Have you ever been confused about what love is? Do you struggle with being consistent with loving yourself and others. Have you always thought that love is simple a feeling?
In this episode we also look at some of the misconceptions that we have about love, what love truly is, and how we can access our true nature of love.
I hope in this episode you will see that YOU ARE LOVE!!!
Join me as we take a look at:
• Why love is not just a feeling or preference • How to overcome self-judgment and embrace self-compassion • Practical exercises to nurture self-love • The spiritual essence of love and its healing power
Love is not a transient feeling or a preference; it's a deeper, steadfast commitment that transcends changing circumstances. By understanding love in this way, we can cultivate more stable and meaningful relationships with ourselves and others.
We can bring love to all aspects of life, especially the challenging ones, such as personal struggles and negative behaviors that often stem from pain.
Whether you're struggling with self-acceptance or seeking deeper understanding of love's true nature, this episode has valuable insights to help you on your journey to self-healing and transformation.
Have you ever been confused about what love is? Do you struggle with being consistent with loving yourself and others. Have you always thought that love is simple a feeling?
In this episode we also look at some of the misconceptions that we have about love, what love truly is, and how we can access our true nature of love.
I hope in this episode you will see that YOU ARE LOVE!!!
Join me as we take a look at:
• Why love is not just a feeling or preference • How to overcome self-judgment and embrace self-compassion • Practical exercises to nurture self-love • The spiritual essence of love and its healing power
Love is not a transient feeling or a preference; it's a deeper, steadfast commitment that transcends changing circumstances. By understanding love in this way, we can cultivate more stable and meaningful relationships with ourselves and others.
We can bring love to all aspects of life, especially the challenging ones, such as personal struggles and negative behaviors that often stem from pain.
Whether you're struggling with self-acceptance or seeking deeper understanding of love's true nature, this episode has valuable insights to help you on your journey to self-healing and transformation.
where you stop turning love on and off towards yourself. Oh I did good, so I love myself. Oh, I did bad, so I hate myself. Oh, I can love this part of me because I like it and it's good. Ah, but I can't love this part of me because it's bad and it's wrong. No, you're going to love all of yourself, you're going to work towards loving all of yourself, and that's how you're actually going to heal. I know it feels very contrarian to think well, how could I love parts of me that just are so wrong and bad and that I hate about myself? I hate that I'm a people pleaser. I hate that I keep this addiction or this behavior. Those things are coming from pain. Okay, let me just be as clear as I possibly can, out of deep compassion for you. Those things are coming from pain, and pain gets healed with love and great, fantastic news you are love and that's why you can be your own healer and that's why you can transform your relationship with yourself by accessing the love that is inside of you, that is just waiting for you to release it towards yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm your host, jerry, and I'm so deeply grateful that you are here, as always. I want to say thank you, thank you for doing the work to work on your relationship with yourself. You know, one of my favorite quotes by Ram Dass is this that I can do nothing for you but work on myself, and you can do nothing for me except for work on yourself. And I think it is so true because the more that we work on ourselves, the better version that we become and it's really the only thing we have any control of or any agency over is our ability to work on ourselves. And as we work on ourselves our relationship with ourselves we show up in this world in a much more healthy way. Our relationships become more healthy and what we have to offer this world becomes so much more beautiful as we work on ourselves. So thank you, thank you for being here, listening to this podcast and doing the work of becoming the best and highest version of yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
As many of you know, I just recently got back from walking the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage or a journey, or whatever you want to label it of almost 500 miles or almost 800 kilometers, and it was such a beautiful time, but I'm so happy to be back here in Colorado with my amazing bride and just spending some beautiful time catching up with each other catching up with each other. So it's good to be back and I'm excited to continue to share with you some of the insights that I gained along the way as a part of being on the Camino de Santiago. And today the thing that I want to share with you is about love. I'm going to have some very beautiful insights and breakthroughs around love what it is, what it isn't, and how we can continue to walk in more love and expand the love that we have. So today I want to talk about maybe some of the misconceptions that we have about love and because of those misconceptions, we really struggle with things like self-love and loving other people, and we're really limiting ourselves, love and loving other people, and we're really limiting ourselves. We're really limiting the access to the greatest healing power, the most transformative power that we have, which is love. Now I do want to acknowledge that, after over a year of doing this podcast, that I've not actually had an episode on the topic of love itself or defining what love is, and that's just kind of ironic considering that the name of this podcast is the Permission to Love podcast. But I guess everything has its right timing, and now is the right timing for me to share with you some of the thoughts about love, what it is, what it isn't, and, once again, maybe some of the misconceptions that we have, because if we can get rid of some of those misconceptions, it will unlock some very beautiful and powerful things within us that will help our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others and just our relationship with life in general.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, so let's go ahead and get started, and let's start with what love is not. So, if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I like to start with talking about what something isn't before I really jump into what something is. So, for me, love is not a feeling. Okay, let's start there as point number one. And why is that important? Well, one. And why is that important?
