Transcript:
0:01
Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimacy, attachment, sexuality, spirituality, self expression and other relational themes from a trauma responsive somatic energetic lens. And with the queer polyamorous twist, of course, I’m Isha Vela, trauma, psychologist somatic intimacy Alchemist shadow doula love at our guest, intuitive channel and sovereignty coach. You’re here because you understand that integrating intimacy wounds build safety and trust within your body. And that safety and trust is what allows you to fully own and direct your erotic and creative life force in your relationships and purposeful work. My intention is for the conversations and tools shared in this podcast, to light a fire in your heart and under your magical ass while supporting you on your kinky human journey to owning all of yourself.
0:52
Hi, Rompereglas. Welcome to my kitchen and to this Full Moon episode on love anarchy. Before we get started, I just wanted to share the multiple ways that you can access and explore somatic intimacy alchemy right now. I have three spots open for my nine month one on one mentorship for spiritual entrepreneurs called legacy. And this involves teaching you the foundations of radical embodied devotion to your lifeforce, so that you can create a balance between systems and flow in your own body by healing intimacy wounds by expanding your nervous system capacity to hold more and to become the sovereign author of your energy. For folks wanting to explore somatic expressive shadow alchemy, to break through intimacy impasses and deepen the connection in their relationships, I offer three and six month mentorships for individuals and couples of all configurations and persuasions through devotion. Finally, I also offer monthly events that with registration include one month free membership into my online somatic healing collective revolutionary Trombetta glass. And you can join revolutionary on pay glass anytime. But it’s really nice to get a taste of the work and then have that be sort of
2:18
an invitation into exploring more. So the one for this month is happening in one week on February 23. I’ll be offering a two hour workshop all about accessing the divine self within you also known as your sovereign or authentic self. Basically the place in you that is clear and unencumbered with the you know, unencumbered with the self doubt and fear that we’re often conditioned to feel. And we often think that we have to like heal the self doubt or overcome fear before moving forward with the things we desire in our life with our vision. But the truth is that fear and self doubt and maybe even judgment is going to accompany you through the journey. And having access to the sovereign place inside of you especially to make decisions that are aligned with your truth is essential. And I’m here to show you that it’s a lot easier than you think. It’s an inquiry process coupled with direct compassionate attention and body work that’s accessible and simple to do. So the workshop is called Sanctum body as temple. And during the workshop you’ll learn and practice my four step process. I call them body relational presencing through which you can access and hold your inherent wholeness and sovereignty. And this, this four step process
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is the foundation for all of the work that I offer, right? So you get this taste and you really get to feel into okay, like what is this really about? So this is happening on Wednesday, February 23, from five to 7pm, PST and investment is $55. And all the links to the experiences I just talked about are included in the show notes. And the link to explore what’s inside revolutionary from Vegas is also included in the show notes. Okay, on to love anarchy. This is one of my favorite topics, and something I’ve been really diving deep on over the past year. And love anarchy is different from relationship anarchy. I do consider myself a relationship anarchist and I’ll share briefly what that means to me just so that we have a point of differentiation here.
4:35
So relationship anarchy means that I approach relationships in a non hierarchical way. All of my race relationships whether or not they include sexuality, have equal importance to me and I invest in them as such.
4:52
And that’s largely the reason why for this podcast I’m not focusing solely on polyamory.
5:00
But on relationships in general, and particularly the multi Emery aspect of relationship, right we’re, you know, the point being that we’re already multi amorous, right? We have relationships to everything, we have a relationship to ourself, we have a relationship to land, we have a relationship to our business or we have a relationship with our children. We’re already multi amorous, so this is sort of like a deconstruction process. So
5:29
you know, in short, I’m interested in on colonizing our understanding of relationship, and in particular D romanticizing relationships because our conditioning into this whole romantic model is part of what keeps us externally focused on getting our needs met. And I love that this episode is coming out just days after after housing, say Thanksgiving after Valentine’s Day.
