Love over Defense — Master Class Series #9

Love can't really exist without empowerment. You can be fond of, you can be scared of losing, but to actually love in a, in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming, the only way you can deeply welcome is to feel deeply empowered to not be worried of the results.

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 I'm Eric Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. We are taught how to defend ourselves from a very young age, but few of us are taught the pragmatic power of love. We build a series of walls we can put up whenever someone makes us uncomfortable. What if those very walls create a drag on life that slows down our dreams? And what if love is an easy-to-use tool that turns all that friction into forward momentum? Today's topic is love over defense. So Joe, we've all heard, "All you need is love," "Love will tear us apart," "Love is the answer." We get hit with these phrases all the time, but it's hard to tell what anybody really means by love. So what do you mean by love?

Whoa, that's a good question. That's a big one. Um, before I say what I mean by love, let me, let me say what is often considered when people are thinking about the definition of love. So one of the things that I see is that people think about it, they dissect it kind of the way the Greeks did, which was like, there's like the love of friendship, like the friend, the love you'd have with a friend, the love you'd have that's romantic, the love that you would have with God, uh, the love that would be, you know, very, very much dissected by who you were loving and how they had different, um, visceral experiences in the body. Uh, for me, I think about love, uh, slightly differently. I think about love as in there's a love that feels a lot like peace, and there's a love that feels a lot like enjoyment, and there's a love that feels a lot like care, and there's a love that feels a lot like deep— a deep welcoming. And so when I'm speaking about love, I would say that it's, it's close to the— this closest to like a deep welcoming. They're all components of love, right? It's not like It's not like one of these is a better love than the other, or one of these is a separate love than the other, but that deep welcoming seems to be like the, the biggest leverage point. It's what seems to activate everything else the most.

Hmm.

Yeah.

What makes, what makes that the deepest leverage point?

I'm not sure if I have a great answer for that, uh, outside of experience. Um, I mean, it's a dance for sure, meaning that like when I when I really put myself out there and deeply care for myself or care for others, then that absolutely helps me have a deeper welcoming of all life, all people, all parts of myself. But what I notice is the focus on that deep welcoming towards self, towards others, towards life, that seems to have a very big influence on my sense of peace, my sense of enjoyment, and my sense of care. It just seems like it has like the biggest turbo booster. And, and I think in my life what I've noticed is different ones at different times have bigger turbo boosting potential, so to speak, but that deep welcoming seems to be like the center of gravity for all of it.

It sounds like what you're saying is that this, uh, the, the deep welcoming is letting information, letting, letting the world be seen by you and be felt by you and letting it impact you as it is.

Yeah, it's just letting it— yeah, exactly. It's allowing myself to be touched. Yeah.

So what would be the, the next most important leverage point for me?

I think it's care. It's self-care and care of others. You know, if you look at different religious traditions, you'll see that they kind of fall into, um, these different categories. Like, they're focused on these categories more or less. The Buddhist peace has a big emphasis, um, Taoist enjoyment has a deep emphasis, and the Christianity care has a deep emphasis. So for me, the care one seems to have a big impact. There's something about being generous and being giving that also dissolves the self in such a way that it creates a lot of peace and a deep welcoming. So it's another really influential one. The dilemma with the care one is that all of these ways of loving, they have kind of a dark shadow on the other side. And the peace side of things, for instance, can become disassociation. The enjoyment side of things can be hedonism. The care can be codependency, and a deep welcoming can, can become an apathy of sorts, and it can become a, um, a giving up of responsibility. So all of them have a way to have a shadow take over them.

Yeah, it sounds like, it sounds like that the deep welcoming and the, the dark shadow of it, the apathy A lot of that seems to relate to surrender and the way that people talk about surrender. How, how does this relate to surrender for you? Um, and many traditions have surrender as an important part of the journey to love.

