Session 4: I Am Love

Positive Affirmation: I am love. Today I declare that I love myself. I do not require anything for this statement to be true. The most important opinion is what I think and feel about myself.

Seamus: How is loving yourself first crucial to loving everything else in life?

Ned: If you don’t love yourself, you’re simply not in your power. I think it’s a common paradigm in people’s minds, and you might even catch yourself doling out that advice to another. What does that really mean? How does it equate in our lives if we don’t love ourselves, and what are the consequences of not loving yourself?

When I didn’t love myself, I wasn’t empowered because I was more inclined to say mean and awful things to myself. I was more inclined to criticize, put myself down and just hold myself in a place of disempowerment, which eventually drove me to feel shameful, not good enough and eventually depressed. There are a million reasons to love yourself. The bigger question is, are you willing to drop all the commentary that doesn’t support that love for self?

Seamus: I spoke to a friend the other day. He said something along the lines of “By loving ourselves, some people might equate that to the idea that you’re narcissistic, and that is not right.” He said that it’s good to give yourself permission to love yourself. Does that make sense?

Ned: Yes. As soon as you give yourself even the slightest permission to love yourself, it’s a way of inviting the divine to come and be with you. One of my favourite authors, Thomas Keating, talks about this all the time. He said all we need to do is look toward the divine, and the divine comes all the way to us. With just a small amount of willingness to love myself, I’m given great rewards. The impact of loving myself has been enormous.

Really, loving yourself requires all things that are not loving to be put up for debate, because it’s only a concept when it’s not actually put into practice. When you decide to love yourself and give yourself permission to do that, that is your entry point. Then the next step is to actually do it. To love yourself, you must be willing to set down any dialogue that is not loving, you also must be willing to pull yourself out of situations that are not loving as well.

Loving self also includes not giving another person your power or allowing them to chisel you down.

Seamus: That would be a fairly common concern for a lot of people—when to put themselves first like that. It is difficult for some people to deal if they don’t feel they deserve to love themselves. Is that a possibility?

Ned: When we are disempowered and not loving ourselves, or when we are not putting ourselves first in life, all kinds of mindsets are employed and there’s justification for all of it. I’ve heard people tell me why other people are more important than themselves. I know people who would put their pets above themselves, like a pet is worth more than they are. Again, in an empowered mindset, or if you move into an empowered place where you really love yourself, everything changes. Your love for self is never put up for debate. Any sign of moving into a place that’s not loving with yourself is automatically out of bounds for you.

Seamus: At the start of this chapter in your book. you say when it comes to love, “the deeper you go, the greater it gets.” What does that mean, exactly?

Ned: That’s my experience. I was just reading a book the other day by Henry Drummond. In his book he said, “Love is a universal language. It would take you years to learn Chinese or the dialects of India, but from the day you land, you understand the language of love.” Love resides at the deepest depths of our being and it’s the first quality that we emanate when we’re born. Love just emanates out of us naturally. It’s at the core of our being.

When we learn how to love and to dive into the deeper aspects of love, that love becomes like a deep well in us. It goes right to the core of who we are, and it gets deeper and greater. The reason it gets deeper and greater is that the deeper we go into love, the further we go into God.

Seamus: I’m wondering if the people who put other people or even their pets above themselves in that respect maybe think that’s a noble thing to do. I wonder why people would suppress the need to love themselves first, though?

Ned: You can’t access something that you don’t know anything about. If we have not spent enough time going into love, or if we have a perverted sense of what love is, how do we miss that? If you have never had apple pie, you won’t wake up at three in the morning pining for it. I think that a certain number of people experienced a very limited or conditional love in their life. If this is the case, they don’t understand the deeper levels of what love is about.

It’s like that quote that we read a few sessions back about going to the ocean with a small cup. It’s not that the ocean didn’t want to provide or couldn’t provide; it’s just we arrived with a small cup. The same applies to love: the deeper we dive into it, the more we receive from it.

Seamus: You’re right. I also think you made a good point in saying that we all make mistakes, and when you do make a mistake, instead of beating yourself up over it, that’s the time to love yourself more. How did you come up with that, and what does that mean?

Ned: I spent a great deal of my life beating myself up. Nobody was more violent to me than I was to myself.