5:53
So that’s, that’s extra beautiful Kismet. So, I have a lot to say about on colonizing relationships. And I’ll do that in another episode because it deserves its own episode. But I do want to say a little bit more about relationship anarchy. So when I enter relationships, as a relationship anarchist, I don’t follow the expected progressive stages of a relationship, also known as the relationship escalator. So
6:23
the hetero normative monogamous relationship, escalator often looks like, you know, initial contact, dating, romantic courtship, emotional investment, sexual contact, becoming an us adopting relationship role labels, making explicit agreements, committing, merging and concluding with marriage, okay.
6:50
And instead, I approach relationships from an like with a,
6:55
from an emergent kind of perspective or orientation. So I allow relationships and love to unfold naturally and to take whatever form it desires to take, right? Whether love wants to, you know, go into flow in a certain direction, or the relationship wants to develop in a certain direction. I approach it without pulling or pushing the energy in any particular direction, right, I can want something. But I’m really just sort of like opening up and allowing the process to unfold naturally as it wants to do. And this often means that I don’t get what I want, or what I expect. And, you know, my ego doesn’t like that. And this is accompanied by plenty of heartbreak when things don’t go like I want them to go, because I love when things go my way, as we all do, right.
7:58
And it also means that I experienced plenty of attachment fear that I heal in the process of being in these relationships. So that’s partly why I’m here for it, because I find that part really, really exciting. As difficult as it is, I really love the challenge, and the invitation to heal. And honestly, what satisfies me more than getting a specific outcome or protecting myself from fear or pain is being in a co creative dance with life and love that feels authentic, organic, and spiritually aligned. Right, like I feel curious about like, oh universe, like, what do you have in store for me, because that, again, thinking about relationship, that’s the relationship that I have with the universe, the universe is like, it’s, it’s here for me, it wants the best for me and my evolution. So I’m like, I’m open and friendly with it.
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So I want to back up for a second to talk about, like, coming into this process of love anarchy, because it deserves a backstory. And I promised a lot of really juicy storytelling in here.
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So that’s what I’m gonna do. So
9:16
after two years, almost two years of celibacy, intentional celibacy, and obviously COVID helped with that. But it was really about
9:27
you know, I was, this was sort of this devotional practice that I was engaged in, that I talked about in the last episode, during which I was stoking and enjoying the fire of my own sacred sexuality. And I got to a point where I finally felt ready to explore relationships with other people. And that readiness like if the readiness was a process, right, during that period of cellos, celibacy, I was healing
9:58
any, any little piece of them
10:00
The violence that I had about being in relationships and I have plenty ambivalence, because had come out of a relationship that didn’t feel good.
10:08
You know, my marriage, and especially the divorce had become toxic. And partly like my contribution to that is what I had to really clear out.
10:20
I carried some scars from that, and I had my own pieces that I needed to look at, like what was my contribution to that toxicity, and I wanted to get really, really, really clear about that, because I did not I was committed to not making the same mistakes again, I was committed to really creating the sexual spiritual partnerships that I desired, and I had to really look at myself in that process. Right. I was aware that I was you know, avoidant Lee attached
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Yeah, yeah. I was avoidant Lee attached and, and I, for me to resolve that, for me to resolve that part of my avoidant attachment, I had to get really deeply in touch with my loneliness, which is something I don’t often feel because I had some protective layers around it that needed to be peeled off. Essentially, I had to make sure that I was opening my heart and erotic lifeforce to become an energetic match for what I desired.
11:21
And so when my body finally arrived at that full, yes, like the FUCK YES to receiving other humans, I dove into sexual intimacy as a polyamorous person, and committed to dating like it was psychological field work and research, exploring intimacy, desires, consent, kink, and sexuality from a spiritual perspective, and even gender.
11:49
I really wanted all of my sexual connections to be heart connected, that was really, really important to me, because that was a really big part of my healing was was connecting heart to sex, which is, you know, the essence of what I do in my work. And because I had experienced extreme codependency and entrapment under the guise of love, right, calling it love, but that it was something that didn’t feel good, something that
12:19
made me feel trapped. I wanted to experience relationships, in which love flowed freely and abundantly without those unhealthy attachments and expectations and entrapments. Because let’s face it, a lot of what we as a society called Love is actually the negotiation of needs, and the creation of contracts on that relationship escalator.
