Re.love: Finding Lasting Love with Dr. Ezzie Spencer

What if I told you there was a simple formula to cultivating love in your life?

I can guess your reaction! But while the formula we’re talking about today is simple to remember, it does require work to put into practice.

In today’s episode, we’re talking with Dr. Ezzie Spencer, creator of the re.love method.

Ezzie helps women walk through a proven process of healing as they face their blocks to love. Her work has been influenced by her experience as a human rights lawyer and her own struggle with a toxic relationship.

Ezzie isn’t promoting a quick fix. She helps her clients generate lasting change so that they can attract the right people into their lives.

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that dating is one of my life’s crucibles. I keep coming back to this issue, and it keeps shaping me, challenging me, and directing me onto new paths. I recorded this episode with Ezzie back in August, and her insights resonated with me so much that I immediately signed up for her program!

Join me in today’s episode as we discuss common roadblocks to love and how self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and gratitude can help you develop deeper, lasting relationships.

Listen to episode 362 now!

In episode 362 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

• [5:21] How Ezzie developed the Luna Abundance program as a result of her work as a human rights lawyer
• [9:30] How the re.love method was born out of Ezzie’s experience with a toxic relationship
  
• [14:28] How the re.love method is designed and what the process is like.
  
• [20:22] Why and how to move slowly in your healing journey
  
• {27:30] The difference between allowing yourself to feel pain and holding onto it
  
• [35:14] How Ezzie works with women to learn self-compassion and acceptance
  
• [38:04] Common barriers to forgiveness and the key to forgiving ourselves and others
  
• [41:50] How forcing gratitude at the wrong point in your healing can be harmful
  
• [49:17] How genuine internal motivation can help you in your healing journey
  
• [53:11] Ezzie’s answer to the common question: “Where are all the good men?”
  
• [57:47] How Ezzie responds to people who suggest that they don’t need anyone

Resources mentioned by Ezzie and Elizabeth in the episode:

• Learn more about Ezzie and get on the waitlist for re.love.
• Follow Ezzie on Instagram
• Listen to Elizabeth’s interview with Ken Page, author of Deeper Dating.
• Check out The Embodied Living Center.
  
• Email us with questions or feedback.
• Don’t miss an episode of The Embodied Podcast.

Quote from this Week’s Episode of the Embodied Podcast:

• “Once you have that positive regard, deep love, respect, trust, acceptance, and compassion for yourself, you’re actually able to better perceive when other people are loving you.” – Elizabeth

• “There’s a reason you constructed these protection mechanisms. You don’t need to dismantle it all overnight.” – Ezzie

• “I think anger holds the key to so much, for women especially. A lot of women’s sadness is because they haven’t let themselves be angry.” – Elizabeth

• “Each one of these feelings we can tap into is like a portal into a kaleidoscope of ourselves, our magic, and our mystery.” – Ezzie

How was this episode for you?

 

Was this episode helpful for you today? I’d love to know what quote or lesson touched your soul. Let me know in the comments below OR share the episode on Instagram, tag me your stories @elizabethdialto, or send me a DM!

 

About the Embodied Podcast with Elizabeth DiAlto

 

Since 2013 I’ve been developing a body of work that helps women embody self-love, healing, and wholeness. We do this by focusing on the four levels of consciousness – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

In practical terms, this looks like exploring tools and practices to help you tune into the deep wisdom of the body and the knowing of the heart, which I believe are gateways to our souls. Then we cultivate a new relationship with our minds that allows the mind to serve this wisdom and knowledge and soul connection, rather than override it, which is what many of us were taught.

If you’ve been doing self-help or spiritual development work for a while, these are the types of foundational things that often people overlook in pursuit of fancier concepts that often aren’t practical or sustainable. Here, we will focus on building these strong foundations so you can honestly and thoroughly embody self-love. If you’re feeling it, subscribe to the show, and leave us a review wherever you listen from. You can also keep up with show updates and community discussion on Instagram here.

 

Transcripts for Episode 362:

– What’s up, everybody? Welcome to episode number 363 of the podcast. Today, I have my friend, Ezzie Spencer here, and we are digging into her re.love methodology, modality. This is about dating and relationships, this is about love, this is about healing, this is about self compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude when it comes to opening your hearts, healing your wounds, facing your blocks to love. I enjoyed this conversation so much, by the way, we recorded this back in August that I actually joined Ezzie’s program. I was like, first of all, I love Ezzie, second of all, while we were having this conversation, I realized a block I was aware of having had in the past that it just, I was like, whoa, this is still, this is still active and this is still present. And some of you know like, dating and relationships is one of my crucibles in life. We all have our crucibles, like our multilayered onions that we are always on the spiral staircase with and this is certainly one of mine and so I love, love, love Ezzie’s approach to this and I can’t wait to hear what you all think of it. ‘Cause I know this is always a popular topic when we get into it on the podcast. So let us know what you think. You can check out the show notes at UntameYourself.com/363 and let’s get into the show. Ezzie, you’re back

– So good to be back, love, so much-

– It’s been years.

– Many years.

– Not since we’ve spoken, but since you were on the podcast.

– Yeah, that feels like another lifetime actually.

– I think it was actually 2015. I think you were in like the first 100 episodes. So long. We’ve lived 17 lifetimes since then.

– Plus another seventeen in the last few weeks, it feels.

– Oh my God. So, the podcast name is the EMBODIED Podcast now and for awhile I was asking people how’s your body to start the interview, but I really am more interested lately in people’s hearts. So how’s your heart today?

– Hmm. It is tender, alive, gentle. Oh, I’m so happy to be here.

– Yay. So I love journeys and so like six years ago, when we spoke on the podcast, you were doing your Luna Abundance work and now you’re doing something called re.love. Tell us everything. Not even just, I want to talk about re.love and what it is, but start me with the journey. How do you go from that, to this?

– All right, oh, I love this question ’cause I love journeys and this has been one and in fact to properly tell the journey, I actually need to go the step back before Luna, can I do that?

– You do whatever you want and you take as much time as you want, go for it.