When I used to beat myself up, I was only disempowering myself even further. What I have learned from years of beating myself up is that when I make a mistake, this is when it is most needed to be loving and kind to myself. The same applies to others as well. This is a concept that we bring into the relationship portion of my book. When your partner is at their worst, that’s when you need to be at your best. For example, say they lose the keys to the car. They already feel bad that they have lost the keys; they don’t need us to yell at them on top of that. They need someone to come to them and say, “They’re just keys. We’re going to get through this. It’s okay to make mistakes because that’s the way life is.” We learn a great deal through mistakes. Hopefully, we make a whole bunch more. I beat myself up long enough that I learned that I’m not willing to do that anymore. I decided that my self-worth is no longer up for debate by myself or another.

Seamus: Using your example of the keys, let’s say if someone loses the keys and then someone comes along and really gives them a hard time about it—is that the ego projecting? What is that, exactly?

Ned: Do you think your soul would be upset if your partner lost the keys to your van? Do you think your soul would be upset if your partner threw the keys to the van in the ocean?

Seamus: I might be.

Ned: When we’re loving during the times our mind wants to be angry, we’re addressing our partners with our soul. We are engaged them with love, from a deeper place within ourselves. I don’t need to react in accordance to what my mind may be saying, because I’m not my mind.

Seamus: Let me present something to you, then. This is something I’m having a little difficulty with, because, let’s say, for example, that your spouse is a pyromaniac, and they torch the house. Would you not get totally pissed off about that? Are you supposed to be like, “It’s okay, honey, it’s just a house”?

Ned: I’m not sure that I would date a pyromaniac. I might ask you what drew you to this person. I’m sure it would be a hot romance! [laughing]

Seamus: I’m just presenting an extreme circumstance, where I think that the only reaction I would expect is to be upset by something like that. What I’m trying to do is paint a picture, because I would imagine readers would be thinking, “Yes, there are certain situations that happen where is it reasonable to get upset.” Because everybody needs a consequence too, sometimes, right?

Ned: Sure.

Seamus: I understand that when it comes to losing keys, it would be unreasonable to lose your mind. The consequence of you losing your temper is worse than them losing the keys. You’ve done more damage with the way you are interacting with her or him, than the keys being lost. But there sometimes needs to be a consequence for your actions—not to say that you lose your mind over it. I’m just wondering, do we sometimes need to teach them a lesson?

Ned: In the context of the question that we are talking about, anger is not an appropriate response. It doesn’t negate the fact that anger can be useful in some situations. We are talking about loving someone when they’re going through a difficult situation. That also applies to loving ourselves when we mess up. In that scenario, love for self shouldn’t be replaced with anger or frustration towards ourselves. Love returns us to a peaceful place much quicker than anger. However, is anger appropriate? Yes, in certain situations. For example, anger is the most appropriate way to respond if somebody is harming your child. However, if you are using anger to school another adult for losing keys, that is your ego running wild. Because your partner doesn’t need to be taught a lesson through your anger; your words in love speak much deeper, and more clearly. If anger is how we feel we need to express ourselves with the ones we love, this is a sign of a communication breakdown. Anger is not the problem. However, what we do with our anger can often lead us into big problems.

Seamus: Say you live on a busy road, and your child runs out into the road. You’ve told them numerous times, “Don’t go into the road. It’s dangerous.” Then one day, they go into the road, and there is a close call, and the result is that you punish your child because you love them.

I guess the tricky thing with this is everyone is going to have their own perception of what is excessive and what isn’t enough. The trick is finding the balance of what’s effective, appropriate, and not inflicting long-term damage because we can’t control our emotions and our behaviours.

Ned: Yes, when it comes to the safety of your child, and they’re not listening, then anger may be an appropriate response to them walking toward the road. However, most of the time, anger is not the appropriate response. We have a range of emotions at our disposal. By accessing our range of emotions, we can better communicate our message. Embracing life with love has become a blessing in my life. It also helps me find solutions to my questions much quicker.

Love sometimes calls me to settle down and relax and breathe for a minute. The most loving thing I can do sometimes is to calm myself down when I get angry. It doesn’t mean that we don’t ever get angry. If your partner does something and anger comes up, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with feeling angry. The only thing that would be wrong is if you start projecting it and abusing your partner

Seamus: I would like to know what your advice would be to someone who has a negative past and can’t seem to love themselves.