That's exactly right. So surrender, it's a path to love, and it's also the result of love. Or the other way to say that is surrender is a path to a deep welcoming, but it's also the result of a deep welcoming. And so many traditions have surrender being the first step. The first step is to surrender to Jesus. Or in, um, in like Buddhist monasteries, for instance, the first Buddha you see in China in particular, the first Buddha that you see is kind of this happy fat Buddha who's, you know, plenty. And that kind of gets you into the temple. And once you're into the temple, then it's like surrender And then once you've surrendered, and it's surrendered to the teacher, to Buddha, and then, or to the teachings or to the Dharma. And then beyond that is compassion, right? Is that, is that a deep care of self and others? And they have different Buddhas or different, you know, archetypes in the different stages of the temple, depending on, you know, how far in you are allowed to be. And it's a great description of how that journey works generally. In the Western world, however, surrender has, has some connotations and some issues that is— I don't know whether it's just people thought of surrender differently then as they do now, but the dilemma generally with, uh, surrender is that it's been used to subjugate people. It's been used to have people follow without their full authenticity involved. I stray away from the word for that reason. The real key is what are you surrendering to, right? If you surrender to Jesus, you're not just surrendering to Jesus, you're surrendering to the concept of Jesus in your head, or what you think the scripture says. And surrender is —so incredibly powerful. And it's very, very much a deep welcoming when you're surrendering to that very quiet call inside of you, to that impulse, to that thing that is always there, that always knows the right direction.

But that we always have a voice in our head that shoots it down, perhaps surrendering to that. So, so what do we lose by not emphasizing surrender, given that it's been so useful in so many traditions, but also there's these problematic aspects, and particularly in the way that it's conceptualized in the West? And what do you— what do we lose by you not emphasizing it in your, uh, in your conception of love here?

What we lose in not emphasizing it is another way to lose our identity. In general, all of these methods the deep care, the surrender, the silence of meditation, all of them are just ways to get past the illusion of self. It is to evaporate the identity, to see yourself beyond the small me that you think you are, to see yourself outside of your everyday cares and worries. It is to not be able to identify with the voice in your head anymore. That's generally what all these paths are pointing to. There's other less known traditions too. There's a way of losing your identity in a group that's healthy, unlike most of the ways people lose identities in groups. And, you know, the Quakers had some great work on that as well. There's lots of ways to do it, but these are the big ones. And love itself is that same thing. It's an expression. And that's why in some of the writings you'll see people talk about love as your inherent state, because love and it's, you know, as, as you walk down that path of love, the identity evaporates as well. And you see that your identity is love. You are love, and love is what you are, just as you are nothing, and nothing is what you are. It is, it is when the, when the sense of self dissolves into, into the whole, if you will, then love is the result, and emptiness is the result.

So this, this process of, you know, it seems like a lot of people are on to this, you know, love being so healing, but there are just so many ways that you can get caught in an eddy or a backwater, um, or in a shadow. So what are, what are some of the main misconceptions about love that we hold?

Everybody's a little bit different here, and, and people's misconceptions of love are based on their childhood. So if the thing that you looked for to be your role model of love beat you, then love is painful.. And if the role model that you look to was critical, then love is critical. And if love meant being nice, then love is nice. Or if love meant not holding boundaries, and love is not holding boundaries. So whatever you experience love to be when you were young, those are usually exactly the misconceptions you hold about love. Uh, societally, however, there's some pretty big normal ones. There's nice. Nice is a big one. Like, if I'm nice to you, then I'm loving you, which is horribly inaccurate. That being compassionate is often a very sharp sword, right? Being compassionate is often saying a hard truth in a loving way with an open heart. I remember when I was a kid, I, I had— I lied all the time. It was like I was compulsively lying. I was like a freshman in high school and And it was to make people like me. And this guy, his name I remember, it was Alex Bell. And he said to me, he said, hey, Joe, this is like a week before the end of school. He said, hey, Joe, you know, we all know that you're lying all the time, and we would all like you so much more if you didn't. Hmm. And it was the most profound act of love that I had experienced to that date. And I'm sure it was scary as shit for him to say, and nobody else had said it. Nobody else had given me that information. And my line just stopped. It just like— there was no— nothing else needed to happen. My line just stopped at that point, or reduced by 97% or something like that, right?

And syntactically, yeah, yeah.