– Love it. All right. So I, I actually created Luna Abundance, I think as a response to my original career, which is I was a human rights lawyer, specializing in domestic violence and sexual assault. So that’s what I did my PhD in as well. Therapeutic jurisprudence, all about the law as healing for women who’ve been subjected to abusive dynamics. And when I was doing that, I realized actually what I’m really interested in is healing, right? And so then that activated the opening of my own exploration into my own feminine mystery and like so many women, I mean all genders, across the world but of course, primarily, women tend to be the most interested in the moon cycle because of the resonance of the menstrual cycle. The moon started to whisper to me and so I went very deeply into my own personal healing journey, which was a very soft, gentle learning to feel my feelings ’cause as a lawyer, I was living from the neck up in so many ways like doing very meaningful, purposeful work and completely disembodied. And so for 10 years, like developing the Luna work was a way for me to just very gently start to defrost and start to feel everything that was there waiting to be felt. And so I started talking about that very naturally and organically, like I was so excited. I was like, oh my Lord, like, this is a way to like activate your magic and being in your body and to be in flow and suddenly everything happened and this is like ten years ago. Like before Instagram, before anything, no one was talking about the moon in Australia, which is where I was living. And so people started to be drawn to me, I was just magnetic because I was just like really starting to tap into another soul truth and soul essence and soul wisdom and it was so pure, there was such like an innocent and joyful exuberance in it.

– I wanna interrupt you there for a second because that is really such a thing. It’s just, there’s so many people who are like, how do I build a business? How do I da, da, da… It’s like, find something that you are just so fucking lit up to do and talk about like, that’s literally the most magnetic thing. Like that’s the marketing plan y’all. When you’re just so into something like people want to be around that.

– I feel like there’s such a, yeah there’s such a beauty in that innocence and of course I went ahead and forgot all of that and had to go ahead and remember all of that. Of course.

– So, yes, yes, yes. I’d love to dive into that part of the journey too. At the time when I started to talk about the moon, people would ask me how can they work with me? So that’s how I started a one-on-one practice. I lived in Bondai beach, people would come to my apartment, they’d pay me a hundred dollars and sit there and do an intuitive session.

– Amazing.

– But I was still a lawyer, right? Like I was still doing the human rights work. I was still planning to be a law professor and publish about mental health law and all of that type of, totally different world, right. And so actually what happened with Luna Abundance, the way that it then became a blog and then Instagram came along and then it became an online program and then it became a global coaching company and then it became a book and that was originally an Australian book, but then it became an international book and it just kept growing and growing and growing. It led me to New York and that was always a childhood dream of mine. So it’s like none of that was planned and if I had sat down as a PhD student, tried to plan that out, I mean, I just sort of laughed at myself ’cause it was so out of my frame of reference.

– Yeah.

– But then, we all have initiations upon our journey, even if something is pure and beautiful and the magnetism of it, probably because it was pure and beautiful and because of the magnitude of it and the extreme expansion of my life and the way that it ended up coming around the circle, I had a personal experience of being in a very toxic relationship, which was extraordinarily shameful for me because this was after I had graduated with my PhD. You literally cannot be more of an expert on the topic, like the universe is laughing how could you be.

– And now you’re going to experience this for yourself.

– Right? And it’s like, realizing that no amount of intellectual understanding, no amount of protection, no amount of looking for red signs or hyper vigilance is going to provide immunity when there’s something going on underneath the whole . So of course that was a lot for me to unearth and excavate and to explore and ultimately to build a solid foundation and self worth and self love and self sovereignty from the inside out. But that was a journey, and there’s a part of that journey, of course, as I came out of that relationship and I started to rebuild my sense of self, I started to support others on that process and supporting them as well to understand that it wasn’t their fault. I think that for particularly for extremely intelligent women, the shame can just be too much of a cognitive dissonance because not only does everyone else say they should have known better, that’s also what they’re saying to themselves, right? And so then that prevents the kind of depth of healing that can then crack open what can lie on the other side of that initiation, right? So that’s where re.love was born, but I wasn’t calling re.love at first but of course people were gravitating towards me again because I was passionate about my own healing process over the years and eventually about two and a half years ago, I codified it into a curriculum. And so initially re.love was around recovering from toxic relationships, it’s now around self-love and cultivating self-love through dating and relationships, which really takes me full circle back to the original, career as a human rights lawyer, specializing in domestic violence which is truly astounding to me when I kind of look at the perfection of that, of that circle and that cycle of my life and also, I mean, that’s been, like it’s been nearly two decades long and every single part of that journey has been critical to get me to where I am now.

– I love this so much. And you and I, over the years, have talked so much about relationships and different things that we’re reading and like different things that we’ve been experiencing and I agree with you, there’s such a, there’s such an important piece to really thinking into none of us could have possibly known, like we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what is toxic for us until we’re in it and we’re like, damn! I gotta get myself out of this. Like I find for so many women and you’re not the only like expert like highly educated. I have a closer friend, who’s an older woman who two master’s degrees in psychology and she found herself in a physically abusive relationship. So like, I just really want to emphasize that point for anyone ’cause that’s one thing when I came out of my toxic relationship almost five years ago now, I didn’t waste any time on that because I had other people in my life who had been through it with like masters degrees and PhDs and I was like, oh! Damn! If these bitches didn’t know, there’s no way I was gonna. And obviously we all know I’m from Sutton and I use the term bitch is a term of endearment to me, but it’s like, you don’t know, like you can’t know. Like you can think you understand, you can have all the depth of understanding in your brain, but if your body, if your nervous system is wired for something, if there’s something in your history or your ancestry that like you don’t know, you were the one who came here to like break the pattern and stop that for your family and future generations, you’re going to have the damn experience.

– I think it’s so confusing for people as well when they might be like, but every other relationship in my life has been a positive one or where did these even come from and to touch into what you said, it’s like you come into this lifetime with stuff on your tape and whether that comes through the DNA, whether it even comes through, past lives or choices to bring on things from the collective, unconscious, because so many of the women I work with are brilliant, magical women. They literally are multi-dimensional. And so it’s like, it doesn’t make sense to the mind.

– Yeah.

– And it’s a trap to get stuck in that loop of trying to figure out and understand what happened rather than see it as the portal for like, whoa, like what actually might be possible on the other side of this. What could this cracked me open-

– A thousand percent. Yes. Yes. Okay, so tell us more about whether it’s the curriculum or the journey, like tell us about the re.love experience or process.

