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 Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay.
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And me, Simone Boyce.
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Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.
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I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side.
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You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share.
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 Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
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Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.
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 Guess what, Will?
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What's up, Mango?
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I've been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we've done over 250 episodes, we don't really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you're saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we're the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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It's a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
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Let's learn about all of it, and then some.
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Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
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Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.
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 Are you in a toxic negative place and need to get out of it?
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Are you looking for better ways to navigate life, career, love, friendship and more?
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Then Genius is for you.
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I do a few free workshops a year for the public, but the majority of the time I'm going live in weekly private Genius workshops and meditations.
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 It's been shown that just 90 days of Genius workshops and meditations improve happiness by 40%, reduce anxiety by 25% and increase daily motivation by 75%.
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It's incredible.
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But how does it work?
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Genius lets you access personal coaching with me in 3 different ways.
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 You'll meet me inside weekly live coaching workshops and meditations with the group.
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You'll be able to access hours and hours of personal coaching with me on the Genius app.
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And you'll get to go on Genius journeys and experience curated workshop sequences that are designed to achieve a specific goal for you.
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You can sign up at jscheddygenius.com today.
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I can't wait to welcome you into the Genius community.
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See you on the inside.
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SPEAKER_02
 Have you ever experienced heartbreak?
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Have you had a recent breakup or are you still struggling to get over a love from months or even years ago?
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If so, this episode is for you.
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But even if you're in a happy relationship, I promise there will be some wisdom for you today as well.
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 I know that one of the areas where so many of us have been experiencing stress and strain during this pandemic is in our relationships.
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Today we're talking about heartbreak and how to deal with it.
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Not just how to deal with it, but how to really, truly heal from it.
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And so it doesn't matter if your heartbreak is fresh or if it's from a long time ago, or maybe you're hurting from just a few disagreements in your current relationship.
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 Today I'm going to share with you three ways we love, why that matters, and four big questions and exercises for real, lasting healing.
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 First, I wanted us to look a bit about the nature of love.
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Because when we understand the type of love we want to feel, we can identify when we've healed from heartbreak.
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I'll say that again, when you really understand love and what you want to feel, then you'll know when your heart has truly healed from past hurts.
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 I'll explain how it works.
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There's an idea about love that I came across recently, and that's that we fall in love with three different people in our lifetime, or that there are three different ways we love.
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This is an idea that's appeared in many places, and I think that there's some real truth there, but I also think there are a few things we're missing that are causing some of our biggest challenges when it comes to having successful relationships and to feeling lasting love in our lives.
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 Now I want you to close your eyes for a moment, not if you're driving or walking or chopping vegetables obviously, but take a screenshot of this and come back to this moment.
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But if you can, close your eyes and just think back for a moment to your first romantic love.
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Who was the first person you fell in love with?
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 It doesn't matter if you were 10 years old, or 16, or 26, or 36, or 46.
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What was that relationship like?
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Maybe they loved you back, or maybe they didn't.
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Maybe you felt that obsessive desire to see and speak to them as much as possible.
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Maybe you're in that place right now.
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 The first way we love, for some of us, it's the first person we fall in love with, is called the love that looks right.
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That is the love where we can't eat, we can't sleep, we can't focus on our work because we're always thinking about the other person.
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 And in this love, provided that person loves us back, we mostly try and mimic relationships as we've seen them in popular media.
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We buy gifts, we write love songs, we maybe ditch our friends.
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We stand outside their bedroom window in the rain with a boombox over our heads blasting Ray J, One Wish.
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 I experienced that when I was in elementary school.
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I had my first huge crush on a girl and I absolutely obsessed over her.
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But here's the thing about the love that looks right.
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It's rarely grounded in our deepest self.
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It's rarely from a place of true love.
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Instead again, we're mostly mimicking the behavior we think we're supposed to engage in when we're in love.
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 and we mostly go for people who we think are supposed to be right for us, even if they aren't.
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It's a lot about externals.
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I remember just thinking and obsessing over this girl and that was exactly it.
