Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.12: Love as a Spiritual Path | A Conversation with Matthew Busse
What if love isn't just a feeling, but a powerful spiritual path that could heal our divided world?
In this soul-stirring conversation, I speak with Matthew Busse, a former molecular biologist turned spiritual teacher who serves as teacher-in-residence at the Abbey of the Redwoods. Matt shares his remarkable journey from scientific success to spiritual seeking after discovering that conventional paths to happiness left him feeling empty and disconnected.
Together, we explore the concept of interfaith spirituality as a remedy for those disillusioned by traditional religion. Using a delightful ice cream metaphor, Matt explains how different spiritual traditions can be seen as various flavors of the same nourishing substance – with problems arising only when we insist others prefer our favorite flavor.
At the heart of our discussion is love as a spiritual practice. We examine how our culture has diluted and commercialized love, making it difficult to connect with its true power. Matt offers practical approaches for reconnecting with our hearts, including meditation focused on cultivating love, bringing love into everyday activities, and the transformative mirror practice of looking into your own eyes and saying "I love you."
We dive deep into why many struggle to love themselves, exploring how early emotional wounding, conditional love, and cultural messaging create disconnection from our hearts. Matt shares how breathing practices can calm the nervous system when trauma responses are triggered, creating space for healing and reconnection.
Perhaps most powerful is our exploration of "saving what we love versus fighting what we hate" – a profound shift in perspective that changes how we approach activism and social change. This episode, dedicated to the memory of Thich Nhat Hanh, reminds us that in a world facing crisis and division, reconnecting with love might be our most powerful response.
Ready to explore this path of love? Visit Matt's website at embracelovelife.com or the Abbey at abbeyoftheredwoods.org. If this conversation resonates, please subscribe and share it with someone who might benefit from these healing insights.
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 12 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, shannon Wills, and in this episode, my guest and I will be exploring the path and the power of love. But we're not going to get all mushy about it. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human.
Shannon W.:Today's guest is Matthew Bussey, teacher-in-residence at the Abbey of the Redwoods, a contemplative interfaith community in Northern California. Matthew is a scientist, a molecular biologist, by training, and he's a seeker, having left his conventional career behind for spiritual study and exploration. When he found our culture's mainstream route to success left him cold. He's now a practiced yogi and a devoted student of meditation, ordained as a monk in a lineage of tantric Buddhism At the Abbey, matthew teaches yoga and meditation and gives classes on mindful living. His current teaching centers on the theme of love as a spiritual path, offering practices that reconnect us to our hearts, for healing in a world that has, in so many ways, forgotten how to love, in a world that has, in so many ways, forgotten how to love. My conversation with Matt explores this theme of love as a spiritual path through the lens of interfaith spirituality. We'll talk about the value of an interfaith approach to spirituality, especially important in this time when so many of us have been turned off by conventional religion. We'll explore how the word love is often misused or co-opted in our culture and the importance of reclaiming its true meaning for ourselves. We'll ask why we sometimes struggle to love ourselves or others and offer some simple practices to reconnect with our hearts. And we'll talk about saving what we love versus fighting what we hate. And we'll talk about saving what we love versus fighting what we hate, exploring love not only as a healing path for the individual, but as a tool for the activist working for a more just and loving world.
Shannon W.:I believe that having some kind of spiritual practice is one key entry point for reconnecting with our essential powers as human beings. Why? Because all human traditions have some lineage of spirituality embedded within them, and each lineage carries within it seeds of ancestral knowledge. When we connect to a spirit lineage, we step into the flow of ancient, collective human memory and we give ourselves the opportunity to live that ancient wisdom into being in the modern world. Sages and masters of most, if not all, spiritual traditions teach that love is a power. Whatever we may think about love these days, however, it has been confused or overused, or however we may feel when we've been hurt by love, I think it's wise to consider it as a form of power. If our wise elders and spiritual ancestors say again and again that love is a power, could it be that love is one of those essential native human powers we've been looking for? Listen in as Matthew and I attempt to scratch the surface of this question.
Shannon W.:Coming up next, speaking of wise teachers, I've just heard the news that Thich Nhat Hanh has died. A Buddhist monk and a peace activist and a spiritual teacher of great proportions. His example of compassionate, engaged spirituality has been a powerful role model to me and so many others. It feels meaningful that, just as this episode on love is about to be released. One of the great exemplars of living love into the world has left us. Thich Nhat Hanh has passed his torch into the future. Will we pick it up and carry it forward? Thich Nhat Hanh, I dedicate this episode to your memory. May your spirit and your message take wing and fly. And now for the interview. Hi, matt, and welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast.
Matt B.:Hi, thanks for having me.
Shannon W.:We're going to be talking today about interfaith spirituality and your interfaith work at the Abbey of the Redwoods. We'll also talk about the current focus of your teaching at the Abbey, which is love as a spiritual path. Yes, but first I want to ask a bit about you and the path that led you to this current work. Would you share a bit of your story with us? Just where you came from and what steps along the way have led you to where you are now?
Matt B.:Sure. So since we're going to be talking about interfaith spirituality, I guess I should start with my childhood. I was raised Lutheran and my family was pretty serious about it. I guess I should start with my childhood. I was raised Lutheran and my family was pretty serious about it. I guess you could say we went to church almost every week and my dad is actually a Lutheran minister, but he's not practicing as a Lutheran minister. He went to the seminary and he was very interested in theology, studied German theology. He has a PhD in German theology. Oh, wow.