– So it is, I mean, I suppose it’s like a heroine’s journey and so the sort of the broad brush strokes is starting out on the island. So the metaphorical island, obviously, with the fortress walls and the fortress walls indicating the walls around your heart and I think for so many women, it can be, myself included, it can be so surprising to realize that effectively you’ve lived on an island for your whole life and you can be on an island in some way, shape or form and still actually be in relationship, right. It doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily fully single. It certainly doesn’t mean that you don’t have a full, and robust and sparkling life, and fulfilling like work and career and spirituality and friendship and all of the things but it’s like, if on a deep level, you’re protecting yourself by closing your heart because you’ve been hurt or indeed you’re carrying through your lineage or through something else, some deep pain, and you’re going to stay on that metaphorical island. And so the process, the relapse process is a very specific process of the seven steps that are required to come out of the island, state of being out of the mindset and that really is like very much being in your head and coming into a place of feeling, feeling confident and safe to be seen for who you really are, your own beautiful, unique essence. So then you can be like loved and cared for and become magnetic to the kind of people who are going to meet you as you really are, rather than being in that performative people, pleasing mode, which again, it’s a little bit like being a fish in water. If you don’t realize you’ve been performing yourself for your whole life, because that’s just been your norm and you’re surrounded by others who are also part of your same play and being part of the validation echo chamber, it’s like the realization that actually there’s something deeper than that inside of yourself can be like it could be like an epiphany in the terms of like of the how much that can crack you open and so there’s a huge amount of self-compassion and self-forgiveness that sits at the root of everything that we do in re.love. Because what I find is unless someone has a certain level of being able to speak to themselves with kindness and gentleness, like, unless someone’s mastered like a certain level of self-compassion, they can’t even have that realization. Their mind won’t even allow them to see the tricks of how they living their lives. Because that’s a protective mechanism and that’s so important to understand with the island, it’s a protective mechanism. And we have protective mechanisms because we need to protect ourselves. Like it’s not a bad thing to be on the island, you actually do need to create a certain level of self compassion and self-love first before you can even consider opening the door and going out and having that not be a traumatizing experience for you.

– Okay. This is perfect because one of the things that I talk about fairly often is I hate like, hate, hate, hate the popular concept, like, until you love yourself, you can’t love anybody else. Because, or like, until you love yourself, like nobody’s going to love you. I hate these like really shamie. You know what I mean? What I have found though, and it sounds like you’re sharing similar sentiments is once you do have that positive regard, deep love, respect, trust, acceptance, and compassion for yourself, you’re actually able to better perceive when other people are loving you. So it’s not that you’re not loving people or that people aren’t loving you, it’s that you’re just not letting it in. Or you just can’t feel it or perceive it or even detect it around you. What, like, so that’s kind of like my nuance to it ’cause I just, I hate, I hate when people are like, until you love yourself, you will love anybody else or like whatever it’s like, okay, are we just going to invalidate all the love that’s really here in our lives, right? Or the amazing, like sometimes we learn how to love ourselves by watching other people do it really well.

– I love that you, I love that you brought that in. Yes, yes, because I mean, I believe that love is the language of the universe, so the love is always there. The love is infinite and love is constant and we’re, if there is like any real ocean that we’re in, we’re in the ocean of love. So like the island is bathed in love. But to your point, it’s like, it’s about whether we’re able to open up the pinhole even and that’s how much of a space there can often be in the beginning. It like, it can be a pinhole, but if you can open up sort of the pinhole of love, if you can even just breathe through your nose and like, feel like the physical sensation of your breath coming in, you just do that and speak kindly to yourself for a year and like that in and of itself could be the most profound life-changing practice that you might ever do in terms of being able to create what it is that your heart very deeply desires deep down. Then that’s where you’re going to start to be able to receive the love. And it’s gonna sting at first, like it’s going to hurt. Now, what’s really interesting is like the love itself isn’t singing but when you’re coming out of the island state, which is where you’re really numb, it’s like when you’re coming out of that numb state, then the defrosting occurs and you start to feel the pain that was there in the first place, which led you to the size itself. And so feeling that pain can sometimes be too overwhelming, it could be too much and so the invitation I always give to people as they start to go through this learning process, it’s like, just be so patient, just be so gentle, just go so slow because there’s a reason, there’s a reason. There’s a reason why you constructed these protection mechanisms, you don’t need to dismantle it all overnight.

– But people really want to. How do you get them to not to… And I’m always working, I love healing processes. Like I’m so excited to be talking about this because this is, and I look at this and like the big, broad world perspective as well. Like even as we’re still at the time of recording this, we’re still in the pandemic and one of the most polarizing conversations out there is about like, to get vaccinated or not to get vaccinated and all this stuff and you know how the culture is too individualistic and we need to be more collectivist and it’s like, okay, but we are wanting whole cultures to make these pendulum swings that individuals can’t even make like that shit, it just doesn’t fucking work that way. So for in your specific context, this is a journey kind of like how we started the conversation, right? So what are some things that you notice are helpful to get people to slow down, right? Because we can tell people slow down, slow down, slow down, but we want instant gratification. Like we want to be out of the pain. We want to be out of this comfort. We want to have what we fucking want to have, but that shit does take time.

– There are two things that I recommend and the first is more DIY and the second is a more facilitated process. ‘Cause you can actually make a quantum leap with both, but you will probably make a faster quantum leap with a facilitated process in my experience. So the first one DIY is around recognizing the power of slowing down to speed up through practicing self-compassion.

– Yes.

– Number one, self forgiveness, number two, and then the third one gratitude. And like, this is not brand new stuff people, spoiler alert, like we’ve had the tools for ages. But in terms of an efficient DIY process, what I find is so helpful for people, when they’re first starting to become alive to their pain, right? Because honestly, I mean, if someone is not alive to the fact that somebody is in denial, that they’re even in pain, it’s actually beyond my limit. Like I’m not here to serve that person. But when someone is becoming alive and aware to their pain, then self-compassion like self forgiveness and gratitude. And I sound like a broken record, but it’s not a mental thing. You know that when you are actually feeling that in your body, you can actually make a quantum leap in five minutes. You might need to wake up the next morning and do it again and again and again. And indeed for some of my clients, ’cause by the way, like, Eliza, I love what you said about the speed, because I think we want instant gratification, but also I think the future of our humanity demands a very, very rapid mass awakening. And so if we don’t do this quickly, then I don’t know if we’re going to make it as a species.

