What if everything you’ve been taught about fear, love, and even spirituality is too small for who you really are? Today, we sit down with Christian de la Huerta to trace a raw, hopeful path from paralyzing shyness and self-hatred to self-love, purpose, and relationships that actually work. His story spans cultural pressure, misreadings of religion, and the long shadow of depression—and lands in a place of clarity, courage, and grounded joy.
Our conversation reframes spirituality versus dogma. We explore how mistranslated texts have fueled exclusion, why breath is a universal doorway to the sacred, and how a namaste ethic—honoring the divine in each other—raises the bar on morality beyond rule-following to do no harm and live with reverence.
Along the way, Christian introduces his books on empowerment and conscious relationships, with clear guidance on avoiding common traps like settling, ignoring red flags, and expecting a partner to make you happy.
If you’re ready to trade anxiety for agency, confusion for conscious love, and smallness for a more authentic self, this one’s for you. Listen, reflect, and take one bold step beyond your comfort zone today. If the episode moved you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
To connect with Christian or purchase his latest book, Conscious Love: Transforming Our Relationship to Relationships visit his website: www.soulfulpower.com
To download a free chapter of host Sylvia Worsham’s bestselling book, In Faith, I Thrive: Finding Joy Through God’s Masterplan, visit her website at www.sylviaworsham.com
Transcript:
SPEAKER_00:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt, or worry, and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, Sylvia Worston, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, Sylvia Worston.
SPEAKER_01:
Hey my priest, it’s Sylvia Worstham. Welcome to the Restop Review Prepast. And today is Christian Deletta. And he has an amazing story of transformation this channel. That’s a lovely day. Christian, thank you so much for joining us today on this channel.
SPEAKER_05:
Hey Sylvia. So happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01:
It’s awesome. The first goal round there was some flexibility issues, and I always am open to that because if it’s got to rule to have the enemy, it’s gonna happen. So it doesn’t matter whether it happens then or it happens now. There is a purpose to things in life. So tell me, Christian, where are you at?
SPEAKER_05:
Right now I’m in South Florida at a friend’s place that he kind of rented on Airbnb in Florida. My family’s in Miami, uh, but I stay up here when I’m down here. I’ve been nomadic for the last, wait, three, four years since the pandemic.
SPEAKER_01:
You know, I find that a lot of people are nowadays because you can take your work wherever you go, especially the kind of work you do. And so it doesn’t matter where you’re at, as long as you’re present and you’re doing these interviews and you’re sharing your wisdom.
SPEAKER_05:
Exactly. I mean, that’s that’s what freed me up is I used to do, and I and I’m starting to do them again, live events, um, you know, workshops, retreats. Uh, but the pandemic, right, it couldn’t. So then I realized I’m doing most of my work now online. I can be anywhere. Yeah. I just need good Wi-Fi.
SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, that’s all the meaning. And I was really like hoping that my Wi-Fi was gonna work properly this morning. I was over at a neighbor’s house just recently um like an hour ago, actually, because my Wi-Fi was failing and my husband then texted me, hey, the Wi-Fi is back on. So then I walked over the two houses down to meet with you right now. So I find when it’s good, man, it’s gonna happen whether we’re in alignment or not.
SPEAKER_05:
Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:
So I mean an amazing story of transformation, Christian. Can you share with us how you landed in the spot you’re in currently?
SPEAKER_05:
Wow, I mean, that’s a long story.
SPEAKER_01:
Um We have time.
SPEAKER_05:
The highlights. I was born in Cuba, uh, so lived under communism for the first 10 years of my life. Came to the US with my family, went to high school and college here. Um, you know, what what I think the the the aspect of my transformation that would be helpful for your audience is that I I was so painfully shy as a teenager. Like painfully. I was okay one-on-one. But if you added a third human, forget it. I clammed up. And yet I knew that I have always had a sense of mission, a sense of purpose. Um and so I knew that if I was gonna fulfill that purpose, that I had to get over that fear. Because that I knew that was gonna entail speaking in public, and forget that. That wasn’t even a possibility. Uh so through a series of of choices and experiences that I set myself up for, I was able to transmute that that fear, that self-doubt, that self-hatred into self-confidence. And uh if I know that if that can happen in me, that can happen in anybody.
SPEAKER_03:
That’s awesome. Because you know, there’s a lot of kids out there that are very shy.
