Legacy Love

Love is not just a feeling. It's a skill set. It's a capacity. It's something that we need to grow on, work on, expand upon every day a little bit at a time. It's not something that just happens naturally. Hi.

Welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure, and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here.

Whenever I say that I help couples create legacy love, a lot of people light up around that. That sounds great to them because they're the kind of people who have a vision for their whole life. They want to leave a legacy. They want to create a legacy in this lifetime and doing so with love, creating a love worth kind of handing down, sort of an heirloom, something that goes far beyond just the couple to bless others, appeals to them. But a lot of people ask me, what do you really mean by legacy love? What does that entail? And so today, I'm going to walk you through eight things that legacy love means. And this is both a description of what legacy love winds up being, and it's also a little bit of a tutorial on how you create a legacy love. So let's jump in. First, legacy love means no longer settling for good love. You know, a lot of people tell me, well, we have a pretty good marriage, and they kind of trail off. You know, it's like, way too good to leave, but not really good enough to light them up. So the first thing that we have to do to create a legacy love is decide that pretty good isn't good enough, that we and our partner and the world deserve for our love to be truly extraordinary. The second thing that legacy love means is that our relationship becomes a school. It becomes a monastery. It becomes an ashram. It becomes a place where the two of us are studying how to get better at giving and receiving love. Now, people tend to think, boy, relationship's supposed to be easy. If you're with the right person, then it should be easy to just be yourself and do what comes naturally and have a great relationship. So if I have to learn how to get better. It means there's something wrong with me. And if my partner's behaviors or the way that they feel isn't good, it means there's something wrong with them. Or maybe we're just not good together. But legacy love recognizes that none of us had the modeling or the guidance earlier in our lives to have the kind of love we really want to have and really deserve to have, no matter how wonderful our family might have been. And a lot of families really had a lot of pain in them. You know, like, more than half of marriages ended in divorce. Your parents might have been among them. There are lots of kinds of losses. My dad was sick from the time I was 11 years old and died of a brain tumor when I was 19. That loss shaped me and shaped the ways that I showed up in love when I got to my husband. So recognizing our love as a place where we can complete the kind of learning that in a perfect world, you might get as a child, but I don't think most people get. When we recognize our love is the school where we get to learn how to love. That's when we start to create a legacy love. The third thing legacy love means is making love itself a habit love is not just a feeling. It's a skill set. It's a capacity. It's something that we need to grow on, work on, expand upon every day a little bit at a time. It's not something that just happens naturally. And the relationship we have today is the product of the habits that we've had in the past. So if there are places of conflict, of distance, of lack of intimacy, those are the product of the behaviors that each of us have habitually engaged in in the past. And to create a legacy love, we recognize which habits don't serve the vision that we really have of the kind of relationship we want. And we install habits a little bit at a time, day after day after day, that build the kind of love we deserve. The fourth thing I mean when I say legacy love is a sacred crucible for the practice of integrating the divine feminine and the divine masculine, both in each person and between the couple. So when I say feminine and masculine, I don't mean male and female. This can happen in any configuration, regardless of our genders assigned at birth or how we identify. It could happen with two women. It could happen in a couple where somebody is transsexual. It doesn't really matter. What I'm talking about is yin and yang. I'm talking about active and receptive I'm talking about flowing and structured those qualities within us. And in 2004, I began teaching something called the 12 elements of power, a structured way of looking at masculine and feminine yin and yang that helps us see that, for instance, connection and self reliance are just two sides of the same coin. Focus and holism, pragmatism and sensuality. These are pairs of elements that define yin and yang. And when we start to become conversant with each of the specific qualities of masculine power and feminine power, we become much more able to show up as the kind of man we want to be in a heterosexual relationship or woman we want to be. And we also become able to be fluid in bringing whatever power is the right tool for the job when we're at work or at home. There are definitely times when I bring a lot of solid masculine qualities like pragmatism or providing or self reliance, and that's healthy for the relationship, healthy for me. And then other times, I'm in my sensual or my receiving mode, and those are more yin or feminine qualities, and that's the right tool for the job. So legacy love means that your relationship is a crucible where each of you is cultivating all 12 elements of masculine and feminine power, becoming someone who embodies the divine in those particular flavors. And that means that between the two of you, there is this space of divine communion, like the sun and the moon, shakti and Shiva, this beautiful dance between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. The fifth component of legacy love is that we leverage the pain of our past or the gaps in our development to grow into the kind of love that we really want. So often over time together, a couple comes to recognize that the patterns that they each brought into the relationship create an intrinsic incompatibility or friction between the two of them. And at that point, the relationship has probably already started to deteriorate or started to be less comfortable, less fun. But you can decide you're going to let the relationship deteriorate. At that point, you're going to both hunker down in your own corners. Or you can choose to create legacy love. And how you do that is to make each of those places the places where your communication breaks down, the places where you want to come together in intimacy, but you don't. And there's more distance than you want and less erotic delight, less closeness, less emotional fulfillment than you want. The places where you don't partner well together as well as you'd like, you take those places and you use the relationship to heal that in Yourself, as distinct from blaming your partner, deciding that there's a me and there's a you, and the two are opposed and I have to fight you on things. You really choose that we and you recognize, oh, it's