Reflections on love is a personal recount of Ame-Lia’s own struggle with the will to live and how love helped her say yes to life, day after day. This circle connects being the change with love, an emotion and quality of energy that Ame-Lia believes will change the world.
What’s in this episode for you:
A personal reflection on Ame-Lia’s struggle with the will to live
The connection between love and the divisiveness in the world
A small question with big impacts
Poem: The Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo. This is the excerpt is from July 13, 2021:
It doesn't take long for each of us to accumulate an emotional history. The child burns her hand on a stove and a fear of fire begins. In a tender moment, a hand is slapped and a fear of love begins. Our emotional associations and reflexes run deep. Often the heart breathes beneath all our associations like a soft sandy bottom, waiting underwater. Thus to see ourselves clearly we must try to still our associations until we are as transparent as a calm lake. When still enough and clear enough others can also see through to our bottom. It makes love possible again, but paradoxically, when someone is moved to reach for us, their fingers stir things up sending ripples everywhere, and we and they often lose sight of what matters.
All this affirms the need to stay with our feelings long enough for the emotional associations, the ripples to settle. No one can escape this no matter how young or old you may be, no matter how innocent or experienced you are. If you've been awake and alive in any kind of relationship that has in any way been real, your waters will stir. Your emotions will ripple. It seems the only way we can truly know our own depth is to wait for our associations and reflexes to subside until we are clear as a lake again. Only when what gets stirred up settles, can we see ourselves and each other clearly.
Tools for change:
What is your intention? This question is powerful when asked before you step into a new project, conversation, meeting, or out the door for the day. See how your world changes when you get clear on your intention.
Let me know in a voicemail. I'd love to hold it for you!
Pick up the talking piece:
What came up for you as you listened to this episode? I'd love to hear your experiences with any of the reflections and exercises. Send me an email at podcast@humconsulting.ca or leave a voicemail (click the voicemail button on the right).
Gratitude:
Circle of Change is recorded on lək̓ʷəŋən territories.
Our opening and closing music was created by the talented E-Rol Beats. You can find his creations at www.erolbeats.com
My fabulous podcast coach, Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions, brought this podcast to life www.organizedsound.ca
Transcript: (Some words may not be accurately recorded. Please let us know if something seems off.)
Change begins from within. As easy as it is to look outside of ourselves and want the world to change, the truth is, it never will if we remain the same. This podcast was created for change-makers like you who want more love and connection in your community. Today you are going to hear stories that will inspire you, and also challenge you to be the change. We are going to go deep, my friend, so take a deep breath and settle in. My name is Ame-Lia Tamburrini - Welcome to the Circle of Change.
Ame-Lia Tamburrini (AT) 0:52 Hello, friend, thank you for being here. Today I want to share with you some reflections I've had since our conversation last week with Helice Bridges and Walker Brandt. The reflections are about love, and how setting our intention to love is essential in this work of being the change. If you've been around me long enough, you know that I believe love is the bravest emotion we can bring into our personal lives, our working lives and our community work. So I want to spend some time diving into this a bit deeper, using the experiences of my past week to really ground these thoughts and these teachings.
To begin, let's start with an excerpt from Mark Nepo. This is from his daily reader The Book of Awakening, and the excerpt is from July 13.
It doesn't take long for each of us to accumulate an emotional history. The child burns her hand on a stove and a fear of fire begins. In a tender moment, a hand is slapped and a fear of love begins. Our emotional associations and reflexes run deep. Often the heart breathes beneath all our associations like a soft sandy bottom, waiting underwater. Thus to see ourselves clearly we must try to still our associations until we are as transparent as a calm lake. When still enough and clear enough others can also see through to our bottom. It makes love possible again, but paradoxically, when someone is moved to reach for us, their fingers stir things up sending ripples everywhere, and we and they often lose sight of what matters.