SPEAKER_01:
I know mine claims to be shy. I don’t I don’t believe that for a second. My 10-year-old saying, I’m shy, my you used to not be. I would do these videos during the pandemic times and you would appear in the video. And now she started to reappear in my podcast interviews. She will walk behind me at times and and showcase like a little note. So I find that when you put your mind to it, when you have an intention set up, I am going to conquer these fears. I find that it happens more often than not. What do you think are the challenges that people face when they can’t get out of their own heads?
SPEAKER_05:
Oh my god, it’s it’s I don’t believe in hell, like technically. Um I think hell is a state of mind, just a state of consciousness that that we place ourselves into. I don’t believe in a punitive God. But this life like inside of our heads can be heaven or it can be hell. Um and I think the the the source of the problem is that we don’t really understand who we are. Like we don’t really understand what makes us do the things we do. And and the tragic part of it is that many of us try to run away from those questions, from the deep existential questions. Who are we? You know, who are we? What are we doing here? What’s this life about? Why do we do the things we do? Um, why do we get find ourselves stuck in certain patterns of relationships that sometimes feels like it’s the same boring movie, only with a different different lead, you know, a different co-lead, but the same patterns, the same crap, the same argument. So to me, there’s no way around that. If you want to be free, if you want to really discover who we are, like we gotta go with it. We have to be willing to do that, and as opposed to what a lot of people do, which is self-medicate, run away from. And self-medicate, whether it’s food or substances or or drugs or work or gaming in the computer, whatever it is, all the activities that we do to keep us from looking within. And and to go back to that fear question, because I I think that is so relevant too. And this is this is before even knowing what we’re talking about, which is how to transcend fear. Um it’s kind of what I did. But but here’s a really quick model. It’s from a book by Susan Jeffers, Seth Jeffers, titled Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. So imagine this concentric circle. This inner circle represents our comfort zone. This is where we’re comfortable now, being in the world, being with other humans, just being so every time we take a little step, a tiny little step, or it could be a huge leap. But we establish ourselves beyond that comfort zone at the next circle, at the next level. And imagine if we did that, like once a week, we did something that had a stretch that has has you know makes us stretch beyond our comfort zone. Whether that’s saying yes and going on a coffee date with somebody, or whether it’s saying yes and taking on a project at work that we don’t feel quite ready for, or we say yes to an invitation to speak in public when that terrifies us. Each time we do that, we’re expanding that comfort zone and it doesn’t uh retract. Like we’re settling ourselves in those expanded comfort zones.
SPEAKER_01:
I actually love that visual that you provided. Something I used to use a lot in my talks was the law of the rubber band, because it talks about the same thing. And if you think of a rubber band, you think of your if you were to take uh a rubber band and stretch it from your chin out to as further that you can take it, the chin represents the comfort zone, and the furthest point is your capacity zone. And in between is the tension you’re creating. So it’s the goals you’re setting up to create a little bit of tension, not a whole lot, because if you create too much tension for people that are creating new habits, it will the deception of the subconscious mind will kick in and it’ll help help quit their their capacity zone kind of like goal-reaching capacity, right? So we always tell people it’s you want to create a little bit of tension, you want to increase your heart rate a little bit, but not so much so that it’s gonna stop your heart.
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, you can pop that rubber rubber band and bring it back, right?
SPEAKER_01:
Into the comfort zone. That would be bad. But you do want to create a little bit of tension. And so the goals that you’re setting up in your life, or the habits, if you will, to get out of that fear zone is so that you can start visualizing, you know, that big bold life that you want and that you desire. But to do that, you have to give your mind kind of like a GPS system. It’s gotta have a guiding, a guidance to it, and the goals are the guidance to it. And it’s it’s it’s kind of moving slowly to that capacity zone. And the more you do it, the more you’re empowered to do it. And by the time you turn around, you’ve already created the identity of someone that’s out of their comfort zone and completely immersed in their capacity zone. And then from that point on, then you do it again. It’s like, okay, well, now I’m here. Where do I want to level up to? So those kids that love video games, I always tell them this way it’s like life is like a video game. You’re constantly leveling up. And you’re developing skills that you practice to make them permanent to be able to level up to the next level. That’s all we’re doing in life, really.
SPEAKER_05:
I like that. I like that visual.
SPEAKER_01:
And so, you know, for kids that get overwhelmed, because nowadays I see kids get overwhelmed very quickly. They want things now, they don’t want to work at it. They don’t, it’s like our cultures are very, very different. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, Christian, or not.
