Elizabeth Gilbert on Letters from Love: Is love conscious and what does it want us to know?

Hi everyone, I'm Ky Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from The Telepathy Tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities.

If you haven't yet listened to The Telepathy Tapes, I encourage you to start there, it lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring. In this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, nonspeakers, and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't long.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Talk Tracks. I'm so excited to welcome the bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert, back to our show. If you listen to Season Two, Episode Three of The Telepathy Tapes, you heard author Liz Gilbert, among other brilliant creatives, talk about the creative force and how it works with each of us.

But creativity may not be the only force seeking to engage with us. There's another, and it wants us to know it. And that force is love. Here's Liz Gilbert talking about the first time the force of love spoke to her. This voice came to me and it was incredibly clear, and it said, get out of bed and get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you have always longed to hear somebody say to you, just write it down to you.

Though that was the first time Liz engaged with the universal force of love, it wasn't the last. Today we'll be talking to her about her practice, Letters From Love, that she's been using for over two decades to converse with the love in the universe. It's a force and a source that is incredibly consistent, that's non-judgmental, non-condemning, non-controlling, deeply gentle, and incredibly present.

The first time she wrote her own Letter From Love, the instructions were simple. What do you need to hear that's gonna get you through this? And the first thing it said was, I'm right here. I'm right here. Which I now have tattooed on my chest, 'cause I think it's the most important thing. The act itself is simple.

You sit down and write a letter to yourself from love. In short, you're basically allowing a message from love to flow through you to you. This is intuitive writing. You're downloading a message from the cosmos, from your intuition, from your heart. If unconditional love existed, what would it want you to know?

Don't try to make this poetic. It actually doesn't work if you try to make it poetic. And even though this may seem like a simple act, it can have a profound impact.

What we're doing here is that we are learning as a practice how to write to ourselves and speak to ourselves from a place of kind, loving, simple, often humorous affection. Rather than speaking to us in the voice of an evil, cruel, monstrous enemy, which is what the interior voice of so many of us has been, and still at times can be.

What emerged 20 years ago from Liz's Darkest moment has expanded to envelope a community of thousands as more and more people have joined her in writing these Letters From Love on Substack. And if you don't know what Substack is, it's an online platform which allows people to publish content and engage with their audience, kind of like a blog.

It's on Substack because it's a safer place for people to be vulnerable, at least it is so far. I share a Letter From Love every week that I've written to myself, and we invite somebody to come risk doing this, to risk trying this, and then they write a letter and they read it, and then there's a comment section, where people can write their own Letters From Love and share them. And people respond to each others and they've created friendship and community across that. Our little trademark is like kindest corner of the internet. And it so far absolutely has been.

And what's amazing is that as people from all walks of life wrote these letters, love had a similar message almost every time.

There's nothing you can do to lose this love, and there's nothing you can do to gain this love. Like you didn't earn it. You can't lose it. It's your innate birthright. Wherever your life takes you, I'm gonna be there.

We went through some of the recordings in the Letters From Love Substack, and the consistency in themes is striking.

Here's just a few lines from various letters recorded by the people who wrote them.

I'm with you always. You know that.

I'm always here without conditions.

You already have it because you are it.

I have been here and here I will stay.

And what's interesting is that much like creativity, love can engage and work with all of us, but the two forces are very different.

Later in the episode we'll talk about how love and creativity act differently, treat us differently and want different things from us. Perhaps the most important takeaway, this is something we can all do. But that doesn't mean it's easy, and I know that from firsthand experience because back in October, Liz asked me to write a Letter From Love, and so I did, and it was one of the most vulnerable things I'd ever done.

I wasn't entirely sure how I'd do it, but kind of like Liz's first letter, it just rushed through me. And this was months before our conversation today, and I had actually steered clear of reading or listening to any of the letters to avoid being influenced because whatever love was gonna say to me, if it said anything at all, I wanted there to be nothing in my subconscious regarding what others had been told.

But when talking to Liz, I was surprised by the themes that appeared in my letter and others. The letters that Liz has curated come from every walk of life. Intellectuals, atheists, people who consider themselves spiritual, some who don't, people who don't consider themselves creative or writers, and some most remarkably who've never experienced tenderness or even unconditional love in their lives.

