We Trace Valentine’s Strange History And Choose Love Anyway

A holiday about love built on goat skins, secret weddings, and a century of checkout panic? We pull the ribbon on Valentine’s Day and follow the thread from Lupercalia’s raw fertility rites to a martyred priest, through Chaucer’s courtly polish, and into the modern marketing machine that tells us care can be measured at the register. The history is wild, but the goal is simple: reclaim love from the script and give it back its backbone. I share candidly about how belief bias makes us easy to sway—why we accept the stories we want to be true—and how that shapes not only holidays but also politics, religion, and our feeds. 
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Transcript

Welcome And Intention Of Love

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Here's to a day filled with love and the people who bring it into our lives. And for me, of course, that's not only my husband, my children, my grandchildren, and my friends, but it's you, humanity, Vil, because I think about everything that I do on this podcast is to help humanity, to share what I'm going through, because I am you. We're all floundering around, we're all trying to figure out what is going on in this crazy world we live in. And my heart goes out to you because it goes out to myself. So happy Valentine's Day to everyone out there that is a human being trying to figure this world out. And I welcome you back to Free to Just Be, the podcast where my personal dance of transformation hopefully becomes an invitation for you to start your own dance of transformation. And I'm your host, Teresa Marie, an ambassador of Qi, and I am here to share my daily observations, the lessons that I get from Earth School, and all the ins and outs of my awakening journey as we navigate this powerful energetic shift unfolding across humanity together. So come on in, and if my content resonates with y'all, please take a minute to smash the like button because every time somebody hits the like button, it raises the algorithms up higher. So therefore, more people get to see and try out Free to Just Be. I sure would appreciate it. And now without further ado, let's start our Valentine's show. And like most holidays, um, you know, Halloween, Christmas, all of them, um, it's, if you haven't noticed, it's an opportunity to do what I say many, many times on this podcast, and that is to resurrect Inquisition. We have become a society that forgets very much to question anything. We do what we're told, where we follow the crowd, we uh, you know, think that the trend is our friend, and uh whatever everybody else is doing, we follow suit. Now that's not always the case, and certainly as we can tell around the planet, more and more people are waking up and recognizing that something is not right, and they're beginning to question, and that's awesome. Well, very much like many of us out there that are questioning everything, I had to do a little dive into this particular holiday of Valentine's Day. Do you know what Valentine's Day represents? Just raise your hand if you do. Well, I didn't really know either. Ah, you know, you think of Cupids, and I kind of assumed it was um because it's called Saint Valentine's Day, so I figured it was some Catholic saint that um was in the picture, but I didn't really know the full meal deal on Valentine's Day. And I'm gonna use this particular um holiday to show us, to remind us what we're in, right? So Demosthenes, I probably killed his name, he was a philosopher way back in the day, um, had this quote, and he said, A man is his own easiest dupe for what he wishes to be uh true. What he wishes to be true, he generally believes to be true. So if I believe that one political party is right, then uh what I wish to be true, that's what I believe to be true, is what uh Demosthenus is is stating in this quote. And I'm gonna show you how we do become the most dupable people. What what is to dupe? It is to pull the will over our eyes, it is to waylay, it is to distract, it is to fool, to uh make you think one way when really something else is happening. Now, if that doesn't sound like the matrix, oh baby, well, let's let's just give ourselves a wake-up call in regards to Valentine's Day. So Valentine's Day actually originated from Lupacalia, a Roman fertility festival. It was uh a festival where um uh let's see, I'm looking at my notes now. Uh the aim of this Lupicalia festival was to purify the city of Rome and promote health and fertility among the people, the fields, and the flocks. And what they did on that day, that festival, is they sacrificed goats and they took the goat blood and they put it on their foreheads, and then they took um a dog and sacrificed a dog, and the dog was to represent um uh and loop, the actual festival name also came from Lupus, um, which was the supposed she-wolf that nursed the uh Rem Remus and Romulus, which were the legendary founders of Rome, right? So they sacrificed a goat, goats and dogs, and they took the goat skins and made thongs out of them, and then they ran through the town