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think, I mean, our whole society has trained us to be that, right? They want that immediate gratification. Um, and I think the the computer gaming industry even reinforces that even more. Like that you’re always going for that extra bell or star or fireworks. Um and you know, life doesn’t really work that way. Life requires work and requires presence and requires that ability to to go within and to if you want to be really successful at it, I think you have to go within and you have to, like we were talking about earlier, ask yourself, face yourself, not run away from yourself.
SPEAKER_03:
Yes, and you said you talked about self-hatred.
SPEAKER_01:
Can you touch a little bit more on that? Because there are quite a few people out there that probably are in this space that don’t know quite how to get out of there. Can you shed some light on that?
SPEAKER_05:
Sure. Um, I mean I can start by telling you that my adolescence was one long depression with suicidal fantasies. Um and it was an effort to try to fit in a in a culture in a religion that didn’t have room for me. So I grew up Catholic, and I know you did as well. And and yet from an ear an early age, even before I did anything about it, I knew that I was gay. And so there was part of me that had this really genuine desire to to be spiritual, to to know God, to even to serve God. I I thought I I thought I was gonna be uh a priest when I was in high school. Um and then there was this other part of me that was deep, dark, secret that nobody knew about. Um and that you know, I thought I was told that I was gonna burn burn in hell for eternity. And you know being young, like young and asking a priest once, how long how long is eternity exactly? And he used, you know, I’m Cuban born, so we could you know he used an um an island metaphor. He said, Well, imagine you’re gonna go to the beach and you bring a thimble with you, and you use that thimble to start taking water out of the ocean. That’s eternity. Which of course terrified me.
SPEAKER_03:
Of course. That you know, that makes me sad.
SPEAKER_01:
And I’ll tell you why, because I left the Catholic uh religion when I divorced, because they didn’t accept divorce back in those years.
SPEAKER_04:
Right.
SPEAKER_01:
Now it’s shifted. You you see the shifts a lot, it’s become a lot more modern in our old. I don’t know if you’re still Catholic, but I’ve left it. And when I married my second husband, he was late Pentecostal, and I was like, No, I’m not doing that. And he and he said, Well, I’m gonna be Catholic, and I said, Well, I don’t want to do that either. And he said, Well, what do you want to do? And I said, Well, what about a non-denominational Christian? Right? And the church we landed at here in Austin, I love their motto, no perfect people allowed. And I love that because we’re not perfect, we’re nowhere near perfect. And they’ve actually touched on gay people in the church. Our senior pastor, the senior founding pastor John Burke, who became a New York Times best-selling author with his book, Just Imagine or Imagine Heaven, based on near-death experiences. Very good book, by the way. Wow. But going back to what he said in one of the sermons was homosexuality, um, that the Bible scripture actually meant pedophilia as being the abomination and not homosexuality, but that the translation from Greek, because a lot of the text was in Greek, they or ancient texts, people misinterpreted, miscommunicated that. So for a long time, they communicated that as being homosexuality, when in reality, that’s not what they’re talking about. And so there’s a lot of acceptance. We teach in our home, we teach our kids acceptance, not tolerance. To me, tolerance is a negative word, and it’s like, well, you you know, you have to do it this way. No. Acceptance is people are allowed in our home to love whomever they want. And I had a gay cousin uh growing up, and I remember he his family doesn’t know he’s gay. In fact, they deny it, even though we all know he’s gay. And when he came to see me uh about 30 years ago, he uh he was in my home and I and I said, Hey, you’re always welcome in my home with your partner. And he just bursts out crying because he just he had never felt accepted by any of us, and he felt accepted by me and by my mother. How beautiful is that? You know, and my mom, she’s turning 85 this year, you know, and is one of the most accepting people out there, and she doesn’t, and she hails from the Mexican side and Catholic, which a lot of people initially say so close-minded, not all of us are like that. That’s true, you know, not all of us are like that, and and I think you’d find that now more and more there’s a lot more acceptance of it, and I’m grateful for that because there’s just I just can’t imagine that people would choose to put themselves in a position to be, you know, like how you were feeling that self-hatred. Who would willingly do that to themselves? You know, and it doesn’t make sense, it’s not logical. And so I always tell my my children, like one time we were walking at the mall, and my little girl, she was little, she was like five, and she said, Mom, um, why are those two men with the baby? And I said, Oh, they’re a couple, honey, just very natural.
SPEAKER_04:
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:
And and it’s like, oh, isn’t it supposed to be a man and a woman? I said, you know, it could be the man and a woman, it could be a man and a man, it could be a woman and a woman. As long as that child has love in their life, it doesn’t matter.
unknown:
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:
You know, in our in our home.