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All the highs and lows I felt were just a replication of what I thought I was supposed to feel and behave like when I had a crush on someone.
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That's what I'd seen in the movies and those images are so strong and vivid that they stay in our minds.
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 This can also be called early stage love.
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 For many of us, early love often feels like an addiction.
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And brain science now shows us why.
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Researchers took several groups of people.
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One group described their feelings toward their partners as steady and long-lasting.
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And these people had mostly been with their partner for a while.
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Others described their feeling towards their partner as more obsessive.
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The scientists put each of these people in a brain scanner and watched their brains while they looked at photos of their partner.
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 Among those who described feeling a more obsessive love, areas of their brain lit up that correspond with addiction.
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But not so for the first group.
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So in many ways we really can be addicted to love or our perception of what love is.
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 And by the way, this early stage love behavior is not a bad thing.
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It's only negative if we don't move out of this phase and into a more lasting and contented stage within a few weeks or months.
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Or if the obsession goes overboard and we become overly possessive or unhealthy fixated on the other person.
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 Usually this addiction is characterized by the idea of lust.
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We think we're in love, but actually we're in lust.
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Lust doesn't just mean physical attraction.
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Lust means that fascination, that curiosity, that obsession with the new, with the exciting, with the enthralling.
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We start with lust and we think it goes to love next, but it doesn't.
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It actually goes to learning.
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 And that's what I mean by moving out of that lust stage into that learning stage.
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Often we lust after people we barely understand or barely know.
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When we learn about them, we can elevate to love or we can realize it's time to leave.
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 The second way we love or type of love experience that I've read about and heard about is called hard love.
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This is the relationship or the time in a relationship where you learned difficult lessons, where you experienced pain.
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Now think back to whether you've had that type of relationship and who it was with, and maybe with more than one person.
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 In this relationship, at least for a time, you hung on.
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You tried to keep it going because you wanted to make it work.
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Maybe there were intense highs and lows.
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The good times were phenomenal.
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But then, every time at some point, things would come crashing down.
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You fought a lot.
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There was a lack of trust.
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There were fights and friction.
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You gave too much of yourself.
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 And again, maybe some of you are there right now.
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Maybe it feels like just about everything is uphill or a constant roller coaster.
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 These experiences are definitely hard, but learning those relationship lessons is important.
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When we truly metabolize them, they put us in a position to have better, stronger relationships in the future.
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We all make mistakes of some sort in our early relationships.
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Pretty much no one is immune from that, myself included.
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But we can learn and grow from them.
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Or they can leave us with deep emotional wounds and we'll come back to that in just a minute.
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 When you find that bright spot to help you get through your day, it's powerful.
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That's where The Bright Side comes in.
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A new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine that's bringing you a daily dose of joy.
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I'm Danielle Robay.
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And I'm Simone Boyce.
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Listen, both Danielle and I are reporters.
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We've covered the news and we know the world can feel heavy, but The Bright Side podcast is a space to have a little fun, to learn something new and get into some friendly debates.
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 That's right.
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Join us five days a week to see how life can look from the bright side.
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We'll hear from celebrities, authors, experts and listeners like you, whether it's relationships, friend advice or figuring out how to navigate life's transitions.
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We'll talk through it all together.
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Listen to the bright side from Hello Sunshine every weekday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
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Radios were smashed.
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Cassettes burned.
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You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
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And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
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 The danger they endured.
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They said my head should be cut off.
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The joy they brought to the nation.
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You're free completely.
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No one is there to destroy you.
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I'm John Legend.
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Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Parents, ready to discover a new educational and interactive podcast for kids?
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Join Stories for Kids by Lingokids, where episodes are packed with fun activities.
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Right, Elliot?
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Oh, yes!
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We learned how to recycle at the beach.
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 That was great fun!
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Cowie, what do you say?
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It was!
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And that time when we did the science experiment and Billy made raisins dance!
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That is so cool, Billy!
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He did!
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Not to mention when a certain Elliot took up swimming classes with Lisa.
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That was me!
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Bet you can't catch me!
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I'm going to get you!
