Love is the power podcast

Notice your response to receiving critical feedback from another. Do you feel compelled to tell the person that they’ve hurt you? Do you find the urge to apologize and reach a resolution? Whatever your tendency, we all know how painful it can be to be judged by another—especially when we make it mean we’re a bad person! In this week’s episode, Tom helps a meditation participant welcome the preciou...

Most of us can relate to the fear of being “found out” that this week’s meditation participant speaks to. Whether it be imposter syndrome, social anxiety, or a general sense of insecurity around others, many of us have been conditioned to believe we need to prove our worthiness in order to belong. This is, unsurprisingly, quite a stressful way to experience life. If you have grown accustomed to pu...

Could it be that you—not your parents, children, or any other person or entity—are responsible for your suffering? Quite a radical proposition. In this week's meditation, we explore this notion through the lens of the commonly-held beliefs "I should be appreciated" and "it was all a waste." Many of us can likely relate to the desire to be acknowledged for the sacrifices we make for others—especial...

Our Weekly Meditation Group tries on the New Year Meditation as guided by Tom. Tune in to hear folks share their New Year's wishes and also explore what shows up as resistance. To join us for our weekly sessions, please find Zoom and meeting details on Tom's website ! http://www.theworkwithtom.com/group-meditations.html   Until love is satisfied by Caroline Corcoran | Awakening by Jimmy Stofer

What would you like to experience in 2022? This week, Tom leads a meditation session that allows us to get in touch with what we'd like for the new year and what might be in the way. To follow along, take a few moments to write down your new year's wishes. Then, say your statement out loud with either the words "I allow," "I’m open," or "I’m ready" as a preface. For example, "I’m open to experienc...

This week, Tom guides us in a meditation that explores pure, "filterless" experiencing. Settle in by allowing yourself to completely trust the chair and floor that supports the body. As you relax into your seat and surroundings, simply experience whatever is appearing, without knowing what it is or what it's for. If the mind demands for attention, be completely uninterested in whatever it might be...

Holding onto a sense of separation from others and life itself can be quite a demanding task. While we may not initially be aware of the energy we exert to keep this story and experience of separation alive, this week's meditation shines a light on how that energy can unravel all by itself. As this "unraveling" occurs, there is nothing for us to do with or about it. There is no need to make sense...

This holiday season, Tom invites you to practice consciously welcoming all of the different parts of yourself that show up as negative reactions around the family. It's an opportunity to try on the living turn-around "I allow myself to be exactly the way I am." Family gatherings can be used as a time for self-realization or reparenting, for no matter how sweet or beautiful our family of origin exp...

Once we examine our thinking, we notice how often the mind uses feelings to "prove" our stressful stories are true. But are feelings solid evidence of what’s true in reality? Often, we become so accustomed to the meanings associated with feelings and sensations created in the body that things “feel true” even when we can see they are not. This week’s episode helps us move beyond feelings while sim...

Could it be that our presence of awareness shares in the fundamental qualities of love? Utter allowance, openness, room for everything just the way it is; perhaps these phrases are descriptions of who we are. In this meditation, Tom invites us to contemplate and experience our oneness with and as love. As Katie puts it, "Who you are is not an option. You are love, and it hurts to believe you are o...

After a stressful event occurs in our lives, becoming consciously aware of the fact that the experience is now over can be a radical relief. This week’s meditation invites us to consider allowing our past—the images you see and the sensations you feel—to not just be over, but to not mean anything at all. Who are you without your stressful stories of the past? Whatever the long-held, long-cherished...

Have you ever had a big life-learning moment and then decided you "never want to show up that way again?" Perhaps, you saw your ego/controller self in a situation and noticed you were not interested in living that way any longer. While these insights can be life-changing, they can also create a fear of falling back into old patterns. Thus, in an attempt to honor our learnings, we unconsciously pla...