Matt B.:But he worked as a teacher, he taught theology and also he has a concession business that he runs in the summer selling fried vegetables for the fairs.
Shannon W.:Oh, my gosh.
Matt B.:So I was raised Lutheran. We went to church, but I never really experienced anything spiritual going to church. I think other people can probably relate to this. It just seemed like something we did, we had to do every Sunday. It was something you did if you were a good person and my parents talked about liking the community. So even though I was raised Lutheran, I didn't really have a fundamentalist background or anything like that. So just to give that kind of background about my religious history, and then I went through life.
Matt B.:I started off life pretty much just on a worldly path, doing the things that you're supposed to do in life. So I went to college, went to graduate school. Actually, I studied molecular biology. I got a phd in molecular biology and then it was right after I finished my phd. That's when things started to get more interesting, spirituality wise, because at that point, when I finished my phd, it was like all the things I'd supposed to do I'd done right.
Matt B.:I went to a graduate degree and then I was staring down the barrel of the rest of my life and imagining a job either in pharmaceutical industry or in academic research. Those are the two main paths for someone with a degree that I had and both of those. Whenever I thought about spending the rest of my life doing either of those, it just filled me with kind of a sense of dread. And so it was after graduate school that I really started thinking about things, and so, rather than pursuing a normal course, I actually tried to pursue a career as a freelance science writer, writing about science for magazines, because I'd always loved writing, I liked science and I was. It seemed like I had a good knack for explaining science to lay people, and so that was what I attempted to pursue after graduate school, and that went all right. I was starting, I was actually starting to do okay, starting to make some inroads, getting published in magazines, but it was developing really slowly and it wasn't earning much money kind of going into debt, and it wasn't fulfilling to me right. Even though it was interesting and I met some really fascinating talks with interesting scientists, it wasn't filling me with a sense of purpose or a sense of fulfillment, and so my life started going to a very dark place at that point, because I didn't have a lot of direction in life. I was working a little bit, um, but kind of my life was just not really going anywhere. I didn't know where, I didn't know where I wanted it to go. So at that point, uh, I kind of I fell in with some friends who go out drinking a lot, so I was drinking pretty heavily. I had some starting to develop some eating disorder, binge eating problems. I remember at some point sometimes I would just get in this kind of state and go to a store and buy some junk food and then eat it mindlessly in the car even before I got home, just so, these kinds of just trying to feel something in life, right, trying. So I was at that point.
Matt B.:I was just a very dark place and fortunately that's when I found a teacher. A meditation teacher was teaching Buddhist meditation at the time and I had really nothing else going on in my life. I had a series of failed romantic relationships, so that wasn't giving me fulfillment. So really, when I found my teacher, I went all in. When I found my teacher, I went all in Very quickly. My life started revolving around my spiritual path and really devoting my life to meditation and spirituality, because for the first time I felt a sense of meaning there. I think the first time I heard my teacher talk, she talked about that, this kind of thing, what she was teaching, that this was a path for people who had always hoped there was something more in the world but were never quite sure. And I was like, yes, that's me, that's what I've been my whole life.
Shannon W.:I think so many people will be able to relate to your story.
Matt B.:Yeah.
Shannon W.:So many people who follow this sort of standard American path to success. Oh, it's education and career and family, and then what you know, and then finding ourselves unfulfilled, often finding ourselves in a dark place that comes from often not knowing what our purpose is, because we've been following a path that doesn't lead to purpose. It often leads to material accumulation exactly it may lead to some kind of material security, but it doesn't lead us to the the fulfillment of our our soul, or even the fulfillment of our deepest needs in life.
Matt B.:Right, yeah, and especially now with the pandemic, it's forcing a lot of us to face these ideas, because we no longer have access to all the distractions the material distractions that we had before. A lot of us are forced to sit face-to-face with our lives and we're forced to really examine how we feel about our lives.
Shannon W.:Right, and what's important to us and what's important to life.
Matt B.:Right and what actually? What really makes us happy, what makes us fulfilled?
Shannon W.:Yeah, yeah, well, so along those lines, then let's let's talk about interface spirituality, because I think it is something. Spirituality is a thing that people look to. When we come up against that wall and say life as I know, it is not working for me, I want something more, and people will often look toward spirit. For me, this leads directly to interface spirituality. One of the things that often doesn't work for some of us in this culture is organized religion, the way we have come to know it. We get put off by contemporary religion, traditional religion and some of those aspects that might be, you know, those aspects of the punitive God or the fear-based aspects of religion that people just don't, we don't find resonance with, and then we go searching and seeking for other things that might fill that need for purpose that we have.
Matt B.:Right, and maybe we should back up and define the word spirituality, please. So to me I feel like spirituality one way to define that is what you've alluded to that search for something more, something beyond the material, something that can't quite be put into words, but something that gives a deeper fulfillment, a deeper meaning to our lives. So so, if spirituality is that search for a greater meaning beyond the everyday, mundane life and there are many different approaches to that throughout the world and throughout history there have been many different, many different spiritual traditions, different religions and starting all the way back to the early shamanistic religions, you know there's people have been searching for spirituality or exploring spirituality since we first evolved into people yeah and throughout history there have been many approaches that have become very popular, very widespread.