– I liked what you said and I wrote it down, slow down to speed up. But, right? These things, people don’t real… I talk about this a lot too. It’s like, if you do the work upfront, which is the slowing down then it’s like pulling back a Slingshot and then you let it go. Like it’s going to take whatever time it takes, it’s just a matter of, do you want to do the work on the front end, setting yourself up to let the Slingshot go? Or do you want to make it just like this excruciating long process?

– Exactly, exactly. And I think that, again, like that can be done in five minutes. Once you’re willing to say, Hey, I’m hurting and what, Hey, I’m hurting looks like might be as simple as I feel sad.

– Yeah.

– Like, you don’t need to write a sonnet. Like, I mean, you can paint beautiful art if you want to, like do all the things if you want to, but it can be as simple as I feel sad, I feel compassionate with myself around that sadness. I forgive myself for feeling sad and I feel grateful for, and give your mind something to do for gratitude. Because oftentimes when you’re starting out, you can’t feel grateful for the sadness and that’s okay. That’s more advanced, but start like, I feel grateful because I have the courage and the fortitude to actually feel what’s going on underneath the surface. I feel grateful for myself. What we want to do is use those words as it triggering to come into the feeling sense, the physical sensations, the expansion in your chest when you’re feeling grateful. And when you make that leap from the head to the heart of like, say, I’m thinking about appreciation or whatever, into actually feeling it when you open your heart, because that’s actually what is required, right. To be able to create love, it’s to open your heart. Like you have to open your heart to yourself and then you can open it to a loved one and then you can open it to the world. But it does, it can be done in five minutes, but there’s a discipline, there’s a practice because people will do it and then they’ll forget. So that’s the DIY version.

– Yeah. I know you also said like facilitated and we’ll come back to that in a second, I made myself a note. But here’s something that I’m curious for your perspective on. It is so important that we feel our pain, I’m with you on that. And sometimes, sometimes just acknowledging that there is pain, it dissipates immediately, right? Instead of like, you’re saying, putting up all these walls, pretending I’m not hurt or whatever, being like, ouch! Ow! Like I like to do that. And I’ve been talking about this a lot. This year, I’ve really embraced, you and I were talking about this before I started recording that in my astrological, my birth chart, my Venus is in Leo, so like, I do have a little bit of flare for drama around my feelings. I don’t need inter-relational drama, but with myself, when it comes to expression, I need some drama. So like sometimes I need to be like, literally, ow! Like, and like journaling out, and like pouring my heart and like being super fucking dramatic about it, but you’re right like, I could do that for like five to 10 minutes and then I’m like, I feel better. Because I just need to tease it out but there’s a difference between, and this is what I want your perspective on the difference between. Finding whatever way of expressing your pain works for you. Right. And massaging the pain. Right. Anchoring it in and like, there’s a way I think that we can fool ourselves into what I’m feeling my pain, that’s actually holding on to it. Do you know, does this make sense?

– Yeah.

– And do you have a distinction that you talk about, or maybe you get, but have not articulated before, as I’m watching your, for people who are listening, I’m watching her like scan for the answer. I do the same thing.

– I mean, what I find is that when people get stuck in pain loops, which must be what you’re saying.

– Yeah.

– It often is kind of, they haven’t gotten to the root of the pain. So they haven’t been brave enough to actually feel what’s underneath what it is that they’re feeling and like that’s okay. Like the self-compassion, self-forgiveness, gratitude formula that I gave before applies there too. Like forgive yourself for not being able to feel the route right away because it hurts, like hurts and pain usually really, really hurts ’cause someone has inflicted that pain on you, right. And so it’s not your fault. You’re hurting it’s not your fault. And so I would, again, just invite like a slow down process, but again, in the slow down to speed up way of just approaching the pain through an order. So like do a level of the pain, which you can handle where you can be, where you can name it or do whatever it is that works for you in terms of being able to surface that pain and then follow the order, be compassionate with yourself because, forgive yourself because, for feeling that until we’re grateful for again, like your incredible willingness to grow and your motivation to like open your hand, to listen to those calls and it’s not easy and you have to trust your instincts and trust the process and trust something that’s stirring deep inside of your soul even when there’s an entire world out there that will rationalize, something different to you. So, that journey of going within like can be layered but again, it can be five minutes. You can do five minutes and to speak into you like anger point for instance, I think you’re making a good point before. I don’t want to project that on to you with that with maybe, was I just thinking anger in my head? Maybe I was mad.

– You know what? You’re probably, I know we’re on social media, this coming weekend, I’m running a workshop called Alchemizing Anger. I talk about anger all the time. I think anger holds the keys to so much, for women, especially because a lot of women’s sadness is because they haven’t let themselves be angry. Underneath the anger is usually a well of grief and sadness. So it’s like, it’s almost, it’s kind of like, I love this thing that you were talking about, like the walls and I often think about things as like different rooms. Once you go into the anger room, it like opens up a whole wing of like grief and sadness that needs to be felt. So it’s like, there’s what I think I’m upset about but then I get to my anger and I’m like, damn! here’s what I’m really fucking upset about. You know? And that’s like, that’s why I call it alchemizing anger. So I don’t think… I didn’t specifically say anger here, but you probably just had that associated with me.

– That’s extremely likely, thank you so much for sharing that. I just love that and I think that’ll be such an incredible workshop and I totally agree, like each one of these like feelings that we can tap into is like a portal into whoa! Like a kaleidoscope of ourselves and our magic and mysteries. So exciting what’s this underneath. Every time now I feel an emotion I’m like, yes! celebrate. Cool. Like now is the price is knowing like how to dive in and get underneath that. So for anger, for example, I would find like, I feel irritation. Like I would normally find that a client would come and feel irritated. Like that’s the way the anger is presenting and so, then once you handle irritation, then you might be able to go into frustration, then you might be able to like get into like bitterness and resentment again, usually because you’ve been taken advantage of, you’ve been exploited because you had a great heart. Like again, like it’s not your fault if you’re feeling like some of these emotions, which can seem like extremely dissonant with the way that you perceive yourself and you being like a good person who like, is serving a loving from the heart, like them to speak into like bitterness about your children, like can just seem like so diabolical and again, it’s the same formula, self compassion and self forgiveness and gratitude.

