OVERVIEW
There is no substitute for “Real Love” yet many of us continue to struggle through relationships with “Imitation Love”. Baer says, “We can’t give what we don’t have,” and our inability to offer love stems from never having truly experienced unconditional (Real) love. Watch to explore taking the leap of faith necessary to experience unconditional love and fulfilling relationships.
TRANSCRIPTION
So if you were here last week and you heard me speak, you might be saying, why is she speaking again today? Because we don’t usually speak back to back. Um, but Reverend Linda’s mom, um, is in the hospital. Well now she’s home. Um, but Reverend Linda’s mom was rushed to the hospital this week and she is in hospice, but she is at home. So Linda felt like she couldn’t be here. So a couple days ago I found out I was giving the talk. So <laugh>, here I am again. But we send our love to Linda and her mom Jean. So I’m gonna start with a story. And you might know this story, it’s from Greek mythology, it’s Orpheus and you’re a DC And Orpheus was the world’s greatest Mui musician. And he would play his harp and his voice would soothe everything around him, even the savage beasts.
And he falls in love with the stunning yure, a dc but sadly, she is bit by a venomous sta snake. And she dies and she drifts off to the underworld. So he travels there and he sings such compelling songs that even Hades the God of the underworld feels sorry for him. And he said, okay, you can take her back to earth on one condition. She can follow you back as long as you do not turn around and look back. And of course, all along the way back he doesn’t hear yure a DC behind him and he is almost steps from the exit. And then he can’t help himself. He turns around and he looks back and she disappears and she’s gone forever. And we do the same thing, don’t we? We do that in a lot of places in our life. And whether we’re talking about relationships or friendships or things that didn’t work out in our life, it is so tempting to look back.
We know better here cuz we know we’re supposed to look forward, but we still look back. We’re trained that way and we can really be committed to our doubt and our fear. So today I want you to commit to the love you’re calling in in your life and that might be more self-love. I think a lot of us could use a dose of that, like that little self-critical voice that lives up there, at least in my head. Or maybe it’s love for a partner, whether you have a partner right now or not. Or maybe it’s greater love in your family or your friendships. But we know that what we focus on expands. So I want you to commit to looking forward. That’s my invitation for you this morning. So we’re gonna talk about faith and this is based on Greg Bearer’s definition of faith. And then I’ll throw in a few others.
But he says, faith is the act of consciously choosing to experience something we don’t know. Faith is believing that something is true. And then acting on that belief despite our fears. And that’s similar to the Bible. Faith is the conviction of things unseen. Ernest Holmes says, the law of our life reacts to our spiritual or material concepts and builds and rebuilds according to our beliefs and faith. And that points to us consciously choosing, right? Where’s our attention going to be? What we focus on expands. So Greg Bear talks about four things, four kinds of faith that are essential to our genuine happiness. The first is faith that changes possible. The second is faith in the truth and finding true love. The third is faith that people are doing their best. And the last one is faith in our partner. So I’m gonna say a little bit more about each of them.
So faith that change is possible, okay? Who’s been discouraged about something in their life, right? We all have, and we’ve practiced these beliefs we talked about last week, that if we practice what Greg bear calls getting and protecting behaviors which are lying, which means basically not being completely authentic, like not speaking your truth, attacking, acting like a victim, running away and clinging. And when we do that, we’re not experiencing real love. We’re in some sort of a fake control dance with whoever it is, partner, kid, parent, friend. But when we have a discouraging experience, it can be really hard to pick ourselves up, right? I mean I know I’ve had somewhere I was like, Ooh, I was a mess for a while. And it can be hard to keep going.
So how do we com keep our belief that we can experience real love? How do we keep that, you know, without that faith we’re looking back, right? We’re having the same experience over and over again. We’re looking for something to go wrong. So guess what? It goes wrong, right? And there’s no blame in that. That’s just sort of how the universe work works. And in the Bible they say as a man, or I’m gonna change as a woman, as a person, think it’s so are they right? As we think it’s so are we. But as I said, it can be hard to pull out of a slump. And I think that the easiest faith to build, especially about the areas in our life that are hard, you know, today we’re talking about love and relationships. But the area of your life that may be hard might be something different.