Matt B.:You know, and I think in my opinion a lot of religions started from early a form of spirituality that then became codified and developed dogma and orthodoxy and rules. But religion at its root, I feel like, has the same goal or same aspirations as spirituality, is again that searching for something outside of ourselves, something greater to belong to, something that gives us meaning and sense of belonging, sense of connection to something greater than ourselves.
Shannon W.:So that makes sense for spirituality in general yeah, it really does, and it reminds me of the term that is now so common in our vernacular these days, which is people calling themselves spiritual but not religious.
Matt B.:Right.
Shannon W.:Right, Because we understand, we recognize, we feel in our bones, you know that there is something more to this world than the material, consumptive everyday reality that we're living. But we also feel that religion as we know it is not it, and so then we call ourselves spiritual but not religious. So there is that. I think there is that understanding of there's something in spirituality that's worth exploring. Right and um, thank you for that reminder that religion and spirituality are not different things. They're not opposites or anything like that. They really are coming from the same kind of roots.
Matt B.:Right, and they're just approaches to the same thing. So all religions, all spiritual traditions, they all lead to the same thing. They just have a different particular path about how to get there. And throughout history, like I said, some of the big religions have worked for a lot of people and drawn in a lot of people, but now, in recent years, religion has become very divisive or probably not even years, I mean throughout, throughout history.
Matt B.:Religion and even spirituality. Blind adherence to any particular path, whether it's a religious path or a spiritual tradition, leads to lots of problems. You could say.
Matt B.:That's an understatement, right the idea of interfaith spirituality is that all faiths, all traditions, all religions are at some level true. They all are based in some level of truth and they all have some good in them and they all lead towards the same goal. The only difference is the particulars about how you get there yeah, how you put that path into effect in your everyday life. Yeah, how you put that path into effect in your everyday life.
Shannon W.:Yeah, I remember you using one of the articles I read from you on this topic. You use an ice cream metaphor which I loved. You're saying like oh, spirituality is like ice cream. We all most of us love ice cream, but we love different flavors, right? It's not about like there's a right or wrong, or my ice cream flavor is better than your ice cream flavor. They're all ice cream at their roots and the flavors are our preferences or our individual choices.
Matt B.:Exactly, yeah. So if you think of ice cream, everyone loves ice cream, or almost everyone loves ice cream. I mean, there's some people who don't, there's some people who are lactose intolerant and some people don't like, and that's great too, but a lot of people like ice cream. A lot of people are drawn to spirituality in some form or another. And the different paths, different religions, different spiritual traditions they're all a different flavor of the same thing, but they're all still ice cream, right. Vanilla ice cream still, it's the chocolate ice cream, strawberry they're all still ice cream and we can all enjoy them and we can all respect that. I may love vanilla ice cream, but I can respect that someone else loves chocolate ice cream hopefully you can respect that right and also I can respect that some people don't like ice cream, I mean.
Matt B.:I mean, I think that's a pretty small percentage, but then there's a small percentage of the population who are atheists, right, who don't don't feel any sense of something more meaningful. That's right and that's great too. I mean, that's, that's fine too. I can respect that as well.
Shannon W.:You actually say in that same article that strife arises when we insist others love our favorite flavor of ice cream as much as we do. So that's the problem. It's okay to like different kinds of ice cream. It's not okay to insist that everyone else loves the ice cream I love.
Matt B.:Exactly yeah.
Shannon W.:That's the beginning of fanaticism right.
Matt B.:Exactly, and with ice cream? We never think of doing that right. I think most people wouldn't.
Shannon W.:No, we get to laugh about it, but it's a great metaphor for this.
Matt B.:Right. So the value of an interfaith approach is providing an environment where people can sample many different approaches to spirituality or religion and allow people to find what works for them individually. Spirituality needs, and what spirituality moving forward for humanity needs to be, is something where we all find a path that works for us individually. We're all everyone's different and everyone needs a different approach to spirituality and for everyone, different experiences or different ways of thinking about the world or different ways of thinking about the afterlife or what the true nature of reality is, different approaches to that, different explanations that are going to resonate with different people.
Matt B.:Sure sure and that's where a lot of the problems with religion come in is when someone starts insisting that their way is the only way yes, or their ice cream is the only ice cream and it's just nice to be reminded that we do have choices in life and that if we have a path that is working for us, then we can consider ourselves fortunate.
Shannon W.:I think, and deepen in, and if we don't feel that we don't need to live a life of unfulfillment, there's so much richness that we can explore.
Matt B.:Exactly yeah.
Shannon W.:So, speaking of paths, let's talk about love as a spiritual path, which I know is something that you're focusing on in particular right now, and I want to make sure that we get to really unpack that. You defined spirituality for us. You defined interfaith spirituality, and I would love to ask you to start this part of the conversation by simply defining the word love, because, as we're aware, the word love can mean so many different things in our culture, and I mean we can love lots of things. Right, we can consider love to be oriented toward our spiritual practice or toward a person or a pet or a place, but it can also be oriented toward a football team or a new pair of shoes or ice cream an ice cream flavor, for that matter. So, just to get us oriented, what do you mean by love in the context of love as a spiritual practice?
Matt B.:Yeah, and that is a great question, and it's been something I've been thinking a lot about lately. I guess I should give a little disclaimer.