You may have heard Byron Katie talk about the three types of business: your business, my business, and God’s business. This week’s episode dives deeply into this notion and asks whether anything at all is actually "your business." In other words, do you make any of your thoughts, feelings, decisions, or experiences happen? Notice the response that arises within you: Whether you embrace or reject t...

Consider the possibility that there is no wrong experience, but just experiencing . When we cease to make an effort to redirect, control, or interfere with the natural flow of life, we allow the world to be just the way it is. As Tom likes to say, this is both a quality of love and of who we are without a story: We effortlessly allow all things to be as they are, even our perceptions of ourselves...

Have you ever considered that desire, lack, and fear might go together? For example, you believe something’s missing from your life - like a romantic relationship - and then you desire to fill that gap. Or, you desire to be with a partner and simultaneously fear rejection. Many of us have bought into the idea that the formula for bringing something into our experience is to identify lack and to de...

Open up to the possibility that there is no one in the entire universe who is dependent on you for their happiness, joy, or wholeness. Does this trigger fear and discomfort or come as a welcomed relief? In this week's episode, Tom helps us navigate the push and pull that comes with wanting to be needed by others - we love the importance it brings until we are the reason for someone else's pain and...

When we experience negative emotions, our habit is to resist. We do The Work, or whatever other practice we have in our toolkit, to get rid of our stressful stories and beliefs. But, what if we welcomed them instead? In this episode, Tom proposes a new way to meet our inner disturbances—that is, through conscious welcoming. This is likely a foreign concept for many of us. It may be challenging to...

Most of us would agree that our relaxed, trusting self is the most effective self we can bring to any moment — past, present, or future. Yet many of us have been so fed up, hurt, and let down by life that we are anything but relaxed and trusting. In this week’s episode, with the support of three powerful shares, Tom uses the principles of The Work and invites us to consider what we would need to b...

How do we live a life conducive to genuine peace and happiness when bad things have happened and can happen again? Most of us are all too familiar with this routine: We experience some kind of loss or pain, and then we resist the future based on our fear of the past repeating itself. Over time, we learn to trust the fearful images and stories the mind presents as being real rather than acknowledge...

Whether it be a character defect or a shameful part of your history, how do you react when you believe you need to hide some part of who you are? You may discover that the fear of being found out leads to constant preoccupation and hypervigilance. You are left contorting yourself into an “acceptable” mold, and you feel little trust for others and the world. This week’s episode invites us to look a...

When contending with loss of any kind, we may naturally feel regret. We ask ourselves what we could have done differently, how we could have been better or more available than we were to have prevented the loss. Upon further probing, we may see that the guilt we feel likely stems from a core belief that we have to prove that what (or who) we've lost is important to us. This week's episode invites...

This week, we look at the story “I cannot trust my impressions and impulses.” In this unfriendly universe, life becomes punitive and fearful. We desperately search for the rule book and become terrified of “getting it wrong.” But even if our impressions have been wrong in the past, could it still somehow be good for us to trust them? Perhaps, there are no mistakes in the universe — even when every...

Why is it so hard to give and receive no’s? Oftentimes it’s because we take them very personally. We put meaning onto the no’s, concluding that we’re not good enough, not worthy, or undeserving. This episode invites us to explore whether or not all the no’s we’ve received throughout our experience indeed prove these painful conclusions. We investigate the related belief that our support in this ex...

Notice the tendency to imagine the body as being the "experiencer." Most of us are so committed to this imagination that we believe ourselves to be the body, or at least dependent on the body. But does experience require a medium? Does awareness need the body, space, stories, or concepts to be? Rather than being the experiencer, perhaps the body is just one more thing in the room to be experienced...

Today, our conversation launches from the premise that the central banking system reflects the human tendency to want to "get something for nothing." But whether we're talking about an economic, political, or cultural apparatus, it's likely that we've all noticed or experienced some form of inequity. What we may not have recognized, though, is that everyone has the potential to liberate themselves...