– Yeah.

– And then, that’s the way that we open up to the wing, the mixing of the palace.

– I love that the formula is so simple. Self-compassion, self-forgiveness, gratitude and that’s why it works, but that’s why people won’t do it. Right. I feel like people want something sophisticated. They want to feel like they have some advanced technology or they think they need it and I’m like, it’s the basics everyone. It is the frigging basics. The basics work, these are the building blocks, the advanced things, great. But are you doing the friggin’ basics for the love of God.

– Exactly, work before you run.

– For real, like let’s tie our shoes so we don’t fall on our face, you know?

– And then you get to fly. And then you get to fly.

– Yeah. Yes. I like this thing that you said about the kaleidoscope. So what I’m also interested in because I see it, right. I’m so fascinated at all the ways that people, we all include myself sometimes, allow ourselves to get stuck, right. And one of the things… So this summer I was moving, I decided to move across the country and it was, it did not go well. Like the process. First of all, I had an expectation that it would just be magical because a lot of things are magical for me and this was not that way. And I spent about five minutes asking the age old, what’s wrong with me? Why is this happening question. And I was like, again, I’m not going to waste time on that. I’m just going to be like, okay, I guess this is just going to be hard. So I’m just going to surrender to this could be hard and it doesn’t mean anything about me personally. It’s an initiation, whatever I get to just use my tools, surrender, trust, self love, self compassion, like all these things, right. And so I just let it, I was like, okay, I’m going to stop trying to get this to not be hard and just friggin’ let it be hard and it was, and then it stopped being hard after like a month and a half and I was like, okay, great. We’re back on track now. But I realized in that process how wrong I was making things being hard. And I’m bringing this up because again, like this process, our hearts are so tender, especially around love. It touches on so many things. It touches on all these reasons why we think someone might not like me because of this. Someone might not do this… Da, da like… So how do you… I find that one of the biggest pieces of compassion is actually acceptance. What do you notice around getting people to compassion and acceptance? Like-

– Yeah, I think the acceptance piece is huge. And again, I’d almost come back just to start my answer to come back to the order whereas it’s like, self-compassion is actually the first step in having compassion with others and then the step after that is having compassion with life and reality, you know? So you can’t really get to compassion with others or compassionate to life in reality until you’ve mastered self-compassion, like until that’s just your automatic default wiring, you know?

– Yeah.

– And so it’s like, so from that perspective, because I treat compassion as something that’s felt in the sense of, it’s felt by the heart. And when I talk about feelings, I mean, physical sensations in the body, like it’s actually embodied, right? To your point, to your mastery, to your essence, right? And so from a personal perspective, I think acceptance can be helpful but the way that I engage with acceptance is, is that it’s a little bit of like a mental construct, which could be a helpful Lily pad to start to step into the feeling. Because when you’re in the feeling of self-compassion, when you’re in the feeling of compassion for others, when you’re in a feeling of compassion for life, like it’s just a physical feeling of being melted open.

– Totally. Yeah. That’s actually… That’s how I describe acceptance is like the minute you accept something, you’re just not fighting it anymore. Doesn’t mean you’re okay with it either and I think that’s where some people… Also with forgiveness. So I’m curious, I love looking at the reasons why people wouldn’t do something and their resistance to it. So I’ve been teaching on forgiveness for many, many years as well. I think this is the balm, B-A-L-M for most things, right. If we can forgive ourselves and we can forgive others, which also includes acceptance. And acceptance is not approval, acceptance is not endorsements, it’s just going reality, right? Like you said, the word reality and I wrote that down because it’s interesting because these things sound conflicting sometimes, right? Like when we talk about being intuitive and we talk about being embodied, we talk about being magical or mystical or whatever people want to be like, well, what is reality, right? And there’s all these debates around what’s reality. But sometimes there’s just shit that’s real that we have to deal with in our lives that we can’t just bypass. And I noticed people like to make a lot of reasons to not forgive or to not be ready to forgive or why forgiveness is like, someone needs to be accountable before they could be forgiven and stuff like that. So I’m curious for you, what do you notice with the people you work with? What makes it hard to forgive? When are they ready to forgive? Is it something people can just choose?

– So in the experience of the people that I work with, what I find the era again, is one of doing things out of order. So because self-forgiveness comes first, then forgiveness of the other and forgiveness of life and indeed of God and the divine, if you wish to go that far like forgiveness, but even being born and being separated, the grand wonders of love and all that is the real nature of reality if your belief system extends to there, or if that aligns with your belief system. It’s like people try to skip out of it, like the first steps again. And so it’s like you get to forgiveness of life and you can’t get to forgiveness of someone else, true openhearted way until you fully forgiven yourself. And so what I find is that for the women that I work with, the main forgiveness or the way the texture of that forgiveness often plays is a need to forgive themselves for betraying themselves.

– Yes.

– And so you go, you’re going to say something.

– Do you distinguish between betrayal and abandonment?

– Yes. I think that abandonment has like a callous connotation to it. And so there is like a kind of disassociation that can lead to abandonment because someone else is so far in their own pain. And indeed inside of yourself, you can self abandon because you’re so numb because you’re so inside of your own pain, right? So there’s a callousness and unintentionally to abandonment for me, like betrayal has awareness in it. It has intention, it has direction and so, Dante calls betrayal like that’s the heart of the seven deadly sins. ‘Cause there is something that’s alive in the betrayal and it hurts so, so, so bad.

– I love this distinction, thank you. So with abandonment, it’s like unintentional. It’s almost that like, nervous system, psychological self-protective mechanism, adaptation response. But betrayal it’s like, I know damn well, this isn’t good for me and I’m going to do it anyway.

– Yeah.

– And that’s why it’s worse because of the consciousness and the awareness. I agree with that big time. I can feel, obviously the episode is an hour, I mean, I’ve been doing this for long enough, I’m going to get notes about this point. People are going to be like, fuck! You got me. Called out. Shit! We’ve all done it. We’ve all done it.

