How to Love Well

Do you know how to love yourself and others well?

Not the kind of love where you try to fix, change or save people. Not the kind of love where you chase someone who doesn’t love you back. But the kind of love in which you want for others the same thing you want for yourself: whatever God has in store.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing a personal journey with self-love and romantic love, and I’m offering insights on how to let your love flow.

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To me, love is divine. It comes from a greater source–be that God, the Universe, or whatever you prefer to call it. When we love ourselves and others, we allow that energy to flow through us.

Only when we love while staying true to ourselves can we experience love in its truest form.

Join me in today’s episode as I share a personal journey with self-love and romantic love, including how I’ve learned to set gentle boundaries and engage in courageous communication with those I care most about.

Listen to episode 375 now!

In episode 375 of the Embodied Podcast we discuss:

[1:07] How collective energy affects us even if we don’t prescribe to the popular way of thinking
[3:13] How withholding your love hurts you more than it protects you
[6:58] Why we disrespect ourselves by chasing those who don’t want to or can’t love us
[10:13] How to create boundaries while still letting your love flow
[11:56] Understanding codependency and recognizing that it is not love
[14:28] Finding healthy examples of romantic love in the people around you
[16:32] Why we need to stop trying to fix, change, and save others while neglecting ourselves
[20:12] Understanding your deal breakers when it comes to dating and romance
[22:00] How to let love flow, both within yourself and to others
[26:45] The power of grief and forgiveness in learning to love well

Resources mentioned by Elizabeth in the episode:

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

[05:54] “Anything you’re doing that’s not being who you really are is a form of manipulation when it comes to relating with people.” – Elizabeth
[09:18] “The feeling of not needing, wanting or even longing for anything that isn’t available, but also letting my love flow is a layer of soul liberation I never would have thought I needed until I was standing in it.” – Elizabeth
[12:09] “Codependency is not love.” – Elizabeth
[14:20] “You can’t tug on the thread of romantic love and not just generally tug on all threads of all types of love in your life.” – Elizabeth
[23:24] “What I have found is the more I love myself, the easier it is to just say no to shit that is not aligned for me.” – Elizabeth
[33:19] “It actually takes a lot of courage, a lot of compassion, a lot of commitment, and also a lot of grieving to love people without conditions.” – Elizabeth

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 375:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Embodied podcast in 2022. I am your host Elizabeth DiAlto, and since 2013, I have been teaching women how to harness the power of their sacred bodies and free their wild souls. This podcast became a big part of that work when we launched in 2015. And what listeners consistently share that they love about the show is how we always aim to address, synthesize, and integrate the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of not just healing, but finding self-love, wholeness, and liberation. The show is available on all podcast players and YouTube and our show notes pages, which you can find at untameyourself.com/podcast, include minute markers and transcripts. If you’re a note-taker or it’s just helpful for you to see things in writing, head on over there and check it out. And thank you so, so much for listening. Your time, energy, and attention is valuable and precious. And I appreciate that you’d focus any of it here with me and our guests. Let’s get into the show.

Hello everybody. Welcome to episode number 375 of the Embodied podcast. This episode is coming out on Valentine’s Day. So if you’re listening in real time, I’m not a big fan of Hallmark holidays. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for any period of time, you either already knew that about me or probably could have guessed it. But here’s the thing. This is the way I feel about New Years and Thanksgiving and like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and stuff like that too. Even for those of us who aren’t really bought into the hallmarknes or the capitalism of it all, there’s a lot of energy around it. And whenever there are hundreds of thousands or a couple million or even billions of people who celebrate or recognize something, that’s a big collective energy around it and that’s gonna affect us whether we’re into it or we’re not. So I do always like to acknowledge these days. And I was so glad that this post that I made on Instagram a couple weeks ago, which I’ll share with you all, which is the basis for this episode, gave me something super appropriate to share on this Valentine’s Day. So anyway, we will put the link to the original post in the show notes, which will be at untameyourself.com/375, because this is episode number 375. But I’m gonna read to you what it said on the little quote cards, what it said in the caption, and then we’ll go back through and break down some of the thing. I got a bunch of questions. People wanted to go deeper, wanted me to explain things on the posts. It goes on Instagram and Facebook. And here’s the thing. I don’t do that on social media because social media just doesn’t leave enough room for the nuance and for the feeling and for the voice inflection, intonation to get the fuller, deeper experience and transmission of what I would wanna share, especially about something this deep and meaningful. So I wanted to record a podcast episode.