And so it was like, that's an act of love. But that sure as fuck wasn't nice. And so I think a lot of times people mistake being nice because they, they think that if they love somebody, there's not going to be conflict or something like that. But that's just not how love works. The other thing that's often the case is a lot of people are scared to be in love because they have a conception that love doesn't hold boundaries. As if Gandhi didn't hold boundaries, as if Mother Teresa didn't hold boundaries. Love is holding boundaries. Great mothers— that, like, the thing that we think as loving is mothers— they hold boundaries all the time. So that's another one I think that people really have a problem seeing, that love is holding boundaries. And I think that the, the other one that's most commonly not seen is that, is that love can't really exist without empowerment. You can't really love if you're not empowered. You can be, you can be fond of, you can be scared of losing, you can really, really, really want, you can desire, but to actually love in a, in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming— the only way you can deeply welcome all the good and the bad and the dangerous and the unknown mystery is to feel deeply empowered to not be worried of the results.

What are some, uh, some other examples of how this has shown up in your life or just shows up in people's lives day to day?

Yeah, so many. You know, you, you see lovers, husbands, wives say that they deeply love each other, but they're constantly trying to change each other, or they're scared of losing one another. That's not love. That's habit, you know. I don't think it's really possible to love somebody fully and want them to change. Then you're loving them if they show up a certain way, or loving yourself that way is another example of it. Being in a job and being scared to get fired is another example of what isn't love. There's a famous coach who used to say, lead with love. And if you're scared of getting fired, you can't lead with love, then you're leading from fear. So there's a lot of things like that. And the thing I think that people don't really understand is people say love is the answer, or love will find a way, or love will, you know, all those things about love. But nobody really talks about the mechanism of what makes love so powerful. What makes it that if I love a part of myself, or if I love a part of you, I have a more power over that part of you than if I don't? Like, what makes that happen is the question that I think a lot of people don't fully understand. And the best way to look at it is internally, which is if I love an aspect of myself that so far I haven't been able to love, it gets to move, it gets to express, and it gets to evolve. If I'm saying that that part is bad, I'm containing it, I'm holding it so it can't move and so it can't evolve. And so that's how the mechanism works. It's like if I love you unconditionally, then you don't have to be constantly managing yourself, and then evolution can like double time it. And, and that's how it works, is that, that loving of ourselves and others or a situation is one of the best change agents for it. The only difference is it's not changing in the way that you want it to. It might change in the way that you want to do, but it's going to change in a way that's best for it and you. But that doesn't always correspond with what you want. The mechanism of love is that you allow for something to be able to move and therefore it can evolve instead of holding it in place. It's just like if you have a kid and you want them to evolve, don't, you know, stick them in a room with no lights on. You, you let them play and explore and learn and grow.

So this, this, uh, allowing something to move, allowing things to move, feels a lot like undefendedness, which is kind of brings us to the, the second half of this, this topic of love over defense. What What do you mean by defense and how does that relate to this?

Yeah, on the mind side, defense is any way that you've decided that there's separation. They don't understand. I'm better than them. This course moves too slow for me. Any way that you're creating separation between you and other people, that they're— they come from an inferior race. They are better than me, they come from a better race. All of it, all of that is separation. And that's the mental place. Somatically, it's literally like a wall, typically in front of you, typically from, you know, somewhere from the perineum up into the, like, top of your head. And it's stronger for different people in different places, but it's literally— you can just feel like the shutting down And on a gut— it's a gut level, it's a subtle fear.

That's what defense is. But clearly there are times in life when you need to defend yourself, and we've talked a lot about how boundaries are a part of love, and that can feel like defense. Yeah, yeah.

