Summary
Joe and Brett explore the deep relationship between obligation and love, beginning with a coaching clip where a man discovers that every time he took responsibility for his wife out of obligation, he cut off his love for her. Joe explains that obligation is essentially a form of management — and nothing wants to be managed. The feeling of obligation requires constricting the emotional experience of love, trading it for a watered-down version of connection.
They trace obligation back to childhood conditioning where we learned we had to do something to be lovable. This creates a strategy where obligation becomes the path to getting love, but it simultaneously pushes love away because we know we performed for it rather than being loved for who we are. The episode covers how obligation operates in money, business, relationships, and self-talk, showing how it oppresses and deadens every domain it touches.
Brett shares how he kept a foot out the door in air sports to avoid obligation killing his love for the sport, while Joe points out that obligation is an emotional experience, not a reality — some artists feel obligated doing professional work and lose their love, while others feel lucky and keep it. The episode concludes with the insight that the search for love itself requires cutting off from love, and that love is simply available when we stop trying to earn it.
Key Concepts
- Obligation cuts off the experience of love in the moment
- Using obligation as a strategy to get love always backfires
- Obligation oppresses every domain it touches — money, work, relationships
- Saying no restores agency and reconnects you to your want
- The search for love requires cutting yourself off from love
Key Quotes
“Obligation is in its essence a form of management. Things don’t want to be managed. ‘Wow I really like my wife because she manages me’ — it’s not something you hear very often.”
“Every time you took responsibility, acted out of obligation, it stopped the love that you felt for her.”
“If somebody feels like they have an obligation to make money, it doesn’t allow you to love money.”
“The search for light requires darkness. The search for love requires lack of love.”
“I feel this tremendous sense of empowerment — of I’m doing what I want to be doing.”
“We often, when we’re in the pattern of obligation, see that the obligation is the only thing maintaining our connection.”
Transcript
obligation is is in its Essence a form of management so there’s not only a not letting it in there’s a pushing a away of it right things that we things don’t want to be managed you know like wow I really like my wife because she manages me you like it’s not it’s not something that you hear very often and so if you look at like the Long Haul of relationships you know that like everybody’s walking on eggshells everybody feels is obligated to do a certain thing all the time so that they can be loved and the marriage just the the love erodes 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 two-minute clip from yesterday’s coaching session hi hi um yeah um you know I seem to be on the cusp of everything I could want and hope for um but oh great the patterns of obligation and responsibility probably intertwined with fear and a scarcity mindset just seemed 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 the same patterns apply sometimes in work and everything else and where does obligation sit in your body chest um great upper arm Ms 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 where I can accept myself I’m not sure I can get to loving myself great so do me a favor getting contact with the love that you once had for your wife if you maybe you still have some yep yeah tell me when you feel it hey okay now I want you to feel responsible for her happiness that’s easy what happened to the love disappear dissipated retreated deep into a you you you you stopped loving her to take responsibility for her is what I’m hearing you say shit I never had it heard it said that way I guess that’s accurate my first response would be is wait I don’t want to guess I want you to actually feel it this is an emotional experience 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 o 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 uh 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 um the emotional experience of love and so every time we are acting out of obligation we’re saying hey I’m G to trade obligation for love okay I’m GNA I’m gonna feel I’m gonna I’m gonna trade either um feel an 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 so we’ve talked before about how how we come into this world how children are born hardwired for love 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 back right and so if you notice what I said I said that the that the feeling of Love gets cut off and then there’s a stagnation of of emot the emotion gets cut off and it kind of therefore creates a stagnation it’s because 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 to shove this obligation and we’ve talked about in the podcast how guilt and shame are the stagnant they stagnate emotions yeah 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 a 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 I can’t take care or we sorry it doesn’t mean that I can’t care for you it doesn’t mean that I can’t uh be generous with you or a whole bunch of things but but I can’t do it out of obligation and maintain this 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 that happens all the time so that’s that’s the distinction got it it’s fascinating I like how you connected that to the shame because in one sense it could be that obligation is like an internal threat of shame that yeah like the obligation is the the threat that there will be shame if I don’t do what I feel oblig 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 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 which means there’s already something wrong with you that you’re already ashamed like I’m I’m not like okay I better not kill anybody right like that’s not like I’m not doing that oh 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 with identity there yeah it’s 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 yeah exactly so so that’s so that’s the pattern is that we we go and we try sometimes we have leared that obligation feeling of obligation is going to get us the love slash approval that we want and but if you pay attention to the moment it actually takes the Love Away immediately yeah how how does that work how how does it not get us the love well it it might get us somebody liking us or somebody approving of us or somebody maybe even loving us they like oh wow thank you so much