So here’s what it said on the quote cards on Instagram. Always remember that withholding your love hurts you more than it protects you. We must learn in this life to let our love flow and to direct that energy wisely even when it’s not received or reciprocated. When we stop treating people as the objects of our affection and learn to experience love as the holy and universal stream of divine energy that it is, we can cause less harm with our unrequited desires and experience less harm at the hands of other’s unavailability. And I wanna just say a few things about even that second paragraph there. That’s the second quote card. If you’re listening to this, you don’t really know that. But, you know, this show, for the most part, mostly women and fems listen to this show, and often it’s really regarded that women are the ones who are objectified, but that is not true. We objectify people just as much as we get objectified. It just might look different because treating someone like the object of our affection, like there’s something to acquire or something to get or something to catch or find or win, these are all verbs that really describe how we would engage with an object, not necessarily a person. And so that’s nuanced, but that’s something to really reflect on and really self-inquire and look at when we’re treating people like objects. And then causing less harm with our unrequited desires. Listen, I know there’s people listening to this show who have tried to convince people to be with them, who who have chased people, who have manipulated people or tried to insert themselves in people’s lives or listen to dating advice that was more like strategies and stuff like that and done things that might have been either out of integrity or compromised who you really are to be someone that somebody else wanted, that’s a manipulation. Even if you are doing the self-sacrifice, even if you’re manipulating yourself, anything you’re doing that’s not being who you really are is a form of manipulation when it comes to relating with people. And again, manipulation isn’t necessarily always malignant, right? We’re not like try to be a bad person, but sometimes when we really want something especially love, you know, we’ll bend and twist ourselves into human pretzel versions of ourselves to hopefully be something that somebody else will choose. And we can cause harm when we do that to others because it’s deceptive. We can cause harm to ourself, which is why I say cause less harm with our unrequited desires and experience less harm at the hands of other people’s unavailability.

Because the thing is, and all of us have done this, too, sometimes we will stay too long whether that’s in pursuits or whether that’s in relationships or connections, loverships, situationships, whatever you wanna call them, with people who were just not, they don’t what we want, you know? I saw a meme once that said something like stop prioritizing people who treat you like an option. And I was like, “Oof! You don’t have to tell me that shit twice. Once I got like that articulation of that thing, I was like, “Damn, all right.” I’m not gonna do that anymore because that is really disrespectful. That is not loving to ourselves to continue to prioritize people. And listen, I know we’ll do the thing. We’ll make excuses. “But this person has this going on or that going on or whatever.” But the bottom line is, can they be in a reciprocal, loving relationship with you? Do they want what you want? Are you on the same page? Are you moving in the same trajectory or not? You know, when we’re not, we gotta make some choices there.

So my posts, the caption on the posts after those two things is here’s what it said, this was a couple weeks ago so I said I’ve got a little heart share for this Monday morning since I bumped the return of the podcast to February 7th. 2021 gave me a masterclass in allowing love to transform and inform me. I was invited in a big way through a soul contract to practice letting myself love someone from afar because withholding my love would’ve been far worse and pursuing them would’ve been an act of self-abandonment and disrespect. I learned how to live without reciprocity or any real relationship with them, even a friendship, without resentment or closing my heart, which again is harmful to me and doesn’t get me anything or anywhere I wanna be anyway. This experience broke a lifelong pattern of being available for people who weren’t available for me and also showed me where I was still over-functioning in relationships of all kinds, not just romantic. So I could stop doing that too. And what a fucking relief, I cannot tell you how much energy I got back for myself after this. And it’s amazing to see and feel how my attractions and my impulses have shifted since this experience too. My final passing grade in the masterclass came during an unexpected catch-up call after months of not hearing this person’s voice. We were remain friendly. We’re just not really in each other’s lives.

