The Loveable Podcast

“We've been taught to believe life is only meaningful if we're getting from here to there—doing a lot, becoming more important, accruing more stuff, feeling safer, and increasing our comfort. Even the good work of redeeming the world can become its own straight line, as we single-handedly try to move the world from Point A… The post The Conclusion to the Loveable Podcast [Loveable 054] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Your true self folded in upon itself never ceases to be your truest you. Your soul is bigger and more beautiful and more mysterious than you can possible imagine. It has been folded in upon itself by people and by experience and by life. But it need not remain that way.” One of the most… The post Week 52: Reflecting Upon the Unfolding of Your Truest Self [Loveable 053] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Fear about the future becomes bravery in the present becomes joy in hindsight. Joy is knowing you can be scared and still ride through life. Joy is being terrified and trusting you'll survive it. Joy is believing in yourself enough to believe you are brave.” Joy and happiness are not the same thing. In fact, they may… The post Week 51: How All This Passion, Pain, and Courage Add Up to Joy [Loveable 052] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Courage is ignoring the jeers and feeling the fears. Courage is returning to the edge of our comfort zone and choosing the place where our fear dwells, because we are worthy of another chance at life. Regardless of what the critics say.” People who experience success aren't better at being successful; they are better at… The post Week 50: The Courage to Fail [Loveable 051] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Life is a gift in terrifying disguise, and we are here to open it, until we find the still-quiet place in the center of it, where fear no longer decides.” In Episode 50 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about fear. It is an important emotion. It causes us to buckle our seatbelts, run out of burning buildings,… The post Week 49: What to Do When Our Feelings Are Lying to Us [Loveable 050] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

The so-called good life is a hollow promise. It's empty of the things we desire most, like passion, purpose, and peace. It bores us. Makes us restless. We crave something else. We ultimately crave a redemptive life. In Episode 49 of The Loveable Podcast, we shift our focus slightly to something that will clarify not what our passion… The post Week 48: The Good Life vs. the Redemptive Life [Loveable 049] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“We are healed when we reveal our mess to another and put our real self on the line. When we connect in our brokenness—not in spite of it—we discover what makes us messy is also what makes us beautiful. And we give everyone around us permission to be broken and beautiful, too…A world torn apart by invincibility can only be… The post Week 47: What a Life of Vulnerability Really Looks Like [Loveable 048] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Life doesn't have an easy setting. Remembering who you are isn't an all-or-nothing endeavor. It's not a pass-fail assignment. The truth is much closer to this: life is like a sieve and everything we do runs through it. If we watch closely, we'll notice passing through the sieve all those things that aren't really us.… The post Week 46: You Aren't Here to Be More Happy (You Are Here to Be More You) [Loveable 047] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert In Episode 46 of The Loveable Podcast, we are focused on taking the space in your life created by last week's exercise and doing something a little counterintuitive with it—we are going to build some monotony into it.… The post Week 45: Why the Most Mundane Life Is Sometimes the Most Passionate Life [Loveable 046] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Sometimes, life gets too cramped to move in any new direction. Sometimes, the direction we need to go is backward. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is to undo the best things we've done.” In Episode 45 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on quitting some of the things we added to our lives before we gained clarity about… The post Week 44: The Beauty of Becoming a Quitter [Loveable 045] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“If you were given permission to simply be more you, what would you do? Start speaking up? Standing up? Standing out? Walking out? Reaching out? Pouring out? Sitting in? Giving in? Giving up? Opening up? To what? Dance lessons? Photography school? Medical school? Dropping out of school? Starting a band? Starting a business? Starting a movement?… The post Week 43: Don't Do Something More Meaningful (Do Something More You) [Loveable 044] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Yes, the extraordinary is a gift some of us receive at rare, fleeting moments. But our humanity is the ordinary gift we are, all of us, always receiving all the time.” In Episode 43 of The Loveable Podcast, we are once again tackling the voice of shame, which undermines the practicing of our passions by convincing us that those passions… The post Week 42: Don't Try to Be More Extraordinary (Try to Be More Human) [Loveable 043] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