Matt B.:My ideas on this are still evolving, right, and I'm still evolving on my own path of love sure yeah so my understanding is constantly evolving and sometimes I say something and then a few months later I think about that wasn't quite right and so, but this is. I have been thinking about this. So yeah, what? What does love mean? What does that word means? It's an often used word, an often used concept. It can mean different things to different people, and we can all experience love in different ways. It by one specific definition.
Matt B.:The way I think about it, at least, is that love is a feeling that we feel within ourselves. Okay, right, that feeling of and people again are going to describe it differently depending on how exactly it feels to them, but for me, love feels like warmth, feels like connection, feels like acceptance, feels like being a part of something, and we can feel love, like you were saying, from a person, from a place, from an experience, from friends, from family, from religion, from spirituality, and so it is. It's a very open-ended concept, but I think the unifying idea is the feeling that we feel within our own hearts.
Shannon W.:Okay, like a physical. Is it a physical feeling? Is it a? Is it something that that is an intuitive feeling?
Matt B.:I think it's both. Maybe you could say a physio-emotional feeling.
Shannon W.:Okay, I like that.
Matt B.:Something we feel physically in the body, but then also in our emotional body. It's an emotion as well. I think all emotions are both physical and mental. There aren't as many clear dividing lines, I think, between mental and physical and feeling. There aren't as many clear dividing lines, I think, between mental and physical and feeling. It's all kind of a continuum. So love is something we experience in our mind, in our hearts and in our bodies, and it can be different types of love or different experiences that evoke love can affect one or more of those differently. Maybe we feel a love for a book more in our head than in our body, whereas we feel love for a person maybe is more in our body.
Shannon W.:So is it fair to say that love would be sort of a connecting force or an affinity, a force of affinity or a force of feeling safe or accepted in the presence of something? Um, yeah and feel free to say no, I mean yeah, I'm just trying to like parse this out just, I mean definitely a connecting force.
Matt B.:But that word you use there affinity that that's very interesting too. Yeah, I think that's a good description for it as well. Yeah, feelings of connection, belonging and joy and happiness.
Shannon W.:Yeah, one of the reasons that I'm asking this question is because I think there are what I would call like love skeptics out there. I don't know, I feel like that's an accurate term, which is I mean, I'll speak for my own self. Sometimes when I hear the word love, my attention may actually shut down a little bit, because I'm so used to hearing the word love, it's so general, that sometimes it won't land for me or it won't mean something to me because it could mean anything. But then there are also people who, I think, actually get turned off by the word love, like thinking that it's kind of an airy fairy thing. You know, no offense to the fairies, but you know it. I mean, like people may equate love with something fluffy, and then they, they decide it's not for them, and then they, they don't hear the value of this.
Shannon W.:so sure, but kind of translating this concept into terms of connection or joy, what more concrete yeah, and and just offering up these different ways for people to think about it, because these are things that we all truly want and need, and if we have a word that makes it so that we can't hear it, then we miss the opportunity to benefit from it.
Matt B.:You know right and that's a great important point that you bring up about how that term love has been is sometimes misused yeah and I think well, some people may particularly struggle with love, depending on they may have had experiences with people who professed love but at the same time caused lots of pain. Sure, whether in family dynamics or romantic relationships, or for a lot of us love is was our early experiences of love, it was intertwined with pain and suffering, so that that kind of, in that sense, love can be almost triggering for some people, or it can definitely cause people to shut down. And then love has also been abused by capitalism in the, in marketing, you know, trying to sell us stuff that we love like you'll love this whatever product, you'll love this car, you'll love this shampoo yeah, yeah, yeah that's another way that perhaps the power of love has been diluted in our modern culture that's a great way to put it that it's.
Shannon W.:The problem is not with love, the problem is with the dilution. When we have a culture that teaches us, teaches us specifically, to love our toothpaste, or, you know, to love our running shoes, or whatever it is, then that does dilute the power of the word and it confuses us, or it confuses the definition of the word. So, with that definition of love in mind, as you have shared it, what then does love as a spiritual path look like? Is there a model or path that you follow to teach this that you might share with us?
Matt B.:Sure.
Shannon W.:Okay.
Matt B.:And again, like I'd say, my understanding of this is constantly evolving in the process.
Shannon W.:Understood yes.
Matt B.:But right now, the approach that I'm taking in my own life, and what I'm trying to teach as well, is to just bring more of that feeling of love into my everyday life.
Shannon W.:Okay, so what does that look like?
Matt B.:Again, I'm focusing on really the feeling of how I feel, and so, for me, that comes into my life in several ways. One is through meditating on my heart, just directly sitting in a space of meditation and concentrating on I don't want to say creating, but in a sense just trying to remember the feeling of love in my heart. And I teach a few different meditation techniques, sometimes involving breathing, but just to try to visualize and try to feel the experience of giving ourselves more love, of creating more of that feeling or remembering more of that feeling of love in our hearts, that feeling of joy, that feeling of contentment, feeling of connection.
Shannon W.:So meditating on the heart.