Jerry Henderson:
Well, feelings are very, very, very fickle, right, I will feel one day one way and in the next day I'll feel a totally different way, and that can go moment to moment, and you know that feelings can ping pong all over the place, right? And so if we put love in the feeling category, it just changes too much, right, and it really devalues what love is at its essence. Okay. So if I wake up one day and I love how the weather is, right, I feel great. But I wake up the next day and I don't like the weather and how it feels, and then I feel terrible, right, because maybe I've got something planned, I've got some type of event, and if it's raining or if the weather isn't the way that I want it to be, that can affect the way that you feel, okay. And so feelings are roller coasters and feelings are impermanent and they're always changing.
Jerry Henderson:
And so if we say that love is simply a feeling, we are going to be all over the place, right? We're going to love somebody one day and not love them the next day. We're going to love something about life and not the next day, and then we're going to love something about ourselves, and then you know, within hours we're going to be judging that thing about ourselves. So I want to help you get the idea out of your mind that love is a feeling. Now, that might be a new concept for you, but just trust me on this. Okay, that love is not a feeling. Now, feelings come with love. Okay, we can feel certain things as a result of loving somebody or of loving the universe. Of loving somebody or of loving the universe, the people that are around us, and loving ourselves and loving nature and loving animals. Yes, feelings will come with it, but it's a backwards approach from what people think.
Jerry Henderson:
Many people think that, well, I'm going to have this emotion of love and that's going to cause me to love or to do acts of love. It's actually the choice of love that then has feelings that follow. Now, how does that work when it comes to a relationship or when you meet somebody and you fall in love? Well, it often does start, yes, with emotions, and we have these feelings of attraction, we have these feelings of infatuation and we start to have all of these emotions, which are a lot of times bodily reactions, visual reactions, energy reactions, and those are all good and beautiful things that are around attraction and connection, which then do grow into love. And you might say, well, I had love at first sight. Absolutely possible. And I'm not going to try to bucket anything into some solid definition of how humans work as I go through explaining, in my opinion, what love is. But the reality is is that love is not a feeling, but feelings do follow love. You know, you can have somebody who fell radically in love and then maybe two, three, five, ten years down the road, they're no longer with that person and we'll say things like well, I fell in love and then I fell out of love. I don't believe that love is that fickle or fragile, that love is something that goes beyond all of that, that transcends feelings. Okay, so we're going to talk about what it is here in just a little bit, but just hold with me that it is something that transcends a feeling.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, the second thing that people really struggle with and maybe even more so than love being a feeling is categorizing love in a preference, as a preference, and it's not as conscious as I've just said it for many people. We don't make this conscious decision that, oh, I love things that I prefer. But that's really what is happening, right? We prefer certain things to be a certain way, and then we love it. Or we say that I love it. For instance, I love it when the sun is shining, I love when things go my way, or I love when you know things come together in a certain way, or whatever nomenclature or language you like to use, but we're actually what we're saying when we say that we love something or love somebody in a certain way, or whatever nomenclature or language you like to use, but we're actually what we're saying when we say that we love something or love somebody. We're often actually talking about our preference, that we like it when things are a certain way and we don't like things when they're not a certain way, and that's going to be very important for you to grasp hold of as I talk about self-love and what love is here in just a little bit.