What if someone is listening to this, and they think their past is so broken, and have been told they are worthless for so long that they no longer value themselves? I don’t want anyone who is reading to this feel like they’re excluded from the possibilities of this conversation that we’re having. I’d like for you to bring some light to that for those who might be questioning whether it’s possible to love themselves.

Ned: By embracing love it becomes easier to be willing to drop our past. If you’re having a challenging time with being stuck in your past, what I found helps me is to apply the qualities of love to the situation I’m in. What are the qualities of love? Love is patient, love is kind, generous, humble; it’s courteous, unselfish; it’s good-tempered, honest, and it’s sincere. These are a good chunk of the qualities of love.

When we find it hard to address love for ourselves, which one of these qualities do you need to put in place? Do we need to be more patient or kind with ourselves? Is that the quality the moment requires? Do you need to be better tempered? If you ask yourself, by directly looking at the qualities of love, you’ll see they are signposts for us to go further into it. Make your own list; come up with more words on your list than I shared. That could be your first step in practising how to love yourself.

Another way to love ourselves when we have had a horrific past is to remember that loving self is not an action that you perform once. It is something that we reinsert daily. We sometimes need to reinsert loving ourselves from one moment to the next. This is such an important task to master in life. It changes the dynamic of so many circumstances when we love ourselves this way. Chapter four of my book is one of the chapters that is very dear to me. My campaign in the last year and a bit has been Be Love.

Love is a doorway into a deeper union with God. It brings the essence of our Creator into the moment we are in. To be clear, I’m not talking about God from a religious perspective; I’m talking about the God that lives inside your soul. The depth of who you are is rooted in love and in God, because love is the essence of life. If we can just get a handle on how to apply love to ourselves and others and start to work toward bringing more of that into our lives, our lives will radically change. That I guarantee. It’s turned my life upside down and brought so much goodness to me and everyone around me. It’s positioned me to see things that I never thought possible. Just thinking about this causes my emotions to well up in me. I have so much appreciation for the quality of my life. The opportunity to sit here with you today is because of love.

Seamus: When you were young and going through your difficulties, did you think that anything like this would be possible for you?

Ned: No. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know the depth of my soul. I was afraid and didn’t have a clue. When I was the most afraid and angry, I forgot that I was love. I forgot that I was the love that I was searching for. I was looking for love outside of myself. I was looking for somebody to give it to me.

Seamus: Yes. I can relate. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think in those situations you feel that you are incapable of giving yourself what you need and then you look for others to fulfill that for you. You must rely on yourself, as you say many, many times throughout the book; you need to be able to supply yourself with that. That’s incredibly important. How does loving yourself put you in touch with your soul?

The bottomless nature of love is revealed to you when you fall in love with yourself.

Ned: What I’ve discovered is that my soul is made from love. Love is to God as the weave is to cloth: they are inseparable. Without each other, God itself would surely fall apart. You cannot have God without love, and your soul is God. When you know love, you know your soul and you know God as well.

Seamus: You’re saying that your soul is God?

Ned: Yes. Your soul is God. This is something that a lot of people have a hard time talking about, or they think it would be blasphemous to believe that your soul is God. I’m not talking about your ego. Thomas Keating, one of my favourite authors, talks about this in his documentary called “The Rising Tide of Silence.” Keating is a Trappist monk; Trappist monks are part of the Catholic order of monks. He said, “We are not only made up in God’s image. We are God in every sense of the word.” Now that’s coming from a very high-level Catholic monk. I think this is a paradigm that needs to be talked about, because that’s what we’re missing.

When we don’t love, we’re missing God. That may be an out-there concept, but it really that’s how I feel about it. Now, I usually try not to throw the word God in people’s faces too much; I just tend to talk about love. However, if I get down to it, this is the core of what I believe. I’m not the only one who understands this concept or who is following this type of dialogue.

There was a paradigm that was shoved in our faces and thrown around for many years: that we are not worthy, and we are not good enough, and we are sinners. I don’t think most of the people who propagate this idea understand what sin is, nor do they have a clue about who they really are on a soul level. If you don’t want to talk about God or claim your position with the Creator, that’s cool. You don’t even have to believe a word I say. If we could just love ourselves and love each other, there would be a massive shift in the world. You want to talk about an awakening—that would be a mass awakening.