All this affirms the need to stay with our feelings long enough for the emotional associations, the ripples to settle. No one can escape this no matter how young or old you may be, no matter how innocent or experienced you are. If you've been awake and alive in any kind of relationship that has in any way been real, your waters will stir. Your emotions will ripple. It seems the only way we can truly know our own depth is to wait for our associations and reflexes to subside until we are clear as a lake again. Only when what gets stirred up settles, can we see ourselves and each other clearly.
Thank you, Mark Nepo, for your wisdom, your beautiful writing.
AT: 3:35 This past week for me has really felt like an immersion in how to transform through the power of love. Given our circle conversation last week with Grandma Sparky and Walker, the experiences that I had really felt perfectly timed.
So I have just returned from a week long cancer healing retreat deep in the wilderness. And this retreat was hosted and facilitated by the Callanish Society. It was like nothing I have experienced before and I have sat in many circles and done a lot of therapy over the years. But this was different, because it was holistic, really tapping into mind, body and soul and doing so immersed in nature. There was this synergy that made the interconnectedness of all things tangible, and the healing for myself and others was profound.
I have thought a lot about the simplicity of the message in last week's circle, taking one minute to tell somebody that they matter and how impactful that is. And now this week, there were many activities, there was a beautiful combination of circle conversation and self care, nutritious food, nature, therapy and friendship. But the power was not in the individual activities, it was in the wholeness of everything, every person, every morsel of food, every flower, every Hummingbird, the creek, the artwork, the laughter, the tears, and just how the day flowed.
Although seemingly very different, what both the Blue Ribbon ceremony and this cancer healing retreat share. And what I think makes both experiences as powerful as they are, is the intention of unconditional love. Of saying, I'm going to take this time, one minute or a week, and let you know that you matter. And you are loved, all of you. You can be that grumpy boss, and I appreciate you anyways. You can be the son who doesn't get top grades, or do the chores, I love you anyway. You can be broken and missing body parts from disease and show up with anger and fear some days, and I love you.
In these cases, somebody paused and made a decision to act with a loving intention. And it changed lives. When our hearts are closed to love, both giving and receiving for the many valid reasons that they tend to be, it's very painful. You'll recall that both Helice, Grandma Sparky and Walker had very painful upbringings and young adult lives where they recognized that love was missing. And both of them went through a really dark period of being suicidal. And they have since encountered hundreds and thousands of people that have felt the exact same way. I can relate to this experience, and maybe you can as well. For me, it's happened a number of times in my life. One was about seven or eight years ago when I found myself all alone in my life, because well, I had pushed everybody away, and then when I went through my cancer journey a number of years ago, it was present again. And I'm a very positive person, but there were many moments where I lost my grasp on the will to live.
When you're in cancer treatment, for those of you who have not gone through that experience, you know, there is this combination of feeling terrible, and the isolation that going through that experience brings and then there's the intensity of the pain and the trauma that cancer brings up from your past and present life and all the uncertainty in your future. Will my treatments work? Will I be able to work again? Will I ever be the same? All of this combined was overwhelming on days. And then after treatment? Well, that's a whole other story. And I do just want to make note of that here.
For those of you who are caregivers, or friends of people that are going through a cancer experience, that period after treatment is actually quite intense. And it's often when people need the most support because they feel the most isolated. We go through this experience and in that whole time, you're just in survival mode, getting through the treatments, and then you come out the other end and all the supports disappear. You sort of graduate from the oncology system. Your friends are like, yes, you made it through treatment, great and they trickle off. And you're just left with this pile of rubble, all the things that were brought up through this experience, your relationships, the trauma of your past the meaning of life, and this body that you no longer recognize and this person who you also don't recognize and you don't know how to show up in the world. It's a very isolating experience. So I just want to make note of that. Not at all for shaming anybody, because until you go through something like that, you just have no idea what it's like. I, as a cancer patient had no idea that after treatment would be so intense.
The only thing that saved me on those days was my spiritual practice. I would sit down and listen to a meditation that reminded me that I was loved, that I was not my body, that I was going through this experience to become the person that I was at my core and I would cry and cry as I took in this message. And then I would step outside and I would soak in all the beauty of the flowers and the trees in my neighborhood and I would get through the day. But that was an intentional act. I paused and took the time to act with love toward myself. And in doing so, a love from a greater source lifted me up. And this comes from somebody who really rejected religion for most of my life. And I thought spirituality was a sorry excuse for not showing up. My spirituality, that belief that something bigger than me loved me more than I could imagine, it saved me knowing that we matter. It's life saving.