And what kind of shocked me about my letter is that it tended toward how the non-physical world has gone through great lengths to demonstrate to me that I am unconditionally loved. And here's just a short excerpt from the middle of mine.

I was there. That is the first thing. That is the last thing. That is the only thing you've ever needed to know.

I was there when you sat beside your dying aunt, begging her to speak. I gathered what remained of her and pushed it forward with all her might so she could press final words into your ear. It was a garbled triumph of sound. You did not understand the words, but thank you for telling her you did. I stayed with you through the years, as you replayed those jumble sounds again and again, listening with your mind, trying to solve them. And then one night when you finally listened with your heart, they arrived whole: take care of your mother. That was me. Not late or even unclear, just patient enough to wait for the part of you that could hear them rightly.

So, Liz, maybe just take us back to what was going on in your life when this voice first came to you.

I was in the darkest time of my life when I was around 30, 31 years old and I was going through my first, but not last divorce, and I didn't have any tools of life yet. I didn't know myself. I knew shame. I knew how to be humiliated.

I knew how to hide. I didn't know any concept of divinity. Certainly I did not know how to be kind to myself.

So you hear this voice that tells you you need to write a letter, and I love that you were just like, okay, and you pick up your pen, and then what happened? I wrote, I need you. And in response I wrote, I'm right here and I'm with you.

How many start that way? That's where mine started.

Most of them start that way. Like I've now read thousands of these and it's rare that it doesn't start with either I'm right here or we you are right here. It sometimes comes in first person plural, sometimes comes in first person singular. But the very first thing is this deep reassurance that you are not alone and that you have never been alone.

And mine also said very similar to yours, I was with you at the moment of your birth and I'll be with you at the moment of your death. There's never been a moment that I haven't been here.

Wow, so beautiful. And it's kind of curious, right, that this reassurance is almost ubiquitously the first thing love has us know. Why do you think that is?

I think this speaks to our deepest, fundamental fear of like looking out to the void of the perceivable universe and being like, there's nothing there. There's that tremendous existential angst. And then the letter went on to say, I don't need anything from you. I don't need you to be successful.

I don't need you to not be depressed. Everyone in my life needed me to not be depressed, including me. And love was like, I have no need for you to be any different than what you are right now. Nothing about you needs to change, and if you never get well and you are this depressed and miserable for the rest of your life, don't worry.

Like, it's okay. I love, that's okay. And just for those listening who may not know much about your books or background, two of my favorite books of yours are Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic. But your books can get pretty personal and you've been through a ton, you know, divorce and addiction and death of a partner.

My life has been like many of our lives, periods of great joy, periods of great sorrow, seasons of loss, seasons of success, seasons of fear, seasons of confidence. It's changeable, it's mutable. People die. Another divorce happened. Sickness happens. Like all of the drama of life happens, and this steadily beating source that says, I'm right here, you're not alone, i'm not going anywhere, and I don't need you to change, is constant. I've had hard times, but I've never dipped again to the level that I was in at that moment because that voice is always there.

So now, you know, knowing that you do this almost every day, I mean, are the letters the same? Are they short like a post-it note now? Like do they change a bit? You know, does love give you a little variety? They've changed over the years where they're now more instructive. The first decade and a half, my love, hunger, my bereft sense of being alone, that sense was so deep, that I think that that source just needed to spend a decade and a half reassuring me, yeah, that there was nothing it had to do.

Like you can fail at another marriage, and I love you. You can lose these relationships and I love you. You can have disastrous things going on in your family that you don't know how to deal with, and I'll love you. I needed so much convincing. Because that message is exactly the opposite of what I had always been led to believe that my merit of being loved was based on how much I could produce, how successful I could be, how lovable I could be in human terms in the last 10 years.

It's like, you know how loved you are. I've got some work for you to do. Here's where I want your attention. Here's who I want you to be serving. Here's what I don't want you to be doing. Before it was telling me, you don't have to do anything. I just love you. And now it's like, I do love you and there's a couple things I need you to do.

What are some of the things like I'm curious about, love's directions. Sometimes it's about what I'm not supposed to be doing more than what I'm supposed to be doing, which is harder. Sometimes it's just a redirection of attention. Like, I don't want your attention on this. I want your attention on that. I want you to teach people how to do this practice, or sometimes it's very specific.