It might be finances, it might be having the right job, it could be anything, right? So I think the easiest way to build our faith is to just practice affirmative prayer for the desired state and just see that it works. Maybe you can’t go far enough, you know, if you’re trying to call in a partner, maybe you’re just like not quite ready to do that. But you can practice in other parts of your life. You know, as I was preparing this, I was thinking about um, places in my life where change happened because I did spiritual practice and I got prayer around it. And sometimes it was prayer for a long time, just to be clear, right? It was like coming back to it, coming back to it. But when I was in practitioner training, I had been dating this guy on and off for four years and the day before my second year started and I knew he didn’t want me to continue.
So I was sort of like him or that him or that. The night before my first class in my second year, he broke up with me out of the blue and I’m like, I guess I got an answered prayer. <laugh> wasn’t what I expected, but I got an answered prayer. But I think about when I left my corporate life and I found a new vocation, like I had to keep turning that over. And then things began to appear. You know, I not the house, not the condo we live in now, but a place I bought a while ago in the city. I had just left a corporate job. I didn’t have predictable income. Someone actually said to me, you’re gonna need a cosigner. And I’m like, I am 50 years old. I am not gonna go ask my big brother to cosign my loan. I have money in the bank.
And you know what I found someone who would look at the fact that I had money saved, right? So that was an answered prayer. It was stressful when it happened, but there’s, we all have examples, but we have to build the muscle of our faith in general so that then we can apply it to the area of our life, which is a challenge. And specifically today we’re talking about relationships. Second kind of faith. Faith in the truth and in finding real love. And when he says faith in the truth, he really means speaking the truth. Saying what is true to you? So for you, so if you speak the truth, then you feel seen, then you feel accepted and then you experience love. And so we have to tell the truth about what’s going on with ourselves to feel loved and accepted. And so often we’re afraid to, right?
Have you ever had the experience though when you shared something that was really felt like you felt so vulnerable sharing it and then you just felt so connected to that other person because they heard you, you know, but it’s, it’s not natural for us cuz it feels risky. What if this person rejects me? What if this person laughs at me? What if this pur person, you know, criticizes me or avoids me or whatever. It can feel really vulnerable. But when we block what’s in us, do you ever have that feeling where like you really have, you really know you’re not saying what’s true for you and you just have like that icky feeling in your body? I always think that’s your spirit telling you you’re not being authentic, right? And it can be terrifying to step through that. So we need to lean on our face to bolster us.
You know, sometimes it’s just a prayer for courage. Like I have to have this hard conversation. Help me. Right? This might be hard, they might not be able to hear me, but I have to do it. Help me. Faith means believing that when we consistently tell the truth, someone will accept and love us and someone will. Faith is a decision you make to tell the truth about yourself even when you’re still uncertain about what might happen. I love that and I think that you know, a lot of us in life, we’re trying to play it safe, right? Just to be honest, I can look at myself and go, I can see lots of ways that I have played it safe and not spoken my truth. But it takes a little vulnerability to step out and say, look, I’m not doing this by myself. The spirit which created me is my partner in this and helping move me forward.
And sometimes disappointment in life turns into the best thing that ever happened to us. Have you ever had that happen? That uh, you know, the worst thing actually is the best thing. So we don’t know what spirit’s up to the next type of faith is. Faith that people are doing their best. You know, I had an experience with my mom, it’s probably like 23 years ago I was sick. I’ve told this story before and my mother, I couldn’t keep anything down just to be clear in defense of my mom, <laugh>. But she couldn’t bring me anything I could eat. She didn’t bring me anything I could eat cuz I’m allergic to corn and everything at corn. And I’m like, Jesus, don’t you know I’m allergic to corn? You know? And so like I was all mad after this after she came and cared for me, but it just like pushed a trigger from my childhood, right?