Seamus: Absolutely. I feel like up until now, we haven’t really discussed God yet. We haven’t mentioned that word very much. I feel that there might be people who have their own fixed belief, whatever that may be. Like you said, this isn’t about convincing or trying to force people into not believing in whatever it is they believe. But I do feel that clarification is important as well. I’m very neutral with this. I’m not a religious person; I have never been.

I’ve attempted it, but there was just too much stuff in there that just didn’t sync with my logic, or what I grew up with as being logical. I just couldn’t get on board with it. This, however, seems far more tactile. There’s actually something to this that my logic agrees with—that God is within us, and that if we are good to ourselves, and if we love ourselves, then good things come. This seems a lot healthier to me than this hierarchical idea that we’re down here and God is way up there.

Ned: Yes, it is. Certainly, when I learned how to love and go deeper into the love in me, I found a deeper relationship with God and myself. My relationship with love is a bottomless adventure that is unfolding moment to moment.

Seamus: Knowing you and having all the conversations and interactions that we’ve had over the years, there is something different about you. It’s difficult to say what it is, but everybody projects something subconsciously. It’s like everyone has their own aroma they put out. It’s part of their being. I’ve never had a conversation or spent time with you where I left feeling depleted, or judged, or disliked, or not welcomed.

It’s very neutral, yet there is a warmth to your energy, the way that you feel and your authenticity as well. It’s sincere. Everything that you talk about and everything that I’ve read in your books synchronizes with who you are as a person. It’s not like “Here’s Ned over here, and here is something he wrote,” and then the two somehow just don’t seem to correlate. They are in perfect unison.

Ned: Yes, the book is my experience. It’s not something that came out of my mind or a fantasy I’ve created. The thing about love is that the further you go into it and your soul, the more truthful your experience is. There is a deeper and more sincere relationship waiting for you in your soul. I would go so far as to say that the most sincere and truthful relationship you’ll ever have is the one you develop with your soul. The further I go into my soul, the more I understand your soul and the connection we share.

Seamus: A conversation I had with a friend of mine who is Buddhist comes to mind. He said that you and I are no different, and that if I care about what happens to myself then I should also care about what happens to you.

Ned: Yes. This is a concept that we’ll talk about in session ten, which deals with the topic of unity. There is a common thread that ties us both together. Love is a universal force that ties us together like a weave. No matter how far away we are from one another, we are still bound to each other. What closes the perceived gap between you and me is relationship and understanding of our soul. Therefore, the further we go into the soul, the smaller the gap becomes between you and me.

Seamus: Another thing I would like to discuss is, what is conditional love? This is kind of a toxic thing, isn’t it?

Ned: Yes.

Seamus: What are some of the common reasons why people might be conditional with love?

Ned: Well, first off, if someone is conditional with their love, they don’t understand what love is. Conditional love is nothing more than a bargaining tool of the ego. When you’re projecting a conditional love, you’ll say to a child, “If you don’t behave, you’re not getting ice cream.” This is a very simplified version, but we do this as adults. “If you don’t behave the way I want you to behave, I’m cutting off my love to you.” Love can sometimes become a bargaining chip that we sort of dangle in the air and say, “You do this, or else.” That’s conditional love. That kind of love is born out of our own suffering. It’s also a love that is born out of our traumas and the things that we’ve gone through. Therefore, that kind of love isn’t love at all. It’s not even remotely close to what love is.

Love needs nothing, and love is more than a desire. If breaking one of my desires causes me to not love you, then I never loved you to begin with. That’s the very truth of what conditional love is. When you hold back your love you are not really holding back anything. All you are really holding back is your approval or the attention you’re willing to give to another.

I remember I was out visiting a tattooist, and I’m not going to mention whose name it is, but this tattooist had a lot of unsavoury clients. He was a very kind man, very gentle, caring and nurturing.

While I was out for dinner with him one evening, I decided that I was going to confront him about his clientele, so I said, “Can I be honest with you?”

He’s like, “Oh, yeah, ask me any question you want.”

I reply with, “Why do you tattoo criminals and such terrible people?”

He says, “That’s a very good question. What do you need in this world?”

I said, “Well, we need clothing.”

And he goes, “Okay, aside from shelter, clothing, and food, what do we need?”

I said, “We need people who care about us.”

He says, “You need love.” He then went on to say, “When these people come in to get tattoos by me, it’s my job to love them. Regardless of who they are or what they do for a living, I may be the only person in this world who really loves these people. That’s my role, that’s my job, is just to love them.”