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 All this fun and more in our Stories for Kids.
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Lingokids Stories for Kids is now available on Story Button, the kid-friendly device for screenless podcast listening.
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Listen to Stories for Kids on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The third way we love is what we all dream of.
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 It's the love that lasts.
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Have you ever heard someone say, I never knew what love was until I met my current partner or my spouse?
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If you've experienced that yourself, you know what I'm talking about.
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The love that lasts is the kind of love experience that is so supportive, where the other person loves you for exactly who you are, where you feel like that person wants you to be the best version of yourself, and where you can truly be yourself.
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The first time I felt that kind of love,
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 was when I was 18 years old.
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The person who connected me with that feeling was a monk.
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In fact, love that lasts doesn't have to be limited to romantic love as we sometimes think.
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If you've read my book, Think Like a Monk, you know this story.
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The first time I ever heard a monk speak, I was in college and some friends dragged me to a talk by a man named Gaurangadas.
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 Incidentally, Goranga Das is still one of my great friends and teachers, and I interviewed him on this show a few months ago.
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And so please go back and check that out if you missed it.
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He shares some incredible wisdom from the monk perspective.
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 This third kind of love, the love that lasts, is what I think of as universal love.
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There's a spiritual path called bhakti yoga that isn't at all to do with what we usually think of as yoga, the poses or the positions that you see in a yoga studio, but it's to do with cultivating a total devotion to love in all forms.
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All of the kinds of love we can experience, love for our family and friends, love for nature, for animals, romantic love,
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 God love, universal love, planet love, earth love, all of it is encompassed by universal love.
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It's what we think of as unconditional love.
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And one of the things that I think it's helpful for us to understand is that this last kind of love, this universal love or the love that lasts,
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 This type of love is not different from the first two types of love.
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It's not different from the obsessive love and from the hard love.
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It actually encompasses these ways we love.
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When you feel the love that lasts, it has this feeling of pain along with it sometimes too.
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If you've felt it, you know what I mean.
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 And that's not just with romantic love.
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I've heard my friends with kids talk about that too.
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They love their children and so much and so completely, there's almost a pain to it.
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Or even love for your pets or other animals can make you feel it.
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Because we care so deeply.
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And it's because we've learned that in life, inevitably, there is always some pain associated with love.
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 Whether that's because the other person intentionally or unintentionally hurts us, or because we're aware that someday, inevitably, as time passes, we will no longer be together in this way.
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That we may lose them.
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We want love to be pain-free, but that's not love.
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It's not deep love anyway.
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It's not the love that will last.
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 In a conversation with Oprah, Buddhist monk Pema Chodron said, you can't know how to love unless you also know how to hurt.
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Often in our lives, love makes us make the biggest sacrifices, takes on the biggest stress, takes on the most pressure.
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Love is not about peace.
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Love is about accepting stress for the one that we love.
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 Of course, that stress doesn't mean accepting emotional or physical abuse, but it can be going through difficult times together to truly fall more in love with each other.
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What we need to do is learn to recognize and separate this kind of pain, the kind that's a natural part of universal love, from the pain caused by injury, by wounds.
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That's the pain we need to heal.
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And incidentally, Pema Chodron knows about both types of pain.
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 Before she became a monk, she was married several times and had an extremely painful breakup when she discovered her second husband had been cheating on her.
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So let's talk about how we address that pain from wounds that we probably got when we experienced hard love.
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See, that's the pain you want to heal.
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The pain and the stress you get from experiencing a loving, fulfilling relationship, that's not what needs to be healed.
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 For many of us, even if we moved on to other relationships, some part of us is still stuck in the hurt of the heartbreak we've had before.
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And one of the reasons for that is we don't know how to do something I call WISE HEALING.
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That's an acronym, W-I-S-E, for weakness,
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 insights, service, and expansion.
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Those are the four steps we're going to take to heal.
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If you've listened to me for any length of time, you probably know that one of my big loves is football, or as Americans call it, soccer.
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As a longtime football fan, I've watched many, many games, easily hundreds.