perfect that we came together with this particular friction so that we could become something better than we ever could have become without one another. The sixth quality of legacy love is that it evolves through time. So a part of what makes relationships fragile is that we create a certain rapport or stasis that works well inside a particular set of conditions. You know, we're parenting school age children together and we've got it down, and then we become empty nesters and it upsets the entire apple cart. You know, our, our roles and our ways of working together are completely disrupted. Now who are we as a couple? So legacy love adapts and changes. As for instance, one person loses their job and that creates financial stress for the family. Or another person has a huge advance in their career and that changes the power balance between the two of them. Or there are changes in children's ages and stages or need levels. You know, one of your kids might have a special need or be an elite athlete and require lots of energy from the family because of that. So as these kinds of circumstances change and then over time as our bodies change, this one happens to everybody. As our bodies change and respond differently in the bedroom, as we age and our appearances change and our overall health and vitality, hopefully you're fighting against that, deteriorating, but it does change through time, the level of care that we need in order to be our best changes. And if your love has room for that, and if the two of you evolve and create a new kind of love at each chapter, you can create a legacy love. If on the other hand, you say, oh, we can't have the kind of closeness I want, the kind of communication I want, the kind of partnership I want, because these things are changing. Then you wind up with a lukewarm love and eventually, quite likely a dead love. So legacy love finds ways to embrace those shifts. So that year after year, rather than life grinding your love down, life is actually spiraling your love up. You're becoming softer, sweeter, more passionate, more close, more connected, more supportive of one another with every passing year and every passing change. The seventh component of legacy love is what I call learning love, teaching love. It's where at the same time, if we have a family at the same time that we're endeavoring to show these new persons in the world what love looks like and how to give and receive in healthy, nourishing ways. We're still figuring that out ourselves. We're imperfect, we're in process, and we're doing the kind of healing and growing that I've been describing with each step in real time while we're raising other people. And that is a tremendously vulnerable, tremendously courageous thing to do. To endeavor to give better than you got, to endeavor to raise the bar on what you want for your children rather than just sort of parenting them and doing marriage on autopilot while you raise them. You're looking at how can we be more intimate, more communicative, more intentional in how we relate to one another? And as we parent imperfectly, inside legacy love, we're vulnerable. We make amends with our children. We are, you know, not inappropriately so, but we are transparent with them, that we're on a learning curve, that this is what it looks like to learn and grow in love. This is what I do with your dad. I tell my kids, you know, we're figuring it out. We're getting better every day together, and you get front row seats to the. To the adventure of it. And we're getting better every day at being parents. We've never done this before, and so we're learning on you. And that kind of vulnerability gives our kids the room to be human themselves, to make mistakes and know that that's okay, to love deeper and with their whole hearts, because they know that it's all right to not get it perfect every time. And then the final trait, number eight, for now, at least, I'm always thinking about this. It's always expanding. But the last thing I want to share with you today about legacy love is that it is a love that blesses the whole world. When we endeavor to create legacy love, the real outcome is that our relationship is, instead of draining us, frustrating us, or being just kind of on the back burner, sort of a background thing that we, you know, get some things out of and put up with in other ways. Our relationship becomes this hearth, this warming place that gives heat and light and beauty to us and keeps us at our best so that we have more to give to the rest of the world. The relationship fuels both partners to have more impact in the places that really matter to them, so we can express our values in our communities as activists, to be change makers more thoroughly, because we're not wrapped up in the pain of having a mediocre relationship. You know, it's kind of like having a wounded foot where you have to walk around on crutches all the time. That's how a lot of relationships are for one or both partners. They're kind of putting up with it, and as such, it is a leak in the bucket of their energy and their vitality and what they came here to do. So our true purpose in the world is best manifest from Legacy Love if we're in a relationship. And I'm not saying that being in a relationship is the be all, end all, but I'm saying if you are going to live with another person, we're all hard enough to live with that we can be a drain on each other. If we're not creating something that's truly magnificent and really energizes both of us, then it's the opposite of that. It's gonna drain us and it's gonna take us away from our real mission and purpose. So I love that Legacy Love has the potential to create the change that our world most needs, regardless of what area of change you feel called to work on, whether it's hunger or the environment or political change you want to create. There are so many things that deserve our care and attention, but that we don't have care and attention to give to if we're muddling around in a lukewarm love. So Legacy Love gives us the fire with which to go and do that. Great work. So I hope you've enjoyed this tour through the eight components of Legacy Love. I'm sure enjoyed walking you through it, and I look forward to hearing what comes up for you as I share all of this and which parts of this you're already embodying and which parts you want to learn more about. So thanks for listening. I'll see you soon. And remember, when you love, love, love loves you too. I'd love to hear what you're taking.

Away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My free Conscious Couples Circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in the show notes for you.

You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too.

Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts.

So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app while you're thinking of it. Before you forget, with just a few.

Words about what this show gives you. And, hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to, so you never miss an episode.

Please go to the app where you.

Listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Azenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.