Matt B.:Yeah. So that's one way, one aspect of this path that I am following myself. Then another is, throughout my day-to-day life, as I'm going through my life, trying to approach people and situations with more love, with more of a loving attitude. So, for example, the part-time job that I do, I still do to earn money. It's it's not a particularly fulfilling job, but yet, but I need to do it to earn money, and so part of my practice lately has been trying to do this job that I don't really want to do it, but trying to do it in a more loving way, trying to put love into this work I'm doing and as a way to just try to bring more love into my life. Since I have to do this job to earn money, I might as well try to do it lovingly, yeah, but I feel more love in what I'm doing like, if you have to do it anyway, why not do it with love and bring more love into your life?
Matt B.:Yes, I can't do what I have been doing, which is like grudgingly do it and being kind of irritated about it all the time and forcing myself to do it. That's not very fun.
Shannon W.:No, not fun. And also it reminds me of something that I heard you say, actually, which is basically that we can be either bringing more love into the world or we could be bringing more hate or division or negativity into the world, right, exactly, yeah, you shared this idea of saving what we love versus fighting what we hate, and yeah, you actually mentioned it in terms of what I would call kind of a social justice element, or basically like explaining how this might work in the world. We want to make the world a better place and that we have a choice. We could be fighting for the same thing, we could be working for the same outcome and by working for it in terms of saving what we love, we're actually adding more love to the world yeah, and that's a very good point, but no, just about how to approach the world, and so.
Matt B.:So I feel like I should give credit for that quote. That was in one of the I think, the latest Star Wars movie. At the end, when there's that scene where Rose, she saves, what's the former stormtrooper's name? Finn? Yeah, finn, finn's on the suit mission. Yeah, he's gonna. The battering ram cannon is going to destroy, they're going to break into the rebel base and kill the rebels. So finn's in his speeder, he's on a, he's going kamikaze, he's going to ram himself into the battering ram laser or whatever. But rose, his other character, comes and rams his speeder and knocks him out of the way. That's right.
Matt B.:Yeah, and he's like what are you doing? And she's like we win, this is how we win. We win by saving what we love, not fighting what we hate.
Shannon W.:Oh. Yeah, that's where I got the I remember that scene and I didn't make that connection. Thank you, that's such a profound scene too.
Matt B.:Right yeah.
Shannon W.:Okay, well, so you got that from Star Wars, which I think is awesome, or I could say I think that's rad, but then it seems like you did take it sort of a step further, right, that by saving what we love, we actually bring more love into the world.
Matt B.:Right. And then just recently I saw a quote by Martin Luther King Jr saying essentially the same thing. There's that really famous quote of his. That how does it go? Hate doesn't end hate. Only love can do that. Darkness doesn't end darkness, Only light can do that.
Shannon W.:That's right.
Matt B.:I just saw another quote by him that said responding to hatred with hatred just brings more hatred into the world. I'm paraphrasing, but it's the same idea that, yes, there can. There are horrific things going on in the world right now. There is vast, widespread injustice in the world right now and some people want seem to want to use that as a justification for why they can't love right. Because it's impossible to love a world with all this injustice in it right, With all this unfairness, with all this suffering. Yeah.
Matt B.:And so it is true that there is widespread injustice in the world right now and it needs to be changed. But we can change it. We don't have to directly fight it in a conference in a confrontational way, we don't have to meet them. We don't have to meet hate with hate Right. And so, just to follow up on that idea of saving what we love versus fighting what we hate, when we're fighting what we hate we become focused on destroying the enemy Right. Yeah.
Matt B.:If we're fighting to say sometimes we do have to fight to save what we love. But when we're fighting to save what we love, when what we love is safe, we no longer have to destroy the opponent.
Matt B.:We can work to undo the injustices. We can work to make the world a more just, fair place, without, without hating the way it is right now, but it's again. It's. Where is your focus? Do you want to fight what's wrong with the world or do you want to make the world a better, more fair, more just, more loving place? And so if we focus on that second part, coming in from the approach of how can we make the world more fair, how can we make the world more just, how can we bring more love into the world?
Shannon W.:I love the question that you're asking there, which is just where is your focus Exactly Right? And it reminds me actually of. It reminds me of two different things. One of them is a quote by Gandhi where he says an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Matt B.:Yes.
Shannon W.:You know. So true. And then, on the flip side of that, there is a story I've heard about Mother Teresa, which is back in the 60s, when there was so much protest against the Vietnam War. She was invited to go to an anti-war rally and she refused to go and the people were saying you know, you're all for peace and love, why wouldn't you come to this anti-war rally? And she said that's exactly why I will not come to an anti-war rally, but as soon as you make a pro-peace rally, I will be in the front row oh, that's beautiful it does matter.
Matt B.:Yeah, the focus this is not a new idea, like you said. No, gandhi was proposing this idea. Martin luther king jr. His love, was a basis for everything he did in the civil rights movement.
Shannon W.:Absolutely no question. And the community of activists that he was a part of and cultivated was they called the beloved community.
Matt B.:Oh, oh, wow, yeah.
Shannon W.:Yeah, so let's. I want to go back to talking about what it looks like to live this practice, love as a spiritual practice. There was a practice that you mentioned, which was this practice of looking in the mirror. Looking in the mirror and saying to ourselves I love you.
Matt B.:Yeah, so looking into the mirror, making eye contact with ourselves, that's an important part.
Shannon W.:Oh, of course you can't just stand in front of the mirror and look down right. Yeah, would you say something about that practice, because I think there might be some power in that for some people who are listening Right.