SPEAKER_05:
So that’s beautiful of what you’re the values that you’re teaching your daughter. And and and I think it’s really important to do to the differentiation you’re making, the nuance between tolerance and and real acceptance. Yeah. And I want to go back to what to what you were referencing, you know, the Bible. Because there are only six texts. Like six mentions that refer to or are said to refer to, that are used to condemn. You know, LGBTQ people. And and homosexuality in particular. But the thing about those those texts is that they have been translated, retranslated, mistranslated, misinterpreted. Like there’s one of those that where the sin was supposed to be just being unwelcome to strangers, unkindness to strangers, and yet it was mistranslated, um, and then and then used to persecute uh gay people. Uh so and and you know, it’s like I I know what you’re saying about the the how the church is changing. And and you know, even the new Pope and this the last one give me a little bit of hope. Personally, you know, where where it’s women are not even considered equal, where women are not allowed to be priests. Um and I know that in the ultimate sense they are considered equal, but in the day-to-day, it’s like, come on. Um and you know, I just I’m not gonna sit around and white personally.
SPEAKER_01:
No, no, and the thing there’s a huge difference, Christian, I think, in religion and faith. There’s there’s an enormous difference. Most people use it interchangeably, you know, and I always correct my husband because he, well, you’re religious. I said, no, sir, I’m not. I’m actually faith-based. And the reason why I say that is faith to me is relationship with God. Like straight relationship. I don’t need to go through a priest to talk to him. If I want to talk to him today, I I choose to do that today, you know. Um I also find that a lot of people today, in fact, I had a good friend of mine ask me, they don’t even, there’s no relationship or connection with your inner self. You don’t even know whether your ego is speaking to you or your soul. I had a friend that asked me, I don’t even know how to discern between when God is prompting me to do something and when it’s my mind telling me something. And so I always tell her, I was like, you know, when it’s doubt and fear and scarcity, that’s your mind. That’s the programming that you have fed it over time. That’s the modeling you receive, that’s the environment that you find yourself in, all the subliminal messages. You have to be aware of what’s what you’re allowing to influence you. Who is you’re allowing to speak into you? Are they bringing you light? Are they bringing you darkness? Are they taking your light? Things like that. It all impacts. The mind has no filter, the the subconscious part of the mind. So it’s just gonna take everything in and form belief systems, whether they’re real or not.
SPEAKER_03:
Truth or not.
SPEAKER_05:
Yes. Yeah, I agree. I think I think the mind is what keeps us from God. And I’m more like in the spiritual, not religious category. I honor all traditions, I also challenge them all. Um, you know, I think I think of religion and spirituality as like if you can see an exquisite swimming pool, perfect temperature, refreshing, beautifully landscaped, with a bunch of diving boards surrounding it. To me, those are the religions, right? That to the degree that they help us dive into that, you know, whatever you want to call that, um, then they’re doing their job. But to the degree that they’re they’re getting into what I call the theological pissing contest, you know, my God is bigger than yours, and and that they’re causing guilt and s and fear and and separation between people, then I beg to differ. You know, then then that’s the part that I challenge. Um and and you know, one of the things that I’ve I’m so grateful that I was able to navigate that question of who am I, and and and realize that we all are inherently spiritual because that’s our nature. And it’s just as ludicrous to try to reject part of who we are as human, like our sexuality, like I tried to do, and I know m countless other people have done as well, or our spirituality, which which understandably a lot of people who have been uh burnt and hurt by religion also tried to do. But to me, it’s just part of who we are. It’s like it’s it’s I loved Shardan, you know, theologian Toyar the Shardan, his quote that we are spirits having a physical experience for one time or many times, depending on your system of belief. Um, and and to me that’s what my spiritual um expression is more into.
SPEAKER_01:
Okay, so can you dive a little bit deeper into that because I know people use the word spirituality and they mean faith, and vice versa. So can you distinguish between the two then?