for the Porsche honey and then this person has this feeling of like it actually does work sometimes which is why we do it however there is something like the it’s always kind of a watered down version of it because somewhere in the back of our mind yeah or surrogate but because somewhere in the back of our mind we know we had to perform for it which means if we’re not getting loved for who we are we’re getting love for our performance so it never fully fulfills it’s it’s never like a wholesome meal at best it’s like a Pepsi you know 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 and performed for it so they couldn’t possibly actually love our authentic expression they’d only be loving what what we’ve presented 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 shit 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 um um uh I think you can equivalently say it’s in the way of our connection is it it also means that it’s stops us from loving yeah a very similar 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 I 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 it’s again that we were taught as kids that we were we were um we were taught as kids that we had to do something to be lovable right that’s 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 that’s the main component of it I think the other component of it is it’s like this 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 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 uh to do the right thing uh 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 and that false binary that we have that it’s one or the other is also I think a a mental the mental uh 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 we 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 and so then that becomes the kind of love what 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’m imagining somebody listening right now and they’re thinking oh my gosh if I I have to not feel obligation for somebody or I can’t act out of obligation for I’m not saying that like feel free 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 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 or action sports or in the rest of podcasting yeah yeah well I mean let’s take 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 they would be awesome for me to have 20 new obligations this week right and the reason is because that 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 and so and so then since you can’t love the money then like why do you want it in your life like if you’re if you if if money is this oppressive obligation like that’s 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 made it make it if it’s this oppressive obligation thing that cuts off your love like what like f like we’re not wired to to to feel obligated and cut off from love that’s not like that’s not our wiring so yeah so so it’s it’s inadvertently pushing money away and that’s what happens with almost all forms of obligation is that that sense of obligation in 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 um uh 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 um 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 um and so so that’s another thing that it does and in jobs one of the places that I see 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 they have a sense of like we’re going to get this done and and we’re doing this but they don’t feel there it’s 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 like and so 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 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 shit 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 oh yeah they they didn’t feel that they they did feel a want they did feel they were connected to their love of what they were doing yeah something fascinating here also is you describe so if 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 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 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 a 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 that’s the other thing just to know about that is letting it in there’s a pushing away of it right things that we things don’t 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 like if some if I talk to someone 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 and um so but nobody really wants to be managed we don’t run towards things that are like trying to control us and trying to control us for a particular outcome no it doesn’t feel particularly good and and that’s that’s also what’s happening when you’re so so the way this works in like a 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 just working with a client the other day where it’s like it’s going to be good we’re all okay we’re gonna 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 like if we’re trying to like Our obligation is to manage something like their good mood we’re pushing it away or if the obligation is trying to manage something um like someone loving us we’re pushing that away and so if you look at like the Long Haul of everybody feels obligated to do a the love erodes so longterm 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 Springs up for me which is somewhat related to each of the things you’ve just mentioned um kind of in 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 maintain 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 there’s a different path that could have been available to me had I really allowed had I had I had freedom across all of those different aspects here and not been afraid of obligation yeah so that 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 shit still love it I love getting up and like playing rock and roll or I love the painting that I’m doing I feel so lucky that I get to do it and in that even though there was an obligation to make an album and to go on tour it never felt like an obligation right that it’s that feeling of obligation and so so for 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 and yeah and if I make agreements it doesn’t mean that I’m obligated in a in the sense like you described like it’s a re like it’s not a new reality for me it’s an agreement and I’m choosing to be there that so that what you just said there’s two like really huge components exactly that that allow an artist or airports 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 it’s 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 saying 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 it be like I feel this tremendous sense of of of empowerment of I’m doing what I want to be doing so those are great tools the other thing about airports that I noticed is that there’s