Jerry Henderson:
But we get really confused around this. We begin to associate love with our preferences and when things aren't the way that we want them to be, we say that we don't love it or that we hate certain things, or we hate it when things go a certain way, because we're confusing love with a preference. So love is not a preference. Love transcends preferences. We can come to a place where we love everything, and I'll get into what that might mean here in just a second. But we can come to a place where we love everything, but what that's going to require from us is allowing us to move away from the concept that love is a feeling and then, moving away from the concept that love is our preference, that we love things when they go our way or we love people when they align with our thinking or our politics or our you know religion or whatever. It is that idea that we love the things that we prefer. Once again, isn't this like conscious decision that we're always making? But that's what's happening, and that's why it becomes very difficult for us to practice love when we put it in the preference category or when we're loving things that we like or loving people that we like, or loving ourselves when we do what we like. Right, we love ourselves when we do the right thing. We don't love ourselves when we don't do the right thing. We talk nice about ourselves and feel good about ourselves when we do certain things, or we hate ourselves and judge ourselves and condemn ourselves when we act certain ways. Okay, that isn't love. That is you responding to a preference or a like that you have all right. So what we want to be able to do is move away from that type of thinking into a higher level thinking of what love actually is.
Jerry Henderson:
So what is love? Well, love is a transcendent, eternal force. It is the highest force. An eternal force, it is the highest force. Some people call it God. In the scriptures it says that God is love, not that God does loving acts, not that God is loving at times, but that God is love, it is the essence of God, it is the highest form of energy that transcends everything. Okay, so you are love, that is your nature, that is your essence and it gets buried with life. Right, we get hurt. You know, no infant comes into this world hating everything around them. Infants come into this world with love as their nature and it takes a lot of work to cover that up, to distort that through pain, through judgment, through our training as humans on this earth. Right, we get trained pretty fast to not be loving, to not be kind. But the essence of who you are, the essence of humanity, the essence of God, the essence of creation, is love. It is what it is, it isn't what it does. It is love. Love isn't something that is done, even though love has actions that go with it. Love is a state of being. It is the actual nature, character, being. It is the actual nature, character, essence of God, of you, of this world. Okay, so that's really different than it being a feeling. That's really different than it being a preference, and it's really different also than it just being an action.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, why is all of this important? Why am I framing this in this way? Well, because if you are love, if we are love, then we will love everything, because that's who we are, that is our nature. And you might be saying well, how could we love everything? I mean, how could we love war, and how could we love pain and crime and violence and all of the horrible things that go on in this world? How could we love that? I mean, if you're asking us to love all things, then how do we love that? Well, once again, that is a confusion around preference. Do we prefer war? No, is war horrible? Yes, is it something that we can wish doesn't exist? Yes.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, when I'm saying that we are love and that we love everything, what I'm actually saying is that we're bringing the force of love to those things, to the pain, to the war. What changes war? What stops war? Well, ultimately, it's going to be love. What heals relationships? It's going to be love, it's not judgment.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, you don't have to like what's going on, you don't have to prefer what's going on, but you can still bring love to things that you don't prefer or that you don't like. You can meet violence with love. You can love people in their darkest moments, in their most challenging moments, because what you're doing is you're bringing that energy of love that's within you and you're offering it to this world. You're bringing love to pain, you're bringing love to suffering, and it is only love that's going to heal those things. You see, we can sit around and complain about why things are so terrible and it shouldn't be this way, and somebody's politics is like that, and this world has too much suffering. All of that is judgment, and judgment changes nothing.