The feeling of not needing, wanting, or even longing for anything that isn’t available, but also letting my love flow is a layer of soul liberation I never would’ve thought I needed until I was standing in it. Like bell hooks taught us, which, by the way, this is from the book “All About Love.” If you’ve never read that, such a freaking great book. Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a doing. It’s action. And I’m a lover. I love, it’s what I do. In a world where so many don’t know how to love or afraid of love or can’t let themselves love, I refuse to be less loving. But I had to get more discerning first and practice working with the energy of love, the divine force that wants to run through all of us and I had to deal with the egoey codependent, unhealthily attached trauma-responding bits before I could even touch that energy in a responsible way. And I’m sure some of you could relate to that. So people ask me how to let love flow while still having healthy boundaries, how to open up the divine force of love and some other questions, especially about those two things. And so I wanted to break it down a little bit for the rest of the episode here.

This is probably gonna be a shorter episode, but opening up to divine love really took two things for me and over the course of several years, okay? So when I really started working on this, it was 2016, and I say I graduated from the masterclass in 2021. Now, I’m not saying this is gonna take you five years, but it could. It could take longer than that. I mean, if you really wanna be honest, I really, up until recently, haven’t been without a crush in my life. Really since like kindergarten. I had my first crush in kindergarten. And so I’ve given a lot of energy. I mean, I’m heterosexual, so I’ve given a lot of energy to men. I know we have a full range of sexual preferences in our listeners. So you may have given a lot of energy to love, lovers, whoever it is that you love or attracted to date, prefer or anything like that. And so we could say it took five years. We could say it’s been taking me my whole damn life since I was five years old. The point I’m trying to make is more than likely you’re not gonna rush through this so don’t expect too. Don’t be hard on yourself if it takes a while. I mean, these are big things. And for a lot of us, these are the things that we really, these are some of our like lifetime things that we come into this life to work out and to get through.

So one of the first things that was so important for me was understanding codependency and recovering from that because so many of us, our culture is very codependent and so many of us come from codependent families. And codependency is not love, y’all. I have some people in my life who are constantly telling me how much they love me, but then also trying to control me, butting into my life, giving me unsolicited advice. Like that’s not love. From their perspective, they think they’re trying to be help. They think they’re doing it ’cause they care about me. And those two things might be true, right? They might care about me, but that behavior is codependent. That behavior, right? Remember, bell hooks taught us love is action. Love is doing. That behavior is codependent. That behavior is not loving. ‘Cause when we actually love people, and I’ll talk more about this in a little while, when we actually love people, we want what is best for them. We want what God wants for them. And a lot of the times, that is not aligned with what we want with them or we want from them. And so that’s a really big piece. So I had to really learn a lot, unpack codependency, recover from that, heal from that.

Now, I’m not gonna go too deep into codependency here. If you wanna dive more into it though in those years when I was really unpacking it, I did some great interviews with people who are amazing with it. So go to the show notes page, untameyourself.com/375, and you’ll find links there to episodes with Terri Cole, Lisa A. Romano, Avery Neal, Eva Clay, and Ken Page, all of whom addressed in their interviews codependency and unhealthy attachment and how to really stay in your own energy, in your own desires, how to spot red flags, how to really have much healthier boundaries and energy around, especially dating in romantic relationships and connections. But this also goes for all kinds of relationships. And the cool thing about this is even though my share was in a romantic context, like I said in the caption of that post, it really, really helped me also see where I was still over-functioning in all kinds of relationships. ‘Cause you can’t tug on the thread of romantic love and not just generally tug on all threads of all types of love in your life.