Call this person and check on them. Go to this person's house and see if they're all right. A lot of the direction is about the releasing of control or the illusion of control, and of course, letting go of control is letting go of something you never had and you don't even need to understand it. And I need you to back off because.

Your anxiety about this thing that you have no power over or your anxiety about this person or group of people that you have no power over is draining, vital and crucial energy that could be used very well elsewhere. So interesting. One of the other messages we hear a lot about is surrender, and we hear this tremendous relief from people when they are invited into surrender.

Everyone is so stressed and everyone is so tense, and that's from trying to control what we can't control. So, okay, that's kind of cool, so love can direct you it sounds like. The directions are more intimate than global. And for my big, old, grandiose ego that wants to be a world changer, that's very humbling.

Somebody in the Letters From Love, love said to them, you are loved beyond measure, by forces that have given you control over practically nothing. But the little teeny tiny bit that you do have control over is so important that you show up for. And if you are expending yourself on things that you can't do anything about, then you're not gonna be able to help where we actually need you.

So it's very humbling. I, I love that though. I mean, what a beautiful thing. And I guess as a writer, have these letters influenced any of your work? My last book, it was a direct instruction to write, even though it was uncomfortable, it was like, we need you to write this. We need you to tell the truth.

For the many people out there who aren't writers and may not even consider themselves, you know, really creative, and this task seems daunting, what do you say to them?

What would be your advice? That's a big obstacle for people, they're like, I'm not a writer. And I'm like, the most beautiful letters I've gotten from our guests are from people who are not writers, because a very simple un writerly message is trying to come through you, and they're just downloading the message without any obstacle.

Have there been any surprises in the Letters From Love where you've been like, wow, this person was not tuning into love, you know, or does everyone seem to be able to tune in and, and receive it?

Nothing. I have read. Doesn't sound like love to me. That's what is so wild about it. People doing this for the very first time, which is every single week a couple people will drop in and say, I don't even know if I believe in it.

It feels really weird. I'm feeling super vulnerable. Anyway, here's my first Letter From Love and I'm like, that's identical to mine, like that's identical to the messages that I've been receiving. The same themes run through. You don't need to understand there's more going on here than you can see. You have no idea how loved you are.

Stop doing so much. Stop trying so hard. Which I think the whole world could use as guidance right now. I just wanna share a few clips from guests that you've invited to read their Letters From Love:

Your striving meant nothing to love. Your being meant everything.

What I really want you to know is that you're already so loved.

You don't have to work so hard to push, so hard to perform so hard for it.

Don't worry, I got you. Not because you deserve it, mind you deserving has nothing to do with it.

It really is remarkable because if you were to tell someone, even to write a letter from God, that could be an angry God or jealous God or this God, or it could be multiple God, like it's not the same.

Or if you were to tell someone to write a letter from Earth, you don't know what to do and I bet they'd all be a little bit different. And I always think what's real kind of resonates, right? Like you can feel it like with your core and the fact that everyone knows what a Letter From Love is or how to do it, or it comes out the right way, must mean it's just so tuned to who we are that it's not difficult to get there.

Something that I found really interesting when I started doing this is I would say to that source, to that voice, are you God? And the answer came back, no, we are love. And I'm like, well, I don't get the difference. And they're like, I'm part of God, but God is much more than just this.

Love is an actual thing, and unconditional love specifically is an actual thing. So are there times when love maybe, you know, has surprised you or tells you, you know, no, I'm not that, or I'm not gonna do that.

There have been times where I've almost, I'm trying to do divination, like I've asked that voice to tell me what's going to happen if I'm in a really scared situation and it has said, we don't know the future, that's not our department. We're just here, we just love you.

And do you ever get frustrated by what love says to you?

I remember in a very dark time in my life saying, if you can't fix it and you can't change it, and you can't tell me what's gonna happen or make it go away, what use are you? And the response was, we are company for you in the darkest moments of your life.

And if you don't think that's vital, just try being in the darkest moments of your life alone.

Wow. Yeah, dang, that lands. So it sounds like this has kind of, you know, deeply changed your approach to navigating good and bad times, which sounds trite, but it has made a difference.