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And over my many decades of being a fan, I've seen many player injuries as well.
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 Because if you're playing the game long enough, you're going to get hurt in some way at some time, right?
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Of course, the same is true with love.
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There are two common responses to injuries.
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We either take a lot of ibuprofen or paracetamol or try and numb the pain.
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And maybe we take a short break or we bandage our wound.
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But then we get back to the game as soon as possible.
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 In love, we ignore our pain.
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We tell ourselves that person didn't matter.
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Then we fire up the dating apps and do our best to move on and to meet someone new as quickly as we can.
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The other common response is that we take time off and rest.
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We stop playing the game entirely and lay on our couch.
0
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 In love, it's similar.
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We're on the couch, not going out, not talking to anyone.
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We're watching sad movies and eating chocolate or ice cream.
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I promise I'm not talking about myself.
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And then eventually we start to feel a bit better and a bit better.
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And then finally, maybe we're ready to date again.
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And then we get back out there.
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 Here's the problem with both of these strategies.
0
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It's not that either is bad or wrong, but neither truly heals us.
0
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We've still got a wound that's been untreated.
0
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Here's what not treating injuries properly looks like in the human body.
0
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Let's say you tear a hamstring muscle.
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When a muscle tears, your body doesn't replace that muscle tissue with more muscle tissue.
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It can't.
0
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 The only thing it can do is replace it with something called collagen which is more dense and less flexible than muscle tissue.
0
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And because collagen is replaced in kind of a haphazard way it interferes with the way the muscle functions and you're more likely to get injured at the same spot again.
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Or you're more likely to develop a new injury because you're trying to protect that spot from getting hurt.
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Our hearts and our minds are the same way when we get hurt emotionally.
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 So how do we truly heal?
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With a muscle injury, we focus on the site of the injury.
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A physiotherapist might do some massage to break up the scar tissue and they give us exercises to do what will help strengthen us.
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That will cause the collagen fibers in the wound to actually line up with our muscle fibers.
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And you know what's really amazing about that?
0
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Because collagen is a lot stronger than muscle.
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When we take the time and put in the work to heal this way, we actually become stronger in the injured place.
0
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 And once again, your heart and your mind are the same way.
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Ernest Hemingway once wrote, we're stronger in the places that we've been broken.
0
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I agree and I love that quote, but only if we practice wise healing.
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You can think of me as your love physiotherapist because I'm getting cheesy now, but because I'm giving you these four exercises designed to help you get stronger in the places where your heart has been broken.
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 So, our first step in wise healing is that we find our site of weakness.
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We find the site of the wound and we actually pan out from there.
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When a physiotherapist helps you heal your quad, they don't give you a bunch of difficult exercises to start with.
0
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Otherwise, you would just get hurt again.
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 When we're suffering from a breakup, when we're in that pain space, we tend to over-focus on this wounded part of our identity.
0
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And so even though we have many other aspects of our lives and of who we are, this gets all the focus.
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We over-emphasize its impact on our life.
0
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 Our first wise healing exercise is based on the idea of a mind map where you get a big blank piece of paper and you put a topic or a goal in the middle and then you write down any ideas or thoughts that come to you that are related to that goal or that topic.
0
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It can be a great way to organize your thoughts or to brainstorm.
0
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We're going to do something similar but in this mind map it's more of a heart map.
0
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 So screenshot this because you're going to want to come back to this.
0
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You're going to get out a big piece of paper.
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It's easier to do this by hand rather than a computer.
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And you're going to write the word me in the middle and circle it.
0
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And now you're going to ask yourself this question.
0
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What are the other parts of my identity beyond being a romantic partner to someone?
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And what did they mean to me?
0
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 Okay, stop judging your handwriting right now.
0
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It's fine.
0
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Just go with it.
0
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You're not sharing this anywhere.
0
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You might share an Instagram later if it's a work of art.
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You're going to write down the other roles you play in life.
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You'll draw a line from me and maybe you'll write sister or brother.
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You'll draw another line and write co-worker or another line and write parent.