So unhooking from codependency, for me, largely meant that I had to pay attention to the meaning-making and stories that I had about what love looked like and meant or what it was supposed to look like. And I also really had to find healthy examples. I had to root out some big time family of origin stuff, and I did this through so many different modalities, traditional therapy, obviously embodiment work is my jam, other energetic healing modalities. And I really didn’t have any healthy examples of romantic love in my life until well into my thirties. And so that was important for me. I had to find proof that what I want even existed to build my confidence in finding it and to not get jaded during the healing process of this because so many of you were probably listening to this ’cause you could relate. So this shit is very common and I truly believe this is something collectively that we as women, in this lifetime, came to really break these patterns of self-sacrifice, of codependency, of overfunctioning, overgiving, all of these things people-pleasing, or like hustling to get love and doing just weird things that are not self or soul-honoring to get love, right? So part of of healing was also dating and meeting people, having those, Terri Cole calls this repeating reality. It’s like meeting similar people, similar patterns, but responding to them differently as I was healing and learning and growing and being able to spot things I didn’t used to be able to spot, right? So I would be able to say no to things I didn’t used to say no to, that I would just like let slide or deal with, I would just walk away or I would set a boundary or have a courageous conversation and you know, celebrating my progress along the way and really noticing and noting my progress. I also, one of the ways my codependency functions, I had to really stop trying to fix, change, and save people. You know, we’re all built differently.

Again, if you’ve listened to the podcast or if you follow me on social media, you know I’m a Virgo. I also have a Capricorn moon. My Leo is in Venus. And so, again, I’m such a lover. I care so much about people. I have three planets in Sagittarius in the house of like love and partnership and relationships. So it’s like there’s a lot of my life’s lessons and journeys and healings have come through, especially romantic relationships. But I had to break my pattern as well of falling in love or becoming enamored with people’s potential. And that was really hard for me for two reasons. One, I am a highly-sensitive person. Some of you probably are too. I’m an extroverted, highly-sensitive person. But nonetheless, I receive a lot of information through my nervous system, through my senses. And then on top of that, I’m also quite psychic. So there are just a lot of things that I just hear, see, sense, and know that there’s no reason for me to know them, but I do, which makes it really hard when you’re dating. And you’re meeting people who are like saying one thing or behaving one way, but you could really feel or you just know that this is not who they really are. And listen, in some cases, people are being deceptive. But in other cases, people are just not connected to who they really are. And so that was a big pattern for me. I would get these people who just like weren’t really connected to themselves yet, but I can feel like how amazing they were. I would always meet like amazing people who just weren’t fulfilling their potential yet or who weren’t aligned with their soul or who didn’t even really know who they were. But I could see it. And because I’m a healer, I’m a mystic, this is like my work, I love helping people heal, connect to who they really are, embody their soul. You know, that’s exciting for me. But I really had to decide that in personal relationships, that’s what I do professionally, and in personal relationships, I was not doing that anymore. And so weaning myself off of that was really, really, really important because, again, it’s hard when you see the best in people and feel deep down where they’re loving and tender and wise and vulnerable.