with this blood smeared on their foreheads, and they found women and smacked them with these goat thongs. And that was supposed to, it was believed to enhance their fertility. So then move up a few years to 494 CE, and Pope Galileius I abolished this holiday because they said it was a pagan holiday, and what the Catholic Church did then is they called it Saint Valentine's Day, and the story behind Saint Valentine's was that he was a priest, and uh he martyred himself by performing secret marriages against Emperor Claudius, his orders, because in the 14th century, um no, wait a minute, hold on, I'm backing up here. Um, Saint Valentine was a priest who martyred himself by performing secret marriages that Emperor Claudius ordered shouldn't happen anymore. He was concerned that young men who were married and having um relations were going to be weaker soldiers. So he ordered that none of the young men could get married. Well, some of the young men were in love, and this priest, Saint Valentine, was secretly marrying them. And then of course, when the king discovered or the emperor discovered that he was breaking that rule, they killed him. So then we move up to uh the next dupe of ours, right? And that was when um let's see, the fourteenth century Jeffrey Chaucer polized the day as a celebration of courtly love. And now St. Valentine's Day has become one of the biggest consumer spending days ever, especially for men, uh for their wives and uh possibly uh girlfriends or what have you. And oh baby, the shame that a man would get if they forget to do that, right? You see massive amounts of male bodies going into Florist and into Walmart at the last minute because of what? This quote unquote holiday that we have been duped into, right? Think about it. Here we are, we're sparks of God, we come onto the planet, and all these other legends and all these other deities and all these other uh festivals and and performances and and certain things that we were supposed to do, and Valentine's Day is a perfect example of how the evolution of the dupe of humanity has has kicked in. What are some of the other uh ridiculousness that surround Valentine's Day? Well, there is vinegar Valentine's. Get this one. In the 19th century, people didn't just send cards to people they liked. They sent vinegar valentines to the people that they despised or hated. Isn't that a nice practice? And the cards featured grotesque caricatures and stinging poetry, and the biggest insult was that they were sent among uh they were sent anonymously among flirts and alcoholics and meddlesome neighbors and unwanted suitors, and the biggest uh burn was like in the UK, the recipients often had to pay the postage. So in fact, they were paying for others to insult them. And then, of course, the other thing about St. Valentine's Day is the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, when Al Capone's gang dressed up as police and lined up seven members of their rival Bugs Malone gang and gunned them down with machine guns. And yet for some reason this day has now evolved into a day where we're supposed to focus on love. And I think that you and I out there in Humanityville should do just that. I think that we should re-hijck Valentine's Day and let it kick off a day where every single day in the rest of 2026 we exhibit love to one another. Because love really does conquer all. All things. But we forget that, don't we, as we're flailing around trying to get off this matrix merry-gound that we find ourselves in. So today, in this little short Valentine's Day Diddy, I just wanted to remind you to not be the man who or woman who is as uh the easiest dupe, because unfortunately, what we often wish to be true isn't actually the truth. Thus, the need to on the daily resurrect inquisition and begin to not only be the observer and remind yourself you are literally a spirit, you are a spark of God, you are love and light, you are a consciousness, having a human experience. How can you watch yourself if you're not really on the outside looking in? So continue to observe yourself, but also question everything. Question your beliefs, question your feelings, question your doubts, your thoughts, question politics, question religion, question the medical matrix. Question it all because the truth is sitting there waiting for us to rediscover it, and we only rediscover the simplicity of truth when we are courageous enough to take off our rose-colored glasses, recognize that everything isn't simply through the lens that we're viewing, that there is an actual truth underneath all this stuff that we're trying to navigate through. And I want you today on Valentine's Day to give yourself a big old hug. Because anybody alive right now, as we are going through the most incredible and most powerful energetic shift that this entire planet, this entire universe has ever experienced, you are one courageous man or woman. And I am so proud to be on this journey with you. So have yourself an incredible day to focus in on love. And until next time, I wish you the greatest health with vibrant energy, and of course, peace.