12:47
That, you know, we do to decrease the likelihood of experiencing hurt, rejection or abandonment.
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So, this has more to do with fear, and then security, then with actual love, and I really wanted to experience the actual love part. So
13:07
want to back up for a second and talk about like, why, why do we even get into this, I’ll get more into it in the next episode with intimacy wounds, but I just want to touch on it briefly. Because it just, it just provides a solid background for this.
13:27
This dismantling or like decolonizing aspect of love, right, what we call love, what it is and what it is. So you’ve heard this before our first relationship, right? Usually with our caregivers sets the foundation for all other relationships to everything, right, as I was saying before, to ourselves, love money, etc. And most of us, if not all have experienced unresolved trauma and some form of attachment wounding somewhere on the spectrum of trauma. Right, that first relationship with your caregivers was unsafe in some sort of way. And maybe instances only. Maybe it was inconsistent. Maybe it was emotionally disconnected. Or maybe it pushed you to be a version of yourself that didn’t reflect who you actually were. Right? It can be having a parent that is emotionally fragile. It could be having a parent who abuses substances, it could be even ancestral trauma coming from collective trauma, it could be overt neglect or abuse, right, things like that.
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So most of us don’t get our needs met, even with adequate parenting. And so this relationship dynamic causes changes in the energy body, right? Trauma is just too much too fast too soon, right? This is experience of overwhelm. And because emotions are energy, it’s really about how we manage pain and overwhelm. And when you are like a little, a little blob, a child
15:00
Baby, you create strategies, you create energetic strategies that help you cope with the pain of disconnection and loss and fear, etc. And these patterns because assuming that, you know, these, this environment that you grew up in creates repetition of some of these ways that are disconnected. So we create patterns to cope with that environment. And these become energy, relational energy templates.
15:32
And, over time, right, these becomes sort of solidified in your energy field, and then we sort of grow up with them. And then we bring those patterns and templates into our adult relationships, mostly romantic, because what we’re seeking to do in our adult relationships, if we’re not conscious of it, is heal those early wounds. Why?
15:58
Partly is is is our mega socialization, right? Everything we’re fed about relationships is about recreating a two person partnerships that reinforces this parent child unmet needs, right, we look to romantic partnerships to heal us, but unconsciously reenact our familiar and familial past in our search for that, that completion, that wholeness we place romantic partnerships above friendships because we’re seeking to get those primal needs met, which is right hence the relationship anarchy piece. Because you know that in your friendships, like the same issues don’t come up, right? You’re like Oh, but you know with so and so I’m able to do this and this and this and feel these parts come up, but in your romantic partnerships, because there is that like that, that it’s like this level of investment of of that part of you that says okay, you’re here to give this these certain things to me, there’s a contract here that doesn’t exist in your friendships, right. So there’s this piece around like reaching outward and again, I’ll talk more about this in the next episode when I talk about intimacy ones but right reaching outward to complete ourselves or to like from a place of need, I need you to do these things. So that I’m okay or the expectations right around need you have to be a certain way in order for me to feel okay or attachments right getting our belonging and worthiness needs met externally through another person.
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So what that is, isn’t love, right? We are negotiating caretaking, we are negotiating codependence contractual agreements in relationships and calling it love. We’re looking outside of ourselves to get our belonging needs that we’re looking to feel worthy and valuable and validated through
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this experience with another person, right through the through the the love, right, the affection or the affirmation that’s coming towards you.
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And of course, this has a hook, right? It’s kind of a trap. Because
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you know, there may be a sense of security for a while and you may actually really flourish in the partnership, but you begin to really feel this hook, when the relationship is ending. And when you start to feel what you’re losing, right, you’re feeling the loss of love, you’re feeling your your unworthiness, like the unraveling of your worthiness, as this relationship is ending.