And of course, because I’ve done so much healing work in my own life and with clients, I have a ton of compassion for trauma and also understanding, and also, again, sight for it. I could see when someone is coming from their trauma, but I could no longer engage with people at the level of their trauma once I had healed so much of mine. And so that’s why I had to develop some mantras for myself. Something like real rules and guidelines for myself. Like explains it, but doesn’t excuse it, right? Like I can understand. Got it, this person’s behavior comes from their unprocessed trauma, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay. It doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t mean I have to take it. I get it, but I don’t have to stick around for it. I can have compassion for it, but I don’t have to tolerate it or give my energy to it. I also had to get really clear on my deal-breakers. My deal-makers, like what I’m looking for, what I’m excited about, that stuff is like ever-shifting and evolving. And for me that came out of self-love work. I know I’m billed. I know what I need. And I know what’s negotiable for me and what’s not. And by the way, if you need help with that, I taught a workshop last year, actually right around a year ago, it was February of 2021, on dating in your 30s and 40s, which by the way you could be in your 20s, you could be 50 plus, it’s still gonna be good information for you. But the majority of the people in our community are in their 30s and 40s. And so if that’s something you wanna check out, go to untameyourself.com/workshops to check that out. And if you’re in the Wild Soul sacred body membership, which used to be called the Embodied Living Center, you already have access to that workshop. That’s included in your membership. It’s under Elizabeth’s Teaching archives. So just go find that. Now, back to deal-breakers. Communication is paramount for me. So if someone is vague, gives mixed signals, can’t navigate conflict, is super defensive, and just doesn’t say what they mean, I’m out. And I know some of you probably listening being like, “Damn, that eliminates a large segment of the population.” And it really does. And I’m fine with that. Because again, I spent, like freaking almost 38 years of my life tolerating that shit. And now I just don’t. I am no longer willing to interpret what people mean and do the heavy lifting of pulling the truth out of them, if it’s even possible. So mixed signals are a no for me. And that’s actually why I opted out of seeing where things might go with the man that this story is about because he was mixed signal city. So I put us in the friend zone and I gave it over to God. So now, this is the… Let’s talk about the letting love flow part. So one thing I wanna mention here, I’ve created a lot of healing frameworks over the years, healing and embodiment frameworks. And when I talk about self-love, I’m always referring to like the full picture of self-love according to my embodied self-love framework, which includes self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-trust, and self-respect. And those things also include boundaries and courageous communication.

So I have a course for that, by the way. If you go to untameyourself.com/selflove, it’s a great course. It has supportive embodiment practices to go with it, Wild Soul Movement classes, erotic body classes, playlists, mantras, all kinds of great stuff to help you really incorporate and embody those things in addition to the workshops. And you know, I personally, these things that you hear popularized and you see memefied on social media all the time, like you gotta love yourself first before you can love anybody else or before anyone’s gonna love you or stuff like that, you know, those things are just not absolute truths. What I have found is the more I love myself, the easier it is to just say no to shit that is not aligned for me because I know that I am worthy of what I give. And again, trusting myself, honoring myself, knowing who I am and how I’m built, respecting myself, it’s like I have too much respect for myself. I care about myself too much to do self-sacrifice anymore, right? Or to negotiate on my deal-breakers. On things that like aren’t that important to me, sure. Oh, I don’t mind negotiating on that stuff. But on my deal-breakers, hell no. So the letting love flow part not only came from doing that foundational self-love work, which led me to developing that framework, but really also came about by studying the works of great mystics and poets, specifically and most notably Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mother Mary, Rumi, and Teresa of Avila by way of Caroline Myss are at the absolute top of the list for me. And not just Rumi. Other Sufi poets as well. And Rumi’s stuff, there’s just something about, and I wanna be accurate and important and just acknowledge here the things that get attributed to Rumi, because there are a lot of things that come from other teachers and other masters that aren’t necessarily Rumi, but they get attributed to Rumi. And Rumi’s own stuff also gets distorted quite a bit over time. But one of the things, all of these mistakes have in common is how they engage with God as this source of divine love and how they’re able to let love flow through them and let love be the teacher, let love be the guidance, let love be the healing bomb, let love be the religion truly, right? If we’re stepping outside of traditional religions, then we’re getting into mysticism. Love is actually, that’s the ruler, it’s love. Is this loving? Is this not loving? Does this get me closer to God? Does this not? Does this get me closer to my soul’s path or does it not? And in 2020, October 2020 into January, 2021, I did this ancestral healing work with a woman named Francisco Santibanez. And connecting to my ancestors, that was my intention. Just help me. I only wanna do things that get me closer to God and that keep me on my soul’s path, my soul’s intended path, right? And so those were major influences for me.

