>> Here’s your AUDIO for today’s Transformation Tuesday. 

There’s a suggestion I’ve been offering a lot lately, and it goes like this…

“Set down your struggle portfolio.

Revel in your wins instead.” 

Usually when I teach this, we’re talking about an area of life we’re trying to improve, or we’re focused on a goal or a project. 

See, lots of people feel the need to argue all the reasons why they haven’t yet gotten where they want to be in their lives by listing off their past limitations and disappointments which — as you might imagine — only keeps the energy of past unwanted experiences alive in their present. 

That’s what I’m usually talking about, when I give this advice.

But I’m not here to talk about goals this week. 

This idea of trading in the laundry list of your struggles for some reveling in what is working, instead is also very useful on the subject I do want to talk about today: LOVE.

Here are a couple of quick premises: 

1. Love belongs to you. 
2. You are entitled to it by virtue of having been born on Planet Earth. 
3. You never have to earn it. 
4. And you can’t ever mess up, fail or screw up enough to lose your entitlement to love.
5. Ever.

That said, most of us do not feel that we were totally, completely, one million percent adored and accepted as very young children the way we’ve always known, deep down, we deserved to be. 

Even if we had wonderful parents. 

And most of us have never really grieved those old feelings of unlove. 

So those feelings harden and calcify into chunks of grievance that clog up our hearts. 

Grievance causes us to act in all kinds of ways that replicate and perpetuate that feeling of unlove. 

Grievance causes us to block ourselves from creating a love-riddled life, full of thriving work and play and healthful food and sleep and habits and relationships that fully nourish and love ourselves. 

Grievance also causes us to engage in patterns of thinking and acting in ways that block others from loving us the way we deserve to be loved. 

So here’s the question of the day: 

Is there any chance you might be ready to set down even some of your grievance so you can let more love in?

See, unlove is an entire mood. It’s like a life operating system where we view the world through grievance-colored glasses. 

Grievance can cause us to see the whole world through the lens of what is wrong, broken and not working, despite the relentless evidence of beauty and wellbeing that is all around us, all the time.

Grievance can cause us to think that the way to love other people is to commiserate with them or to fix them. 

Grievance can cause us to find and fixate on what’s broken and what’s not working for them or in them, and to rail away at the perceived cause of that brokenness, whether it be poverty, tough breaks, sickness, social injustice or the injustice of life itself. 

When your prevailing story around love is tinted through the filter of grievance, you think that’s how you love someone. 

You find their suffering and pick the scab of it. You pick something you see as “broken” about them and dive into the depths of that brokenness with them, try to “fix” them, or offer resources they didn’t ask for, which is actually the same exact thing as judging them Not Okay Just As They Are.

All of this fixing and fixating on what’s not working in our loved ones lives or in the world at large simply reinforces the mood of unlove: our own sense that others or the world or life or the universal powers that be don’t love us, or don’t love us as we are.

There are many definitions of love, and many of them are gorgeous and expansive. 

But for now, let’s try this one, from John Welwood: Love is the recognition of beauty and goodness. 

One way to be the Being of love you came here to be is to play this game I’ve been playing the last couple weeks: Walk through your life and your town looking for what is beautiful, what is good, and what is working, even in situations that are unwanted. 

And one way to love someone — yourself included — is to seek out and recognize their innate beauty and the goodness in them.

As they are right now, and also with all the limitless, vast potential they possessed when they were born and still do possess.

How might your relationships change if you consistently reset your concept of who your parents and your kids and your dates and your mates really are through the lens of love instead of the lens of grievance? 

If you could release the need to see or focus on their weaknesses, release the desire to control what they are and aren’t doing, and instead, revel in their wins? 

…their actual wins, the things that have gone right for them and are going right for them today, even if you have to dig very deep to find a few.

…and also the “wins” they represent, just by existing. 

Just by showing up and playing the game of life. 

My bff and I were reading an article the other day in which a young man was explaining that he doesn’t eat natural food anymore because lunch doesn’t hold “value” and in fact, the time it takes to eat real food limits his ability to be “of value” at work. 

My immediate thought was WOW. It’s going to be a wonderful day, the day this young man learns that he is of value because he is, not because of the tasks he gets done at work that day.

So, let’s revisit the question of the day. 

Are you ready to set down even a little bit of your grievance so you can let maybe 10% more love in than you have before?

Before I go, here’s a Pro Tip: In order to be a lover of life and people, you have to make a choice that you prefer to live a love-riddled life over focusing on the “objective”, outrageous facts about your loved one or the world news. 

The bright side is that if you make this choice, you’ll start to experience life in a transcendent kinda way. It’ll feel something like heaven on earth. 

Love,

TNN

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