Hey everyone. This podcast episode is going to be a quick but powerful one. I am recording it at midnight, so my team can get it ready for Friday. And we’re going to talk about choosing love when it’s hard. When it’s hard for your marriage and when it’s hard and your life. If this is your first episode, welcome. If you’ve been listening for a while, I am so glad you’re here. This is a podcast about marriage, and that is what I will always focus on. So I will keep talking about all the ways to make marriages better. But in case you’re not aware of this. I want you to know that you’re listening to a podcast by a mixed race, Cuban American Filipino. So I am both Latin and Asian at the same time. And I was born in Puerto Rico. If you choose to learn from me, you will find that the spaces that I lead our anti-racist and I love this definition from the Ontario anti-racism secretariat, “anti-racism is the practice of identifying challenging and changing the values, structures, and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism.”
So I am by no means perfect at being anti-racist. In fact, I think it’s a very messy thing to be, but I’m here to be messy and real and keep it real with all of you on the podcast, online, wherever you see me or wherever we interact together, I’m a human, just like you guys. I just use coaching tools to help make my life better and to hopefully help make your life better. So right now there’s a lot of emotional intensity going on in the United States, which is where I live. And by the way, I would like to give a shout out to my listeners in Singapore. I read that my podcast, is in the top 10 over there, and I am deeply, deeply honored. So thank you Singapore, for listening to the American life coach podcast. I love everyone who listens all over the world and here in the U S we are growing through some things right now.
I always use that term. We are growing through some things, and that made me want to talk about choosing love when it feels hard. I am all about teaching simple tools for better relationships. And I am not by any means an expert in diversity or inclusion, but I’m a big believer in blooming where you’re planted and doing what you can with what you have wherever you are. So back when I was a recruiter, there were positions that we used to hire only men for. And I was one of those recruiters. I would just ask questions. I was learning the craft of recruiting back in the day. And I asked things like, well, why do we only hire men for this? I don’t understand. And I was told that it was because he had to share a cabin. It was like two people in a cabin. And they both had to be the same sex.
And I was like, oh, so if I recruited two women for this position, does that mean we can just know hire women into this role too? Which I was met with a resounding yes. All this time, they had only been hiring men, supposedly because of this whole cabin thing and they said, okay, great. So I did what I could with what I had in that moment. I didn’t do anything massively huge to change the world, but I changed the lives of two women who wouldn’t have had been hired otherwise. So when I say do what you can with what you have, whether it’s in your marriage in your community in your life, that is what I mean. And when it came to today’s episode, what I have is a podcast and a lot of feelings about the state of the world right now, and I always ask myself, when I prepare an episode, what would be most useful?
What do you most need to hear right now that can help you turn your marriage around. That can help you feel better about what’s happening in the world that can help you in some way. And today, what came to me that I thought would be most useful to talk about specifically now, specifically this week, is when in doubt about what to do, do love. When in doubt about what to choose, choose love. And yes, we’ve all heard that love is patient and love is kind, and that’s a beautiful thing that love can be, but love is also fierce and protective. And the absolute foundation of all creation love can be both a song and a whisper and the sound of a drill, building, a new structure. And love can be messy and beautiful at the same time. So when in doubt about what to do for yourself, the fastest path to peace is to reach out your hand and do something for someone else.
That is something I have found to be true over and over again in my life. And I really invite you to not just believe me, go out and try it. And anything that I teach in the podcast and this episode, or any other episode, I always invite you to take what resonates, leave what doesn’t. And don’t just believe me, cause I say something, go ahead and try it, experiment it in your own life, ask yourself this question. What is my version of this? And when in doubt about what to do for yourself, the fastest path to peace is to reach out your hand and do something for someone else. Just think about what is your version of that? And then do that. See what happens. So when we see what is happening around us, especially when we have a situation, a lot of emotional intensity, we can stay stuck in the emotion of it, whether it’s anger, disappointment, grief, or any intense emotion like that, or we can acknowledge the feeling and then use that feeling as fuel to take action.
And one of my favorite unity ministers, her name was Elizabeth Longo. She’s amazing. She’s here in South Florida. She did a sermon a couple of years ago where she spoke about something called sacred activism, inviting us all to get involved in the communities that we care about, but not from a place of hating the other side. And instead of that, trying to make any act of service, sacred, any act of service. And as I see so many of my friends and colleagues and people that they care about going through different stages of grief and deeply moving reactions to what’s happening around the world right now, and in the United States, right now, the idea of bringing sacredness to this moment and she would ever, we do with this moment, it feels like relief to me. And I really wanted to share that with you today. I wanted to share something that could bring relief.
So imagine saying to yourself, I can honor my beliefs from a place of love and not from a place of anger. Imagine saying to yourself, I can honor my feelings from a place of love and not from a place of anger. I can honor them and then take action from a higher place. I can love and respect people I disagree with. Let’s think about that for a second. In fact, we have all disagreed with people that we love and respect at some point in our lives, right? So we actually already know how to do that. We just need to practice it. So moments that have a high degree of emotional intensity or when we need to pull out all of our spiritual tools, all of our coaching tools, any tools that we use to help us feel better and use them. Whether it’s disagreeing with love and respect or helping each other heal or holding a space in our heart for our own healing, holding the vision of what healing looks like.
And one of the questions I ask my coaching clients, when we start working together is how do you currently manage stress? I personally love guided meditations. I love journaling. I love watching funny videos of my hubby or chatting with a girlfriend or catching up with people that I love on Facebook. I love listening to podcasts. That’s one of the ways that I like to manage stress. I like to be inspired and have inputs that are going into my brain that are constructive and useful and powerful. So I invite you to think about right now, your top two or three ways to relax and recenter. And I really invite you to remember that all the ways we nourish our hearts are meant to prepare us for when we need to stay centered. When we need to remember who we are, these are the things that help us remember.