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, I don’t I don’t use the word faith often. I mean I I I read it a lot, you know, it’s faith-based. Um to me, to me that I don’t believe in abominations, but if I were to believe in an abomination, to me that’s the externalization of the sacred. You know, where we have placed anything that’s that’s we consider sacred or holy, we place it way away from us. How much further could we have placed heaven? And where the hell is heaven anyway? Right, where to me, I but spirituality if you look at the Latin root of it, it’s is spidade, which from that root we get both respiration and inspiration, expiration. So to me, that’s what spirit is, you know. Like if you if we’re gonna connect it to holy text, you know, God breathed life into that. That’s the spirit. To me, religion, though that word still comes from also comes from a Latin, religare, which means to bind, to rebind. Um which understandably I you understand that it probably means rebinding to the to the to the sacred, but it still feels a little I don’t know, restrictive in my sense, in in my perceptions. Where spirituality feels a lot more open, a lot more flowing, um, a lot more inclusive. It’s you know, it’s the breath, the breath of life. The breath is our most loyal, our most faithful companion in this journey of embodiment. And if we look through if we look at the different religious traditions in the world, in the majority of them, almost all of them, and even some secular languages, one word can mean breath or spirit.
SPEAKER_03:
Um so it’s the same for you.
SPEAKER_05:
The breath is spirit.
unknown:
Yes.
SPEAKER_05:
I find it interesting, yeah. Don’t tell me that God is everywhere except for right here. And in particular, it’s God is everywhere except for the genitals and the bedroom. But that’s a different conversation.
SPEAKER_01:
Here’s the here’s the thing. I you know what’s coming to mind as you’re talking is Napoleon Hill.
SPEAKER_03:
There was a uh the thinking grew rich.
SPEAKER_01:
I did a very extensive study on it because as part of the John Maxwell team, as one of the coaches, they kind of have us go through some of these studies to really understand. And Napoleon talked a lot about how God shows up. You know, God is a spirit inside of us and he comes in through thoughts. The thought that is, in my case, a persistent thought that just comes out of nowhere, that doesn’t kind of align to what my doubt is telling me to do. Um that’s how he shows up for me. And he talked about sexuality there, not quite in the context that we’re talking in, but he did say, you know, the oneness piece is the sexuality piece that scripture talks about in marriage as well. It’s this oneness with spirit, oneness with one with ourselves. And and it’s the same like concept throughout uh scripture. The more we become one with him, the more we’re in alignment in our thoughts, in our hearts, in our heart space. So I find that I can see both faith and spirituality kind of flowing more with each other than religion. Religion is to me man-made, and it’s something that Christ Himself didn’t uh feel attuned to when he was here on earth. He actually rejected the Pharisees. That’s what most people forget. I find that so interesting because he would do things that were rebellious in those years. He included women in his ministry, which back in those years was unheard of. Like if now the Catholics don’t see the women as equal images then, how that would have come across to them that here’s this person claiming to be you know God Himself and the Son of God, and and he’s including women in his ministry.
SPEAKER_05:
And he’s getting considered property, yes.
SPEAKER_01:
Um and their people, the women in his ministry were actually helping manage the finances and in some cases providing the finances for his ministry. I find that so interesting. I also find it interesting that he sat with who he claimed, or what people claimed to be the outcasts of society in those years. Tax collectors, thieves, you know, adulterers, the lepers, the lepers, you know, and so I always had a post not too long ago that said, I wonder what Jesus would what his opinion would be about um people that exclude others based on their sexuality. I wonder what his opinion would be, considering how he showed up in his ministry. And then I kind of went through the whole process that I’m discussing with you now saying he actually the Pharisees were, I mean, they’re the ones that condemned him, right? The ones that brought him to get executed, pretty much, the ones that were promoting it primarily. And so you see religion and him not really going side to side. So I always find that interesting. And then I figure it’s like he was more about relationship with people, and he was about love, he was about love and connection.
SPEAKER_05:
That’s it. It is it, as simple as that, and you know, it’s it’s interesting because the the reason he bucked heads with the Pharisees was because they were so preoccupied about dogma and doing things the way they were supposed to do. The law. This is the law, this is the only way. This is you know, these are my things. Too many Christians do that now. Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately.
SPEAKER_01:
I agree, I agree, and and it I always say, you know, the mission that he has me on, aside from this podcast, was. They get my life cheap. You know something people are really pissed off at you. Don’t find them and bring them back to me.