I also realized many years ago that loving someone doesn’t mean wanting what I want for them. I had mentioned this earlier. It means wanting what God wants for them. Just like I only want what God wants for me, I only want what God wants for people I love, which doesn’t always involve me. And that took a lot of surrender and trust and grieving. Y’all, we gotta grieve. Grieving is everything. Grieving and forgiveness were such a big part of this transformation, transmutation, alchemy, this masterclass, and again, over the course of many years, not just in this experience with this one man. He was just like the cherry on top who helped me pass the masterclass. I like to say he initiated me out of my availability for unavailability. And surrender and trust are pillars of another healing and embodiment framework. I created, actually the very first one I created in 2013, my self-liberation framework, which I’ve changed the name of that so many times over the years, but it is, self-liberation is really the best name for it, ’cause it’s so freeing. So I’ve been working surrender and trust for myself since 2013 with deep devotion, but also facilitating and teaching and helping other people practice surrender and trust for just as long. So I don’t have any stubbornness around that anymore. I can easily recognize when I am clinging or attaching to something that’s just outta my control and honestly not my business. So I don’t waste my time on stuff like that anymore. And so I had a direct conversation with this man at a certain point, just to say, “Hey. What trajectory you’re feeling for us? Are you feeling we’re more in a romantic lane? More in a friendship lane?” And where he was, he couldn’t even really pick one ’cause he wanted to kinda hold on and say, “Well, you never know what could happen.” But he was also not in a place to say, “Yeah, let’s see what’s possible romantically.” And so for me, because it was mixed and it wasn’t decisive, I opted out, because I mentioned earlier, mixed signals are a no for me. Mixed messages and mixed feelings, all those things are nos for me now. Partly because, and this is another big piece of it, I know my shadow self. I know how she could be manipulative and how she is a real good at it. So I will sometimes play out what I’m tempted to do, how I wanna be manipulative, little games I might wanna play and then I let it go. But it’s important to not pretend that I don’t feel that way, that I don’t have those thoughts and I don’t have those inclinations because I damn sure do, just like everyone listening here also has those inclinations.

And so prayer was really another, just massive, massive piece of this. And I’ve always been of prayer by the way. Like I was raised Catholic. I grew up praying. Some of you heard me say this before and I’ve believed in prayer since I was really little because I wanted, from the time I was four years old, I was the first child born in my family, my generation’s first grandchild. And then when I was three, no, when I was four, my cousin Danny was born and I wanted a little brother so badly at that point. And I would pray every single day. I would sit at the window in my house, look up at the clouds because when you’re four, you think God lives up there, right? In my four-year-old mind, God looked like Mr. Clean and he lived up there in the clouds. So I would sit at the window and I would pray to him like Mr. Clean-looking God hid an earing and everything and I’ll ask for a little brother. And then about a year later, I got one. And so when I was five, I was like, “Well damn, that shit works.” It’s probably not exactly how I was having the thought in my mind. Although it could have been, y’all. I am from Staten Island. So I’ve been praying forever. My prayers are just quite different now than they used to be when I was religious. But last year in the spring in 2021, I realized that for years and years I had been saying some version of this prayer, use me, move me, and make me a force for expansion, for love, and for good, or for self love, healing, wholeness, and liberation. And one morning, I was sitting there, I have this beautiful, big statue of Mother Mary. I was sitting there with my Mother Mary statue. She’s always like a focal point on my altar. And I was saying my prayer. And I was just like, “Wait, I am so tired. I don’t wanna be a force. And by the way, I don’t have to be. God is the force. Love is the force.” So I changed my prayer to make me an instrument and a channel. And I opened myself up more for the divine love to flow through me, which it’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of it in this context prior to that because this is something I had been doing in my work for years. You know, one of the prayers I say all the time before I run a workshop, or for the podcast, do anything with clients, “Dear God, use my mouth. Let me say or do whatever this person needs today or whatever this group needs today.” So I was familiar with surrendering my egos, my needs to be right, my judgments, and letting God or love, whatever you wanna call it, work through me. And you know, I always regard myself as a steward of my work. I’m co-creating with the divine, even the gifts, talents, psychic abilities, whatever that I have, those are not mine. I’m not doing those things. Those things are happening through me. I am just one human vessel that those particular things move through. So that prayer and that focus and feeling whatever I let my human get in the way of my soul’s wisdom and truth to basically stop dropping prayer be like, “Woo, I need some great stuff in here. I need some God. It needs some Jesus, Need some Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, help a sister out,” you know, whatever it is, because our souls are oriented towards unconditional love. But the human part of us is not. Human minds is hella programmed. It’s hella conditional. So that’s why, again, working with Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, these different energies, praying, feeling them, getting their guidance, reading their prayers, reading their books, things like that helped me to access immense compassion and love without attachment.

