024: Living with Love

Living with love is something we could all use a little more of. With everything going on in the world, learning to live with love can do so much to bring more joy into your everyday life.
In this episode, I talk about how you can live a little more intentionally by focusing on love. I talk about some of the changes that can occur when we approach things in a more loving way and how withholding love doesn’t bring any good.
You’ll hear why this is so important for those around you, but most importantly what it can do for you internally!
What you’ll find in this episode:
What I am currently creating
Why I chose the focus on living with love
How you can experience more love with mindful thinking
How there isn’t any upside to withholding love
How learning self-compassion is one of the most loving things you can do
Read the transcript of the episode below:
 Episode 24 - Living with Love

Is it true that all you need is love? I mean, I'm getting a little cheesy here, with my Beatles reference. This is Episode 24, Living With Love.

Welcome to the Committed to Create Podcast. I'm Lisa Funk, and I am so excited to hang out with you here as we talk about the power of creating with our hands and our minds. I like to keep it real, remind you that you are not alone, and share specific ways that creativity and mindfulness can help us live even more meaningful and joyful lives.

I am so glad that you're here.

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad that you're here. This is episode 24. I remember when I started the podcast, it felt like I was just a little baby podcaster and I still feel that way. But every week I'm like, oh my gosh, here we are. Episode 24. That's 24 episodes. It's not nothing. And I must say that I truly enjoy it.

I recently saw on Instagram, this person say that they don't have any inner monologue. And I was like, dying because I was like, wait, what? You don't have an inner monologue, like you don't have like a constant chatter happening in your brain? And I asked her to please expound because I had never, ever heard of someone that doesn't have like an inner dialogue happening constantly.

I mean, I knew that some people don't have it constantly, but I just definitely can't relate to that. And she was like, yeah, I just, I don't really have a dialogue going where I'm talking to myself.

And I don't necessarily talk to myself in the second person all the time. It's not like I'm saying, all right, Lisa, let's get up out of bed. Okay. Lisa, let's go get dressed. I don't necessarily do that, but I'm definitely thinking a lot. And sometimes overthinking, I think you and I might have that in common. But I think that a can be a good thing in a lot of situations. And it is a blessing for me to be able to share some of those thoughts with all of you here, because I think that we all are human and going through life.

And it's just nice to hear someone else's experiences, maybe some things that they've learned and connect, know that you're not alone and have some ideas for how to create a life that you love.

And especially on this podcast, we're talking about mindfulness mindset and creativity using your hands to create and have fun, have a creative outlet that, and improve your life.

So before we get started with today's episode, I wanted to have a segment currently creating.

So I have been talking in the past several episodes about the new products that I have been creating, and I am so pleased to announce that they are now in the world. You can find them now over at handlettereddesign.com.

We've got our new spiral lettering notebooks, which have two different covers. And I have to tell you about them because, well, first of all, they're amazing. And often when there isn't a product that I want in the world already, I have to create it because I really want it for myself. And that is what these spiral lettering notebooks are.

I love the inside. The paper is so nice. It's 80 pound opaque, uncoated text. It's so thick and smooth. It's the same paper that we use in our other books. If you're familiar with it, you will know how amazing it is. And it is perforated. It has a faint dot grid on the front of the pages blank on the back, a nice thick chip board for the backing so that it's sturdy if you want to write somewhere other than a table. And it has a nice big spiral at the top, so you can fit your pen in it. I really wanted that. And so I love it.

And then I have to tell you about the covers. There are two different options. One has kind of a striped gradient of like a sea foam color and says dream big dreams, because I feel like as adults, we sometimes stop dreaming. We tell kids to dream big and follow your dreams. And I think sometimes we stopped doing that. And so I want that notebook to be a reminder, every time you use it to continue dreaming, it's never too late. It is so fun to be creative and thinking about how you want to spend your time, what you want to create in the world, what you want to do and keep dreaming.

The other cover is very special in relation to the podcast because it says committed to create. I am so connected to this phrase. I obviously named the podcast committed to create for a reason. And it's because I have dealt with so much, not just outside challenges, but also my own mental health.

And of course those two things are often related for me. But throughout all of the hard things that I've been through, creativity has been a constant for me that been a blessing for me. And that's creating with my hands and with my mind. When I have figured out how to create a mindset that gets the results that I want so that I can have more peace and joy in my life.

