Duration: 14:07
Listen to ‘Why I Gave Up on Love’
Episode 7 Transcript
Hello, my name is Roxanne Darling and this is In the Transition podcast.
Today is episode 7 and I am talking about LOVE.
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If this is your first time listening, please visit my website, in the Transition dot com, to learn more. You can also find me on instagram and twitter at roxannedarling.
In today’s episode, I am embedding a copy of a talk I gave in Feb 2017 on Maui at a live event for Valentine’s Day. The overall theme was how do we have a more conscious approach to love – both individually and in the community?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept as part of my personal process in learning about codependency. I also came to discover that the advice John Lennon has been giving us all these years might be actually be mis-directed.
So, let’s have a listen. I have a few more ideas to share after the 7 minute talk.
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TRANSCRIPT OF LIVE EVENT
So um I am a life long love addict I’ve just about gotten my PHD in codependency. And I want to share with you what I have learned to finally get through that decades program. Like perhaps some of you I’ve used love and taken advantage of love and tried to understand love and expected love that would solve all my problems. And I thought if I got to be a good enough love then I could change all those people in my life who weren’t quite living up to my expectations and perhaps change the world.
Any of you tried to do any of those things? I grew up brainwashed by the music of John Lennon. All you need is love, love, all you need is love… Any body heard that song before. It’s running in the back and you you know what, I think it’s a big lie.
So that’s basically the premise of my talk here.
But there’s something better is what we’re going to get to. So what I’d like to do it backup a little bit and the way I like to play with consciousness is really paying attention to words and language. Words carry so much power and so much energy and so much stuff that is taking place in the back of the brain and we don’t really pay attention to it very often. And if we just take this goofy word love for starters, there are over 15 definitions in the dictionary. Some of them have to do sex as in love making. Some of them have to do with appreciation as in I love what you did for me this afternoon or I love the quesadilla that I had for dinner before I got down here today.
And so to that monkey mind that is always with us and chattering away and trying to figure everything out so we’ll be safe, that little person is constantly trying to figure out when, in my case, she hears me use the word love or someone use the word love she’s going what do you mean, which love is it. Which one should I pull up here. Which one am I supposed to be managing. Which kind of love is it. And you know, it can be very confusing when a woman says I love you to a man a lot of men interpret that as meaning I want to have sex with them. Men are wired that way. That’s the good news right. That’s my comedy line.
But you all know what what so it gets confusing which love are we talking about and that confusion takes a tremendous amount of energy. And then when we apply that type of love, like many people here on Maui we care so much about the world and we have values of wanting peace and wanting harmony, and we’ve tried to make love fix that for us. Take care of that for us. And I think we need to give love a break.
I think that love is this random, unpredictable amazing magical thing that no one can really define. Two people can talk about it and we may have very different ideas in our heads and hearts about what we’re actually talking about. And most of all it isn’t something we can call up on demand 24/7 like an Uber car. It comes when it wants to come and so to continue maintaining this belief system that all we need is love and if we could only learn how to love better and love more that the world would change or relationships would change I think that’s a fallacy and I think that’s making life hard on us and we’re too good of people and we’re too loving of people to really have that kind of struggle going on.
So what that does is put us in this loop of shouldification as I call it. You should be doing this different. You should be doing this better. You should never get angry. You should love all these terrible things going on because that is the way it’s going to get healed.
But I don’t believe that’s true. So in my PHD of codependency studies I’ve realized I can change one word and make an enormous difference.
And so instead of trying to love, I now choose to accept. Instead of trying to reach for this passionate undefinable slippery amazing thing that I can sometimes find and many times not, I can always consciously choose to accept. And I hypothesize and propose to you that looking another person in the eye and saying I accept you is perhaps one of the most loving things that we can do because it means I don’t need you to change for me. I don’t need you to be any different than you are. And that comes from this very confident premise that we’re all part of the Divine and everyone has the right to be here. Even the drunks and the ISIS and everyone else. They all have their right to be here as well as us.
And if I focus on accepting what is, then suddenly I’m grounded. I’m neutral. I’m clear. I see a path forward. And the other person, if it’s a one to one situation, that person gets to drop their defenses. Because when you feel judged what do you tend to do? Get defensive. And Byron Katie she brilliantly observed that “Defensiveness is the first act of war.” And we can’t have a loving community if we’re judging and then other people are getting defensive and then it’s this loop of shouldification and shitification in many cases once it really gets going.
So I’m making the case and we can talk about it here today – one of the questions I’ve posed is what does love have to do with changing the world. And what would happen if we started accepting things as they are.
During the tsunami a couple years ago I was on twitter a lot and a lot of people on the mainland were getting nervous because CNN was playing their high drama music and everyone was nervous and scared and we all shared this thought #thinkcalmthoughts. And Shane my partner was actually asleep on the sofa next to me with our dog Lexi and people were saying how can he sleep through a tsunami. And I said, it’s great that he’s sleeping because he’s bringing calm energy. We don’t all have to be up 24-7 monitoring all the terrible things going on in the world and in our own relationships. We can accept them and carry on.
So let me see if I missed anything too much here. I think that pretty much covered it. I just want to thank John Lennon for his beautiful music and his amazing heart and let him know that we’re taking things a little bit further now. We’re taking the pressure off love and we’re raising our consciousness.
Thank you so much.
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I hope you found that useful! I’d like to add one more thought. What if we came here not be all one but to play with being separate? What if we chose to leave the omniscience of the illness of the universe, being interconnected parts of the grand ether and incarnate to play with form, to push up against limits and boundaries, space and time, for an altogether different experience of separateness? Yes, on the soul level I believe we are all connected. But as souls having human experiences, I don’t believe our goal is to have all live and play as one.
It seems impossible, frankly, given the diversity of humanity. And this somewhat new age admonition to “love everyone” and that will save the day, feels pointless to me. One, not likely to ever happen, so now what do we do instead? Two, many people think that loving someone – as an enemy – will magically convert them over to our point of view. Well that to me is pure codependency. I will love you until you change and become the person I want you to be!
So my intention these days is to appreciate the wild and crazy diversity of humanity. To choose not to be threatened by different opinions and actions than the ones that make me happy. To allow my own subjective irritation at all these things I can’t understand or control. And then to move on by accepting this stuff is real and I don’t necessarily have to change it. I can work to change things if I want – and – I am much more realistic about how hard it actually is to change some things.
I mean, those people who have tried to change me, well, they learned it’s hard, too.
At the core of all this, I think, is fear. We fear that which is different, We fear that which we don’t understand. “Seek first to understand.” is such powerful advice. And then, haha, ignore as much as possible because most of it does not affect me here in this present moment. So there is way less to be afraid of, here in this present moment. Seeing all these others who are so different from me doesn’t mean I have to be afraid.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you’d like to share your comments with me, I have several options for you! You can leave an audio message at my Google voice mail,
(505) 510-1135.
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That’s all for today’s episode. Thank you for listening and hanging out here with me, In the Transition! If you liked this, please tell a friend and/or leave a review in Apple Podcasts or on Podchaser.
Please note: I like to include about a minute of music at the end of each episode to allow listeners to stay “in the zone” of the podcast, giving you additional time to rest and integrate.
Thank you for being You.
Love,
Why I Gave Up on Love by Roxanne Darling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