SPEAKER_05:
Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:
And share the love that I have for them. Share who I my character. Like, don’t let people talk bad about me. Don’t let them use my name and just create these things that are not true. Because when you look at scripture, when you actually read it, and even in the Old Testament, which scares most people to death. I knew it scared me too when I read Job and you had me reading Job. I’m like, please don’t put me through this test. I don’t think I’m up for it. But I could see his character, how faithful he was to people, how many times he forgave them, how many chances he gave people. When you see that over and over and over again in his word, you can’t help but think he is a loving God. He is someone that wants the best for you. Um He wants you to have more joy than you could ever fathom. You know, because the the ideas that we have in our mind of what we think joy is gonna be are so far in our first act. I know for me it was all about the achievement. The more I achieved, according to me, as a 20-year-old, the more I the happier I would be. And when I got to the pinnacle of my success at Pfizer, and I’m standing in front of 300 of my peers, and I’m the number one saleswoman at Pfizer in the country. I’m like, is this it? Is this what happiness is about? Right? And then and then something almost always happens. Something shifts our view, our lens. In my case, I received about three medical miracles in 72 hours, things that I should have never survived, and yet I did. And then I had a very strong um encounter with um Christ in the ICE. And it was undeniable. The love that I felt was a love I have never felt on this earth. It is so accepting, it is so nurturing. I felt like I was being cradled by him and he and he and a peace washed over me, a peace that is not of this earth, that only he can provide. When I when you have experiences like that and you and you live your life in connection with him, like I have, it’s really hard for me to say there is no God, there is no oneness, there is no higher level of consciousness because I have experienced it.
SPEAKER_05:
Beautiful. You know what is that and you think about it so beautifully from personal experience, like somebody who knows. This is not something you you read in a book.
SPEAKER_04:
No.
SPEAKER_05:
Um and that’s what makes it so authentic and so powerful. If I can go back for a minute and just clarify that I’m not advocating amorality or a lack of morality, like I am profoundly moral and I have a deep sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s something that I’ve had to work out for myself. Right? Because if if I wasn’t gonna go by texts that were written thousands of years ago and translated too many times at a time when women were not even human, that were property, like then what am I gonna go by? What? But you know, how will how am I gonna determine what’s what’s right and what’s wrong? And you know, it was years of searching and figuring it out. But and and I write about it in this last book, in which I write about conscious relationships and conscious love and and what it means to to to have relationships consciously. And I have a whole section on sexuality and spirituality in which I get into morality. And and so to me, I have like different faces of it. I’m not gonna get into all of it now. To me, the the deepest, to the highest sense of morality is what I call a namaste um state of mind, right? Namaste, as you know from Hinduism, it’s it’s the sacred in me, uh, the love in me, the God in me, whatever words, the beauty in me that sees and acknowledges and bows to that in you. So if we were if we were to live from there, right, how could I possibly steal from you or or kill you, or or rape you, or invade your country? Um So to me, like it it’s it’s the highest way that we can be that that it precludes doing harm. The most basic way is do no harm, right? That’s that’s the most basic morality. Do no harm. And I honor, that’s one of the few rules that I live by. Uh but then I started fine fine-tuning the different levels of morality and navigating, how we navigate and figure out for us for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong. And that’s what I landed on, right? Namaste. I can see that in you, how can I do harm to you? Um, and because ultimately we are an expression of that. If we’re gonna go with God is everywhere, God is omnipresent, then it’s in me and it’s in you.
SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and from that outflow, because his love is so immense, there’s like no, it’s boundless. And so when we receive that love, it’s the overflow of that love that comes out of us and to others. You know, it’s that it’s a gift that we’ve received and that we also give unto others. I I find that really powerful, that concept that you were discussing. What is the name of your book?
