say, oh, they're a good manager. But what that means is that they give you autonomy and appreciation. That's what a good manager— if I talk to them and they're like, I really love my manager, I'm like, oh, tell me about the autonomy. Tell me about the appreciation, because that's usually, not always, but usually what's there. But nobody really wants to be managed. We don't run towards things that are trying to control us and trying to control us for a particular outcome. No, it doesn't feel particularly good. And the way this works in, like, an interpersonal way is I feel obligated to buy you something so that you love me. So I'm trying to manage your love for me. Or I feel obligated to take care of you and make you happy so that you're not in a bad mood when I get home. Or I feel obligated— I was just working with a client the other day where it's like, it's going to be good. We're all okay. We're going to get, like, managing the person's anxiety out of a sense of obligation. Because they didn't want to have to sit with the person's anxiety. But all that does is increase the anxiety. So, there's a way in which our obligation is to manage something like their good mood, we're pushing it away. Or if the obligation is trying to manage something like someone loving us, we're pushing that away. And so, if you look at the long haul of relationships, everybody's walking on eggshells, everybody feels obligated to do a certain thing all the time so that they can be loved and the marriage just the love erodes. So long-term, the love erodes. Short-term, the love isn't even available. It's just only in that medium frame of time that you might get lucky every once in a while.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's something this brings up for me, which is somewhat related to each of the things you've just mentioned. Kind of in my history, I got into air sports and skydiving and BASE jumping and action sports, and I loved it. And I didn't want it to turn into an obligation. And so while there were a lot of other people who were like, I'm going to become a professional instructor in the sport, I was like, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want it to become an obligation and sap my love for the thing. So I always maintained my own separate business that was in tech doing something else. And that way I always had like a foot in either— a foot out the door, essentially, if I started to feel obligated so that I could continue to love it. And on some level that really worked. It was quite smart of some part of me to not fall into the, you know, the treadmill of getting YouTube likes and feeling obligated to an audience and making dangerous decisions from that place. And there's also a way that I kind of shut myself off from a lot of paths that I could have taken if I was just like all in on doing what I loved and allowing myself to make money doing it and be supported by it and have that be all in one basket. There's a different path that could have been available to me had I really allowed— had I had freedom across all of those different aspects here and not been afraid of obligation.

Yeah. So it's interesting because obligation is an emotional experience. It's not a reality. Meaning, like, I know when I did a lot of art and knew a lot of artists back in the '90s, some people got a job, had a chance to do it professionally, and then they felt obligated. And then their love for their art fell away and then they just kind of bit the dust. And some people were like, I fucking still love it. I love getting up and playing rock and roll, or I love the painting that I'm doing. I feel so lucky that I get to do it. And even though there was an obligation to make an album and to go on tour, it never felt like an obligation, right? It's that feeling of obligation. And so for me, the question to you would be, How, how do you imagine you could have continued in the air sports without feeling obligated professionally?

Yeah. One way, one way to have done that would have been, or one way to have approached it would have been just, yeah, I'm going to stay in my love for this sport. And if it means that I have opportunities to be professionally involved or sponsored, then I'll follow those to the extent that they feel good to me. And if they don't, then I won't. And, you know, just because somebody starts writing checks doesn't mean that they have any— that they have control or management over me.

Yeah.

And, and if I make agreements, it doesn't mean that I'm obligated in a, in the sense like you describe, like it's a, like it's not a new reality for me. It's an agreement.

Yeah.

And I'm choosing to be there.

That— so what you just said, there's two, like, really huge components. Exactly. That that allow an artist or Air Sports or whatever to do that is one is to put every one of those things through the frame of I get to choose this. Do I want to do this or do I not want to do it? As soon as like, oh, I have to do it because I need the money. Right. So to just put it through the frame of do I want this is a huge thing. And then the second thing is say no from time to time really, really helps. Like I get very, very deeply in touch with my want when I draw boundaries. Right. When I'm like, yeah, no, I can't work with you. I won't work in this company. It's just like, I feel this tremendous sense of empowerment of I'm doing what I want to be doing. So those are great tools. The other thing about Air Sports that I noticed is that there's also this other different kind of obligation that I've noticed since fear generally is like, so you're at your exit point, you're looking off the side of this cliff or the side of this telephone pole or whatever, or whatever, radio tower, whatnot. There's almost a feeling of obligation to jump for some people, I would assume.

Oh, yeah. Often that happens.

Yeah. So curiosity strikes, like, how does, how does this pattern play out there?

Yeah. Yeah. On some level, it depends on what we feel the obligation to. I might feel the obligation to my jumping partners and the plans we have for the day and whether or not they're going to have to wait for me at the car if I walk down. Um, it might be obligation to some expectation for myself. So there might be an obligation to like a parental figure or a, um, mentor figure from childhood that I'm not recognizing. And, and as far as how, how that relates to love, there is very clearly I'm cutting myself off from love for myself if I make a decision that is taking me outside of my risk tolerance in order to please somebody else, even if they're just an imagined entity in my head that doesn't actually exist, a representation of society and Bond movies, for example.