The thing is, we mistake that defending ourselves can't be welcoming. That's the way that I would say it, like just because I have to draw a boundary or I want to draw a boundary doesn't mean that I can't love you. Just because I am in a fight with you— if I'm literally going to say, okay, I can't allow this person to throw trash all over my front lawn, so I, I'm in a, a, a fight with you— it doesn't mean that I can't welcome you. And I think that this is like best best in any religious book I've ever seen it. I think it's the Bhagavad Gita. And our— I'm so bad with names. Bhagavad Gita. Yeah. And the, the, the— it starts off with a man who's about to get into a war with his brothers, with like people that he loves, and he prays to— I think it's Krishna who has the conversation with him. And, and which is what most of the book is about. And he says like, hey, you gotta fight. He doesn't say, no, don't fight. He says, you got to fight. And this is the thing about it— doesn't mean you have to give up loving to fight. So life is tension, generally. Call it a fight, call it tension. Life is tension. If I took all the tension out of your cell, it would die. If I took all the tension out of your body, you would die. Tension and life, they, they require one another. Or at least life requires tension. And if you give it up, then you're dead. So the only thing left then is how you hold it. How do you hold the fight? And that's what this book really talks about really well, is like, okay, this is the fight, but how do you hold the fight? And, and that's the same thing here. Like, just because you've engaged in the war doesn't mean that you have to stop loving people. And that's the thing, that, that's the confusion that I think most people feel. Is that if I am going to be, um, if I am going to be in tension with you, then I have to give up my love for you, which is not at all true, right?

And you can think of any, any circumstance where I feel like I have like a conflict with somebody, it's so easy to drop their humanness. Yeah, to make them an other, to make them wrong, to make them an obstacle. And that never helps the conflict, right?

And you can still love them and still overcome the obstacle, so to speak. They don't have to become the obstacle.

So, so how do we start cultivating that love that allows us to experience the, the fight in a different way?

This is why I think I call it a deep welcoming more than any other reason, is because there's a visceral experience of that It's like if you close your eyes right now and you deeply welcome yourself here and love yourself just as you are right now, that's it. That's all there is to it. We can make it more complex, and I'm sure we will in this podcast, but that's all there is to it. How do you deeply welcome yourself in this moment and in the next moment and the moment after that? It's a very somatic experience. To be loved.

Yeah, I just did that in the, uh, the first thing was that I noticed tension in my body and then it just immediately relaxed.

Right, right. So it's literally like you have a feeling of love for something. Maybe it's for your dog, or maybe it's for your child, or maybe it's for your mother, or maybe it's for a friend. Like, how do you give yourself that same feeling that you have, you, that you give to them? How do you feel the same thing you feel for them for yourself? That's the best way to cultivate love, because our capacity to love all the bits of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love everybody on the planet. The more that you learn to love all the parts of yourself, the more you're capable of loving everybody on the planet.

So what else? What else can we do?

Um, well, one thing for sure is if you can't love yourself, then love your resistance. It doesn't really matter in the moment what it is you're capable of loving. There's no time when we're incapable of love for anything. So if you find yourself like, I just can't love myself right now, then love the fact that you can't love yourself. Also, the other thing you can do is not— again, we've talked about this a little bit, but don't mistake love for caretaking. So loving yourself, loving somebody else isn't caretaking them. It's not saying yes, no, even if you want to say no. It's not going against your truth. It's not trying to make them happier. It's just having a deep welcoming for who they are.

What if, what if you identify ways that you're caretaking and you're afraid to stop doing them, and then you realize that you're not loving, and then you get hard on yourself about that?

Oh, you've got lots of choices there. You can love the fact that you're a caretaker. You can love the part that is so scared that it thinks like it needs to be a caretaker. You can love, um, the part of yourself that thinks that getting angry at yourself will actually change anything. You can love, uh, the part of yourself that is, um, really wanting what's best for them and yourself and doesn't know how to get there. All sorts of parts of yourself to love in that circumstance.

Anything else that we can do to cultivate this, to cultivate this love?

Yes, we can draw bound— drawing boundaries is really good. That's a, that's a great way to really cultivate love in yourself and in others.

Describe a boundary that you might set with yourself.

Oh, that's a good one. So first, the thing is that people think about boundaries as a form of separation, and I just said like, oh, like, mentally, defense is separation. So I think it's important to talk about that paradox first, which is when you draw a boundary, you're doing something that's good both for you and for the other person. And that's really the opposite of separation. It's the same actually with being compassionate. It's— there is nothing that you can do that's compassionate, that's truly compassionate for you, that's also not compassionate for those around you in that circumstance. It's the same with a boundary, and that's the important part of a boundary. So the important parts of boundaries are that you, when you draw the boundary, it in— it increases your love for the person no matter what they're going to say to the boundary. So I know that I'm drawing a great boundary when I'm doing that, when I'm— when it opens up my heart for— to the person that I'm drawing the boundary with. Um, so if I'm drawing a boundary to myself, it's— I use that same thing. It's like, what's the— what's the thing that actually opens my heart to myself when I'm setting a boundary?