So we can take action aligned with our deepest values and not with our most recent reactions. So think about everything that has been on your plate recently. And how many times have you taken some time to recenter yourself and relax. Just look at the last week, if you’re on it, great. And if not right now, after you listened to this episode is the time schedule, whatever will nourish your heart. Keeping your heart nourished is so important. It’s one of the most valuable ways you can do what you can, where you are right now. It’s like that airplane example where you have to put the oxygen mask on first and then put the oxygen mask on the person that you love that’s with you. You have to do it for yourself first. That’s the only way that then you can take care of anyone that you typically care about.
So do not underestimate the importance of a nap, a break, a moment to smile. Once you have nourished yourself, then you can think about how to take a stand for love in your marriage and in your life. And you can practice choosing love when it’s hard. And how do you do that? Right? What the heck do you do? Here is step one, it always starts with a pause, right? You pause and everything starts with a pause because in the pause, you can remember your intentions. You can check with your heart. You can connect with what most deeply matters to you. And then from that connection, with your highest, wisest self, from that connection, you can take action. You could choose your next step. You could choose what you’re going to say to your honey or what you’re going to say to your boss or how you’re going to handle a difficult situation.
Once you connect with your highest, wisest self, but you need to pause in order to make that connection. Now, one of my friends deeply values justice. We talk about justice all the time and I deeply value justice. And I become a little bit like a military boot camp officer on a bad day. When I see an injustice, I get a little annoying. So that may be clear when I say connect with your heart, I do not mean do nothing and be zen and go on a mountain and meditate. Absolutely do that. If that’s what your heart is calling you to do. But the real deep work of our lives in my opinion is not on the mountain. It’s in the middle of the chaos and the messiness of everyday life. That is where we practice. That is where we bring our loving, centered self, and offer it to the world, to the people who are in front of us, the people in our communities.
And like I’m trying to do today with you guys offering my hopefully highest wise itself, in service, in this podcast, in our marriages, with our best friends or colleagues at work at the doctor’s office, no matter what’s going on around us, we can bring love. And sometimes it’s fierce and sometimes it’s gentle, right? That’s what I want to share with you today in the midst of whatever’s happening to you right now, when you’re in doubt about what to do, there’s a lot of stuff coming at us from all these different places, ask yourself. If I was deeply loving myself and standing for myself, would I accept this behavior or this situation? If I was truly loving this person and standing for this person, would this, that’s in front of me right now, be okay. And I know a lot of you will say, well, my honey did something that really upset me why should I choose love then?
And my answer to you is always, why not? It doesn’t mean you’re condoning a behavior and sometimes love or choosing love means saying no. Sometimes choosing the means, having a really difficult conversation with someone. And sometimes choosing love means checking in with yourself to see if you’re treating yourself as if you were someone you love. I know for sure, I have been that person who has not treated myself as if I actually loved myself. Right? And I had to figure that out. We always start with ourself first. If I loved myself, what would I choose right now? Then we can ask if I loved this person, every truly loved them without attachment to their reply or their response, what would they choose right now? And think about loving a baby or loving a pet, a dog, or a cat or a bird.
I can imagine you don’t base your loving action for the dog or the cat on their response. You just love them. And they have some wacky responses sometimes, but sometimes when we’re choosing love for a person, we attach, Oh, I’ll only do this. If they react this way. But if they react this other way, then I’m not doing it. Just imagine, you know, with a baby or a pet, just imagine that, see where that leads you. I think it’s going to use some interesting places. So then we start with ourself. Then we start with a person we love the most. Then when we’re choosing love in our hearts and in our homes, we can extend that love to our community. And we can ask if I love my brothers and sisters who are hurting right now, how do I support them? What is the most loving thing I can do for them?
Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is nothing. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is something. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is not interfere. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is intervene in a situation. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is simply ask, how can I support you right now? And choosing love can feel hard, right? I was telling a client earlier today that there’s a type of hard, that leads to better and easier. And there’s a types of hard that leads to harder. So think about that. There’s a type of hard where you’re just always struggling and it keeps getting more intense and you never actually solve any problem ever or manage it or learn to roll with it or how to adapt to it. And there’s a type of hard where you’re learning to do difficult things that you might not have done before.
And then the more you practice, the easier it gets, choose what kind of hard you want. I choose the kind of hard that gets easier. I will choose that every time. I want to thank you so much for listening wherever you are in the world today, next week, we’re going to talk about self-acceptance and how acceptance does not equal agreement. You’re definitely going to want to listen to that episode. It will help you so much in all your relationships, not just in your marriage. And I want to wrap up today’s episode with a quote from Abraham Hicks. I found him in Goodreads. So I’ll link to Goodreads. I looked at their quotes on choosing love and this one just popped out at me.
So here it is; “There are always choices there for you. In other words, you can look at the hole in the wall, or you can look at the beautiful painting. You can look at the light bulb that is out, or you can see the light bulb that is working. You can look at your mate in his positive aspect, or you can look at your mate in his negative aspect. You can look at your own body and find something that pleases you or find something that doesn’t. You can remember your childhood and find something of pleasure, or you can find something that makes you feel discouraged. You can remember a compliment, or you can remember somebody down on you. You can remember your love, or you can remember your hate. In other words, you’ve had that choice in every moment.” I love that quote so much. That’s by Abraham Hicks, to choosing love, even when it’s hard. I’ll see you all next week.