18:49
And what is really important for me
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is in relationships and allowing love to flow freely is right, like what I know to be true is that the more you try to control and define what a relationship is, the more you can find, right? The more you try to create this tight structure around like what are we,
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the more it restricts the flow, think about a dam right or like a river that’s not allowed to flow you put like rocks there and you create structure, structure, structure structure, and there’s like there’s not enough space for love to flow. So love anarchy for me is about allowing love to flow freely in relationships without the unhealthy attachments the gripping right, the who I need to have you in a certain way or right the part of the part that wants to possess without the expectation that it be reciprocated, offering
20:00
instead, love from a place of abundance and genuine desire to give,
20:06
right to give love, just because you have it, and you feel like you want to fucking share it. Okay? So
20:17
backing up for a second, although this is the true desire of my spiritual self, it’s a whole practice. Let me tell you
20:27
fears of not having love reciprocated do come up that is fucking real. And in fact, just yesterday, the day before, I was up in a whole bunch of activated fear. And I wanted to record this episode and couldn’t, because I felt so damn uncomfortable in my body, because there was just a whole bunch of fear moving through me just kind of this release of fear.
20:58
So the practice is trusting love. Because we learn not to trust love.
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Coming back to your own love, and trusting the experience of love that is shared. That is the practice. This is on colonizing, and deconditioning and cycle breaking work. This is devotional alchemy, Okay, folks.
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And to give love freely, you have to be resourced in self love to be able to give it from a place of overflow. And this again goes into the energetics of healing intimacy wounds. Right. So more to come.
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For me,
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true love comes in the form of care,
21:48
consideration and appreciation.
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And I’ll say, again, I’ll repeat again that
21:58
the way you care for yourself, the way you are considerate of yourself, the way you appreciate yourself. That is part of the way that you fill up so that you are able to give and that goes back to devotion. That’s why in my online community, we practice you know, stoking the fires of your own erotic lifeforce, bragging and celebrating yourself. That’s part of the appreciation process and care through the process of boundaries. So
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Frank Maundy OC, who is a facilitator at ista the International School of Temple arts,
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pose the question what if we could define or redefine love as supporting, contributing and celebrating the expansion of the Beloved, right beloved, being a partner, but also a
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memorial expansive concept of love that is really about
23:06
sort of the flow of love in the universe, right, and that you are
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an initiator, a contributor of the flow of love in the universe.
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And so loving another, let’s say, loving another person means wanting them to be at their greatest expansion, wanting them to be happy, wanting them to be doing things that make them feel good and shining their brightest light in the world. That’s, that’s basically a measurement of how your loving is, how well is your partner doing and this goes for non monogamous and non monogamous people that are listening right now.
23:45
taking a sip of my tea.
23:49
So when you’re holding your partner back, and anyway, can that really be considered love, and maybe love is there maybe love is actually there. And there’s also a hook, there’s also some sort of possession, there’s some sort of ownership. So something to consider when our partner or when your partner experiences joy and pleasure, you can also derive happiness from their accomplishments, and that’s Compersion.
24:19
And, you know, when you’re insecure, there’s a vibration of jealousy and envy and competition that comes up, right that’s based in fear and scarcity that prevents you from truly being able to celebrate your beloved, your partner and I don’t want to make jealousy envy or competition wrong. They are human experiences just like any other they’re gonna come up and they deserve your curiosity. And some of that exploration will will involve shadow work,
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but almost guarantee right I guarantee that under each experience is a need a desire
25:00
desire, even if the fear and scarcity come from a condition place, I trust that there’s something underneath there that is worth
25:09
exploring worth feeling.
25:14
You know, so I don’t want you to make yourself wrong by, you know, oh, I’m jealous, there’s something wrong with me. This is all just conditioned. And yes, you know what it is conditioned. And, like, Let’s Let’s peek underneath the jealousy and see if there’s something else there.
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And the reality is that sometimes a partner’s expansion, right? Their happiness, their joy, their fully expressed self in the world goes against something that you need or want. And that’s where a clash happens, right? Because there’s a feeling of having to give something up.