Jerry Henderson:
But what we can do is realize that we are love, and if you are love, you're not moving in love and then out of love, and then all of a sudden, you love this but you don't love that, and that's what's breaking down love so much in this society, and we'll talk about that just a little bit. But what you're doing, if you are love, you're bringing the energy of love to every single situation, every single scenario. Is that easy? It's not easy in the beginning, but I believe that we can get to a place where we're allowing our nature to flow from us. We're allowing love to come from us in this world and we're removing everything from us that is not love. That we're doing the work. We're working on ourselves, our relationship with ourselves, so that love flows more easily from us, that our nature is no longer confused as judgmental. We no longer confuse our nature as somebody bad that's trying to be good. No, we are good. That is letting go of the bad. I hope that makes sense. Very big difference.
Jerry Henderson:
So when we begin to see that love is our essence, we then begin to move into a place of not turning love on and turning love off, and choosing to love this person and not choosing to love that person or to love this condition of life, but not that condition of life. Now we're bringing our love to everything and that love is going to heal everything on this planet. It is eventually love that is going to transform everything into something beautiful. Now that also pertains to your life and that's why people so struggle with self-love, because they're turning it on and they're turning it off towards themselves. I love this part of me, but not that part of me. This part of me is good. This part of me is bad. No, no, no, no.
Jerry Henderson:
That is not how we want to look at our relationship with ourselves. We want to love all of ourselves. And how do we do that when we recognize that love is a spiritual force, love is an eternal force, love is an essence, it is a healing force that we're bringing to the parts of ourselves that we have once been judging so harshly? Because you can just sit around, keep judging it, keep condemning it, keep blaming it and just keep hurting yourself more and more by that attitude towards yourself. Or you can say I'm going to bring love to the parts of myself, yes, even the parts of myself that I don't like. You see, when I work with people in coaching, they'll often say things like you're telling me to love myself, but how can I love that part of myself? I mean, that part is like horrible. I mean that's the part of me as to why I can't love myself. No, that is not the part of you, that is not the reason that you can't love yourself. That is the invitation, more than anything, to teach you how to love all of yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
See, once again, what's happening is people are confusing their preference with love. They're saying I prefer. I wish that this wasn't in my life. So now I'm going to judge it and now I'm going to be mean to myself and I'm going to talk horribly to myself because I wish this wasn't in my life. And then what happens? That behavior continues to persist and to stay in your life because you're feeding it with an energy that keeps that cycle going. But if you can shift that energy towards love, okay, let love come from your heart of who you are, towards that part of you that you wish wasn't a part of you, that you are condemning and judging, and just meet it with love, just witness it, just be with it, because as you're with that part of you, it allows that part of you to open up to you. It allows that part of you to speak to you. You begin to build a healthy relationship with that behavior. You begin to understand why you're doing it.
Jerry Henderson:
For example, with my drinking, I didn't have any idea why I couldn't stop drinking. I just kept drinking and drinking. I didn't understand that I was never going to be able to stop drinking until I learned why I was drinking and what the pain was underneath all of that. And guess what? The pain didn't need me to meet it with more pain. I wasn't going to heal the pain which was leading to the drinking by beating up that pain and causing more pain to it and telling myself what a loser I was that I had that pain, what a loser you were that you had that abuse and that trauma in your life. No, that's not going to heal anything. What was going to bring healing was me seeing that that pain was there and then meeting that pain with love, with compassion. So I had to learn to love all the parts of myself. You're going to have to learn to love all the parts of yourself in order for you to heal those parts of yourself. Judging yourself, beating yourself up, is just turning you into your own abuser and continuing the pain cycle.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, eckhart Tolle talks about the pain body. You beating yourself up is going to keep you trapped in a loop of that pain body and you're never going to move on. You're never going to heal until you meet it with love. And I know that's a challenge. But that's why I'm talking about letting go of the idea that love is a feeling and that it's a preference.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, if you can let go of the idea that love is a feeling, you can look at yourself when you do things, that when you don't feel good about yourself and realize that I don't have to feel love towards myself in order to do a loving action, feel love towards myself in order to do a loving action. The loving action will eventually produce the feelings. Okay. But if you're chasing a feeling of loving yourself, boy, you're going to stay stuck. That's going to be a long journey, it's going to be a roller coaster and you'll never get there. But if you can realize it's not a feeling, it's a choice that comes from the essence of who you are, you're allowing love to flow through you, you're opening the door of love towards that part of yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
And if you can get rid of the idea that love is a preference and stop thinking that, wow, I'm doing that and I really wish I wouldn't do that and I hate myself for, wow, I'm doing that and I really wish that I wouldn't do that and I hate myself for doing that and I'm judging myself for doing that. And as long as I have that in my life, I can't change. And because I'm doing things that I don't want to do, there must be something wrong with me. And so how can I love myself if I keep doing those things. No, love is not a preference. And so what you're doing is you're getting beyond all of that thinking and you're beginning to see love as you are, as your energy, as your nature, who your pure being is, and then that's going to help you get to a point where you stop turning love on and off towards yourself. Oh I did good, so I love myself. Oh, I did bad, so I hate myself. Oh, I can love this part of me because I like it and it's good. Ah, but I can't love this part of me because it's bad and it's wrong. No, you're going to love all of yourself. You're going to work towards loving all of yourself, and that's how you're actually going to heal.