SPEAKER_05:
This last book is called Um Conscious Love, Transforming our Relationship to Relationships. Right, so transforming how we approach relationships, how we think about them, how we hold them. And in it, I I come up with 10 or name 10 challenges. So some of the ways, some of the reasons that we get into trouble with relationships. Like, for example, like how we approach them. If we’re approaching relationships with the unrealistic expectation that you are gonna make me happy, forget it. Hang it up. There isn’t anybody out there who’s gonna make us happy, and it’s not their job to begin with, putting that pressure on somebody else and putting that pressure on the relationship, right? It’s not gonna have um a good ending. So talk about settling and the reasons why we settle um for less than what we know, right? We over we overlook the yellow flags and the red flags because we’re afraid of being alone. Yeah. Um or or we settle because we don’t we don’t value ourselves enough. Um and you know, those those assumptions or those misunderstandings, those beliefs that we took on, that we picked up along the way, right? That there’s that I’m not good enough, or I’m too much, uh, that there’s something wrong with me. Beliefs like relationships always end up in divorce and pain and betrayal. Right? This is stuff that maybe we we picked up from our parents, we picked up from the culture, we’ve seen it in the movies a bunch of times. But if that’s how we’re approaching it, with that expectation, it’s not gonna happen. Right, and so we end up settling for less. Um, and also we confuse, right? This is another one of the challenges. We confuse the feeling of love, the emotion of love with the act of loving. And just kind of paraphrasing Scott Peck, you know, from The Road Less Traveled, who gifted us this definition of love because he he you know, we confuse that emotion again. And you know, we think that love is is those feelings in the honeymoon where the other person can do no wrong and we see them through rose-colored glasses. Honeymoon is is I think it’s a biological trick of nature, right, to ensure the survival of the species. Because at some point, right, in the in that in that initial phase, like the ego boundaries have collapsed, and we feel at one with. Before I knew practices like meditation or breathwork breath work, the only time I felt that deep connection, I felt at one with somebody else was making love. Um and so you know that’s how we escape that individual separate sense of self, the little ego mind, the little ego self. Um and the way that he defines love is like love is not the feeling, right? And we can’t go by the honeymoon because at some point that person’s gonna do the the the it’s gonna put the toilet paper the wrong way, and everybody should know this is the correct way. Um or they’re gonna squeeze the toothpaste, the toothpaste tube from the wrong end, and then boom, then that’s it. Ego boundaries come back up, and then they can do nothing right, and then we go looking for greener pastors looking for the where did the love go? Right? We go looking for the one. But that sense of love is is based on a misunderstanding of what love is because we’re confusing that infatuation, that that period of of they can do no wrong with the the act of loving. And he says that it’s when the honeymoon ends that the work of real loving begins. And he sounds yeah, yes, totally agree with that. Totally, totally. My experience too. And he talks about how love is not the feeling, but it’s when we place ourselves outside of our comfort zone. So, again, going back to that comfort zone, when we place ourselves, when we have to stretch outside of that comfort zone for the sake of the spiritual growth of another being. Like, huh? That’s different. That’s a different way of looking at it. It’s like, what a profound way of looking at love.
SPEAKER_01:
It is, it kind of reminds me of the phases that the mind goes through when you’re making changes. It’s like anything in life when you start off new with someone with that excitement phase. And it’s it’s everybody goes through that. And then about, I don’t know, a year or whatever, in relationships, because it’s a little bit different in relationships. But you’re then initially on, you start seeing the flags, but you ignore them because you’re still caught up in that in that haze, you know, like no, I I really want this. It’s this big thing that you really, really want. And so you don’t pay attention to these things, and then you get married, right? Because you think it’s the next step. And then, like you said, then the pursuit from the guys is over, like in the male-female roles, and then the women are like throwing the women, and then that ends. Um, and it’s like everyday life, right? The ego identity kicks in fairly quickly, and it starts telling you, why did you marry this dude? or why did you marry this person? Um and then, like you said, they can do nothing right. You fall into these patterns of being, because that’s who you authentically are. Until you heal those parts, I think you’re gonna continue bringing them into relationships. And I have no doubt that your book probably addresses some of these things for sure, right? Because we have to first understand ourselves before we can step into a relationship completely.
SPEAKER_05:
Phase one.
SPEAKER_01:
Phase one is is understanding who we are, and having some self-love, because holy moly, does that play a role in how we show up? When you don’t love yourself, it shows up in your relationships.
SPEAKER_05:
Oh my god. How can we expect for anybody else to love us if we’re not loving ourselves? How can we respect for anybody to to respect us, to honor us if we’re not honoring and respecting ourselves? It’s crazy. It’s not it cannot happen. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, you were started to say something.
SPEAKER_03:
No, no, no. I actually want you to finish.
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah, so so what you pointed to, the ego mind is is is important because there’s a lot of confusion about that. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. And in my earlier book, which is about power and empowerment, it’s called Awakening the Soul of Power, and it’s for everybody, but a particular message for women, because I am convinced that the empowerment of women is the single most important thing that needs to happen in the world. Not to idealize women or put them on a pedestal or to give women more crap to clean up in this world of ours, is because as a world, we’ve been running so off balance between the masculine and the feminine energies that course through everybody and everything. Right? No matter what kind of body you’re in, you’re gonna those energies are gonna be flowing through us because they flow through the entire cosmos. And and so in and part of the reason that we have a co well so anyway, so I spent the the whole probably first quarter fifth of the book talking about the ego and what how it works. Uh, because if you want your relationships to have a chance of working, if you want to have a sense of purpose, empowerment, if you want to know why you do the things you do, you gotta understand the ego. And we don’t have time to get into it all here, but but here’s a a a great visual. If you put a baseball in the center of a stadium, that’s the ego. That’s that sense of separate identity that’s as Christian, that’s Sylvia. Um who we are is actually the stadium, the freaking stadium. And we’ve allowed this tiny, tiny, tiny part of who we are to think that it is all who we are, and to make really important consequential choices from its small, limited, and always fear-based perspective. So part of what I do in my retreats, in my coaching, in my breath work sessions, in my book is help people disidentify with a baseball and re-identify with a stadium.