That's what I want. And I'm committed to that. I'm committed to remembering the power of creativity. And remembering that I have that power inside of me. And so do you. So I hope that when you use this notebook that you will remember that commitment to create and to not leave the hobbies just for the kids. Not leave all the fun and creativity just for the kids. And for other people who you think were just born creative. No, this is for you a special notebook to have that special reminder.

And then of course, as I talked about last week, the Daily Mindful Lettering book that has just come out, it is a way to, to a little bit of lettering every day.

And it's not overwhelming. You don't need to set aside hours in order to do it. You can just do a small section and still get all the benefits of that mindful creativity. Because I know how it is to start a new hobby, try it out, think that it's fun. And then not really pick it up again or not necessarily make the time for it.

But having a book like this that lays it out for you day by day, it just makes it so much easier to keep up with it and to keep getting those benefits from the lettering. And in addition, there are five different styles that you will practice each day when you are lettering the different affirmations.

I also want to mention here that the day we launched these new products, we also started our Black Friday sale early. And so if you go to the website, now you will be able to not only get all of these new products, but you'll be able to get them at a discount because of our Black Friday sale. And that sale includes everything on our website, all the markers, all the pens, all the paper, all the small notebooks, the spiral notebooks, the note pads, all of the workbooks, all of the online courses, everything that we sell on hand lettered design.com is included in the Black Friday sale.

So when you get to the website, you will see the codes at the top of every page. To make sure that you can find them easily and use them through Cyber Monday and that's November 30th. So you want to make sure and order before Cyber Monday. So just do it today so that you don't forget, I will put links in the show notes for you.

And that has been what I have been currently creating.

All right. So for today's episode, it's about living with love and it's directly related to one of these products that is now available. The Daily Mindful Lettering book is 30 days of lettering, affirmations to live with love. And you might be wondering why did she pick this of all of the different subjects or topics for affirmations that she could have picked?

Why choose living with love? And that's what I wanted to talk about today.

This book and the affirmations are focused on love and compassion for yourself, for others, your friends, your family, and you might be thinking, why? And I'm going to tell ya it's because love feels so good. And I'm talking about all different types of love.

Like I mentioned, it can be friendship. It can be for those in your community. It can be an, a family relationship. It can be for your neighbors. We can feel love for all of the people around us and it feels. So good. And I'm going to be honest. I think our world can use a whole lot more of it right now. So in this episode, I will be addressing both having compassion for ourselves and for others. And I just want to talk about why it feels so good and how we can feel it more often.

So you may be thinking, you know, we hear people saying, you know, love is the answer. Love is always an option. And we kind of struggled to believe this because we have this longstanding belief that we've adopted from culture or society or our upbringing, where we believe that love happens TO us, that we feel love when other people do loving things for us, or that we can have love for ourselves or love ourselves. Once we have reached a certain point or accomplished a certain thing, or when we are quote unquote "good enough." So when we believe this, that love happens to us, we don't necessarily feel the option to live with love.

That idea of living with love on a regular basis, having love be our driver and our motivation and the emotion that we experience. It feels so good. But when we don't necessarily believe that we have the power to feel it of our own choice, then we don't see it as necessarily an option, but that's what I want to talk about today.

Love definitely feels amazing. Love is an emotion that we feel and, spoiler alert, we actually experience our emotions because of the thoughts that we think. Now this might be something that you've heard before. It might make sense. You might think, oh yeah, I know that when I'm thinking affects how I feel, but for me, it really took a little bit of hearing it over and over again, to really have it sink in.

Because in practice, when someone asks me, well, why do you feel so loved? I'm going to say, because, you know, for example, my husband and my kids told me that they love me and I'm feeling so loved. But then I think, wait a minute, if them saying that is what made me feel loved, then how come one time when I was feeling depressed and they told me that they loved me. It didn't force me or caused me to feel loved. I gave credit to them, to their actions for feeling loved the first time. So how come when they did it again, I didn't necessarily feel that love? And you might put two people in the same situation. One is going to feel love and one isn't.

How can that be? If it's the outside situation that is causing the love? And the truth is that it's our thoughts that help us to feel that emotion.

So for example, I have struggled on and off with depression for the last, over 20 years. I have talked about this many times. And there have been plenty of times when the people around me loved me so much and they were communicating it and they were trying to show it, but I wasn't feeling it because I was having thoughts that were not loving for myself instead of thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so loved.

I thought. I don't know if they really mean it. That was the thought I was having, which caused me to not feel the love. Love is an emotion that feels amazing. And that is caused by our thoughts, which means that we also can't make anyone else feel loved. We can't force them. My family who was trying to help me feel loved when I was feeling down, they were trying, but they couldn't force me to feel it because I had other thoughts going on in my brain.