Like she didn’t care for me the way I wanted her to, right? And I’m not blaming my mom. My mom was the bomb. I loved her. But about three or four weeks into it, she called me on the phone and she said, honey, I don’t know why you’re mad at me, but I’ve always done the best I could. And I was like, Ooh, that stopped me in my tracks. I’m like, I knew that that was the absolute truth. She always did the best she could. She came from a German family. Her father was like tough. I wouldn’t have wanted to get in trouble from him, right? So she was doing the best she could with what she knew. You know, people in my parents’ generation didn’t talk about things, right? We talk about things a lot more than parents did anybody else have that experience?
So the thing we have to kind of assess is, you know, as we’re sharing, uh, with people, you know, we also have to understand sometimes people are not available to show up the way we want them to or we need them to. And it’s okay, right? It’s okay we just bless them and honor them where they are. But they are not the director of your life, right? What someone else does is not determine your life. And I just, you know, we believe that we’re one with spirit. So when we’re anchored in our spirit, we have to have our faith in that. You know? And it’s easy in the world. We’re surrounded by all this social media and whatever to think that we’re at the effect of something. But we’re not. We’re not really, unless we choose to be. So assume good intent, give people the benefit of the doubt, right?
Sometimes we’re all distracted, sometimes we’re all unavailable and you know, we really don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head. That’s the truth. How many times have you had that happen? Where we were convinced that we knew what someone else’s intent was and then we actually talk about it and we found out we were absolutely incorrect. We had no idea. Yeah. So just move toward where you feel supportive, resonant energy, right? That’s, that might not be every place in your life and that’s okay. The next type of faith is faith in our partner. And we believe many of us were taught to believe trust is earned. And I know I believed that that trust is earned. Like you’re not gonna really know who someone is till you’re with them for a while. But if you step, and this is specific to relationship, but if you step into it with this trust is earned thing, you’re always making the other person prove themselves, right?
And I have to say I was super guilty of this when I started dating Rich. I was like, you know, I just had a really terrible experience like a year and a half ago. Like, is this gonna be more of the same? Right? And he was the one who had no skepticism, lots of trust. And it’s like finally I got over myself. But when we’re looking for evidence that people aren’t trustworthy, we see it everywhere. We see every mistake they make, we see mistakes that aren’t even really there. And in a way we’re assuming the other person is bad or wrong. And if we assume someone’s gonna hurt us, then we don’t, they don’t have even have the chance to prove that they’re not. Because we’re already shut down. We’re in the land of what’s absent instead of the land of what’s present. So this points us back to working with the law, right?
We don’t wanna focus on what there’s a lack of. We wanna focus on what we’re calling in. We wanna be at choice in our life and choose what we want to call in. We wanna look forward, you know, choose to have faith in your partner, your friend, your family. Have faith in them. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Greg Barrett tells this story that I love in his book, um, because I think I probably lived to this story <laugh> just to be true. So Chris and Ellen meet, they fall in love. They were thrilled because neither had been unconditionally loved and they were just love and all the attention they were given each other and all the acceptance and they were sure this was it. Their only experience prior to that is what Greg bar call’s imitation love. So when the honeymoon phase was over, they became unhappy with each other. So eventually they found a wise friend to help them. And imagine this dialogue. This is Ellen says, we never talk anymore. Chris says, why would I want to? You’re mad at me all the time and you nag me. Ellen says, you don’t listen to me or spend time with me and if I don’t get angry, I can’t get you to do anything. Chris says, see what I mean? You’re angry right now. Who wouldn’t hate that? <laugh>?