What's an example of a boundary you might set with yourself?

Hmm. Oh, let's say a boundary that I might set with myself is, um, if I am noticing myself getting angry, I am going to seperate myself from other people so that I don't get angry at them. That would be a boundary that I would set with myself.

And elaborate a little bit more on how that helps you love yourself.

Yeah. So if I'm angry at people, then I have shame, then I have blame, then I have a whole big mess usually that I have to clean up. None of that stuff is really loving. And it's also making my anger wrong and making parts of myself wrong. So in that boundary, I stop making myself wrong. And when I'm drawing it, the trick is when I'm literally thinking about drawing it, it doesn't feel like an oppression, it feels like a gift.

Yeah, that makes sense. Like, the part of us that we are drawing a boundary against might otherwise feel defensive against us making it wrong.

I would say with— drawing a boundary with, not against. Right, that's, that's the subtle thing about boundaries that people think— the subtle thing about boundaries it is against, right? Because we value this idea of freedom so greatly in ourselves. And that's the other part of drawing a boundary that's so important. The other part of drawing a boundary that is so important is that you're not asking them to be any different. You're saying, I'm going to be different. So if I'm drawing a boundary with, um, this is different with children, obviously, um, But if I'm drawing a boundary with a friend and that person, to use the same example, has a tendency to get angry, and I would say, my boundary with you is when you get angry, I'm going to walk away, happy to re-engage with you whenever you're not yelling at me. Or if you're yelling at me, then I'm going to walk away and I'm happy to re-engage with you. I'm not asking them to stop yelling at me. I'm not asking for them to stop drinking. I'm not asking for them to stop. I'm saying what I'm going to do.

In these circumstances. It's like creating a background of safety and connection regardless of how they act, so that they don't have to be a certain way. That's exactly right.

It's, it's the fully empowered move. It's taking full responsibility of yours for yourself. If you start trying to love yourself to change yourself, it won't work, because trying to change yourself isn't loving yourself. So what happens for a lot of people is they start to feel the power of love, and they start to feel how loving unconditionally starts transforming the world, they start wanting more of it. And so then they start loving to transform the world, and then it stops working. Because if you're trying to love to transform the world, you're not loving anymore. So it's a really important thing to see that the love, if it gets tainted, it just stops working.

So as we are cultivating this love and these, like, the defenses that creep in taint that love? How do we, at the same time as we're working to cultivate love, how do we work on lowering our defenses as well?

There's a feeling when we lower our defenses that we're— what we're actually doing is allowing a whole bunch of emotions we don't want to feel to be felt. And those emotions purify us. They start to dismantle that sense of self. And it literally feels like it sometimes, like it's burning away or that it's melting or something to that effect. And so there's an intensity to that. Every time we lower our defense, there's kind of this little thing inside of us is like, oh, we're gonna be fucking destroyed, we're gonna be destroyed, don't do that. If I lower my defense, I'll be destroyed, don't do that. So there's an intensity with doing it.

Well, there's a truth to that too, like a part of ourselves does get destroyed. Exactly.

There's a great saying by Pema Chödrön that says, um, I'm gonna paraphrase, it says, open yourself up for annihilation. Because that way you can find out what part of yourself can't be annihilated. And so that's what you're doing. You're just allowing that purification to happen. And you know it because there's an intensity to it, oftentimes a fear as well. And to feel into that, like step into that deeply, is the move to make around the defenses. And surrender is a really— is another really good move in these moments. It's— you're not surrendering to the circumstances. You're surrendering to not defending yourself. So what do I mean by that? I had a great experience of this. There was a man, and I was on the board of directors with them, with this person, and he was bad for the company. And he also had this tendency to, like, whatever I said, he would do the exact opposite thing. And so what I did was I told him, hey, I'm going to try to remove you from the board. I will stop trying to remove you from the board at any time that we can actually work together well and that your, and your thought processes aren't just against mine. And even if, and we love contrarian thinking and boards, typically any board I've been a part of, but this was just contrary for the sake of contrarian. It wasn't contrary because it was independent thinking. Anyway, so every time for like 6 weeks I call him up and I would say— or 6 months— I would say, this is what I'm going to do and this is what I suggest you do. And he would do the exact opposite of that the entire time. And by doing exactly the opposite of what he said is how he got himself removed from the board. If at any time he would have said, oh, Oh, I see. And called me up and talked to me and said, oh, wow, you're really giving me the advice. So I was constantly able to give him the advice that was actually the best for him. I was constantly able to say, this is what I think is best for you, and for it to be accurate. Mm-hmm. And it is also the fact that he couldn't do it that led to his removal from the board, which was best for the company if he couldn't, you know, learn to work with people and be collaborative.