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And that happens when when we’re looking at love as a finite resource. And look, again, this is not easy shit, okay, this is hard. And it involves a lot of feeling and a lot of holding yourself and feelings.
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And it’s what I aspire to spiritually. And I’ve had to like get, get a lot of like, I’ve gotten a lot of dings just in this process of exploring this, but it’s not for another time. So
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what I want to invite you to do is to make space for your egoic humanity, it’s not about bypassing the emotions to get to conversion or to get to this, like,
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I’m happy for you, and I’m over this know, it’s about honoring the messy process, right? Feel all the feelings, right? The Rage, the grief, the fear of loss, all of those get to be part of the experience.
26:49
You know, and again, going back to this, you know, like how sometimes when, when a partner’s expansion goes against something you want, you know, sometimes it’s as simple as sometimes the people we want support from aren’t available to us, and we have to resource elsewhere. Or we’re not always available to give to our beloved, right of return on their investment, let’s say, because life is complicated. I may be in the hospital, I’d have maybe having mental health issues, or I may be sick, you know. So when we have expectations,
27:27
in particular around, you need to give me the specific things because you and I have created a contract. And you are the ones that’s in charge of making me happy in these particular ways or comforting me in these particular ways or giving love in these particular ways. Right, these hips expectations, they add discomfort, right that in weight, like there’s like a pressure, there’s like, yeah, there’s just a weight there, that really is no longer about sharing love, but about trading, accounting and exchanging. So, for me, this is like, we’re trying to control against existential fear of abandonment and aloneness. Right. So
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we have to really like, like, Let’s fucking go there, let’s go to
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this, this.
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I think that there has to be some sort of in this process of like embracing love anarchy, there has to be this acceptance that you are alone, that you are alone in a certain way, like, yes, we are connected to all these wonderful people, and we are connected to these wonderful communities. And, you know, in a sense, I’m alone, right. So
28:50
without some, some form of devotion to intimacy, healing, without some form of existential inquiry, you will consistently look outside of yourself or outward for love, belonging, approval, worth and security. And whenever you get dinged whenever you feel activated, whenever there you know, some attachment stuff or like this, this, the shadowy possession wants to come out. It’s an opportunity to get curious as to what stories fears, intimacy, wounds are getting activated. So
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and so another thing that I want to say about love anarchy, this is kind of like where, like the good news and the bad news. So when you embrace unidirectional, unleashed love, you don’t live in the illusion of guarantee.
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You don’t exist in the illusion of guarantee like okay, well, I invested and it’s going to come back to me, you’re not in that space. There’s a self sacrificial
30:00
but only on the level of ego because you’re not extracting from yourself to give to another not pulling love from yourself. And saying here I have it because I actually want something in return. Right? Only on the level of ego are you sacrificing because the ego wants to control the ego wants to possess the ego wants to have. And on that level, it’s not convenient or comfortable. In fact, it’s quite uncomfortable on the body level.
30:28
But when you’re full of love, you’re not extracting from yourself to give to another you are nourished, and you give because you have it to give. It’s just, it’s just there, you’re just a state of love is a state of being and you’re just like, it’s just coming out of you, it’s just flowing.
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And in this process of love anarchy and not having there be a guarantee on your investment, or return on your investment, ROI, love ROI.
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There is some aspect of pain and risk involved, involved, which exists in any relationship, we just don’t like to think about it, we really just ignore that part of the equation. But here’s the miraculous part. Here’s the good news. Love has a tendency to come around when you are in the flow of love.
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And invested in invested in is just like, Okay, here it is free, you can have it right, like I’m lending you money, I have no expectation that you’re going to give the money back to me.