Matt B.:Well, I think that exercise is a great way to assess your relationship with your own heart, to figure out how much you love yourself. So, yeah, I welcome anyone to try this. Go to a mirror, look yourself in the eyes, hold that eye contact and say I love you to yourself.
Shannon W.:Ooh, that could be scary, right, right.
Matt B.:Yeah.
Shannon W.:Or at least weird.
Matt B.:Yeah or uncomfortable. Yeah, a lot of us. The first time we try that it's going to be uncomfortable.
Shannon W.:I mean some of us some people may even struggle to make eye contact with ourselves. Yeah, yeah, um, I will tell you after I read or watched that, whatever it was from you, you even said stop right now and go look in the mirror. And so I did that and I went and I looked in the mirror and I looked myself in the eyes and I said I love you and I've done a lot of work on myself. So, not surprisingly, you know, it didn't freak me out too much, because I've done things like this before. But when I did it, I was paying attention to how it felt, and what I felt was warmth, it was love, it was compassion, it was like just by saying those words to myself, it's like I felt closer to myself.
Matt B.:Beautiful.
Shannon W.:It's like I felt like I was accepting myself just by looking at myself in the mirror. It was quite powerful. I was like, all right, you got this, matt, and then I came back to the computer and I kept going. But you did also say something following up on that. That you know for people who this might be hard for. You suggested something else. You suggested a practice of breathing, and I wonder if you could talk about that. Why breathing? Why would that help us with looking into the mirror?
Matt B.:yeah, so that that's a great question and leads down a whole other train.
Matt B.:Oh, I bet so let's back up and talk about why, why people might struggle with that exercise, why people struggle with loving ourselves. For a lot us, we've never been taught to love ourselves. For a lot of us, we grow up love is something we receive from other people, and often we only receive this love from other people. We're only told that we're loved when we act the right way, when we we fit into other people's expectations, when we act the way we're supposed to right. So for a lot of us, we grew up with conditional love yeah.
Matt B.:And so as we grow up in our lives, we learn to not love ourselves, we learn that we don't deserve love, or that we only deserve love when we act a certain way. Or, like I said before, if we do get love, it's then followed by pain, and so a lot of us have a really troubled relationship with love in general and with with loving ourselves. I know a lot of times just from mostly from my interactions with peers as I, as I was growing up like I was always a weird kid and kind of got made fun of for not fitting in, and so I learned to not love myself because because of the feedback I received from my peers, starting kind of in middle school, it's so sad, isn't it?
Shannon W.:but it it's, I think it's common right, yeah, I'm sure it's very common.
Matt B.:Yeah, and of course some people I mean I was, I was lucky in the sense that my, my parents were very loving and so, um, my, my trauma, my emotional wounding didn't really start till middle school for me. But some people have very, you know, not great relationships with their parents or with their primary caregivers, where, from the earliest age, love is conditional or associated with pain, and so a lot of us have deep wounds, deep emotional scars within us. That makes it hard to love anything, love ourselves, love other people.
Shannon W.:Yeah, that's a good point.
Matt B.:And then we go through life not being able to express our emotions. If you, we live in a very, if you think about, most of our life is spent in a professional setting where we're supposed to shut down our emotions. Be professional, not let our personal stuff get in the way of our work, whether it's schoolwork or work, job, job.
Shannon W.:Yeah, or like we're told to be rational, we're told to be like be rational, don't be emotional. There's something wrong with being emotional.
Matt B.:Yeah, exactly, and especially under the patriarchy for males especially, we're strongly discouraged from expressing sadness, and pretty much everyone in general in public we're discouraged from expressing and displaying negative emotions Because we're taught from society, we're conditioned from a very early age that negative emotions are bad, that we shouldn't feel them and we shouldn't express them, we shouldn't let other people know that we're feeling them. And so we start off in life. Almost all of us pretty much everyone gets some kind of emotional wounding very early on, like some kind of trauma that that teaches us to fear love or teaches to close our hearts and either not love ourselves and not love the world around us, not love other people, and then it's a protection right, it's a protective mechanism that's a coping mechanism, yeah, but like all trauma is it's it's a response to being wounded and then not not being able to process that wound, not receiving support and processing, integrating that wound.
Shannon W.:And then we just pile all kinds of repressed emotion down on top of that and so it just forms this thick protective layer around the heart yes, it does right it's no wonder we're disconnected from our hearts, matt yeah, exactly so when you're talking about this, what I'm hearing is reconnecting to our hearts and reconnecting to love is not just a spiritual practice, it's a form of healing yeah, definitely exactly, yeah, yeah, okay, so, um, so that was just profound and it made me sort of lose my my track of what you were going to talk about the breathing oh right the breathing in the mirror yeah, and so a lot of what I'm talking about is influenced, uh, by by what I write about trauma, and I'm a big fan of um gabber mate, and so I'm highly inspired by his work he's amazing
Matt B.:oh yeah, so we're talking about, yeah, the wound why we can't look because this wounding that we received and we have these unprocessed, unintegrated wounds and all this repressed emotion on top of it, yeah, and so, as a result of that, a lot of us, when we start trying to love whether it's trying to love ourselves or love another person, and, like in this example, as we go to that mirror and try to look at ourselves and say I love you, some people may experience a trauma response when they try to do that because of the wounds they've experienced. It can create a physical, physiological trauma response where the heart heart rate goes up, breathing becomes shallow and it triggers a stress response of that fight, flight or freeze response and the nervous system becomes overstimulated as part of this stress response. And so breathwork breathing is a way to calm down that overstimulated response of the nervous system.