That's, that's fascinating. And I'm curious how you differentiate in that story the— this, like, love over defense versus knowing what's best for him and versus controlling him through suggestions.

The main difference is what you're feeling internally, right? I am welcoming him as he is, and at the same time, I know I am making the call that says this company is better without you. So that's my call to make, just like it's his call to make. And he was making the call that the company would be better without me, right? Or that whatever, China should win the war, or Korea should win the war. Like, those are calls that people are going to make. That's the war. And you have to call what you think is best. But that doesn't mean I ever had to close my heart to him. And the way that I could act to not close my heart to him is to constantly tell him, this is actually what I think is the best thing to do. And to tell him, I'm going to keep on telling you to do this stuff as long as you keep on— like, so I gave him the whole map. I told him the key. I gave him everything to get out of it. And he chose not to do that. So for me, I could keep a very— it was literally me at the time. It was the first time that I was like, oh, I am in a war. How do I maintain an open heart? And the way I could do it was to give him every opportunity I could possibly think of. And so that, that's the only difference. And I think the thing is, from the outside it might not look different at all. From the inside, it's like, it's a far more effective way to fight a war, right? I mean, you hear this from people who are fighters all the time: try to get your opponent angry, because if they get angry, they'll be less effective. Like, what happens if the person you're fighting has a big open heart for you and they're still determined to win?

How angry did this board member get?

Oh, he got pretty angry. And there's definitely multiple occasions where he called up yelling. And then for me, that was the practice. He would call up yelling and I would just keep on opening my heart and keep on feeling the discomfort and keep on feeling my emotions. And, you know, lots of heartache for me. There was a lot of heartbreak in it, and that was my purification, was that heartbreak.

Tell me more about that heartbreak.

Yeah, I have this saying that, um, every time my heart breaks, it increases my capacity to love. So heartbreak is literally like this— it's like the feeling of it, of it, of it breaking open to expand, or the feeling of expansion. Of the heart, like, and it— and that's the feeling. And it's kind of interesting because I think it— I've obviously never given birth, but when my wife talks about birth, she goes, I don't know why they call them contractions when they're really expansions. But there's a feeling that they're— it's a contraction as well as an expansion. And heartbreak, there's like literally that— that's the visceral feeling of it for me anyway. And, and so there's this feeling of like heartbreak that just, that just totally increases my capacity to love. Another great example of this was, um, I don't know if I've shared this story, but there was a time when I was just totally bothered by all, like, inane conversation. Just two people talking about going 65 miles an hour on the way to Santa Barbara, whatever it was, would just drive me nuts. And, and there's this day where I kind of recognized that I, I shut down when this was happening. And so I was like, I'm not going to shut down. I'm going to sit there. I'm going to feel whatever they're there is underneath this. So I would hang out with people having inane conversations, and I would just weep. I would just cry. Probably at times I had some idea of why I was crying, and I think it— and at the crux of it, I was crying because I had just shut this entire part of life off. It's like I had cut off a part of myself, and as I opened it up, there was just this pain of like, oh wow, I've lost this for so long.

What was it that you had lost?

The ability to connect in this— on this fashion, that I had judged this way of connecting, one more way of connecting with people that I had separated myself from because of my own self-definition. And so I just wept. It was very awkward, you know, sitting there crying. They'd be like, you did this with them?

Oh yeah, I did.

