What if love isn’t a feeling, but a verb—a set of actions, choices, and ways of being?

In this episode, we take on one of the most loaded words in our culture—love—and get underneath the defaults our culture hands us about what it is and how it's supposed to look.

We explore reorienting toward love as an action, a practice, and a capacity for growth—rather than a possession, performance, or obligation.

Resources we mention:

• All About Love by bell hooks — a foundational text reframing love as an ethic and a practice

• The Road Less Traveled — source of the definition of love discussed in the episode

• Joe Hudson — referenced for his approach to truth, grief, and relational integrity

In this episode we explore curiosity as a way of being, as a practice that softens defensiveness, loosens certainty, and reopens the doors your nervous system has been calling “walls.” We talk about how our minds invent “facts” in order to maintain the comfortable illusion of certainty, why being wrong is not a moral failure (it’s freedom), and how curiosity makes conflict, coaching, and real relationship possible.

If you’ve been feeling closed down, reactive, overly serious, or stuck in “I already know,” this conversation is an invitation to come back to play, possibility, and the courage to ask a better question.

In this episode, we pull apart “perfection” from multiple angles: the rigid, human version that freezes us in place, and the spacious, spiritual sense that everything is already perfect as it is. We track how perfectionism shows up as proficiency fatalism (“they’re so good, why should I even try?”), hidden competitiveness (“if I can’t be sure I’ll win, I don’t want to play”), and a deep avoidance of feelings like disappointment and shame.

We talk about perfection as “the anti-try” — the thing that keeps you out of the arena entirely — and contrast it with iteration, play, and being willing to be bad at something (and even be seen being bad at it) on the way to growth. Along the way, we explore growth vs fixed mindset, how confidence is built by surviving failure rather than racking up successes, and how self-kindness turns failures into compost instead of evidence that you’re broken.

We mention a bunch of our favorite people! Joe Hudson, Reverend angel Kyodo williams, Carol Dweck and her book Mindset, among others.

We close with a pair of invitations:

• If perfection is a trap, what would make you feel more free in this moment?

• And if perfection is a myth, what becomes possible when you stop waiting to feel “ready” and let yourself try, fail, learn, and try again?