0
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What are all of the roles you play in your life?
0
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 Once you've done that, you're going to choose the two most prominent roles in your life.
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So maybe that's daughter and boss, or father and brother.
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And next to each of those, you're going to jot down three to five sentences about what those roles mean to you.
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Why are they important to you?
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What do you bring to others or to the world in those roles?
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 So again, you write me in the middle, draw lines from it with one line to each of the various roles you play in your life, and for your two most important roles, write three to five sentences about each of those and what they mean to you and what impact they make in the world overall.
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 What this exercise does is remind us of who we are, which is more than just our wounds.
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We're much more than our heartbreak.
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From this supported place and from this place of greater perspective, we're ready for the next exercise, which is eye for insights.
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Lots of you know that I'm a big fan of the filmmaker Christopher Nolan.
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When I was thinking about healing from heartbreak, I thought about his most recent movie, Tenet.
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 Don't worry, I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it.
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I'll just say that there's an element of that movie that's to do with going back in time and being able to examine and interact with what happened in the past in order to change the future.
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We can do this with our wounds.
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When the physiotherapist does this, they apply manual massage and maybe some cryotherapy or some electrical stimulation to the site of our wound to help break up the collagen so it can be reformed and reorganized.
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 In our case, we're going to go to the site of our wound as well to gain some insights that will make us stronger going forward.
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So again, take a screenshot, get your paper out, or this time you can use the Notes app.
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Your question that you're going to answer is...
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 What insights can I gain from this experience?
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Or, more specifically, what did I learn about myself in this relationship?
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Maybe you learned that you really don't want to be with someone who doesn't share your values.
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Like, they don't want a family.
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Maybe you realized that kids are a deal-breaker issue for you.
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Maybe you learned that you really need to be with someone who makes healthy choices because you need or just really prefer that kind of lifestyle and support.
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 Take 30 minutes to an hour and write it all down.
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A full hour is great because you want time to really go deep.
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The surface answers will come quickly.
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The deeper answers take more time.
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Wear something cozy, get a mug of tea, sit in front of a fire, do this in a setting and in a way that feels comfortable and supportive.
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 because you might come across some uncomfortable realizations, and that's good.
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You may feel excited or energized by some things, and others may not feel so great, but just like getting scar tissue massage, some discomfort often accompanies healing.
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If we can't let ourselves go there, we can't truly heal.
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 Love can make us blind to others' faults and challenges.
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And our desire to feel good about ourselves can make us blind to our own missteps.
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When we love someone, we overlook things.
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We don't see annoying or even destructive habits and behaviors.
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This exercise helps us look at those things now with fresh eyes.
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 Here's another question you can try.
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What did I do well in this relationship and what did I not want to repeat?
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Maybe you found yourself always putting your needs first and not truly listening to your partner.
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Or maybe you feel like you did a really good job of being clear about your needs and drawing healthy boundaries, yet your partner was not in a place of being able to do that or to respect your boundaries.
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Again, write it all down.
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 And again, you see these are not easy surface questions.
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We're looking for the deep stuff.
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When Pema Chodron looked back on her marriage, she found something surprising.
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She says, I didn't realize how attached I was to having someone else confirm me as being okay.
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It didn't come from inside me.
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It came from someone else's view of me.
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 Once she understood that, she knew she no longer wanted to rely on others for her sense of self-esteem.
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It was a painful realization, but it helped her shift something major in how she related to herself and those around her.
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 Now we're onto the S in wise for service.
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One of the things that I think is beautiful is that when we are connected to love in our lives, we're connected to all love.
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When we feel the micro of our love in our specific relationships, it connects us to the macro of all the love that's in the world.
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Similarly, when we experience heartbreak, we can more acutely feel the heartbreak in the world.
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 we resonate with others' pain.
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And so while on one hand that might make us feel like we want to hide from some of the other pain in the world, if we learn to help heal that pain, we can help to heal our own.
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According to the researchers at the University of Notre Dame who followed 2,000 people over a five-year period, those who characterized themselves as very happy volunteered an average of 5.8%