One of the things that it's really taught me is having received all of that unconditional love, I now am much better at just sitting with people who are in pain without trying to fix it, knowing sometimes love just needs to be in the room.

And that presence is enough and nothing needs to be changed because it can't be. That's part of it too, what's happening cannot be changed, and the presence of love changes what cannot be changed into something that can be accepted.

Oh, okay, wait, I just need to repeat that: the presence of love changes what cannot be changed into something that can be accepted. That feels so important.

It's almost like everything.

Okay, so in your experience, are there personality types or patterns to maybe who has an easier time or harder time with this process? Like, does love equally flow through everyone or can we stand in our own way? I'm astonished at how every single person that we invite, including some people who are very well regarded as spiritual people, it's terrifying and it's deeply uncomfortable for them. But I'm fascinated by how difficult it is to get men to do this. There have been a number of men that I was very surprised wouldn't do it, and then there's been a number of men who said they would do it and then bailed. It's so hard for them.

Yeah, I mean it's so important because I'm raising a little boy and he's so full of love and he's so thoughtful, and everything about him is just this like vulnerable sweetness, and I look out into the world and hear about, you know, the epidemic of male loneliness and that men are more likely to isolate and have a harder time reaching out to people and fewer people to reach out to and account for 80% of suicide.

And I mean, I think about him all the time, like, how do I keep that vulnerability alive in you? Right? Because I feel like it's the fear of being vulnerable that makes people not wanna connect or reach out.

In a way it's interesting 'cause you would think that women have a lower sense of self worth, but I think women are much more open to the concept of love.

And one person who is somebody who I deeply admire and is an incredibly compassionate man who does great work on compassion in the public sphere, I asked him to do it and he wrote back and he said, I'm not gonna do this because I know what love is gonna say. Love's gonna say something to me along the lines of, you're perfect the way you are, and I don't wanna hear that because I don't wanna lose the fire of momentum that I need to try to constantly do better.

And I was like, that is a wild response. And also, I don't know what love would say to you, like you don't even wanna ask and find out? That's so interesting. You can still be ambitious if you're loved. You can still be driven to better yourself. Yeah. I think there's a fear of being a sucker or being credulous, or being woo woo or being seen as any of those things because this is unprovable.

Yeah. I mean this is something we think through and wrestle with in The Telepathy Tapes all the time, you know, this concept of not wanting to be tricked or be made a fool, but also making space for and being open to exploring things that we simply don't know are not true.

One of the things that people often say is, how do I know this is the spirit of unconditional love and not just me talking to me?

And my answer to that is, you don't and can't know. I've made a decision to believe that this is a force and a source that is speaking through me and to me. But when I started doing this 20 years ago, it was purely an act of lifesaving imagination where the assignment was, imagine if there was such a thing as unconditional love, and if unconditional love had a voice, what would it want you to know today? And then write that.

So it's an act of creative imagination before it becomes an act of faith. And it may never become an act of faith. It may just be an act of creative imagination where you're just wondering what would unconditional love say? And you write it. And my feeling is, does it matter?

If it's only my imagination, thank you imagination. Thank you for saving me from despair. Because my despairing thoughts are also my only my imagination. So it's a question of like, which aspect of my mind am I gonna listen to? The one telling me that I'm doomed, or the one telling me that I'm loved no matter what? And I'm choosing to turn the dial that way. But I actually believe that it's coming from outside of what I would call myself to me.

Yeah, and sometimes these things that we feel so deeply can't necessarily be proven with the scientific method, or at least not now. But that doesn't necessarily make them any less real. In the upcoming Telepathy Tapes film, we really go through like humanity has lived through multiple paradigms. Things that seem so real and so true change, and then suddenly they're not true, or things that can't be true, it changes and suddenly they are.

So anyway, I think about the fact that every single person is more or less understanding exactly what love is.

That's the thing now that I've been reading these letters for two and a half years and I've come to know a lot of people in the community, not only are there people writing these letters who have never experienced it, there are people writing these letters who have experienced quite the opposite, who have experienced lives of horrific abuse and neglect.