So finally this wise man, they were at, I’m imagining a therapist says, Chris, it’s clear you do avoid Ellen and Ellen. It’s obvious that you’re angry and pointing to all these past mistakes is not gonna get us anywhere. It’s not gonna move us forward. The important question is, are you willing to make the changes to change your relationship completely. So he sent them off to talk to others who would listen and accept them and to practice it. So Chris started to do his homework, speaking his truth, being accepted, you know, being, you know, connecting with these people. And he started to feel differently but Ellen didn’t. And they came back to meet with the wise man. He called her out and said, Chris is taking the steps but you aren’t. And until you decide to have faith in him, nothing’s gonna change. Faith means acting on a belief that you don’t have proof for, right?
So Chris changed, but Ellen never changed so they didn’t stay together. And I like that story cuz it’s so real, right? It’s so real. So faith precedes the miracle of love. We can choose to have faith that telling the truth, being authentic, being vulnerable is gonna bring us real love and happiness. Or we can choose to continue in all our unproductive behaviors. And every time we interact with anyone, we decide whether to exercise faith, don’t we? So here’s Greg Bear’s suggestion. When you feel like someone is attacking you, you gotta do a little bit of self-coaching, which I know can be hard in the moment. Sometimes you give, gotta give yourself a time out. But you know, when I do this behavior, you would say to yourself, when I do this behavior, I’m afraid in protecting myself. And then when other people do this, do the the same thing, they are protecting themselves.
They’re afraid also. And I can choose to see that that person is attacking me cuz they’re feeling unloved instead of getting mad at them. But if I react, I can’t feel love, right? Because you’re not connecting if you’re like, you know, yelling or whatever you’re doing. So I choose to have faith, I choose to be truthful and I choose to stop protecting myself cuz I already know protecting myself doesn’t work. Whoever felt lonely cuz you were protecting yourself, right? Yeah. So we need people in our life who see us and accept us. We need our equivalent of the wise men and women and these people are all around us actually in this room. You know, I remember when I, after the breakup in my second year of prac training, my first class I cried for three hours. You know, it was so great to be in a room where no one tried to fix me.
Our teacher tried to fix me, but all my classmates were like, yeah, she’s just not okay right now. It’s okay, come here honey. You know, <laugh>. But I had never had that experience. Like I grew up in a family where, you know, big girls don’t cry. Like don’t make a mountain out at a vamo hill. All of these things, right? And so we naturally love and accept people when we’re, when we’re vulnerable with them, we have to take responsibility for how we’re being, you know, get real with yourself. I had an incredible experience this week that I’m gonna share a little workshopy style thing with you guys before we finish. Can you hand that out Jason? And it’s online. You guys will have this online. So I wanna tell a story. I had this guy speak, um, I run peer groups for CEOs during the week.
I had this guy Michael Brody Wade is his name, he did a TED talk that has over 3 million views and he is a recovering addict and he was homeless, he lost his job, he lost his car, all of these things. He was in his early twenties and he finally ended up at the Betty Ford Center. And he said the thing that worked for me was they gave me something to do instead of doing drugs, someone telling me don’t do drugs, it didn’t help me, right? But if they said do this instead go do these 12 steps, that helped me. And so he taught us three principles that are really what we’ve been talking about the last couple weeks. One, practicing rigorous authenticity. Just tell the truth about what’s going on for you. Number two, we’re big on this here. Surrender the outcome, right? The how, the whatever, it’s not ours.
It belongs to spirit, God, whatever your word is. And do the uncomfortable work. So this is this little worksheet I gave you that you can take home. Um, but we’re gonna do it together quickly cuz I think I really had a little breakthrough when he did this with us. And you might need a little more time to have the breakthrough I had, but I just wanna walk you through this. So look at something in your life you’re saying yes to, but you really wanna say no to. And what will the person think if you say, cuz he’s said Michael’s thing is addicts say yes all the time to things they don’t want to do. And so that’s, that’s where the yes and no comes. But we’ve all learned that, you know, conscious leadership has the full body. Yes. Like this Yes and no thing we’re familiar with it.