Now I'm not saying that you should never try to show love to people and that it doesn't matter. And it's only their own thoughts that can cause them to feel loved. Now I do believe that their thoughts will help them to feel loved, but having outside situations, I'll say circumstances can help us to have those thoughts.

Generally when people tell me that they love me, I do have those thoughts that are wonderful. That helped me feel loved. But the reason why I share these examples is because we get so much of our power back when we understand that our thoughts help us to feel loved and our thoughts help us to feel love for others.

We often want to give the credit to other people or situations around us for the reasons that we feel love for other people or loved by other people. So for example, you might say, oh my gosh, I love him so much because of his behavior, because he's helping around the house or because she's doing what I asked or we may believe that we love them so much because they treat us so well.

But the truth is that the reason why we feel love for anyone is because we're having thoughts about the way that they're acting or thoughts about them. And the reason why this is the best news in the world is because love is for us. If we can't force other people to feel loved or to feel love for us, then what can we control?

We can only control ourselves, which we have heard probably since we were small, but that means we can only control how we feel. We can still try to show love and do acts of kindness for others and say kind things to others, which I highly recommend. But we in the end are the ones who have the control over our own experiences and feeling love.

So when we're choosing to feel loving towards someone else, it's really, for us! Of course, it's a, can be a blessing for them. If it then helps them have positive thoughts too. But I'm not trying to say that it's selfish, but it definitely feels the best. And I believe that it's why we focus on loving our neighbor and loving each other.

For me as a religious, spiritual, you know, focus. I also focus on loving God. I believe it's because God knows that love feels so good. He knows that love feels so good and that we are going to be our best selves when we're living with love. When we're coming from an emotion of love, we are our best selves, we do things that we feel proud of. We have positive outcomes.

So then you start thinking, well then why would I ever choose anything else, but to love someone. And there are lots of answers. When you think about it, you likely are going to come up with someone who has treated you badly. Someone that doesn't serve, quote, unquote, "deserve your love."

And I'm definitely not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries and that you should let people walk all over you and that you should people please and do whatever other people want. That is not what real love for yourself and others looks like. But I do think that even for those people, that we have a right to, we feel justified in our anger or our frustration or whatever, negative emotion we might feel about them.

We feel justified and we talked to other people and we say, can you believe they did this? I'm just so mad. And they might say, yes. Yeah, you're totally justified. And it's like, okay, good. Now I feel justified in feeling terrible because, just like love, feeling angry is what YOU get to feel. That emotion does not transfer to the other person.

We don't force the emotion on the other person. And what's so ironic is that so much of the time the other person doesn't even know, they're not even aware of the fact that you're angry, but we still feel justified. And we almost feel like it's the right thing to do because we're justified that we should stay angry at someone.

But the thing is that WE are the ones feeling angry. We are the ones feeling that emotion. Do we want to feel that way? Does it feel good? This may seem over simplified and because we're human, it's not like you can flip a switch and say, okay, from now on, I'm not going to feel angry anymore. I'm not going to feel annoyed.

I'm just going to feel love because love feels better. No, it isn't that simple. I understand that. But when we have the awareness that our thoughts are causing our feelings and that we prefer to feel loved, we can start to change our thoughts that are going to help and change our emotions.

Now I do need to just pause for a moment and say that I am never going to tell you to push emotions down and to not feel them. If you have a thought that causes you to feel angry, I am not telling you that you should push it down and ignore it and deny it. I'm think that it's important to feel our feelings for sure. Do we want to stay in that feeling? How long do we want to stay for us? It might be important to feel that feeling, but how long do we want to stay in that anger or that frustration or annoyance? Is it something that we want to keep on feeling?

Sometimes we really feel like we're punishing the other person by being angry, even though half the time, at least they don't even know that we are angry, but it's not punishing them. They aren't feeling it. They may have thoughts that make them feel bad or good, but we're the ones stuck with the feeling that we're feeling.

So then we have to ask ourselves, is there an upside to withholding love? And this goes for ourselves too. I think that you may be like me and I have a long history of having a really negative voice in my head. That's really, hasn't been that nice to me. It says things like, gosh, what's your problem? Why can't you figure that out?

Why can't you just get this done? It's really not that nice. And for some reason, I thought it was going to be helpful to be mean to myself. I thought maybe it would motivate me to be a better person. I don't know what I was thinking, but it didn't work that way. Having love for myself has proved to empower me and motivate me in ways that beating myself up never did.