People who are going through unthinkable catastrophes right now. This is not some lighthearted thing, and the fact that somebody who has never experienced even a simulacrum of unconditional love can generate it, either through imagination or a download, is absolutely incredible to me. Mm-hmm. Like people who had parents who were putting cigarettes out on them are able to write to themselves from this place that is so tear inducing, tender. Mm. Like people have never known tenderness.

So in cases like this where the feeling or concept of, you know, tenderness and love might be so foreign or far away, you know, are there any tips for getting started? One of the clues that we give people to learn how to do this is start the Letter From Love to yourself with an affectionate nickname.

With something that's a very dear honorific, like mine is always Honey Head. There's somebody in our community love always calls her Penguin Cheeks and like these sweet little like Bumble Truck. And that's something the men have trouble with too, but I think about quote, my dad always used to say, the much love child has many nicknames, right?

Like, we do this with our pets automatically. Anybody who's got a pet that they love has like 90 different names for their pet. There's something so literally endearing about an endearment, even if it's just like, My Child. Which is how a lot of these begin. My Child, My Precious One, My Gem, if you knew your preciousness would make you cry if you knew how much we love you.

That's so there was that plural again, we!

And I love it. It's like, who's the we? Yeah, because some consortium of angels or spirits or like, what are we talking about here? Like who's, who's, who's behind this?

I don't know either, but it certainly felt like a very real presence. And whether it was from me or not from me, didn't really matter.

How was it for you?

I mean, it was so different from any experience I've ever had. It was very vulnerable, you know? Yeah. I like to be very private, you know? And like The Telepathy Tapes has social media that posts all the time, but I post very rarely, I don't like to go on the internet. I don't like people to know too much about my life.

And so this felt like a prayer, you know? 'Cause for me, I do think like love and this sense of God are connected, even though God probably created love, right? And love is like a component. It felt like letting people into the most like vulnerable moments of your life. And I didn't know actually how to sit down and write it, so I just thought, well, it'll come to me when it does.

And it was awesome because it was like four in the morning, one morning and it just like, and I wrote the whole thing in my notes app, you know, on my phone. I mean, it was a messy stream of consciousness. But I remember when I woke up that day, I felt so happy.

And everything in the world felt glittery. I wasn't stressed and I wasn't nervous. I just felt like everything grounded itself around me and it was the happiest I felt in a long time. Wow. And I realized like, I need to focus this. And I think you don't often go back and look at like very vulnerable moments that happened for you and who was there.

And often it's no one but love was. For me, it was really this realization that love has manifested itself for me in many ways sometimes to help me understand it's always there. And I don't think love has to do that, I don't think, I think it is just there, right? But that's what inside of me wanted me to know is like, there's like magic, if you wanna call it that, it's also tied with love. This unseen world is tied with love. That's the substrate of everything. So it was beautiful, but then when I had to actually record it and put it out there, it felt like, okay, well this feels really, really, really vulnerable. But I think that vulnerability is good, right? That's the, the doorway to connection.

A hundred percent.

And, I'm so glad you mentioned the unseen world because we also pick a theme sometimes and like our original prompt is the one I've used forever, which is just: Dear love, what would you have me know? But then depending on what the letter is of the special guest, sometimes there's an inspiration for a more specific question.

And so with yours, we asked people: Go ahead and ask the spirit of unconditional love what it would have you know about the unseen world. And those were some of the most beautiful and interesting letters we've ever gotten, including this repeated message that came through hundreds of times, in different people all over the world saying the unseen world is more real than what you call the real world.

I actually hadn't gone back to look, and then my Producer Solina, was like, you should. And so I went through that week's letters and you're right, there are hundreds and I'm just gonna read a few of these excerpts.

Dear one, the unseen is almost all there is.

Here's another one.

The unseen world holds the truest truths, the universal threat of life that tethers you to all other beings in the universe.

Here's another. The unseen world by inspiration is everything that makes the scene world possible.

Here's another. The unseen world is limitless, borderless, non-discriminatory, and open 24 7. And here's another. Everything you see little sun is evidence of what you don't see, trust that. Everything you see is the visible evidence of the unseen me, love. Everything. Everything. Everything.

Ah, I mean, it was so beautiful to read through these and the many of letters that reflect the themes, you know, that we're exploring in our show and that the unseen is more real. You know, and harking back to season two, it's what so many people that come back from a near death experience say.