Yeah, present in their presence. Yeah, it was awkward at times. And they'd be like, what's wrong? I'm like, it's nothing, don't worry about it. You know, and I just keep on— they'd kind of— and then they keep on— they're used to having those levels of conversation, so asking me about this twice wasn't really going to happen. And, and then all of a sudden I was free, and then I was just completely able to enjoy the kind of the, the more superficial way of connecting. And, and even found out that there's some of that super, quote-unquote, superficial way of connecting that's not superficial at all. That, you know, connecting over flowers or connecting over food or connected. Like, there's a, uh, there's a very sensual, non-heady level of connection that is, is quite sweet and has a depth that deep conversations don't have.

Something juicy in that story for me is that you, you started weeping in front of, in front of people, and then they asked you what was going on with you, inviting depth, and then you were like, oh, it's nothing. Yes, that's right, that's right. Because I wanted to be—

that's exactly it. Because I wanted to, like, feel the heartbreak. I didn't want to, like, disturb the thing that was breaking my heart. Like, once you, once you realize that heartbreak increases your capacity to love, then it's like, man, I want it. I want that heartbreak because I know that at the backside of it, there's so much more love available to me. So yeah, yes, if I could shut it down, I'd shut it down because I'd want to just keep on feeling the pain of the, of a superficial conversation so that I could, I could feel that heartbreak. And it was the same with this guy It's like just to feel the heartbreak of the fact that here's two people who want something great to happen in the world, who want this company to be successful, and this is the only outcome that I, I know how to create, you know, whatever. I didn't have the capacity to really get him on board or bring him along or whatever I could, and I don't know if I could have ever, but, but that heartbreak and that incapacity to feel into that totally increased my capacity to love How is it that experiencing that, that heartbreak is—

can be experienced as not discouraging but as empowering?

I think you have to live through it a couple times. I don't know if there's another way to do it but to just live through it a couple times. I think that the— once you live through heartbreak and you realize how, how much it increases the love in your life, then, then it's just like going into a hot sauna. You know, when the— if you go into the hot sauna the first time, you're like, what the fuck are you guys doing? I'm out of here. Like, my skin's burning. What the hell? Like, I'm talking about like a real sauna, not an American sauna, right? And then, yeah, yeah. And, and there's, there's nothing logical about doing it, but then you do it a couple times and you're like, oh man, I can't wait to get back to the sauna. It's just— it goes for a cold plunge. The same goes to the cold plunge. It's the exact same thing. It's like it— the payoff is so great that you're like, let's do it.

So it really seems that this, this love thing seems to be the crux of all of this teaching.

Yeah, absolutely it is. I mean, we— the first real week was VIEW, which is vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. That's, that's really unconditional love if you put all those three things together. And that's another great pointer to unconditional love. You feel vulnerable because you're open and welcoming. You're impartial because you're welcoming as is, not telling them how to be. Empathy means you're open and feeling them. You're allowing yourself to be touched. And wonder is this basic nod that the universe knows more than you do, that it's, it's still a mystery and will always be a mystery. And that really prevents you from wanting to try to change stuff, change things. So we start off with view and we end with love, and they're very much the same thing. They're the whole thing. Everything we've done in this course has been to move us towards a greater state of love for ourselves and others. I think the thing about it is, is that it, it can't be done out of order. You know, a lot of people will move straight to love. They'll say, okay, I'm just going to love everything all the time. I think that's great, don't, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't seem to work as well to love everything as an escape, you know, or to love everything as a, as a bypass, or to love everything so that you don't have to feel it. To love everything means that you're really happy to feel everything, that you're happy to express everything, that you're happy to be wrong about everything. That you're happy to be empowered and you're happy to feel helpless. Yeah, it's a deep welcoming of life, and a lot of times people will use love as a way to cut off a certain portion of it.

Yeah, the, the question I was about to ask, but you've just explained it, was, uh, what makes it that you didn't call this work The Art of Unconditional Love?