I couldn’t understand his position, because I had not gone deep enough into love. I couldn’t understand how he could be so unconditional. He understood a greater depth of love than I could in that time of my life.

Now that I have a better understanding of the nature of what love is, I can spot conditional love a mile away. When we are conditional with our love, it may be a call to go deeper into loving ourselves. Once we do, we may find that it gets easier to share it with others. Without this experience and understanding, we may say and do the most harmful things to ourselves and others. This takes us back to the beginning of this session, where we were talking about why it is so critical to love ourselves.

Seamus: Another thing you say in the book is “The longest-standing battle in your life is not being fought inside of yourself. It is actually the one that’s happening in your mind. The arguing and temper tantrums in your mind will continue until you decide the war is over. When you decide to love yourself, your desire to wrestle with your internal conflicts loses the spark.” I like that part. Is it really that easy to get over our self-defeating habits and to love ourselves?

Ned: That’s the thing: our struggles don’t just go away. This is where devotion must be inserted in your practice of loving yourself. You must fall in love with loving yourself. Some of these things, these self-defeating habits, will continue to come into your mind.

 I remember I was about a month or so into a two-month meditation retreat, and I was feeling at the end of my rope with my self-defeating thoughts. My deeper issues were coming forward. I was sitting in sunny Mexico, staying in a five-hundred-year old hacienda with beautiful grounds all around me, and yet I still had all this crap from my past running through my mind. I was angry. These old dialogues kept coming forward while I was trying to meditate in this beautiful space. Next to having somebody fanning me and feeding me grapes, this should have been a great time. Why was I not having a good time? I went to my teacher and told him, “I’m pissed off, Maharishi. When does this stop? When does it end? When do all these angry thoughts in my mind stop?”

He said, “When you learn to love yourself. They may never go away, but these angry thoughts will no longer have control over you when you learn how to change your relationship to the voice in your head that you think is you.”

There are voices in your head and you think that’s who you are, but you are not a voice in your mind. That’s not who we are. The depth of our being resides in our soul, and it’s much bigger than a voice in our head.

The voice in our head is nothing more than our ego. The thoughts dropping into us are not who we are. The voice that’s responding back to those thoughts is not us.

Another thing that Maharishi used to say was, “The last voice in your mind that dissolves is the one that you think is you.”

Seamus: Wow.

Ned: We are also not a self-defeating habit, nor are we a self-defeating thought. Our job is just to stay anchored in the presence of love and pointed toward our soul.

Seamus: Something that I think a lot of people are familiar with is the term “self-violence.” How do you define that term?

Ned: Self-violence is any thought, behaviour, or action that takes you away from loving yourself. It happens in many ways, not just an angry voice in your head. It’s also the voice that repeats the same commentary that gets trapped in your mind. When a collection of thoughts causes you to stress, worry, or have anxiety, it is violent to allow yourself to keep thinking those thoughts. We don’t think of self-violence as the words that we project in our mind repeatedly, like “I got to pay my taxes.”

Seamus: This is what I’m talking about: a lot of people think that it’s manifested in a physical violence to ourselves. When I read “self-violence” without knowing how you define the term… I think that other people relate to it as self-mutilation, cutters, and those types of things where people cause pain to themselves so that they feel something. You’re saying that self-violence can be mental anguish as well?

Ned: Yes. Is it not violent to repeat something to yourself all day that is stressful?

Seamus: Absolutely.

Ned: If you have a Visa bill for three hundred dollars, and you don’t have the money, and all day long you talk in your mind about that three hundred dollars that you don’t have, and there is no way you are going to get that money until the end of the month—is it not a form of self-violence to keep reminding yourself of that three-hundred-dollar bill? We don’t think of that as self-violence. That sort of stuff goes under the radar. I don’t know the statistics on cutting or self-mutilation, but I can tell you that the statistics on the violent behaviour that happens between our ears will be far greater than any other form of violence.

Seamus: No one can ever see it. The scariest part is how much people can conceal when it comes to this type of violence. The physical form of self-violence is much harder to hide than the stuff that’s going on in your head.

Ned: The violence toward ourselves often starts out in the most innocent way. I talked about this in the book. Let’s say we do something and think, “Well, that was stupid.” Then if we do it again, we may say, “Stupid, so stupid.” Maybe the second time or third time we do it, we may say, “I am so stupid. Why do I keep doing that?”