SPEAKER_03:
I love that. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:
And if people wanted to work with you, Christian, where could they reach you?
SPEAKER_05:
Probably the best place is my website. Um, and then they can access my social media from there. It’s soulfulpower.com. S-O-U-L-F-U-L Power, P-O-W-E-R, dot com.
SPEAKER_03:
And do you feel like you’re in your purpose now, in your divine purpose?
SPEAKER_01:
Oh my god. Or do you think this is seasonal?
SPEAKER_05:
No, no, I I know I’m in my purpose. There’s no question. And and I’ve always for me, I know we were talking about earlier um before we started recording that purpose, you know, it’s not a linear thing you were saying, but it’s sometimes it takes, you know, meandering till we figure it out. For me, it’s I’ve always known. I’ve translated it differently. You know, like I thought initially that purpose was meant that I was gonna be a priest. Then I come out of the psychotherapy world. My dad was a psychiatrist. I studied psychology, so I thought I was gonna be a clinical psychologist. Um, and then realized that both of those entities didn’t have enough room for me, for all of me. At the time, at least, clinical psychology completely ignored the spiritual, didn’t look at it at all, and to me, that’s part of being human. We ignore that. Um, and so I found my own way. Well, this I started uh looking at traditions from the east, incorporating it some of my psychology studies with um eastern traditions. You know, I was raised Catholic, so there’s all and and have a connection with that Christ. So always um, you know, weave that into as well and refer to that. But I don’t belong to any one particular tradition these days.
SPEAKER_03:
I love that.
SPEAKER_01:
I love that you’re free-flowing and that that you accept your there’s an acceptance of of spirit and higher level consciousness. And you’ve written a book on this conscious relationships, which I believe really needs to be promoted. So let me know when it does release or release already. I’ll let you know. So how can we we purchase it on your website then?
SPEAKER_05:
You can get it on the website, it’s available on Amazon, or you can order it if you want to support your local bookstore, you can order it there.
SPEAKER_01:
Okay. I’d rather support the author directly, so because I’m an author myself and I understand what that’s like.
SPEAKER_05:
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:
And so and how much work we put into um to the books.
SPEAKER_05:
Oh, I know. And I saw on your website you got like four or five books. Wow, congrats, congrats.
SPEAKER_01:
Um it’s just it’s a lot. It’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of dedication, and but it’s it’s still worth it because your story matters. It could be the reason why somebody doesn’t take their life. They can say, hey, I love I love a story and I feel like I have purpose and I’m gonna go for it.
SPEAKER_04:
Agreed.
SPEAKER_01:
Um or I don’t have a good relationship with God and I want one. And so I’m gonna go for it. I’m gonna just tune inward and kind of see if my journey resonates with yours in any way, right? So I really appreciate your time today, Christian. It was such an authentic and real and raw conversation that I know my listeners that release that reveal purpose will just love. I’ve loved interviewing you. I loved having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Any last words before we sign off?
SPEAKER_05:
Well, just kind of weaving in both both books, the messages from both books is that we all have within us the the right um to have a sense of empowerment and the and the tools and the skills to have a sense of personal power, um, and to have relationships that actually have a chance of working. It just requires going within and removing what’s gotten in the way of them, right? All the conditioning that we were talking about earlier, all the BS.
SPEAKER_04:
Yes.
SPEAKER_05:
Um, all the the mistakes and the misunderstandings and the limited definitions of of love and the mistaken definitions of what relationships are meant to be. Um, and we can figure this out for ourselves. And yeah, I’m not gonna lie to you, it takes work. It takes going within and figuring out, right? What is so worth it? So worth it. So worth it.
SPEAKER_01:
Nobody wants to live in darkness, everybody wants to live in joy and in light. And for the listeners of release doubt, reveal purpose, remember Matthew 5.14, be the light. Have a wonderful week, everybody.
SPEAKER_03:
Stay safe. Love you all. Bye now.
SPEAKER_00:
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt, Reveal Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes. We’ll win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a twenty-five thousand dollar private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.