– Yeah. And so when you’re able to hold yourself and indeed like speaking to the anchor point, like anger and being able to hold your anger with self-compassion, you’re anger at your self I mean, with self compassion, self forgiveness and gratitude and that could like gratitude by the way, like self-compassionate is hard, self-forgiveness is double up, gratitude is the quantum leap. Truly, like this is not a linear 1, 2, 3. No. And thank you for saying that because something I find really interesting right now in our very polarized times is how people have almost been brainwashed around not valuing things like gratitude, for example, because it’s a bypass. But what I’m hearing you say is it’s not a bypass if you take the order, if you take the steps to get there, it can be, if you don’t… If you’re jumping to gratitude without self-compassion, without self-forgiveness, yes, it is a bypass because then you’re just saying it that’s just like saying an affirmation you don’t believe.

– It actually can be like that and then it can actually be a lot worse because gratitude could be the kind of bypass that can do a tremendous amount of damage if you haven’t followed the order. And the reason for that is that if you have patterns again, which aren’t yours, which do not necessarily come from this lifetime, they could be intergenerational patterns, but if you have patterns of betrayal of the self, which are running in your system, if you have patterns of what could border on masochism, and you’re starting to skip over some of those earliest steps into gratitude, you can blow up energetically, things which actually keeping you stuck. So gratitude can actually be quite dangerous if it is used out of order. That’s why self compassion is critical and self-forgiveness is key and then gratitude, that has to be the final step in the recipe.

– What do you mean blow up things that are keeping you stuck energetically?

– It could be really then… If you have any, like, and again, I’m speaking into the kind of women that I work with, they tend to be so incredibly like big hearted and service oriented by default, but also have extremely porous and energetic boundaries. Meaning that they don’t necessarily even realize how much they abstract out of their own experience, how much they can even abstract out of time and space and just like future tripping and future projecting and pulling ArchiCAD, doing vision boards can all be great examples of how that can work. For regular people like those things can’t cause so much damage. If you’re magical, you can go ahead and change the width that stuff, right?

– Yeah, yeah.

– And so it’s like, and if you don’t actually understand the depth of your power, but also then you don’t understand that distinction between tastes service and martyrdom. If you unintentionally fall so deeply into the shadow, but you’re doing that, like, you know enough to be dangerous. It’s like you can actually create the kind of like web and a knot that’s then going to require you to go all the way back to the beginning and start again at step one.

– Yeah. What’s the difference between that and getting to like the next layer of the onion of healing. Does that question make sense?

– Can you-

– Lemme ask it differently. How do you feel? How does the difference feel? You know what I mean like, ’cause people always are asking the question, how do I know what’s fear and what’s intuition or what’s me fucking up with like, like you were saying with like energy enough to be dangerous, but I actually, I messed something up energetically or I’m just meeting my next level, my next layer. So it feels more intense because it is, but I’m also more advanced. It’s not that I messed something up, it’s not that I’m doing things out of order, it’s that, okay, we’re graduating here so it is more intense. But I feel like often people hit that next layer and it feels like they’ve gone back to the beginning, but that’s not the case. Does that make better sense?

– Oh my gosh, I love that question. Yes, it makes sense. And so, I would say, so the internal experience of that, so the subjective experience of that is that it really is a feeling of peace inside.

– Mh, mh, mh.

– Your mind’s not evolved at all because your heart is open.

– Yes.

– And I would say the external marker of that is humility.

– My last podcast that went up was about patience and humility. This is-

– There you go. I’m in your field.

– You really are. This is so under talked about. Right, and it goes back to something you said earlier. In my experience, when I hit the next level and I’m like, oh ouch! but I’m like, yes! I’m like, this, I am capable of this now. This isn’t going to… I got… Let me use these tools that I’ve been working on. I could do this, this is going to suck, but I can do this. And then, can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of it.

– Right.

– But there is a peace, there’s almost like a relief and that’s, I find what humility bridges us into and you can tell me if you agree or disagree with that. The relief of like, oh, thank God I can see this now rather than what’s wrong with me?

– Yeah.

– Or why is this happening?

– Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a celebration of the affection of all that is and has been.

– Totally.

– Yeah.

– Yeah. I love this. I love talking about these things from multidimensional perspective, because again, in self-help, spirituality, personal development, this is where we get the term Naval gazing, right. When people are just like excavating and excavating and turning things in on themselves, but never actually moving forward.

– Yeah, I don’t think we have the luxury of that anymore. I feel like I’m so lucky because I feel like I had like a good 10 years before the internet where like I got to and my God did I enjoy that process. Like that was a lot of mental masturbation that went on there and it was great.

– Gone are the days when we can afford to just belabor, to beat dead horses and belabor our issues.

– Right, yeah.

– We are in the action and accountability times and the alchemy times for sure.

– Yeah.

– So what else… There’s probably so many more things that I could ask you, but what haven’t I asked you that you’re like, oh, I want to make sure we talk about this.

– I mean, I think that, speaking into that point of needing to move fast, because I do feel like humanity is on a precipice. I genuinely feel that. And I don’t say that in an alarmist way, I just say that as a-

– I’m with you.

– Okay, like we have really like, where we’ve got to go now, like I really got to go now and, it’s instant gratification is a tool that gets us collectively into leaning into the right kind of tools and processes and methods, which are right for us obviously, everything’s going to be different for every single person. But the more we lean into that and the better it’s going to be in terms of the chances. And so I think that one thing, which is really helpful, I find when I’m working with clients is to have them very clearly linked into a motivation that’s meaningful and relevant for them. And again, that motivation is going to be very different for everybody. And because I work primarily in the field of dating and relationships that motivation often can be like, this is not a mental motivation, this is a genuine heart desire for wanting to come into sacred union, wanting to come into a beautiful love and partnership and build from there, create family or to create, some kind of like creative, you should have known. You like, can I have a really beautiful, yummy, delicious life, you know what they say?

– Yeah.

– Whatever the motivation is and that needs to, again, like it’s so important, cannot be an externally generated motivation, it needs to be authentic, it needs to be genuine, it needs to be really something that bubbles up from inside of ourselves then like not lose track of that motivation because we’ve spoken about leaving the island and that’s sort of the first step. There’s seven steps in the journey and just say, creating divine union in this particular example, like loving, romantic, intimate partnership, just say that’s what you get at the end. That’s where you’re going to. Remember that and keep that in your heart on a daily basis. That’s the discipline. Because there will be times where it’s going to feel hard. To your point, it’s like, there are times like you’re moving across the country, you moving the island to the guide and then the secret garden, as we call, the love language that beautiful become lush abundant place, where you get your feet on the ground and you can be the god and goddess, I work primarily with women, so it’s like, the goddess imagery and the feeling of having like your feet, like in the sacred earth, but having like the starry sky up above and like being there with a loved one, with a partner and being able to share that love. Like tap into that feeling every single day, because there’ll be hard moments as you cross the country. There’ll be hard moments in re.love language, if you cross the moat that wild fortress it’s in the middle of a moat. We need to swim across the water. Like there are shots and cold herbal stuff like you might drown in the moat. Like if you don’t remember why you’re swimming. So like, whatever-

– Yeah.