We can slowly turn a dialogue from something being stupid to “I’m stupid.” That’s how the commentaries in the mind can start to turn on us. If we embrace these negative mindsets and allow ourselves to get carried away, or if we get carried away with our emotions, then we start to turn these things on ourselves. We personalize the commentaries that we have in our minds. Then we start to wear them like a label.

Seamus: Why do you think that people turn to self-violence. Is it because it’s easy?

Ned: I think it is a habit. Like I say, we start with small statements, then we work our way into more violent dialogues toward ourselves. We are not given a lot of lessons on how to love ourselves. When you love yourself, it’s a matter of being patient with and kind to yourself. We don’t love ourselves when we are violent in our thoughts. Another way we don’t love ourselves is if we work too much.

I remember working myself into exhaustion, and the Ishayas told me, “You know, if you don’t give yourself rest, it’s a form of self-violence.” That really stopped me in my tracks.

Seamus: Often it’s congratulating to work more. You get rewarded—more money, more stuff. There’s another habit that we can develop. I have some familiarity with this one—with looping thoughts. We touched on it a little bit, like when you talked about the credit card debt of three hundred dollars. Say you can’t pay for it until the end of the month. Then that starts coursing through your mind. Here’s the thing: those kinds of thoughts can perpetuate a lot of anxiety, stress, fear, and then guilt. How can we end that? How can we put it to rest?

Ned: When we focus on the things that bring up anxiety, fear, or guilt, or when we allow ourselves to keep revisiting anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, all these emotions grow stronger. The more attention you put on them, the stronger they get. The thing with looping thoughts is that they perpetuate anxiety, stress, fear, guilt; they become deeply disempowering.

When we become disempowered, we have less power to move into more loving mindsets. But I don’t think that we should exchange a thought for another thought. We covered that in the first session. If you’re feeling stressed and worried about something, I don’t think we replace it with positivity. Positivity doesn’t fix our problems. I think that common sense and a willingness to set down these mindsets and emotions would be more stress reducing than saying, “Well, maybe tomorrow the money fairy will come.”

Seamus: It’s crazy how many times setting down your thoughts alleviates the problem. I hope that the readers are starting to understand and see this pattern that’s going on here. By putting down your thoughts when they have no benefit to you, a more peaceful experience comes over us.

Ned: The idea is that we learn how to embrace love and to hold our attention on the heart. Then a great deal of the stresses that we’re feeling can subside. When we’re trapped in the mind, that sounds nearly impossible. If you go back to the first session or go to the first chapter of my book and get real intimate with what’s going on in your head, you can start to learn how to set those dialogues down.

Seamus: That’s the other thing. You had discussed this with me before, but because of the flow of the podcast being identical to the flow of the book, you were saying that the first part of the book is subjective and there’s more to objective things, and then spirituality came towards the end.

It makes a lot of sense. Like if people go back and they really do a deep dive, a deep forensic on what’s going on in their head, a whole lot more of what we’re talking about now and into the future parts of the show are going to make a hell of a lot more sense. Interestingly enough, in the chapter on love, you introduced the topic of fear. Why did you choose to introduce fear into this chapter?

Fear cannot live in a house love rules.

Ned: People often think that fear is the opposite of love, or hate is the opposite of love, but this is not true. Love has no opposite. Another paradigm is that everything in this world is subject to duality. The thing about love is that it is not of this world; it is divine in nature. Because of my understanding of love, I don’t believe that God has an opposite.

I do believe there’s evil in the world, but evil is not the opposite of God. Fear is a slayer of our awareness of love. Fear has a way of dissolving the consciousness of love in us. Nothing slays love like fear. It takes away our ability to maintain an awareness of love. It is a mindset that only makes us heavy and weak. When I’m fearful, I’m heavy and weak. In the most fearful moments of our lives, we are disempowered, and that has nothing to do with love.

Over the years fear has been used as a tactic to control because of its ability to squash out our personal power. When we are fearful, we become powerless. We tend to freeze.

Seamus: I have seen quotes such as ‘Fear is a lie.’ Is there such a thing as good fear and bad fear? Is fear a lie? How do you respond to that quote?

Ned: Well, there are logical fears, but then there are illogical fears. Most fears are not logical. If you were to walk out to the edge of a rooftop, there is nothing to fear if you don’t fall off the edge.