Jerry Henderson:
I know it feels very contrarian to think well, how could I love parts of me that just are so wrong and bad and that I hate about myself? I hate that I'm a people pleaser. I hate that I keep this addiction or this behavior. Those things are coming from pain. Okay, let me just be as clear as I possibly can, out of deep compassion for you. Those things are coming from pain, and pain gets healed with love. And great, fantastic news you are love and that's why you can be your own healer, and that's why you can transform your relationship with yourself by accessing the love that is inside of you. That is just waiting for you to release it towards yourself. But you're going to have to let go of the idea that it's a feeling. You're going to have to let go of the preference that I like this part of me, love this part of me and not that part of me. That's going to keep you in a constant state of on and off with love, and that on and off is actually going to bring even more struggle to you, more confusion and more judgment. Okay, so, with all of that as a foundation, I want to give you some exercises that can help you with love, with tapping into the nature of who you are and allowing that love to be released towards yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, the first thing, I'm gonna ask you to write down something that you just really dislike or don't prefer or wish was not a part of your life. Okay, this is about you a specific behavior, a specific feeling, a specific pattern or whatever it is. I want you to write that down. You say I wish that this wasn't a part of my life or I don't like this part about myself. Okay, now, after you've done that, I want you to practice meeting that part of you with love. How do you do that when you think about that part of yourself?
Jerry Henderson:
Usually, when you think about that part of yourself, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You want to distract yourself from it. You want to start beating yourself up over it. You want to medicate the feelings or whatever that come up as a result of thinking about that part. I want to ask you to enter into the discomfort of that part of you. I want that part of you that is trying to get your attention, that is acting in certain ways because of pain. I want you to allow that part of you to come up, okay, and then I want you to place your hand on your heart and I want you to say to that part I love you, I love you.
Jerry Henderson:
Now, I'm not going to ask you to say I love the fact that I do this. That's not what I'm not going to ask you to say I love the fact that I do this. That's not what I'm saying. You're going to say that I love that part of me and I want you to think about saying this to that part of you. I understand that you're in pain. I understand that you're hurting and I love you. I love you, I give you love. I allow my nature, who I am, to meet you with love. Okay, so what that's doing is it's helping transition that part of you from a space of judgment and just seeing it as something bad to recognizing that it's a source of pain and it's a source of you that's hurting. And then you're verbalizing and giving the energy of love to that part of yourself, which it is that love that's going to begin to heal that part of you.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, because, once again, we're not looking at love as a feeling. We're not looking at love as a feeling, we're not looking at love as a preference. We're looking at love as a healing force that abides within us. That is who we are, and we're bringing that loving force to a part of us that got hurt, that got broken, that's in pain, and so you're choosing to unleash that love towards that part of you instead of judgment, instead of meeting it with judgment and discomfort and wanting to run from it. You're going to face it head on. You're going to see that part of you and say I love you, I'm here with you, I'm not running away from you. I'm not judging you anymore. I'm seeing you with compassion. I'm seeing the original hurts and wounds that activated all of that in you and I choose to love you. I love that part of me.