31:32
It comes back to you in other ways, and maybe not where you expected it, maybe it doesn’t come, let’s say let’s let’s let’s do it like a money thing. Because I I really feel the relationship between money and love is very, very parallel. Here, we’re decolonizing money in the same way that we’re decolonizing love or uncolonized rather. So let’s say you lend someone $100. And you’re like, here’s 100 bucks, I just want you to have it have it. And you really there’s energetically clean, you can have it there’s absolutely no expectation if they never paid back to you. There’s no hard feelings. And the miracle is that the money might come to you in another direction you might get your car insurance may say hey, we overcharged you here’s 100 bucks, right? So trusting that it’s going to come from somewhere else, like you invested, you sent it out into the field, and it comes around.
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So when you invested it,
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it comes back to you. Not where you expect it to come from. Maybe it comes from a different source. Maybe it’s not from this one to one. And the invitation is to stay open to that miracle. And I’ve actually stayed open to the miracle and it fucking works like it’s fucking real. So I’m totally like, I’m invested. I, I trust this. And yes, my ego gets caught up like any other ego. And I remind myself I step back and say like, actually no, like, let me just let me just bring myself back to trust.
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So this is what I mean when I talk about love anarchy is like being in that field in that in that energetic flow of love.
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And
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when the energy of love moves as it was meant to instead of being confined within a codependent negotiation, like it’s, it’s really miraculous, like,
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it is magical. And this is where it, you know, I
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really want to highlight the magic of everyday life of being able to share love and see this beautiful dance happening.
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So, I want to offer I want to end this episode today by offering this like a visionary definition of love, like what love can look like in partnerships. And,
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and this is from a book called evolutionary relationships. I forget what the author’s name is, but I’ll include it in the show notes. So revolutionary partnerships, center, in the bigger picture of universal love, the collective field of love, and this is what I’m talking about, like being in the field and the collective flow of love.
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In revolutionary partnerships, you offer space and solitude to your beloved’s. Right, whoever you’re in relationship with, whether it’s with your children or with a with your partners or with friends, you offer space and solitude to them as they need it. You offer dignity and respect to another person’s soul, their humaneness and their sovereignty.
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You center in your own soul
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solitude, right you center in your own healing and align with the divine as part of you’re
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part of someone you’re in relationship with or something you’re in relationship with right? Your own divinity, and also the divinity of the external universe, right?
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Abandoning any romantic and sentimental story you have about love,
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illusion,
35:29
embracing your messy human nature and your shadow, right, the part of you that wants to possess an own and entrap and constrain or contain,
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accepting that relationships go through life death cycle, sometimes relationships need to die, in order to be resurrected, right? This is expansion and contraction work, right? It opens it closes it abs and it’s flows.
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And that love ultimately is devoted to making, let’s say in a two person partnership making both parties more powerful.
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In order to bring that energy into the collective healing through projects, what that means is that, you know, if I’m in partnership with somebody, this, this partner is supporting me in bringing my full expression into the world through my work perhaps, or that they and I create projects that improve the world in some way that express love into the world. So the love that exists between us is not just sort of encased in this domestic sphere, domestic sphere, but that it gets like it moves beyond the domestic into the collective. Right. That’s why, you know, this podcast in this episode about love is really important to me, because it’s not just about what is shared between two three or four humans. But it’s about love moving beyond any sort of partnership into the collective because when we can, when look as, as visionary, as these definitions of love are, can you imagine for a moment, if you were to embrace those even, even just like two or three or four degrees more than you’re embracing them now, and how that’s going to spill out into the world. So this is really about not just romantic partnerships, or even the personal relationships that you have, regardless of whether there’s sexuality involved or not, but really about expanding it outside, like an overflow of love into the collective field. Because I feel like that’s what it’s all about, like, you know, even even for the people who, who maybe don’t care that much about the what’s happening in the collective. Even just treating the people you are in contact with
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the casual, the most casual connections that you have with people to the most in depth and intimate. That matters, right when we can respect or offer dignity and sovereignty to someone who’s homeless. That is an act of love. And that flows into the collective field as well. Right. So I’ll end it here. I welcome you to ask questions. You can DM me over Instagram. Any questions that you have about episodes? Look forward to seeing you next time. All right. Bye. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode I’m sending you fierce fierce love.