Ep 16. How to Live in Love

I am Kym Showers, and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 16: How to Live in Love.

Hey, friends. Welcome to Reinvented After 40, a podcast for all you women in the second half of life who are ready to take responsibility for your own wellbeing and create a life you love living.

I’m your host, Kym Showers, and after spending the first 40 years of my life people-pleasing and following all the rules, I was exhausted and ready for a change. I reinvented myself. I stopped outsourcing my happiness. And I’ve been brave enough to live a different kind of life.

I’ll be here each week to help you do the same thing. It’s gonna be fun. Let’s go.

Hello, my dear darling friends. Hope your Christmas was exactly what you wanted it to be and you’re resting up and enjoying some free time. This week between Christmas and New Year’s is my favorite. I’m actually taking this entire week off from coaching, off from writing, and posting, and working. My coach told me to take the week off. And I do everything my coach says because first of all I pay her a lot of money and because she’s kind of bossy and smarter than I am, and because I love her so much.

We all need a break and sometimes we need someone else to point it out to us. This is where having a coach comes in handy. Having a coach helps us see where we’re getting in our own way. You and I have a brain that defaults to self-judgment, and criticism, and blame. It doesn’t default to love. It doesn’t default to forgiveness. It doesn’t default to compassion or abundance. Those are feelings that we have to intentionally cultivate, and work on, and create for ourselves on purpose. It doesn’t come naturally. It’s a skill that I can help teach you.

And today on this episode I want to show you how you can learn to live in love. I have a few examples and ideas from my own life that will help inspire you. Let this new year be the year you’re motivated by love, and inspired by love, and actually living in love, loving yourself, loving your people, loving your life. Love is the best feeling of all the feelings, and we can create it. We create the feeling of love by thinking loving thoughts on purpose. We create the feeling of love by choosing love.

Love is a choice we make over, and over, and over and we never stop making it. Love us our superpower that is always available to us. So let love be the fuel to create your dream life. Love has been my most effective fuel and most powerful tool in creating this life of mine that I’m completely obsessed with, which of course you already know. I don’t hide that thought. I believe it’s the reason we’re all here, to learn to love, to grow in love, to live in love, to be transformed by love. It’s always my new year’s resolution, get better at love. That’s it. That’s for me.

Get better at love, Kym Showers, this year, that’s it. That’s all you have to do. Because the truth is, we’re not good at it. We’re not good at love. Left to our own natural devices we take things personally. We’re hard on ourselves. We’re hard on each other, but we don’t have to stay this way. We can open up to a different way of thinking about everything. So here are three things that I believe about love that have served me well.

My first belief is that we are created by love, in love, with love and for love. I’m a very spiritual person, a very spiritual woman but don’t use the normal Christian age or Qi language because well, it sounds kind of creepy to me. But I’m going to give it my best shot today because it’s important. The fact is, the truth is, is I love God deeply and passionately. And I believe a 100% in the gospel of Jesus Christ because it’s the gospel of love. I spent the first 50 years of my life in church pursuing God. I was raised Catholic, and I’ve loved it.

And then we raised our kids in the Evangelical church and I loved that. I memorized the Bible, and taught the Bible, and lived a Christian life as wholeheartedly and authentically as I knew how. It was a beautiful, powerful, and very helpful way to live. I discovered for myself that life is magical and that we are all deeply, completely loved by our creator with no strings attached. I stopped going to church over 10 years ago because I stopped believing a lot of what was being taught from the pulpit.

I knew so many things that we were all going along with and agreeing to were simply not true. Leaving church was the hardest best thing I have ever done. My faith in God has evolved massively since then. The only thing I know for sure about God is that God is love, if it’s not love it is not God. If someone is teaching something about God that doesn’t feel like love, it’s not God. My favorite spiritual teachers are Father Richard Rohr, he’s my favorite. Jen Hatmaker I love, Glennon Doyle is amazing, Brené Brown.

Sue Monk Kidd is a beautiful writer, Krista Tippett, she does a podcast called On Being O-N B-E-I-N-G. On Being, that has been transformational for me. Shauna Niequist, a great writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Rob Bell, these people off the top of my head, I love to read, I love to listen to. I love their big ideas because they think bigger. They let God be unexplainable. That feels the most authentic to me now. I don’t want to explain God. God is too big to explain. I just want to believe that love is why I’m here and love is the best way to live a spiritual life. I like to keep it simple.

Love is the best way to live a life, period. This is my faith, and it is the most powerful faith I’ve ever had. I live in love, I am powered by love, fueled by love, saved by love. It’s everything and the only thing that matters. Every human is created by love for love and is eternally loved no matter what. That’s my first belief about love. This belief serves me very well.