AT: 10:31 So what does this have to do with being the change? Everything. When I look at the world around us, I see so many hearts closed off to love. Both to loving others and our planet and receiving love from others and our planet. And for various reasons, unhealed trauma being the big one, most of us are walking around the earth in this protective mode. Mark Nepo alludes to these moments in our childhood, that slapped hand from a person who loves us, which makes love confusing all of a sudden, because now love hurts. And what do I do? Where do I put my heart in that? And then there's a series of these small moments or even much bigger ones, and we begin to put the armor on and protect ourselves. And we see this today, it shows up in a myriad of ways: workplace disputes, long standing community divides, toxic and codependent relationships, racism, so many unnecessary divorces and empty, lonely deaths. And it does not need to be this way. And this is where I want to loop it back to intention.
I believe that being the change really requires us to be intentional about our day, our interactions, it requires us to take a moment and say, What do I want to create today? What is the, what's the legacy that I will leave today in this moment? And by setting that intention to show up in love, we become kinder to ourselves and to others, we listen more, we speak from our heart, we see the other person through a different lens, we forgive, we let go of things we can't control and we walk lighter on earth. Both the Blue Ribbon campaign and the healing retreat that I was just at, we're powerful because the givers, the holders of the space, came in with the intention to give love and the receivers were open to receiving love. And I think the more that we bring this into our lives, the more safety we create around us, which allows that healing to occur. And I think this is possible in the workplace, in our households, on the street and with ourselves. But doing this work, it does require a stillness and ability to see what is arising in us in any given moment and be with it long enough to see it for what it is. That fear, that protection to keep us safe. And then getting into practice in safe environments to release it for a moment so that we can see clearly both ourselves and the person in front of us. So we can see our own and the other person's sandy bottom, as Mark Nepo says. So I believe this work is essential for carving out new ways of working in the world that really align with the natural laws that honor the interconnectedness.
AT: 13:41 It's why learning about our emotions, where they come from and how to use them as our superpowers is a core part of the Be the Change program that I'm launching. I know that it's scary to face our emotions. I have, you know, spent a lifetime avoiding them and it's why most of us avoid them, through a plethora of distracting techniques, over talking, overeating using substances, binge watching TV, repeating unhealthy patterns over and over in our relationships. It's familiar, there's comfort there, but at some point, it becomes not worth it. The pain becomes too great. The change we want to see in the world becomes too dire and that is where our program comes in. When you feel that there is something more to life and you want it, when you see that your team's inability to resolve conflict is impacting your ability to innovate, when you see those divides in your community are ruining well being in progress, that's when we are here and we step in and of course we are here if you don't have those things and you just want to proactively take action, but we tend not to do that. We tend to wait until we are in a lot of pain until we see so much pain and that is the motivator and the instigator.
AT: 15:04 So if you are interested in learning more, please head to the website humconsulting.ca and book a free conversation with me. I would love to hear more about your vision and learn how I can support you to bring that to life. As we close this circle, I want to leave you with one question as you enter this moment, this next moment in your day, what is your intention?
Thank you so much for being here for being courageous enough to listen. Much love.
I'm now passing the talking piece to you. If you feel called to put your voice in this circle, please head to www.humconsulting.ca/podcast and share your story there. I cannot wait to hear what has come up for you as you have listened to what has been shared here today.
I wish you love and joy beyond your wildest imagination. Thank you so much for being here in the Circle of Change.
I also want to express my gratitude to the following peeps: Circle of Change is recorded on the Lekwungen territory and I am so grateful to live on this land. Our opening and closing music was created by the talented E.Rol Beats. You can find his creations at erolbeats.com. And special thanks to my coach, Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions for bringing this podcast to life.
Until next time, Ciao.