Yeah, it's like Plato's cave. It's like you are in the dream, but this is the reality. Yeah. Right? And what we're trying to get you to, to is to awaken out of your dream. Mm-hmm. Into the reality of the love and the magic that is the real thing. Yeah, and as we discussed in Season Two, Episode three on creativity and how it engages with us when you download creatively,

I think for those of us who've experienced it, it's very real. And many times it's definitely not from you. And I guess that's my big question for you, and there's no one better to answer this question than you: does the download from creativity come from the same place as the download from love? Like the creative muse that is very much out there that we explore deeply in that episode working with us,

is that the same force as love, you know, that seems to deeply have a consciousness and will of its own, is it coming from the same place as love? Like are they the same invisible entity? No.

Love has a specific fingerprint. Creativity can be very demanding. It can be bossy, it can be elusive, it can be playful, it can be all sorts of things. Love is very straightforward in its absence of demand, the voice of love relaxes us more than anything else does because it answers our biggest, fundamental fear that I think we all have, which is, am I worthy of my existence?

Am I a waste of breath? Am I a waste of genetic material? Has my life been meaningless? Am I enough of anything? Do I deserve to be here? Do I wanna be here? These are ancient, crippling questions. And I think that love comes from a very different place than, than creativity. Love doesn't care, love's like, I don't care if you do that or not, I don't care.

Like creativity is insistent. It's like you must make this work. Yeah. And love's like, you know, you can do it or not do it. You know? Yeah. It really is interesting. So many of these things seem to come from a similar place, and maybe it's just the non-physical world. Yeah. Something, you know, we're swimming in so much that we don't even know exists,

right? Like a fish that doesn't know it's in an ocean, but they are different. So I'm glad that you kind of called that out. One thing that was interesting for me that I think is the most actually weirdly tender when I think about outside of the sentiment of your loved always and you're never alone, was when going through these moments of what I was feeling love wanted me to know, I felt for the first time, like I was back there like I was able to be with the young version of myself.

It felt like time travel in this beautiful way. Where these deep moments where you felt so scared or crippled or angry or frustrated or desperate, and they're so significant 'cause they're moments that dot your life, that's creates who you are. It's your character. But sometimes you think about it and you reflect on it.

But writing the Letter From Love, I felt as though I could see myself like wrapped up on a blanket on the couch as though love was this presence in the room loving me, cradling me, looking at me comforting me. And in doing that, I was able to be back in that room and there was something so sweet about being back in my childhood house and really feeling it.

'Cause it's like my parents are divorced now. That house is gone. My brothers live in different states. You know, it's just like all that stuff has just crashed into the almost like devastation of growing up where there's shards, where there used to be something at least whole and perfect, at least for a little bit. Or that cradle home that felt loving and safe, or that living room couch where you would curl up under the blanket that your parents and your brothers used.

Whatever it is, like you forget how tactile and safe that can feel, for me it felt safe, and I was transported back there and that was the greatest gift of all. That's so sweet. What's coming to mind is I'm hearing the voice of the great meditation teacher, Byron Katie, who I've seen work with people on dismantling their most stressful beliefs, and when they arrive at this place where that belief dissolves, there's this warmth that they step into and she always says, welcome home.

Hmm. Welcome home, honey. Welcome home to love. The rage that they were feeling about somebody that they were able to let go of. Like welcome home to your true nature, like welcome home to where you're really from. And in your case, it was this homecoming that was literal and also emotional. Like, welcome home to the home you grew up in and welcome home to your true nature.

Mm-hmm. Which is up love. Yeah. I mean, you know, it can be so challenging. Some people can be really difficult and life can be really hard and operating from love and grace and forgiveness, which I think are all parts of love all the time, it's no easy feat.

And I know you have done a lot of research on near-death experiences, but the blindingly common experience that people have at that moment of death and the homecoming like welcome home and the enormous waves of absolutely unbreakable love.

Or the reunion with people who hurt you and harmed you, or who you hurt and harmed, and the homecoming back to love, which we can't all figure out how to do in this plane. British Australian writer Kemi Nekvapil in her Letter From Love, so reassuring, love was like, we don't at all expect you to be able to operate from this place in this plane.

You can try and certainly it's worth trying to be this loving, but you are not unconditional love. That's our job.