Matt B.:I think one speaker talked about breathwork. Breathing and breathwork is I like the word he used technology. It's a way that we can directly influence our state of being, our state of mind, through the breath. So there's one great book that I really like. It's called the Healing Power of the Breath. It's written by two medical doctors actually, so it's based on peer-reviewed research and talking about how breathing calms down our nervous system, and so one of the ideas is that so we usually think of the brain sends signals to the body.
Matt B.:Right, the brain controls the breath, the body, but there are, for every one nerve running from the brain to the body, there's four nerves running back from the body up to the brain. There's all this information flooding into our brains from our body, all the sensory information from our physical bodies, from our senses, from our eyes, ears and nose, but in particular, there's a lot of information coming from the lungs, from the respiratory system, because breathing is so important to our survival. Right, we all die very quickly without oxygen, so our brains pay a lot of attention to the signals coming from our respiratory system, and when we get overstimulated, when we start freaking out and getting hyper, oftentimes we start breathing really shallowly, very quickly. That's kind of a standard stress response. And so, by consciously making the decision to slow down our breath, start taking deep, slow breaths. The brain starts getting this information from the lungs saying things are calm, things are okay, you can calm down, you can relax are okay, you can, you can calm down, you can relax, like something, like some kind of um barriers might fall.
Shannon W.:That would allow us to sort of now I'm thinking back to the mirror. You know that some barriers might fall. That might actually allow us to feel more comfortable in the practice yeah, it allows us to calm down it.
Matt B.:it can take a little while to get used to that, to feel the calming effect of the breath on the mind, but once we start to get used to using the breath as a tool to calm down our over-stimulated minds, then that automatic trauma response, that discomfort associated with the past trauma and the past wound, it lessens the severity of those uncomfortable feelings around love.
Shannon W.:You know, as we're talking about this, it's becoming more clear to me that the practice really begins with reconnecting to our own hearts. Yes, right, like that would be like that would be like step one.
Matt B.:Right, it's hard. It's hard to see love in the world.
Shannon W.:If you don't, you don't feel love in our own hearts, and there are so many of us, I think, who look out into the world and we don't see love in the world oh no, yeah, I mean, especially if you follow mainstream news or social media.
Matt B.:There's just all of this evidence of how bad things are, especially right now, especially politics and all that divide. We're constantly just seeing all these messages about how bad everything is.
Shannon W.:Yeah, it's like we're swimming upstream, because imagine already if there's any level of disconnect, if there's any level of that filter where we're not looking through love, and then adding to that the social media and mainstream media and the divisiveness and the hateful language, we really are fighting an uphill battle.
Matt B.:Yes, we are. So there is one more idea about this practice love as a spiritual path. Go for it. Yeah, I talked about the one idea of the meditation practice of trying to feel more love, but another big part of it is. So one way you can think about meditation and spirituality is a way to reprogram our subconscious, so reprogram the base, default level of our subconscious. So a lot of us, because of our as we discussed, because of our, the wounds we've experienced, because of all the conditioning from life, the, the base feeling, the basal experience of our emotions, of our feelings, is one of not love, you know disconnection, alienation, separation, maybe hate, some, some level from discontentment, all the way to depression and right, the, the default state. So how, how you feel? First thing, you wake up in the morning okay right.
Matt B.:So you know a lot of us and for me it's something I still still struggle with and I kind of baseline emotional state of being unhappy with life and dissatisfaction, let's say to go to go back to words of the buddha that state of unsatisfactoriness.
Matt B.:So yes and so in any spiritual practice, any meditation practice, can be thought of as a way to change that default emotional experience of life. So to try to reprogram the subconscious so that it's no longer experiencing the default, no longer dissatisfaction, but trying to shift that default subconscious experience of the world closer towards happiness, closer towards love, closer towards satisfaction with life.
Shannon W.:I love this deprogramming and reprogramming. So how does that work?
Matt B.:Well, and here's where we get into a lot of the kind of the spiritual practices that have been taught throughout the ages of trying to direct the conscious thoughts, the conscious mind, throughout the day, trying to influence what the conscious mind is thinking about. Because what we think about on a day-to-day basis, what we're exposed on to that's that's what programs the subconscious right over time. Repeated exposure to certain ideas, certain feelings, that's what becomes the baseline of our subconscious mind if we grow up. If we grow up having a happy childhood where we have lots of happy experiences, that that programs the subconscious to a happy place. But if we grow up feeling lots of pain and lots of isolation, separation, then that programs the subconscious. That's what's normal. Yeah, choosing to focus on a different feeling or a different mental vibration, or whatever you want to call it, that can start to, over time, change our base level, subconscious experience of life.
Shannon W.:Okay, I love the word you just used there choose. Yes, so it's not like we necessarily have to put ourselves into a completely different environment that has different external stimuli, but rather we can simply make different choices, and that itself can be part of the reprogramming.
Matt B.:Exactly, although it gets tricky because our external circumstances definitely have an influence. So in one sense, changing our external circumstances can help. Just by by breaking that routine, it makes it easier to choose to focus on different things. But we can do that even without making some drastic, huge change in our life. It's just harder because we're used to responding to particular things in our life in a particular way.
