Summary
Joe Hudson explores love as a deep welcoming — of self, others, and life — rather than as categorized by the object of love (romantic, friendship, divine). He identifies four components of love: peace, enjoyment, care, and deep welcoming, with deep welcoming being the greatest leverage point. Each component has a shadow side: peace can become dissociation, enjoyment can become hedonism, care can become codependency, and deep welcoming can become apathy.
The episode addresses common misconceptions about love: that love means being nice (when compassion is often a sharp sword), that love can’t hold boundaries (when great love requires them), and that love exists without empowerment (when genuine love requires feeling empowered enough to welcome all outcomes). Joe explains the mechanism of love — it allows things to move and evolve rather than being held in place — and contrasts this with defense, which creates separation and rigidity.
Joe shares powerful stories including a board member he fought to remove while maintaining an open heart, and his experience weeping during mundane conversations as he opened to a part of life he’d shut off. He explains that heartbreak is actually the mechanism of expansion — each heartbreak increases the capacity to love — and discusses why he chose “Art of Accomplishment” over “Art of Unconditional Love” as a name, meeting people where they are while delivering the deeper truth.
Key Concepts
- Love as deep welcoming is the greatest leverage point for transformation
- codependency
- Love requires empowerment — you must feel safe enough to welcome all outcomes
- The mechanism of love: allowing something to move so it can evolve
- Every heartbreak increases the capacity to love
- You can fight while maintaining an open heart
- Surrender is most powerful when directed to your inner calling, not external authority
Key Quotes
“Love can’t really exist without empowerment. You can be fond of, you can be scared of losing, but to actually love 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.”
“The mechanism of love is that you allow for something to be able to move and therefore can evolve instead of holding it in place.”
“Every time my heart breaks it increases my capacity to love.”
“Open yourself up for annihilation because that way you can find out what part of yourself can’t be annihilated.” — Pema Chödrön (paraphrased)
“Our capacity to love all the bits of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love everybody on the planet.”
“If you start trying to love yourself to change yourself, it won’t work, because trying to change yourself isn’t loving yourself.”
Transcript
love can’t really exist without empowerment you can be fond of you can be scared of losing but to actually love 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 Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson
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 oh that’s a good question that’s a big one um laughs 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 this 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 is 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 it 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 sounds like what you’re saying is that this 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 these different categories like they’re focused on these categories more or less the Buddhist piece has a big emphasis um Taoist enjoyment has a deep emphasis in 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 the dilemma with the care one is that all of these ways of loving they have um 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 that 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 and many Traditions have surrendered 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 or allowed to be and it 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 I don’t know whether it’s just people thought of surrender differently than as they do now but the Dilemma generally with a 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 it always knows the right direction but that we always have a voice in our head that shoots it down perhaps surrender into 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 and not emphasizing it is another way to lose our identity in general all of these methods the 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 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 um losing your identity in a group that’s healthy and unlike most of the ways people lose identities in groups um 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 is 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 the whole if you will then love is the result that’s not 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 Eddie 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 however 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 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 lined 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 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 um and I 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 would give 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 subtotically yeah yeah and so it was like that’s an act of love but that sure as shit 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 that’s just not how love works um 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 if as if Mother Teresa didn’t hold boundaries love is holding boundaries great mothers 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 it just shows up in people’s lives day to day yeah wow 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 then you’re leading from Fear so that 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 change in the way that you want to do but it’s gonna 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 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 mine side defenses any way that you’ve decided that they’re 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 gonna 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 bhagavadavita and our I’m so bad with names yeah and the the there 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 gotta 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 attention 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 I 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 I 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 hmm so what else what else can we do um well one thing for sure is if you can’t love yourself and 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 welcome mean for who they are um 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 uh 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 uh 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 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 look 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 compassion 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 uh let’s say a boundary that I might set with myself is um if I am noticing myself getting angry I am going to separate 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 stopped 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 trying 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 your 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 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 pemma shodron 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 if 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 um I’m gonna 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 and we love contrarian thinking and Boards typically any board I’ve been a part of but this was just contrary for this sake of contrarian it wasn’t contrary because it was independent thinking anyway so every time for like six weeks I calm up and I would say or six months I would say this is what I’m gonna 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 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 for 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 the 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 or 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 gonna 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 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 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 expander the feeling of expansion of the hardly and it and that’s the feeling and and it 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 there 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 there is underneath this so I would hang out with people having to name 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’d 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 weeped it was very awkward I mean you know saying there for crying they’d be like you did this with them oh yeah I did yeah present in their presence yeah it was it was awkward at times and they’d be like what’s wrong I’m like yeah 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 praying that I was just completely able to enjoy the kind of the more superficial way of connecting and and even found out that there’s some of that super quote-unquote superficial way of connecting this not superficial at all that you know connecting Over Flowers or connecting over food or connected like there’s a a 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’re 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 back side of it there’s so much more love available to me so yeah of 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 them along or whatever I could and I don’t know if I could have ever but but that heartbreak and not in capacity to feel into that totally increase 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 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 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 goes for a cold plunge the same goes to a cold lunch it’s the exact same thing it’s like it 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 it I don’t want to answer that question um there’s a part of me that says you answer as a as a as a business guy but also as a um as a coach you meet people with where they are right you meet people with with the problems they think they have and most people aren’t walking around going I just don’t know how to love enough I I you know what my 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 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 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 effectively 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 gonna 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 six 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 to instead of the thing itself how I I think a lot of the 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 trusted in that way I think that’s part of it um but there’s another part of it too which is its 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 back pedal it turns out it’s like the perfect back pedal 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 that there is a 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 choose a little more free time but I’m sad that they’re done because I’m not gonna get to play with you for a couple yeah I’m excited to see what kind of playing happens again in the future yeah yeah it will for sure what a pleasure Brett thank you thank you thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US in your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com