Here's an excerpt from a Letter From Love Written by Kemi: You can't give love to everybody equally because that is not your job, it is mine. I am bigger and more expansive than you'll ever be.

I have infinity on my side, you don't. You are not limitless, but I am. Give what love you can and know that I will fill the places that you can't. You are human, let that be enough. You have your role. I have mine.

Wow. And that's such a freeing message to hear, right?

You know, I'll share this, and this is something I also see in the thousands of letters that I've read now, is that same message coming through of love, saying you have no idea how little control you have over this.

You can be very hurt by people and you can need to separate from them to preserve yourself, and we understand that. We're not asking you to stay in abusive situations. We don't expect you to be universally forgiving like we know how hard it is. Like we're not expecting you to be at this level while you're down there or in that, you know, in that video game that you're in, playing out the karmic dramas and these tremendous conundrums and predicaments that you find yourselves in, and these wounds and these ways of hurting each other, like we're with all of you and those people who you can't love, we love them.

So don't worry. I love that. I mean, what a relief. What a relief. Yeah. What a relief. Because I can't, I mean, I try as hard as anyone I know to be universally loving and I fail all the time at it. And they're like, it's good. We see, we know, we know.

It's really something. And I, you know, people always say that like a dog's life, right?

Like what a joy. You just really live in the moment and pretty much all you feel I think is unconditional love or fear, like the most baseline things, and that's it. And I think there's a lot more going on with our pets and animals in general. But if you think back to being a child, and I hope that most people have one moment before they became a type A personality.

Where you just were happy, you could just lay down and feel happy just for a moment without planning the future or had a schedule. I mean, you think about being nine, I mean, it was at least hopefully carefree in the sense that you weren't having to think out your life. And yeah, I mean, I think those are the moments where you are able to feel that way if you feel fundamentally safe and loved.

Right? And I guess when I think back on what that letter did, it made me revisit those moments where I felt fundamentally safe and loved. Because I don't feel that way when I wake up every day. But doing this allowed me to feel that way again. You know one thing that Margaret, who I did this with me, who's one of my oldest friends and we do this together, one thing that she noticed is that people tend to respond to the Letter From Love that they receive with either a sense of, oh, I remember this feeling from childhood,

this is what it felt like to be free, this is what it felt like to be joyous, this is what it felt like to be light. Or it's people like me who are like. I never for a minute felt that in childhood. I've been looking for this my whole life. Wow. Like there it is. And I've been trying to find it in all sorts of different people, places and things and it hasn't been working, but here it is. So you can either experience it as reminding you of what you remember or for the first time introducing you to something where you're like, I knew it existed.

Yeah. Oh, I knew there was something more than this. And I think that feels very inclusive to me that this can work whether you have been loved and you have known peace, or whether you have not and don't. Yeah. If people want to try this for the first time, how would you walk them through this?

What would you tell them to do? I would tell them to start with it and instead of trying to be a mystic who's downloading a spirit, to be an imagination who's making something up. Don't try to hear love, try to generate it. Because people do get frustrated where they're like, I'm not hearing it, i'm not hearing it.

I'm like, I didn't hear it for a long time either. I made it up, you know, I've made it up until something else happened and I was like, wait a minute, I'm not making this up anymore. Like I, now I'm hearing something that feels like it's outside of me.

So now how do you sort of tap into it? You know? Do you have any tips?

My first guidance would be opening up the channel by reading something or listening to something that feels to you like true love. I always think of the great poets. So Mary Oliver works for me 'cause her work is so infused with Love. Hafez, Rumi, Walt Whitman, when I read those, those are like my great saints.

They had access to this thing. I think part of their generosity and part of their loving service as artists was that when they died, they left the door open behind them through their words, so you can enter in through their words. So enter into that space through the words of somebody who opens your heart for you, and then once you're in that space, once you've read that poem, then you just write the question. And I know this is the hardest thing in the entire world for our monkey minds, but truly do not overthink it, this is another reason why writers have so much trouble doing this. You write, Dear love, what would you have me know?

And then imagine if there was a spirit of unconditional love and it loved you without any reservation completely, personally, and intimately, what does it want you to know today about like the moment you're in, in your life, right this moment? And then write that down. That's it. And then if you want, you can come to our community and post it and we will love you up, but you certainly don't have to share it.