And this is one reason why the Divine Mother is one of the archetypes in my Wild Soul archetypes. It actually takes a lot of courage, a lot of compassion, a lot of commitment, and also a lot of grieving to love people without conditions because all of us at some point or another are gonna want things from people that they can’t give, they won’t give, they don’t have the energy to, they’re not available for. But to want what’s best for them even if it’s not what’s best for us, even if it hurts us or makes us uncomfortable, that’s what we’re talking about here. And so I gave my grief to God. I’d let myself feel it and I’d ask God to transmute it. I didn’t try to cut it off. I grieved a lot and with my grief came a softer heart. This is why my heart doesn’t close because I grieve. I’m not afraid to feel hurt or pain because I know that shit always gets transmuted eventually. So I would pray to God, take this grief, make me softer, more tender, more receptive to what is most aligned for me. I also did a lot of energy work and forgiveness work. And this is really important, I ask that any of my unrequited feelings and desires not be hooks into this man. Only that my love buoy him on his journey. And if that wasn’t available or possible, I just ask God to protect him from my feelings and desires that he didn’t reciprocate or that weren’t aligned or in his best interest at the moment. So as someone who has had to deal with other people’s energetic cooks my whole life, I was just very conscious, careful, and aware that I wanted something that he didn’t. And I did not wanna send that energy of like that. What does it feel like? Like that yearning, that pulling, that tugging, that like kind of vacuumy hoover energy. I did not wanna be creating any of that or sending any of that his way. So I would pray for protection for him. I would pray to not be doing that, but then I would also pray for protection for him if I was doing so unconsciously, because sometimes we think we know, but we don’t know. Energy is not always as straightforward as we would hope.

So calling on divine love and grace to help me move through, also anything I wanted to do or say that wasn’t loving and not just loving towards this person, but loving towards me. Anything that wasn’t self-loving or self-respecting of what I knew to be true. And the mantra that I love, love, love for this, which this mantra actually helps with a lot of things, but specifically for this, comes from Tosha Silver, I will let love do for me what I cannot do for myself. That just softens my heart and melts away pain and angst when I have it. Not all the way, but it’s like a balm, B-A-L-M. It helps. Because this isn’t just about choices and self-control. We really do need grace to do the heavy lifting of letting the love we think we want go so that we could allow divine love to flow through us. So that’s it, y’all. That’s the deeper dive that I wanted to take on that post. I hope it was useful. I mean, I know there’s so many things here.

You know, this is a podcast. This is not a workshop. This is not a course or anything like that. So even though there’s a lot for you to take and explore from here, I have many resources to help you do those things, or you can find resources elsewhere. But again, our show notes are at untameyourself.com/375. Anything I mentioned, references to links and resources and stuff like that will all be on that show notes page. As always, share this up. Use it as a conversation piece with your friends and loved ones. Tag me on social media. Feel free to comment on the post on Instagram. You can shoot me a DM on Instagram. I don’t always respond, but I always read them. Let me know how you liked the interview. I hope that was useful in any way, shape, or form. Thank you so, so much as always for listening.

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