Yeah.

And I'm also not loving the people that I'm with if I am contributing to a group dynamic where each of us is subtly taking a couple of steps away from what's true for us to, to do what we project the group wants without really checking in on it.

Yeah. So that's the other thing that I think is interesting is in general, cutting off your experience of love Like love is like, if you— the feeling of love, which is, I would argue, is a natural state, right? Like there's a very natural, like, expansive state. Not to say anything else is unnatural, but there's this very— it's just a way to explain it— is very natural state love. And when you cut yourself off from love, you have to constrict the musculature in the body. Like it's less expansive, it's less open. And you also have to cut yourself off from other senses.

Right?

Absolutely. Because there's, like, this very kind of soft, open, expansive system. And my, my guess is not having done that kind of sport, but, like, having done, like, live performance and stuff like that, if I am in that expansive state, then I can react to and adjust for and be responsive to things in my environment. That I can't be if I'm in a more contracted, more rigid state.

Yeah, absolutely. And in, in air sports in particular, you're flying your body through the air. And if you are rigid, if you are tense, you're far more likely to be kind of flopping around in a form that we call potato chipping. Like you're dropping like a potato chip out of the sky. That's like the, you know, the worst case form of it. It's typically like beginners do this while they're just learning. And the thing they need to learn to not do it is to be able to relax. So, so to the extent that you have these tensions, whether they're conscious or subconscious, that does inhibit your capacity to feel and notice and be present in the moment and respond to what's happening.

Yeah.

And on, on a jump or wingsuit flight, that is extremely dangerous. And the same flight that might have been perfectly safe for you to make in a, in a relaxed state where you're, like you said, self-loving and also in like welcoming of all of the sensations in your body and not tensing against them, the same jump could become far more dangerous simply because there's obligation running in the back of your brainstem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that potato chipping. It's like, it's, it's like, seems like such a great way to describe somebody who's like caught in their head too.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? It's like they're— Yeah.

Or caught in a decision. Like, gosh, should I buy the car or not buy the car?

Should I do this?

Like flip-flopping.

Yeah.

You know, that's a, another expression of the same thing often.

Yeah.

Right. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that's, so it, it, I think that the reason, the reason I love the question so much is because people often like put obligation towards like somebody else, my obligation towards. But there's an obligation that you have towards yourself, obligation to business, obligation towards money, obligation towards art, obligate. You know, it, it happens a lot of places. And the place we haven't really touched on is the obligation to self. So if you have a critical voice in your head and like, I think we have an episode on this, you're constantly telling yourself to do something. You're often doing it out of obligation because you're like not really questioning the voice in your head. You're taking that all on. And the same thing happens there. You have to cut off love from yourself. You have to cut off self-love if you're acting out of obligation towards the self-abuse, the self-management.

Yeah.

So it's the same thing. And you're pushing yourself away from yourself and you're not able to accept the love that's actually there. So it's all, all of that also happens just in your relationship to yourself.

As—

yeah, that makes me want to ask, if we were, if we were completely free of obligation, how would we know if we're acting from love rather than some other pattern? And if people are often like, well, if I wasn't obligated, I would just be selfish, self-serving, I wouldn't help people, I would— and that's one of the things that people will say to themselves to keep gripping onto the pattern. And I'm curious, to what extent is there some wisdom there? If we had no obligation whatsoever, how would we know?

No emotional— no sense of emotional obligation, would we?

Yeah.

What I'm hearing you say is if you had no sense of emotion, the emotion of obligation, would you cease to act in anything but radical self-interest?

Yeah.

Or how would you know that what is there in the wake of that is love and not another kind of confused pattern around love?

Yeah. So that's a great question. I mean, I would love to jump inside of, like, a dog's head for a minute and, like, see if they actually say, I really should do this, like, as a form of obligation, because other mammals take tremendous amount of action without any sense of obligation. So I definitely don't think it's required for action. But then there's a question of, would I be nothing but self-interested? What I find interesting is that if you scan the world and you're like, okay, who has the deepest sense of obligation? Like people who feel like really obligated, really obligated to be good or to be smart or to go to the job or to make the money. And are they like, is that, are they the paragons of love? So I think there's just some evidence out in the world that shows that they're not particularly correlated, the feeling of obligation and/or getting things done. Particularly like in the case of the CEO that we spoke about.

Or busyness, being busy. You can be extremely busy and not feel obligated.

Absolutely. Right. And I would also argue, like, this is a great intellectual conversation to have, but emotionally, you have to cut off love to allow for obligation. So if you think that what's going to make you a bad person is cutting off the experience of loving somebody, then I would say go experiment. Find out if it's true. Find out if you walk around allowing yourself to feel a deep love for everybody, if you become a worse selfish, self-involved person. This is back to the selfishness episode that we talked about where it's just like that idea of selfishness is just something that our parents, whoever, told us as a way to make us not listen to ourselves and do what they want. Yeah, it's not. Yeah.