Matt B.:We all have things in our life that make us happy.
Matt B.:We have things that make us sad, but we can, if we're desperate enough or if we're tired of feeling the same way and we want to change that, it is within our power to try to make a conscious shift in how we feel about our lives by consciously, by mindfully being aware of what we're thinking about as we go throughout our day-to-day life.
Matt B.:So when I talked about my job for many years, I was just thinking about how much I don't like it, how boring this is, how I wish I could be doing something more fulfilling. I wish I could be doing something to pursue my dreams, but now I'm trying to think about just putting love into the work I'm doing. So that helps time I spend work. Now, instead of thinking about how happy I am start thinking about. I wish I could be doing other things. I'm thinking about love, and so that's bringing the thought of love into my consciousness, bringing the vibration of love into my awareness, however you want to describe it. Over time, through repeated exposure, that then starts to affect our subconscious mind and our subconscious beliefs about the world and our subconscious emotional starting point.
Shannon W.:That is along the same lines as saving what we love versus fighting what we hate. Right, it's. Where do we put our focus?
Matt B.:Right, exactly.
Shannon W.:Yeah, for the most part, we can do that in every moment.
Matt B.:Right as long as we remember to, but Well, yes, well.
Shannon W.:Remembering is often the hardest thing about it taking on a new practice, but it's empowering though, isn't it? Because it's. It's on us to remember, and it's on us to choose we do have a choice.
Matt B.:Yes, we have a choice about what, what we focus our conscious thoughts on throughout the day. That's what we said, what you said earlier about it all starts with reconnecting with our hearts, reconnecting with our feelings. That's where it all begins.
Shannon W.:Yeah, Beautiful Matt. Thank you so much for all of that. That feels like a beautiful place to conclude, even though I'm enjoying this very much. If someone feels called to either interfaith spirituality or love as a spiritual practice, where would you suggest that they start their exploration?
Matt B.:Well, as we were talking about, I think the most important thing is for everyone to listen to ourselves and follow your own intuition. And if what I'm talking about in particular is resonating and makes a lot of sense, I'm in the process of launching a new website. It's at embracelovelife.
Shannon W.:Embracelovelife.
Matt B.:Yeah, so if the things I'm talking about make sense and resonate, that's that's a good place to start. But in general, just listen to your own intuition. If if you've heard about some other kind of spiritual topic or or spiritual path or spiritual tradition, then explore it. One of the beauties of the internet, social media, is that we can all easily find out more information about just about anything. So listen to your own heart, listen to your own intuition. Whatever appeals to you, whatever interests, you, explore that. And if you explore something for a little while and it's like, uh, I don't know about this, then listen to that too. Feel free to explore something else. Yeah, I think everyone's path starts by listening to their own intuition, letting your own instincts guide you and then again, breathing to slow down so that we can relax enough to actually hear what our heart is trying to tell us.
Matt B.:Thank you for the reminder because I think sometimes we may not even know how to hear our intuition right well, and a lot of us are so chronically especially now a lot of them so chronically overstressed and overstimulated that it is very difficult to hear the heart because the brain is so overactive absolutely.
Shannon W.:This is. This is a practice I think is sorely needed, not only for our individual mental, emotional, spiritual, physical health, but for the health of the world, because we're going so crazy when we live that craziness out into the world, we're causing a lot of problems out there well, and we're reaching a point where something has to change.
Shannon W.:Right between the climate crisis and pandemic and state of politics throughout the world, not particularly in the us, but right, we're reaching a tipping point where something's got to give and yeah the more people can embrace some kind of path of self-examination, some kind of path of spirituality, the better it's going to go for all of humanity to kind of to try to change the current trajectory that we're on yeah, and when you say something's got to give, you know, ideally, hopefully, the thing that can give is that boundary that we have between ourselves and our hearts and the love that we lack between ourselves and other people as well. That's the stuff that's got to give if we want to see the world really change. Yes, so now? What's your website again?
Matt B.:Embracelovelife.
Shannon W.:Embracelovelife, embracelovelife. And then, what is the website for the Abbey?
Matt B.:If people would like to learn more about that. Abbeyoftheredwoodsorg. A lot of my videos are on there as well. That's kind of where I started doing my videos and writings.
Shannon W.:Beautiful. Well, matt, I'm really seeing this love as a spiritual practice. Coming back, loving, accepting who we are, to me feels like a way of coming back into wholeness. Yes, so, then, we're becoming more connected to ourselves and we're becoming more connected to the wider circle of life in the process. So I'm grateful to you for the work that you're doing and thanks so much for your time today.
Matt B.:Oh, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk your ear off once you can tell something passionate about.
Shannon W.:Absolutely true. I'm glad your winding path led you to this moment. Thank you, Matt.
Matt B.:Thanks so much. Winding path led you to this moment. Thank you, Matt.
Shannon W.:Thanks so much. That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. To learn more about my guest, matthew Bussey, visit his website at embracelovelife and find more of his writings and videos at abbyoftheredwoodsorg. To learn more about me and the wake up human podcast, visit my website at shannonwillscom. If you liked this episode, please take a minute to subscribe to the podcast and set yourself up to receive future episodes, and if you know someone who might benefit from listening, please share this with them. This podcast is a labor of love for me and I'm thrilled if it can be helpful or inspiring to someone else. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode of Wake Up Human.