'Cause I did this for a decade and a half without sharing anything of it with anybody. I love the idea of just doing it all the time still, you know? 'Cause that like to me is like, okay, I did it once, but I think there's always more to know.

I need so much love, Ky. Yeah. I need it every single day 'cause I'm scared every single day.

I wake up scared. I wake up most days feeling like I got shout out of a canon with this pressing feeling of there not being enough time or resources. I wake up and dread for the state of the world. I wake up in shame for my failures. I wake up in fear about my relationships and what's gonna happen to the people that I love.

Like all of this needs to be bathed in love for me to be able to function. And without that, I'm just a meat puppet walking around trying to make things work. So I need to start the day with like a deeply reassuring message of trust us, whatever happens, it's gonna be okay, because of love. It doesn't necessarily make you get what you want, but it makes you be able to live in what you get.

Yeah, I think that's beautiful. For anybody who thinks this is like light work, and I don't mean light work like a lightworker, I mean like meaningless, insignificant, like the world is burning, are we really gonna sit here telling ourselves that we love ourselves? Aren't there much more pressing things?

There's a famous story about the first time the Dalai Lama came to the West. He met with a group of intellectuals and teachers and philosophers, and in that room was a young Sharon Salzberg, the wonderful meditation teacher and teacher of compassion, and she asked the Dalai Lama, what is the traditional to that remedy for self-hatred? Hmm. And the Dalai Lama was so bewildered by the question that he had to talk to a translator for like 15 or 20 minutes. He kept asking her to repeat it because he literally kept thinking he was mishearing. Who is the enemy that you're struggling with? Like, who is the person that you hate, that you're feeling these hateful feelings for?

And they'd be like, me, I am. I am the person who I need. And he was like, that doesn't make any sense. Like you are you. You are yourself and you need yourself. And he said, do you all have this? This sense of that you are your own enemy of self hatred? And every single person in the room was like, yeah, duh.

And he was horrified. He said later there were two things that shocked him the most about coming to the United States, and one was the rampant consumerism and the other was the deep self hatred. And if you don't think those two things are the same thing, you're not paying attention. This is why this is so important.

It doesn't make any sense that you would be your own enemy. There's just no sense of that in traditional Tibetan culture. And then he was like, you need to learn how to talk to yourself the way your mother talked to you. And then all these people in the room were like, no, no. And he is like, wait, what? And then he found out like what a lot of mothers are like in our culture.

And he was like, okay, grandmother. Like how far back do we have to go? Was there ever anybody in your life who spoke to you with tenderness? And for a lot of people the answer is no. That's where we have to begin. But for some people, you've gotta look really hard to find where anyone ever held them and said, you are innately precious without having to do anything to earn it.

So that's why I think this is deeply, deeply important because self-hatred leads people to do all sorts of things that are incredibly damaging, not only to themselves, but to others. Yeah. I also believe something is happening right now. Mm-hmm. In this moment. People have talked about that end of the age of the guru, you can download this yourself.

Yeah. Like you don't need to go to a medium, you can do this. You have access to all of this. And more and more people, I think are awakening to that. Mm-hmm. And hearing and seeing things that in previous generations where maybe stifled or suffocated. Something's going on, the veil is getting thinner.

I love that you said that we're leaving the age of the guru. It's been heresy for much of human history. You needed a priest or you needed someone above you to access the unseen world. Yeah, and if you could do it on your own, you're a witch or worse, that's a good thing even to end with too, is that this is democratic. I do believe that you can all access this.

Well, thank you so much, Liz. You are just the most delightful, charming person to speak with every time. I'm just so grateful for you sharing this practice with the world, with our audience, and I really encourage all of you to do it. Please try it just once. Just sit down, quiet your mind, pick up a pen and ask Love what it wants you to know and then let us know too. So thank you all. We'll see you next week. And again, Liz. I just adore you. You're a joy. Thank you. Bye, I'm hugging you. That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will be released every Wednesday, so stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality.

And please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Producers Katherine Ellis and Solina Kennedy. Technical directing audio mix, and finishing by Jeremy Cole. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth PW and original logo and cover art by Ben Kandora Design

I'm Ky Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

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