Yeah. This is making me think of a conversation I had with my brother over the holidays, and he was— he was describing having a family because, you know, I'm on the verge of potentially having a family. And he said, something I've noticed is that the more busy I become, with family, with work, with business, the more I just have been finding myself enjoying it. Like, the more I love my life, the more busy I become. And that really hit me as a reality somebody can live in, but also as like something coming from my brother, from my family. And, you know, of course, dissolving some of my perceptions that I've had in the past around what it would mean to have kids and settle down rather than 'Gallivant around the world and jump off of cliffs and party all the time.' And, uh, and there's no part of him that felt to me to be obligated in a reality of obligation, as he said that. But what I felt was it's just a deep love.

Yeah, yeah. There's another experience of this, like, I remember this in college. I also remember this, I see this with my eldest. If she's got a little bit of work to do around stuff, then she feels obligated to do it, more likely to feel obligated to do it, more likely to wrestle with the doing of it. But if she's stacked, if she's like, okay, I'm taking 4 AP classes and I have to apply for college, which is all just what happened, then all she has is just do the next thing. There's no time for the sense of obligation. And she'll say, it feels so empowering. It feels so powerful. I feel so competent. And it's— and to some degree, it's because literally there was no time to, like, feel obligated because there was no time to, like, back off. You just were doing one thing. Obviously, that's not sustainable for— and to be healthy for an extended period of time. But there is this rhythm that's important. And part of a good rhythm is that there isn't, you know, there's not a lot of room for obligation. For that feeling of obligation, which often happens as a way to try to motivate ourselves out of a procrastination. Yeah, right. We're, we're, we're, we're giving ourselves obligation as a way to try to motivate ourselves to manage ourselves.

Yeah. It seems like that what you just said, choice can play into as well, where if we are thinking about all the different things we might do, then the option that we chose or we find ourselves in can often feel far more obligated or will feel more obligation around it. If we're, if we're avoiding feeling the fear of missing out on everything else. And so there seems to be something about the kind of what people describe as a tragedy of choice.

Oh, interesting.

That seems to be related to.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah. It's also why the no becomes such a powerful and empowering thing is that, that no, because it's you're cutting off that choice or you're making that, you're making the choice. And so it's not like I'm confronted with it. It's I've made it.

Yeah.

One thing that no does is bring that back into our own agency. So I don't get to say that I'm being dragged around by life. I am choosing it. And so I can choose to do something different next time. So, and there's something scary about that empowerment also to, to take that responsibility.

Yeah. It's very alive.

Yeah.

Right.

It's very not cut off. Obligation is very like deadens it. It is cut off.

So we've talked about obligation being a way that people cut themselves off from love. They, cut off the love.

Yeah.

What other— what are other ways that people cut themselves off from love?

Wow. I think it's— I think the easiest way to think about it is— maybe I'm wrong, I would have to test this theory, but let's put it out there as a theory, which is, um, any strategy you use to get love in a way cuts yourself off from love. So I'm gonna try to be powerful to get love, I'm trying to, you know, trying to be, trying, trying in itself is a way to kind of cut off from love. So there, there's, I think that might be a really great, I'm just checking to see if that's true. I don't see a way that that's not true. So there's a way and, and that the way I would describe it, there's, this gets a little bit weird, but I love that one of my favorite phrases is the search for light requires darkness. The search for love requires lack of love, right? You actually have to cut yourself off from love instead of see the love that you have in this moment to recognize the love. And in a weird way, I would say that that's like a way to describe potentially the entire journey of the journey of life, of unconditional love, is that you think that it's not there. You think you have to do something to earn it. You think you have to, like, eat a certain thing or act a certain way or have a certain amount of money or whatever it is your particular thing is. And then at some point there's this just recognition that, nope, love's just available. It's like that. It doesn't require anything besides not cutting it off.

Yeah.

But if you're looking for it, then you cut it off. So I would say that's— that would be— and there's— so probably there's a thousand different ways to do that. So there's a thousand ways to describe how we cut ourselves off.

Yeah, I like the way you just described that path as like the looking is the cutting ourselves off from love. And I imagine there's— to get back to that love, there's the grief, grieving that that's been the case all along.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, there is. And just to be clear, there's a difference between looking and assuming it's there. Like, like, I'm not saying like, oh, see, see the love that's there is not a looking. It's like, it's when it becomes in time when it becomes, I have to do X, Y, and Z for— I have to blank for love, rather than, oh, I, I can just see the love that's available.

Even, I have to find myself, or I have to love myself more.

Yeah, exactly. I have to be awake, or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Awesome. Thank you, Joe. What a pleasure.

Yeah, great conversation.

Thanks, Pat.

Talk to you soon.

Yeah, thank you everybody for listening., if you like this episode, please share it with a friend. Find us on X at @artofacomp, and Joe and I also have accounts up there. And check out the show notes. We are going to link to some of the other episodes that we referenced. And take care.