also this other like different kind of obligation that I’ve noticed in 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 uh radio tower whatnot there’s almost a feeling of obligation to jump for some people I would oh yeah often that happens yeah so curiosity springs like how does how does this pattern play out there but gets cut off like yeah yeah I mean 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 um 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 steps away from what’s true for us to uh to do what we project the group wants Without Really checking in on it 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 the feeling of love which is I would argue is a natural state right like there’s like there’s just there’s a very natural like um expansive State not to say anything else is unnatural but there’s this very it’s it’s just a way to explain it it’s very natural state love and when you cut 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 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 and in in airsports 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 um 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 and on a jump or Wings suit 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 brain stem yeah it’s 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 or caught in a decision like oh should I buy the car or not buy the car should like flip-flopping you know yeah that’s another expression of the same thing often right that’s cool yeah yeah so that that’s so 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 you have towards yourself obligation to business obligation towards money obligation towards art obligation you know it hits 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 our 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 and 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 self the self uh management so it’s the same it’s the same thing and and and you’re pushing yourself away from yourself and you’re and you’re 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 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 you know 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 right and I’m curious to what extent is there some wisdom there if we had no obligation whatsoever how would say again no emotional no sense of emotional obligation would we what I’m hearing you say is if you had no sense of emotion the emotion of obligation yeah would you cease to act in anything but radical self-interest yeah or or how would you know that what is there in the wake of that is love and not another kind of confused pattern around 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 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 uh without any sense of obligation so I I definitely don’t think it’s required for Action um but then then there’s a question of would I be nothing but self-interested um 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 and are they like is that are they the like the paragons of love like you know so so I think there’s just just some evidence out in the world that shows that they’re not particularly correlated um the feeling of obligation and or getting things done particularly like in the case of the CEO that we spoke about um or business being busy you can be extremely busy and not feel obligated absolutely right um yeah so and I 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 like I would say go experiment find out if it’s true find out if you walk around like allowing yourself to feel a deep love for everybody if you become a if you become a worse self selfish self-involved person like this is back to the like the selfishness episode of 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 wanted 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 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 was it 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 like if she’s got a little bit of work to do around stuff then she’s like feels obligated to do it more likely 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 four AP classes and I have to like apply for college which is all just what happened then all she had is just do the next thing there’s no time for the sense of obligation and she’ll say It Feels So empowering I feel so powerful I feel so competent and it’s and it 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 doing obviously that’s not sustainable for and 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’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 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 we feel more obligation around it if we’re if we’re avoiding feeling the fear of missing out on everything else and so there there seems to be something about the kind of what people describe as the tragedy of choice or the oh interesting yeah that seems to be related too 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 you’re making the choice and so it’s not like I’m confronted with it it’s I’ve made it yeah yeah 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’m choosing it and so I can choose to do something different next time yeah so and there’s something scary about that empowerment also to to take that responsibility it’s very alive yeah right it’s very not cut off yeah obligation is very like deadens it it is cut off yeah yeah so we’ve talked about obligation being a way that people cut themselves off from love they cut off the love 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 going to try to be powerful to get love I’m trying to you know trying to be trying trying in itself as a way to kind of cut off from love so there there’s I think that might be a really great I’m 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 in and and I the way I would describe it there’s this gets a little bit weird but I I love that one of my favorite phrases is the search for light requires Darkness um 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 in in a weird way I would say that that’s like a way to describe potentially the entire journey of the Journey of like 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 the It doesn’t require anything besides not cutting it off 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 from love 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 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 exactly I have to be awake or whatever the shit is yeah yeah awesome thank you Joe what a pleasure great than everybody for listening uh if you like this episode please share it with a friend find us on X at Art of a comp 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 uh I hope you enjoyed the show take care awesome all right bye