– Whatever that motivation is and I have personal motivations and I’ve actualized my personal motivations through re.love but I have a big mission as well, which is that like, I really deeply believe that if we do not open our hearts together collectively, then the future of us speaks this in peril and I would love, love, love, love, love to create that metaphoric garden for everybody, for every single person on the planet the other side.

– I’m with you. Okay. I have a question that is formulating how I want to say it to be the most effective question. I’m assuming, but you can correct me if I’m wrong that most of your students it’s probably heteronormative or no?

– I’d say that, the majority have been, and I would say that that is changing. And so I am now having a number of women who would identify as queer come through. I do tend to work with the feminine, which means that it’s very rare that a man or someone who identifies as masculine is drawn to my work.

– Right.

– But so that’s why I’m talking in the language of women. But yeah, it’s not about like when I am in my feminine, then I shall-

– No, no, no, no, no, no. I ask because-

– Meet my king.

– I also get that’s like, that’s the great majority, but, and I don’t want to, I don’t want to ostracize people, but I do want to ask this question. I know a lot of women and a lot of dialogue, especially among women who like do their work is where are the men, men aren’t doing their work. Da, da, da, da, da. So I’m super curious how that falls into all of your re.love stuff and like where you stand, because I really do hold the belief that there are wonderful men everywhere and what I noticed though, is they just don’t look like how we think they’re going to look like. And I don’t just mean, I don’t mean physically. I literally mean, like I think we kind of get sold. Like you want a man who’s doing his work too. But honestly, in my experience, the men who are like reading the books and going to workshops and da, da and stuff like this are not, not for me. You know what I mean? But it’s like the men who just like have some kind of like natural, like connection to like the earth and purpose and their power and like women, like for, I don’t know why or how maybe they had a great mom or sisters, but like they revere women in some like natural, almost like holy, spiritual way without having gone to like all the fucking workshops and learned all the lingo and whatever. So I’m curious for you, I guess, I know I have women who ask, like, where are the men? Where are you meeting people? How, this, that, like, it’s so hard, a lot of jaded people. So what do you… How do you respond to that? How do you address that?

– Well, straightaway, someone’s asking that question, they’re on the island so they’re in their head. So right away, I just see whether they’re willing to feel their pain. Like, are they willing to say they feel lonely for instance, or they’re willing to say they have a desire and they feel sad that they haven’t created what it is that they thought that they had created, it’s a little girlfriends den. If they’re not willing to answer that question, honestly, I can’t help them, it’s beyond my limits at this time. If someone is willing to say, actually, yes, like I have such a robust full life that there is something missing and it hurts. And I don’t know how, I don’t know how to find good men or the partner that’s going to really make me, that’s the point that we tend to, I can help someone. And so the how is very counter-intuitive because like the mind wants to know which dating app, like, which strategy? Do I go to a hotel bar, but then he might be traveling and I to have a man who’s in my hometown, you know? So it’s like, okay, cool. Like we could do that and that’s a luxury, like we could do that for a year. I don’t think we’ve got a year guys or girls or women or everyone. Like, I don’t think we’ve got a year, like, I think we’ve got to just calm down into our hearts and start to feel. And then you’re just going to start to see that there is an infinite supply of people who will be able to meet you exactly where you are right now. So the reason why you can’t find any of the men is because you’re too closed, your attraction field is completely closed off and so you’re either A, not attracting them or when they show up, you’re B, too blind to see them. Because they are showing up, they’re showing up all the time and so one of the things that I love around in the re.love process is like, as soon as people start to, and I do, I’m moving fast, like even DIY is like, whoa, people have been single for seven years and then suddenly they’ve got 10 suitors after five weeks and they’re like, I’ve got whiplash. I’m like, again, you don’t have to pace, you can just slow down if you like. So like the process is actually so fast and so effective. The opposite is true. It’s usually a kind of overwhelm at just how many incredible people there are and how do you choose. So there’s a filtering system, we want to build a healthy filtration system, but I guess, the process is for me, it’s about, okay, I totally hear that. I totally hear that’s been her experience, if you’re open, ’cause I’m not going to support you if you’re not open, I’m not down for giving unsolicited advice or feedback on telling you where. Like, you have to ask. That’s the first initiation, like how do I open the door? I say, oh great. I’m so happy. You do it like this. But you need to ask the right question and the right question is an honest question. So it’s a courageous question, which is, I don’t know how, can you show me how?

– Yeah. Ah, also it’s just so gentle. I love it so much. Okay, there was one other… This piece, I want to hop on this for a second because, I know my audience and I could feel, I could feel this. There’s so many women listening who have that program, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, and maybe this is going to unlock it. Maybe this is going to bring it forward into the conscious from the unconscious who are, who have the, I don’t need anyone program. Or I shouldn’t need anyone program.

– Yeah

– Or needing someone makes me codependent.

– Oh yeah.

– Because we’ve worked a lot. You and I have talked a lot about this. We’ve talked a lot about codependency on the podcast. You and I, our beloved Ken page, who we love deeper dating so much, his explanation, we’ll link to that episode in the show notes here of codependency where it’s just like, you just have so much love to give and you have such a generous heart, but who you’re giving it to and the way you’re giving it, hasn’t been appropriate. Hasn’t been self honoring, right. And so it’s not being reciprocated in a way, right. But, and I think this is one of the ways that people block it, I certainly have, right. Being like, well, maybe I don’t need it. Maybe I don’t want it. Maybe that’s not for me. We talk ourselves out of what we deeply want. So we don’t have to face like what you were just saying. Like, I don’t know how, or we have all these different types of beliefs. So, anything you want to say on that note to wrap up.