Oh, that's a— I don't want to answer that question. There's a part of me that says you answer as a business guy, but also as a coach. You meet people with where they are, right? You meet people with the problems they think they have. And most people aren't walking around going, I just don't know how to love enough. You know what? The biggest problem I have is that I don't have a— my heart isn't broken enough. You know, like, I don't get enough heartbreak. You don't get— most people aren't walking around saying that. So you meet them with where they are and Luckily, the unconditional love piece, and especially with the emotional fluidity and the empowerment and seeing yourself as inherently good, which is the crux of the fulcrum that the love uses to create its leverage. Um, all of—

reminds me of where I first met you, which was a, uh, consciousness hacking talk entitled How to Make Better Business Decisions. Yeah, that's what I need to do. Exactly.

And, and so check it out though, have you been making better business those decisions? Absolutely. Yeah, see, that's the cool thing, is like, it— you can actually deliver on the promise, but you can deliver on it only because it's so effective, only because you're speaking to the deeper truth. And I think the other reason, just to say it, is, is that semantically everybody thinks about love very differently. So if you say it, you've got 20 different viewpoints immediately. And so it just makes it harder to really go through the process.

Yeah, I think one of the, one of the main resistances to like doing some kind of group work around unconditional love is that it'll just turn on, like, it'll trip people's cult triggers. So yeah, maybe, maybe another question that I was like, what is the difference between, uh, doing this kind of work in a group and finding unconditional love together and a cult?

Yeah, well, this is the surrender piece. This is why I don't use surrender. Right? Because that little thing about surrender that's in there is— it's basically, I'm going to ask you to give up responsibility for yourself. Whereas everything that we do is very much pointing directly at, take responsibility for yourself. The wisdom is inside you. If you look at how I interact with students, I'm mostly asking questions. And I'm also saying, tell me what your instinct says. Tell me what's moving you, because I trust that more than I trust me. Because I know, like, I might know the terrain, I might know the map, I might know, you know, the 6 most likely places that you want to end up, but only you know where you are at this moment and know what the next move is. And that's the big difference. It's why I don't emphasize surrender, because as soon as you emphasize surrender, people think, surrender to what? And if I do say something like, hey, surrender to the ineffable part of yourself, then all of a sudden there's a definition. What is that? How do I do that? And then that definition, it becomes what you surrender instead of the thing itself.

How— I, I think a lot of that, what you're speaking to, comes from when, when people get into a teacher role, they end up subtly asking for people to surrender to them. Because it sounds like this, it comes from a lack of trust in people's internal, uh, internal work. And like, what is it that makes you feel so trusting when you are working with somebody on one of our Q&A calls, somebody who's miles and miles away and could just freak out and close their laptop and then go do something insane. Uh, what makes you feel so much trust for their internal compass that you feel safe doing this work with them without the sense of control that would lead to them surrendering to you?

Yeah, that's a great question. I've never been asked that question before. It's funny, what happens in my system when you ask it is just like this deep sense of humility. The intellectual answer I want to give you is because that thing in them is the same thing that guided me, and I, I just wasn't lucky enough to, or I wasn't ripe enough to be able to be given someone to guide me in this way. So I, I had to trust my own And so I just trust it in that way. I think that's part of it. Um, but there's another part of it too, which is it's experience. I've just seen— it's just so many times I'm like, this is— I can see where the path leads and I can watch the person just instinctually make the next right move over and over and over again. And not just the person almost everybody that I— and, and whenever I question, I'm like, oh, that's going to be like a backpedal. It turns out it's like the perfect backpedal for them. And I don't mean that in a kind of hippie way of like, everything's perfect just the way it's supposed to be. I mean it just like, just like roses know how to grow. They just know how to do it, you know. Grass just knows what to do. Birds just know what to do. They just know it. I don't have to trust them. I don't have to trust the trees and people. Like, there is a gravity, a center of gravity just asking, and all they have to really do is just get out of the way. And, and all my questions are literally just questions to help them see themselves. There's no question I'm asking that's underlying point isn't just to have them see themselves.

Wow. Well, thanks, Joe. This has been another amazing episode. Yeah, what a pleasure.

I'm sad that they're done. Yeah, I'm glad that they're done because I could use a little more free time, but I'm sad that they're done because I'm not going to get to play with you for a couple.

Yeah, I'm excited to see what kind of playing happens again in the future.

Yeah, it will for sure. What a pleasure, Brett. Thank you. Thank you.

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