Jerry Henderson:
Okay, that's going to be very hard for some of you because you're going to continue to flip back and forth of thinking that well, when I say I love that part of me, that means I'm loving that. That's there and I don't want to love that. I don't want to. I think that part of me is terrible. I'm not asking you once again to say that you like it. I'm just wanting to help you recognize that the way you're going to get unstuck from it is to meet it with love, because love is going to heal that area and that area is what's causing the behavior. And so this is going to really transform the way that you meet yourself and the way that you greet parts of yourself. When you let go of the concept that loves a feeling, loves a preference, and you see it as the essence of who you are and you're going to give that to yourself, you're going to love yourself unconditionally. Okay, the conditions of what's going on with you are not going to change the way that you love yourself okay, the way that you meet yourself with love. You're going to not let conditions dictate whether or not you show love to yourself.
Jerry Henderson:
And we get this idea when it comes to other people. They would think well, we want to live unconditional love towards other people in kindness Great, beautiful, wonderful. But all that is going to flow from your ability to do that to yourself. First, because you're going to allow love to come forth from you towards you and that's going to transform you to an even more loving person. Because what's happening is you're uncovering your true nature of love by learning to love yourself, and that, my friends, will transform you and it will transform this world. And that's why I am so passionate about the fact that you are worthy of your own love. Because you are love right. You are worthy of giving yourself who you are, what you are, and meeting all of the parts of yourself with compassion and love.
Jerry Henderson:
And I know it can sound like a radical idea to unconditionally love all of who you are, because we're so good at sitting in the corner and judging ourselves and remembering the past and criticizing and beating ourselves up. That has got to stop if we're going to walk into the version of ourselves that we truly are. We have to let go of the idea that there is a someday version of us. We have to fully let go of that idea that there's a someday version of us that's worthy of love, because that's always going to keep you from loving yourself in the now. The now is all that exists. There's no yesterday, there's no tomorrow. There's only now, and the only place that you can love yourself is in the now. The only place you can practice self-love is in the now. The only place that love actually exists is in the now.
Jerry Henderson:
So, learning to love yourself, regardless of what's going on, regardless of conditions and circumstances, and to give yourself love now, is what is going to transform and heal your relationship with yourself, the way that you treat yourself, and it's going to cause you to feel the things that you want to feel. Remember those feelings of how you want to feel about yourself. They're going to follow the way that you begin to act and treat yourself, and the way that you act and treat yourself is going to come from the realization of who you actually are. You're going to live out who you are. Okay, beautiful.
Jerry Henderson:
Well, thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode of the Permission to Love podcast, a long overdue subject. So thank you. I'm so grateful that you take your time each week to be here, to be a part of this community. Now, if you've not yet had a chance to subscribe or to follow or to hit those reminders, go ahead and do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out. It's going to continue to keep you in that mode of progressing towards the healing journey and doing the work of learning to heal your relationship with yourself. Now let me ask you a favor If you've not yet had a chance to share this podcast with somebody else, I want to encourage you to do that. It's one of the primary ways that the word gets out about this podcast and it continues to grow and more people learn about how to heal their relationship with themselves.
Jerry Henderson:
Now I also want to remind you of a few more things.
Jerry Henderson:
Number one if you haven't had a chance yet to pick up my book Returning, a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing, I want to encourage you to get a copy, because it's been so transformative for so many people already.
Jerry Henderson:
You can find a link to purchase the book by seeing the show notes in this episode. I also want to remind you that I have a lot of resources to continue to help you on your journey outside of this podcast. So, if you need personal coaching, I offer personal coaching. I'd love to work with you on some of those areas where you feel stuck and you just need some help to get unstuck. So if you're interested in that, once again, you can see the show notes in this episode, or you can go to jerryhendersonorg forward slash coaching and you'll find all the information that you need there in order to get signed up. And then, finally, there are other resources on my website, so you can simply go to jerryhendersonorg and tap into some of the resources that I've created to help you on your journey. And as I close, I want to remind you, as always, that you are worthy of your own love.