What if the true moment of transformation is stepping into responsibility. To say to ourselves, “I’m ready to change my life. And in order to change it, I need to choose it… both LIFE and committing to something different.”
This is the beginning of everything. What lies on the other side of that moment is your POWER. And your power is in your ability to choose what you want. What you desire. What you are committed to creating.
Why do you have vices? Why do you have anxiety? Why do you feel unfulfilled?
Likely because you’re not listening. You’re in the passenger seat of your own life.
Eff that. TAKE THE WHEEL.
Here’s an excerpt from our new book Liberated Love that I know will hit DEEP:
"We want to be loved for who we are, but we aren’t willing to show up as we truly are. Instead, we show up as a sliver of ourselves and then feel frustrated when people don’t seem to fully know or understand us.
Isn’t it wild to think that you can be in a relationship, yet not in a relationship? You can be in a job yet not in a job. You can have a life yet not be living. You can be going about your business, totally immersed in checking the boxes that society tells you matter, and then, bam, you wake up one day to the fact that while you were checking all the boxes and attending to everyone and everything else, you have forgotten about yourself.
Suddenly, you feel in the depths of your being the unmet potential for your life: choosing a life and living a life are two very different things.
This raises the question: Why is it so common to be in relationships, or even just living a life, and feel disconnected from our voice, our values, our desires, and ourselves?
Just take a look at the world around you. In society, relationship status is a hierarchy. If you’re married, you’re better than someone who is engaged, dating, single, or (God forbid) divorced. When we’re single, we’re asked if we’ve found someone. If we haven’t, we’re asked, “Why are you single?” . . . as if there’s something wrong with us. As if we have an ailment. As if we’re not choosing to be single.
As a collective, we value the longevity of a relationship more than its quality, depth, and safety. We want them to last no matter what. We ask people, “How long have you been together?” and the longer the relationship, the more impressed we are. “Thirty years! Wow! That’s incredible!”
Meanwhile, we don’t stop to consider whether this couple have been holding on by a thread — stewing for almost all of those thirty years in a relationship, void of intimacy but packed with contempt. We skip right over any potential dysfunction. But imagine if, instead of learning how to develop the skills to tolerate a relationship like this, we learned how to thrive in it.
Perhaps the real question is: Why don’t we celebrate a relationship’s depth or quality?
The answer: because we’ve placed so much of our worth, validation, safety, and security in our relationship status that we’ll do anything to stay in it, even if it’s dysfunctional. Of course, challenging relationships can often be transformed when we put in the work, but because we’re so afraid of our relationships ending, we avoid any conversation that might end them. The irony? These are the very conversations that deepen relationships, that liberate them.
Alas, time and time again we choose “common” and “normal” relationships over liberating ones.
But you know what else is “normal”? A divorce rate of over 44 percent.* Normal has people remaining in relationships with people they dislike. Normal contains a nasty, silent, contractual obligation: one is supposed to stay no matter what, because they have made a commitment. But this commitment to another almost never involves a commitment to oneself. In the “normal” relationship we are never encouraged to explore who we are, what we actually want, or how we can become our most authentic selves in the world through a partnership.
But we don’t have to be “normal.” You can say you want a great relationship and actually make choices to align with that—you can be with someone and still be yourself.
Here’s the thing: You do want great love; you’ve likely just had a competing familiar template that modeled love as self-erasure. Like most humans you've settled for predictable and painful connection over unfamiliar and expansive love. Unfortunately, we’d often rather get what we’ve been taught to tolerate than step toward the mystery and miracle that is liberated love — a sacred, life-giving, intimate union with another. We would rather abandon ourselves than create relationships that celebrate our self-expression.
If you’ve found yourself silently agreeing with what we’ve said so far, then you are ready to step into the transformative power of liberated love.
You are ready to be finished with the patterns. Finished with the elephant in the room. Finished with the nagging feeling. Finished with the discontent and the disconnect.
You are ready to venture the path to empowered choice.
To get here, we must look at all of the ways we’ve had to disconnect from our true selves. This is where we get to hit the pause button and take an honest, humble look in the mirror. It is in this space where we drop the blame and say,“You know what, I play a role in this dance too . . .”
It is my greatest desire that you give yourself permission to become all of yourself, and know that that is a gift to all of those who get to love you, they just might not know it yet.
Make sure you preorder a copy of our book so you can get more of this deliciousness - and get a free copy of a meditation and workbook we created to get you started right away!
Much love, and of course, liberation,
Mark