Only if you were to fall off the edge would you be in fear, and that would only be while you were falling. Does fear keep you safe from falling off the edge of the roof if you’re walking close to it? I would say logic keeps you from falling off the roof.

Seamus: I would agree with that. Yes, absolutely.

Ned: I think we can benefit from having a logical mindset and using our mind. This is where the mind’s a tool. We pick it up and set it down when it’s not necessary. You would teach your child not to put their hands on the stove because it’s hot, but if you were to sit around all night ruminating on the fact that maybe your child could burn their hand, would that be healthy or productive?

Seamus: No.

Ned: I think that is an easy answer, but we do this all the time. We ruminate on hypothetical situations. The fear of falling off a roof would not keep you from falling off. The logic that says “Don’t go too close to the edge” would be the thing to employ. Again, fear is something that tends to percolate in our body.

Seamus: You also say that worry is the slayer of love. Should I not worry? Just as an example, I know we’re bringing up children. I have a child and so do lots of other people. Can we worry about kids? Say they don’t come home on time—is that not something that people ought to be worried about?

Ned: Again, like fear, worry is also a slayer of love. Worry is fear taking ownership of the body. I would ask you, is it productive to worry if your child doesn’t arrive home on time? How does that help you?

Seamus: Well, it doesn’t change because they are not there, so no, it doesn’t change anything, but it is a natural inclination to worry about kids.

Ned: I think a better way to handle that is to teach your kids rules. Teach them to be home in time and they’ll have consequences if they don’t.

Seamus: Even more reason to worry if they don’t come home on time. If you teach your kids to respect the curfew and the rules of the house and then they’re not home—I don’t know how you couldn’t worry.

Ned: I’ve seen a scenario play out where a person was worried. You can only go so far into worry, and then your emotions start to go into overdrive. Then you become illogical and irrational. Worry tends to be a gateway drug into stupidity.

If you ever watch someone who is really good at worrying, their thoughts are usually irrational. They are not based in logic. Worry tends to cause an overreaction, which can send us into a limbic hijacking. In a serious situation, if you have taught your child to come home on time and they know that there are big consequences if they don’t come home, and then they don’t arrive home, the worst thing to do would be to go right into the stages of worry.

The solution to the problem is to get in the car and look for them or to call them on their cellphone. Worry doesn’t bring any solutions to the problem. I don’t know how many times I have talked to parents and they say, “Well, I’m a parent. It is my job to worry.” What has it accomplished? There is absolutely nothing that worry can accomplish. All it creates is instability in ourselves.

Seamus: Yes, I get all of that. That makes total sense. I just wonder, though, if it’s for people who feel that it’s impossible not to have that emotion. Okay, let’s put it this way. One of the worst-case scenarios for me would be if my son didn’t come home, and he’d said, “I will be home at eight o’clock,” and it’s the next morning.

I just don’t know how I wouldn’t worry. I really don’t know, because that seems to me like such an automatic response. How do I block worry from my mind? That’s what I wonder; it just seems like such a challenging proposition not to worry. I get it if someone’s worried about something that’s not worth worrying about.

Ned: We’re talking more about the anatomy of worry and what worry does for us. Maybe if, on rare occasions, worry comes into our experience, it’s not such a terrible thing, but I’m busting down the truth about what worry is. There is nothing good or productive that ever comes out of worry.

Will we experience worry? Absolutely. I think we will all experience it, but what I’m saying is that it is important, when it comes to the aspect of embracing love, that we start to let go of all these different behaviours that don’t serve us or point us in the direction of love. Worry is one of the things that turns us in the opposite direction from love. It disempowers us, and it makes us weak in the process.

If you are the type of person who is a worrywart and you do a lot of worrying, don’t label yourself like, “It’s just what I do.” You’re on notice that worry is a disempowering behaviour. Just because you’re okay with it doesn’t make you stronger in the process. It diminishes your ability to love because it disempowers us.

Seamus: Yes. I don’t disagree with you. I just needed to challenge that a little bit. I absolutely loved this line, a text from the book, and I’m going to quote. “Love gives your dreams permission to become your reality.” What an empowering sentence. I love that. I think going back to the Walt Disney thing too—this runs in line with that. I feel that many readers will see that and instantly feel something. I can only imagine, because I certainly did.

In your own words, Ned, with our one life to live, how does it make you feel to see people who think their dreams were meant for other people and not for themselves?

