What is love? It's a question I've never seriously stopped to answer — and one that's surprisingly hard to get at.
In this solo episode, I share reflections from Love Camp, a retreat I hosted for 25 people, where only one participant raised their hand when asked if they had positive loving role models growing up. I explore what love actually looks like in practice — not the grand gestures we're sold, but the quiet, boring, mundane acts of showing up.
I read a letter I wrote to myself, share an email from my friend Kathy, and read some of my favorite quotes on love from M. Scott Peck and Rainer Maria Rilke — plus a Hawaiian prayer to close.
This episode won't give you a clean answer. But it might help you live the question a little better.
If you've ever found yourself asking what love actually is, why it hurts, or whether you're doing it right, this one's for you.
Maybe the answer isn't something we figure out.
Maybe we live our way into it.
Listener question from Sarah in British Columbia, Canada.
Featured quotes:
M. Scott Peck "Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
Rainer Maria Rilke "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Connect with Shaun:
Retreats and latest offerings: https://bit.ly/m/thelovedrive
Read my blog: https://shaungalanos.substack.com
The Love Drive Podcast: https://shaungalanos.com/podcast/
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More About Shaun: https://shaungalanos.com/about/
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