My second belief about love is that we’re not good at it, because it’s hard to love people. People are annoying. This is going to just crack me up. People do mean things. People disappoint us. People hurt our feelings and lie to us. People don’t love us back. People are cruel, and judgmental, and critical. People leave us out and talk about us. People manipulate us and use us. It’s the only problem with love, people are hard to love.

The only people who are not hard to love are the brand new people, the babies, our babies, they’re so easy to love. We love them fiercely and unconditionally. We’re only nationally good at loving our babies. They don’t have to do anything but be there for us to love and to enjoy. It’s actually very fascinating if you think about it. We experience unconditional love for the first time when we have a baby. There is absolutely nothing that baby could ever do or not do that will cause us to stop loving her or him.

I like remembering this when it comes to loving the grown-ups. They are here for me to love and enjoy even when I’m annoyed with them, even when they do mean things, even when they’re not being who I want them to be, even when they ‘hurt my feelings.’

We find it difficult to love people consistently because we think they should be different than who they’re being. We have an agenda for them. We take things personally. We have expectations. We have thoughts about them and our thoughts about them create our feelings about them. They don’t create our feelings towards them, our thoughts do. So if we want to have loving feelings towards people we must get better at thinking loving thoughts about people. People don’t have to do anything different to be loved by us, we get to choose loving thoughts and feel the feelings of love.

Love is always to our benefit. I feel the feeling of love when I love you. You don’t feel the feeling, I do, that’s why it’s motivating to practice love. There isn’t a better feeling to feel in my body than love. The feeling of love is magical, and powerful, and inspirational, it transcends every other feeling. I’m my best, highest, truest self when I’m in the feeling of love, when I’m in love. It’s a space I can shift to at any moment. It’s always available to me. It’s a choice I make consciously. It doesn’t come automatically but the more I practice it the easier it gets to live from this place of being in love.

Love is a feeling and an energy that always gives us good results. Take the feeling you have for your baby and practice applying it to yourself and to your people. Unconditional love is almost impossible for us humans, but it is the way to freedom. Even though we’re all pretty bad at it, the more we practice the better we get. And the better we get at love the better we get at life, it’s always worth the work.

My third belief about love is that it’s not transactional. Love is never an exchange like if you love me then I’ll love you back. If you don’t love me then I won’t love you. This isn’t love. Love is an energy that I take with me wherever I go and whomever I’m with. It’s not created by my circumstances. It’s not something that happens to me, or is outside of me, or can be taken away from me. Just because someone doesn’t love me, it doesn’t mean I can’t love them. Love just is. It’s the way you are. It’s who you are.

Love is the reason we change for the better. Love transforms us continually to the highest version of us. We are literally transformed by the energy of love, our truest self and best self is unoffendable. Love is unoffendable. However, our brain is easily offended. Our brain wants us to think that loving people is dangerous, that loving people can hurt us, that only certain people are worthy of love. Our brain also thinks it’s better to not love ourselves. But our brain is wrong, our brain is unreliable.

We should never believe our own thoughts if they’re anything but kind, and compassionate, and loving. Choosing love and letting love transform us will be our most powerful work. Giving ourselves the love we need and the love we deserve first will make it so much easier to love everyone else. This is why I always am saying I’ll always be the one who brings the bigger love. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is thinking, or saying, or doing. I’ll always bring the bigger love. It’s my intention, and practice, and habit.

It’s my new year’s resolution over and over year after year, it’s the only thing that truly matters to me, how can I get better at loving? How can I live a life of love? How can I be transformed by love? How can I fall more deeply in love with myself, and my people, and my life, every day for as long as we all shall live even when I’m bad at it, even when I don’t feel like it, even when I’m not being loved in return? This is true love. And this is what makes life super magical.

So there you go, three of my beliefs about love. Number one, we’re all created by love. Number two, we’re not good at it. And number three, it’s never transactional. And just as a reminder my friends, these are all my thoughts, they’re simply my ideas, and my own interpretation, and experiences. I might change my mind about some of it tomorrow, who knows? I hope I do. I hope I keep growing, and learning, and changing my mind about everything, especially love. How fun of a life is that?

So thanks once more for showing up to listen week and after week and sharing this podcast with your friends. It’s so much fun having you here and I love, love, love you. Have the happiest, most restful day and I’ll see you next year.

Thanks for listening to Reinvented After 40. If you want more information or resources from the podcast, please visit KymShowersLifeCoach.com.