Ned: I wouldn’t know. Honestly, I’m far too busy living my dreams to worry about whether other people are doing the same. And are you entirely sure that we only have one life to live?

I think the best thing that I can do is to fully live my dreams. Love has been something that has taught me that dreams can come true. I think dreams are a preview of the future. I also think that what is actually in store for us is much bigger than we could ever dream.

When I was friends with the doctor, he introduced me to the New Thought movement. It is a collection of writing that came out of the early nineteen-hundreds, by a series of authors who were working with the concept that thoughts are things. I did a lot of study in this arena, reading different works by different authors.

I also I took a course with the doctor that he learned from Bob Proctor. The course was called “The Science of Getting Rich.” The course appealed to people who wanted to attract wealth in their life. When I took the course, it was very evident, after a couple days in, that it was a course about manifesting your reality. What really seemed to be missing was the inclusion of love.

It talked a lot about manifesting your reality, but the most important thing that I took away from that whole collection of writing is that dreams are possible and that there are many people living their dreams. When we include love, it’s like we put everything on fast forward. We turn up the speed at which our dreams come into our lives. It’s like the difference between one-day shipping and two-weeks shipping.

The New Thought movement echoed what Disney was saying: “If you can see it, you can believe it.” These are the mindsets that visionaries hold because they understand their relationship with creation and their role in it. I can say without a doubt that love is the thing that mega-evolves our pursuits and speeds up the evolution of everything.

Seamus: Let’s assume that your dreams are project based. We’ll use musicians for a minute. They want to earn a living as a musician. When we’re talking about dedication versus devotion, what you’re saying is you should devote yourself as a musician. If they pour devotion into what they’re doing, they’re more likely to see the result that they’re after sooner than if they’re simply just dedicated to it?

Ned: Absolutely. It puts things in fast forward. You look at the very best musicians—they must love what they do. They must love what they’re doing to get to that level, or they have learned how to tap into the zone or the silence within. Either way there’s a real apparent love or there’s this person who has learned how to surrender into the silence within themselves, which is where love lives in us. They are getting into the space of love one way or another. Whether they make it as a career is another thing. Many factors enter the equation as to why things happen and why they don’t.

Seamus: You just hit the nail on the head. I would say that even if you’re devoted to what you’re doing, it doesn’t guarantee success or whatever you call success. Sometimes, devotion is what makes something of higher quality because there was more effort put into it, because the person was willing to do it because they love the process.

It’s not just about how hard you work; it’s about what goes into the work. I see people who are devoted to what they do, and they do have more success. They seem to last longer.

Ned: If you pour devotion into something, then you have poured love into it. If love is God, you’re pouring God into what you’re doing. When you watch someone who has carefully honed their craft, what you’re seeing is God’s reflection coming through them. The thing about being an artist is that the most beautiful paintings, tattoos, or whatever medium you’re looking at are the ones that are divinely inspired, the ones that people have poured the most love into.

I’ve seen drawings where the artwork wasn’t all that great, but it still radiated an essence of something very special. It was reflecting the divinity that was poured into the object that was created.

Seamus:That’s food for thought for people who create. It’s just like my wife always says: “It was made with love.” That’s one of the catchphrases around our flower store—that it was made with love. That is what makes everything a little bit better, a little bit sweeter for sure.

I have one last question here with this. How do we find love in ourselves if nothing in our life is loving or good? This comes back to what we talked about at the beginning a little bit.

Ned: We must learn how to step out of our minds. More than stepping out of the mind, we also must learn how to back out of our emotions. Outside of the context of these two things, we find love in ourselves. When I step out of my mind and my emotions, I can now place my attention inward to my heart.

The mind and our emotions are what keep us distracted from experiencing the depths of love. People have claimed their identity through their thoughts and their feelings, but if your identity is wrapped up in what you feel, then you are reduced to a feeling in your body. That’s not who you are.

If you wake up and your stomach hurts, you could spend the entire day wallowing in that. That can quickly become the focus of your day. In the same way, if you wake up and you have an emotion like “I’m feeling angry today,” that could be your entire day I’m angry. Are you? Or is that just a feeling in your body?

How does an emotion become you? A simple fleeting emotion. When an emotion becomes who we are, we’ve greatly reduced the truth of who we are at a soul level. For who and what we are is love.