– I just love that question. So the first thing I will actually say, which is a little bit of a side turn on that is that I don’t actually believe that every single person on the planet is designed to be in partnership. Like it might also be your truth, right. To be on your own and to create a life on your own. In which case, if that’s your truth, like pump, pump, waving, and keep throwing, you never need to apologize yourself.

– Oh my God, sorry. Let me, in case that wasn’t clear, like I’m specifically talking about the people for whom that is not their truth, but they’re trying to talk to themselves. ‘Cause it really, I agree with you I’ve seen this in our community, there’s plenty of people who it’s like, no, I actually, I’m good. That’s filled.

– Yeah. I love that. And so then, it takes a tremendous again, amount of honesty and self compassion and in these cases, the self compassion needs to proceed the honesty, which is why self compassion to be practice can be such a beautiful way to start. And by self compassion practices can just be, like I said before, I feel sad. I feel passionate of myself of feeling sad. And you don’t have to try to So it’s like, once you have a level of self compassion, then you can have the honesty breakthrough, which is like, oh, actually I just didn’t know how and my programs made me feel like, going into like a, relationship was actually going to be something that was going to be a negative in my life, because that was what I observed in my childhood home. That’s the way I saw my mother completely lose herself and, I don’t want to recreate that life. And you know what I said, I didn’t want to recreate that life and I still got into relationships in my own adult lifetime that were less then, and I ended up going ahead and duplicating the exact thing, which I swore to myself, as a little girl, like I would never do. And so then the levels and levels of shame and so forth compound, which can then lead to that superwoman effect and all of that armory.

– Yeah.

– So it’s like, again, that very fair, so I know it’s a broken, feel compassion and then honesty. Right and then

– I feel like I keep setting you up to be the broken record though ’cause I want people to get the point.

– Cause that’s how forgiveness it’s felt, it’s not your fault.

– Yeah.

– It’s not your fault. In fact, and it wasn’t your mother’s fault or your father’s fault, if that was indeed your childhood experience, or whatever kind of patterning that you had experienced. Like we are living in a vast like collective programming of suppression and oppression of the divine feminine for so many reasons. And it’s not like the divine masculine got off great either. Like the whole thing is like, not, not ideal, right. So it’s like it’s no individual’s fault and the pathway through to change itself, compassion, forgiveness, honesty. And then, one of the very first models that I work with in re.love is around needs. So being able to really feel for the first time, what it is that you need? And I had such an unanticipated difficulty with that module ’cause I was like, great, awesome, cool. Okay, I just need to like show the women, like when I first started doing re.love I was like, I can just show the reason that they’ve just not been prioritizing their needs and then they’ll go ahead, have the realization, figure out what they need there and forge like in their relationship with their equal partners and that was such a rude awakening, right. For myself as a coach. ‘Cause I realized, and I know that we’re coming to the end now, but just attaching to that point around the facilitated process, like that’s actually where I realized I needed to add a whole lot a layer into what it was that I was doing and that’s why I love leading live groups and cohorts and doing these facilitated processes now because we need to cut very quickly, I think in order to effectively shift like these intergenerational patterns, which is like, most people feel guilty about having needs in the first place because they do not feel worthy of existing. Like that’s like, boom, getting right to the heart of it. But it’s like that doesn’t make sense to the mind, that is something which is a very like deep psycho-spiritual energetic process, which I take people through. It can be done very quickly to release that block, create a new pathway, meaning like a deep embodied sense of self worth and self love and create that self sovereignty and if and then, go through a recalibration or reintegration process and from that place, then it’s not so much like, what are my scripts for communicating my needs? Not suggesting this is what you’re saying, but it’s like a lot of times people come into it and they’re like, how do I communicate my needs? Or how do I effectively set boundaries? Like what are the words? And yes, absolutely. Like these scripts are good, they’re positive, they’re better than nothing, right? But once you go down to the root of what’s actually operating on a very, very deep level, like what’s the emotional static and again, it comes back a lot of the time, like to guilt and shame and anger and all the things or passed emotions that we’ve talked about. Once you really beautifully attempt to that through self-compassion, self-forgiveness, gratitude and you come into that state of real embodied, self love, then your own words just naturally flow in the right way, at the right time and are heard by the right person.

– Yeah. I love that. So at the time that this interview is airing, which is probably some time in October, I know you just started a module, a cohort for re.love, when is the next time that people can join in?

– Yeah, great question. So early 2022, I do intend to run another group program and the group programs are just, so juicy, delicious and live, they’re-

– How long? Is it like a six month thing? How long is it?

– 12 weeks. 12 weeks.

– 12 weeks.

– Okay, great. Oh, I love this. I’m so excited for you. You know what’s weird? This has been coming up a lot lately when I interview people, I just want to be like, I’m so proud of you. Not like a condescending way, but especially when I know people personally and so I know what, like the front of the house and the back of the house has looked like and like getting yourself here and doing all of your own work because you can’t teach and create a body of work like this without having a really I’ve gone into it and done it for yourself because as we know, when you decide to take on the role of teacher, you are going to be called to integrate what you dare to teach and so I’m just so happy for you. I’m excited for you and proud of you like it’s so, we have, we’ve been connected for many years now, so it’s, I love watching the evolution of my friends’ bodies of work. And I love that, it’s like, we’re all on this. I call it, for years I’ve been calling it like this transition team to just like get the fucking world to be a more loving place. My God! Like get people to wake up to how magnificent they are, so they stop doing things to each other to feel good. Damn! What else we got to do out here? On Instagram you’re @ezziespencer, right?

– That’s right, yeah.

– And then the website is it ezziespencer.com.

– It is.

– And re.love, everything lives on the website. Is there anywhere else you want people to go?

– That’s it. Oh, I do have a podcast about re.love. We’ve got Ezzie Spencer which is in all of the places, Apple podcast, Spotify and so forth. But come on over to the website, ezziespencer.com, sign up for the love notes list. My groups tend to sell out like, so if you are interested then jump on the list, ’cause then you’ll need to be the first to hear and then I always love hearing from you. So feel free to DM on Instagram, @ezziespencer.

– Great. Oh my God, I love you. I’m so glad we got to catch up beforehand, have this conversation. It’s just so good. It’s just so freaking good.

– I love it. I’m so happy to be on the team with you.

– Thank you. All right, everybody, we’ll see you later.