So, so you’re gonna say yes, but you really wanna say no. And what will the other person say if you say no? And why do you wanna say yes? So mine was, I picked a person in my life where I feel like I always need to be available to that person whenever they need help with something. <laugh>, it’s my achilles heel you guys. And you know, what will the person think if I say no? And I thought, well they’ll think I’m like someone else who was earlier in their life who didn’t treat them well. So I wanna say yes cuz I’m a pleaser. So that was mine. Okay. And what are you worried about if they think that right? Well in my case, I was worried that they would think I’m exactly like that person, that I’m not, I don’t care about them. That’s what I was worried about.
And what is the doom or death script that goes off in your head? You know, this is the real breakthrough that I had. Mine was that I’m gonna be like ostracized and I’m gonna be alone. And I’m like, where did that come from? But you know, if I think back, you know, we overanalyze some of us like me and I was like, you know, when I was little we would come home from school and sometimes I would be alone or my brother would come help me break in the house cuz he was a ninja. My brother was a great, great at breaking in our house, but no one was there. So like that created this like being alone and then like losing my brother seven years ago. You know, I was like, oh my god, he was my cheerleader, you know, he got me. And I’m like, so for me it was really about being alone.
But most the thing we mostly fear is physical death or social death. Those are the two biggest fears that people have. So then you gotta rate it emotionally. How uncomfortable does that make you scale of one to 10? So I said it was an eight, right? And then you have to say, how probable does the, is this that it’s really gonna happen? And I said, you know, honestly, it’s a one, right? So then you calculate a percentage, which you can read the form later, but I realized I was making this fear 800% bigger than it actually was, right? Which is crazy. So then instead of what you’re saying yes to that you don’t want to, is anybody getting something for themselves? By the way, I’m thinking about your own life. Um, so then you have to say no three times for the thing in the next month.
So I’m gonna say no three times to be overly available, right? And instead I’m gonna spend that time working on something that I’ve been wanting to do, right? So that’s how the exercise works. So I want to encourage everyone to create, um, an affirmation about what, um, what you’re gonna do instead. Cuz we’re gonna take this into prayer. So my affirmation might be like, you know, I affirm I say yes to spending time on this idea I have that I’m not giving any time to, right? Or I say yes to taking time for self-care, whatever yours is. Okay? And I wanna invite you now just to take a second and turn to your neighbor if you have one and online, you can type it in the chat. What do you wanna say no to? And what do you wanna say yes to? Just take a moment and share it with the me, uh, your neighbor. And then we’re gonna take it into prayer. That’s your homework. Take your affirmation into prayer, just one more minute. You can stay after and have a cup of tea and visit and talk about it more. And so just bring your attention back to yourself,
Finish your conversation. And I just invite you to turn within. And I want you to affirm in your mind’s eye, what are you saying yes to?
And in this moment, I know the presence and power of spirit. This is a presence and power of love and possibility. This is the presence and power of ease and grace and creativity and joy and perfect divine wellbeing. And I know that I am one with this presence and power. I am one with this love, this goodness, this grace, this ease, this divine joy and happiness and love that is unfolding. And as I know this for myself, I know this for each of the people hearing my words, I just know that we are all one with this presence and power of love and goodness and grace.
This presence of possibility, this faith in spirit, this presence that is never an absence. So from this place of oneness, I speak my word just knowing and affirming that each and every person has gotten something new for themselves and their life. I claim and call forth more and more love, more and more love for others, more and more love and self-acceptance. I declare that we speak our truth with authenticity and that it is received in love. This is what I’m knowing and affirming for all of us. I say yes to this and I just invite you to speak your affirmation out loud. Now into the room. I say yes to just do it all at once. I say yes to all of this on behalf of us. Knowing that spirit receives these affirmations, spirit receives these words and acts on them. I declare a transformation is happening now. I know that all is well and I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful to know that God’s got this. I’m so grateful for the love, which is the truth of all of our being. And I’m so grateful to know that this prayer is fulfilled now and with so much gratitude, I simply say, and so it is. Amen.