So when we are focusing on living with more love, it's for ourselves, it's for other people. And I'm not saying that it's always easy, but I do think that it feels better. And because we know that our thoughts are causing us to feel this love. We want to pay attention to what thoughts we are having.

And the reason why I have put lettering affirmations in this new book, Daily Mindful Lettering, is because writing things down and rewriting them is focusing on our thoughts and it helps to change our thoughts. And that is why I wanted this first edition of Daily Mindful Lettering to be about living with love, because it feels so good.

But because thoughts that cause love don't always come super naturally and super easily to us. We need to practice them. Of course we can wait until a hard situation happens and then kind of evaluate why we're feeling what we're feeling and adjust our thoughts. But I find the easiest way to start is with daily mantras daily affirmations, where we can kind of preempt and plant happy and positive thoughts, these affirmations that are going to help us to feel more love.

It's kind of like a little sneaky way to get into our brains through this creative hobby where we can start changing the way that we think about ourselves and about those around us, so that we can experience more peace, more joy, more love.

And like I said before, this doesn't mean that we're always going to agree with someone or condone their behavior or let them do whatever they want.

We can say no, and I love you. There is a way to set boundaries and still feel love for those around us. So often how we feel about ourselves is what we are projecting to other people. So learning to have self-compassion, isn't actually selfish. I believe that it's one of the most loving things that we can do.

Byron Katie says, I love you, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I want all of us to be able to live with more love. The way that we're going to do this is by changing our thoughts and these affirmations are going to make a huge difference. Even if you're not super huge into lettering, even just tracing these affirmations each day is going to help retrain your brain and wire it for more love.

Now, I know that a lot of the stuff that I share on here sounds a little cheesy. Sounds a little woo-woo. But I'm telling you it works. I have struggled with my mental health for so many years. Like I said, since I was a teenager and I have learned that this stuff really makes the difference that we can do a lot of different things to help our mental health.

I believe in all the physiology, making sure that we're moving our bodies, getting enough sleep, eating right, nourishing our bodies and also medication or other interventions, if those are appropriate. But I also believe in looking at our brains and seeing what they're doing. There are these magnificent machines that we have that can do so much good. And also when we're not paying attention, sometimes they can cause us harm unintentionally. And we just want to make sure that we're using them the best that we can.

So, I just want to encourage you, if you haven't already picked up your copy of Daily Mindful Lettering, it's available now on our website.

I hope that you will enjoy it every day, as you are writing and rewriting these affirmations that you will start feeling more love in your life. Both for yourself and for other people.

I am so glad that you joined me today on the podcast. Don't forget that we still have our Black Friday sale going until Monday, November 30th at midnight.

So make sure to head over and get all of the lettering, goodness for yourself and for everyone else on your list. Such a great gift that they're probably not going to already have. That's going to not just be something that they're going to use or throw away. It's something that they can learn a skill that can be a blessing to them that they can continue to use and use over time.

And if lettering turns out to be anything for them, like it is for me, it's going to be a huge blessing. So head over to hand lettered design.com. You'll be able to see all of the Black Friday codes and all of the new products that notebook that says committed to create on it, which is so perfect for the podcast.

And I just want you to know, I am so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for all of your reviews and for sharing the show. I love it when you tag me on Instagram, so I can see your takeaways and when you message me and share what you're learning. Thanks again for being here and I will talk to you next week.
Links:
Lettering Bundles and Tools
Dream Big Dreams Spiral Notebook
Committed to Create Spiral Notebook
Daily Mindful Lettering Book
Ready for a fun activity to feel less stress? Come get our FREE Guide - 5 Creative Steps to Less Stress & More Joy while it's still available!
I hope that my podcast has left you feeling inspired and excited to create the life that you want. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, I’d love for you to subscribe so you can continue to hear more. Want to get to know me better? Connect with me on my website or on Instagram to keep up with everything that is going on with me and my business.
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Jennifer L. IN LOVE!! What a perfect idea! I am a plant mama too, like Lisa. I also manage a great deal of anxiety. I got into lettering a couple years ago as a creative outlet and discovered a multitude of treasures in the lettering community! This book that Lisa created with her daughter is just perfection! It's all the feels for me! Thank you both!!!
Cinthanie C. EXCELLENT BOOK! I really enjoy taking a minute each day to slow down and apply my hand to something that is not only emotionally supportive but relaxing and fun to do!! The mantras for everyday are very helpful for me. Thank you for your work and bringing such a high quality product into my life!
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