In the words of Frederick Buechner, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key… The post Week 41: How Five Senseless Days Could Make Sense of the Rest of Your Days [Loveable042] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Hope can be a beautiful thing, because it gives us direction and imbues our lives with a sense of purpose and meaning. But hope can also be the worst of things, because sometimes we settle for having a direction, rather than walking in that direction. Sometimes, our numbered days are spent hoping and waiting, instead of acting and living.” In Episode… The post Week 40: How Hopelessness Can Become Our Best Hope [Loveable041] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“We have a list of things we think must be accomplished inside of us before we can start taking risks outside of us. We think, Once I'm more confident, I'll start dating. Once I'm more patient, I'll have children. Once I'm wise enough, I'll start a blog. Once my insides look as orderly as everyone else looks… The post Week 39: The Blessing of Being Unfinished [Loveable 040] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Sometimes the simplest, most elegant, most life-changing solutions are right in front of our noses. But we can't see them, because we are locked in to old schemas. A schema is a mental framework that helps organize and interpret information in the world around us. Schemas are essential when we need to act quickly and decisively. But schemas… The post Week 38: What If a Resurrected Life Isn't as Impossible as It May Seem? [Loveable 039] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Sometimes, joy is simply undone things finally lived. We need to keep the door of our hearts open, so we can listen to our urges and our wants. Many of them are trying to lead us into joy. Yet, when we've been shutting the door on them for so long, it can be hard to break… The post Week 37: When You Think You Don't Know How to Live [Loveable 038] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“You have things you've always wanted to do with your life. Ways you've wanted to spend your days. Passions you've wanted to practice. Hobbies you've wanted to make a habit of. Love you've wanted to spread in the form of a vocation. Care you've wanted to give in the form of a calling. The things… The post Week 36: Why Wanting Is the Way to Truly Living [Loveable 037] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Let's admit it: we're obsessed with winning. Just look around. Everything has become a competition. Our will-to-win is everywhere, and it's not going anywhere. But what if we gave it something better to do? What if we all decided to compete at a game called kindness?” In Episode 36 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about how to take our instinct… The post Week 35: The Kindness Challenge [Loveable 036] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Sometimes, we fight so we don't have to feel. Sometimes, we trade jeers so we don't have to trade tears…and that's a problem. Because the solutions to our most pressing concerns don't lie within the heated exchange of our ideas; they lie at the bottom of our grief. If we don't get better at grieving, we can't… The post Week 34: Let's Hold Each Other Like We're Dying [Loveable 035] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“True intimacy is not the absence of privacy or the absence of boundaries or the absence of a separate self—in fact, we need to have our own spaces and limits and identity. True intimacy is the absence of secrets.” The quality of your belonging will be inversely correlated with the size of your secrets. The more… The post Week 33: The Healing Is in the Emptying [Loveable 034] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Relationships can grow stale and stuck. Perhaps that's just the way life goes and the way love ages. But maybe, just maybe, we can fall into love again by learning how to pay attention again—by giving up all of our judgment and assessment and critique and meeting our people in the field of awareness, instead of upon the… The post Week 32: Becoming Students of the People We Belong To [Loveable 033] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“You have a relationship gift. Something you are naturally good at. A way of loving that no one else can do in exactly the way you do it…You can stop being humble about it. You can stop suppressing it and burying it. You can stop being an amateur at it. Own it. Claim it. Inhabit it.… The post Week 31: Turning Pro at the Art of Loving [Loveable 032] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Relationships do not thrive on big things; they thrive upon small things done every day. They don't thrive necessarily on doing new things; they thrive upon doing old things we used to do and quit doing somewhere along the way. And, if we can set aside our ego for a little while, we don't need… The post Week 30: Letting Grace Show Us How to Love [Loveable 031] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“To live from our soul—the great, powerful, divine thing at the center of us—is, paradoxically, to become aware of our dependence on other souls. When the bad stuff happens, it's a chance to rely on the good stuff in other people. And the people who bring the good stuff are the people we belong to.”… The post Week 29: Embracing Your Limitations and Being Embraced by Your People [Loveable 030] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Once upon a time, before our wounds and our world made us forget, we knew the good things about us were true. We believed them so thoroughly it didn't hurt to hear them spoken to us.” In Episode 29 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on the art of receiving compliments. You see, for most of us,… The post Week 28: Learning How to Take a Compliment [Loveable 029] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“When our egos lose, our hearts win.” In Episode 28 of The Loveable Podcast, we dive deep into the topic of empathy, including how essential it is for true belonging, and the five barriers to cultivating it and communicating it. It's time to exchange protection for connection. It's time to quit living from your ego and… The post Week 27: The Essential Building Block of Belonging [Loveable 028] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“The world we live in is aching with loneliness. Yet, we are rarely aware of it, because in a loud and crowded world, loneliness has a thousand busy disguises.” In Episode 27 of The Loveable Podcast, we discuss how our mass connection culture produces fake news and fake belonging, we explore the necessary requirements for true belonging,… The post Week 26: The Opposite of Loneliness [Loveable 027] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“I'm not going to worry very much about offending people anymore, which means I need you to tell me when I do, so I can think about it and decide if I need to apologize.” This is the one sentence that can change the way you love and live. In Episode 26 of The Loveable… The post Week 25: The One Sentence That Can Change Your Love and Life [Loveable 026] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Your time on this big rock is limited, so it is probably a waste of your time to spend it trying to convince people who cannot see the goodness of your heart that it is, indeed, good.” Finding true belonging is not just about finding people, it is also about letting some people go. In Episode… The post Week 24: The Other Most Important Thing to Look for in a Best Friend [Loveable 025] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Belonging is built on bravery.”   Most of us, when we are looking for someone to belong to—whether in marriage or friendship or anywhere else—look for someone who seems either perfect, or a perfect fit. Neither exist. In Episode 24 of The Loveable Podcast we explore what else we might look for in our relationships. Hint: it… The post Week 23: The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Best Friend [Loveable 024] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Every opinion is a story in disguise…Every belief is a story fashioned into a worldview.”   Episode 23 of The Loveable Podcast is all about opinions, opinionated people, and how to go deeper than our opinions in order to form true belonging. We wear our opinions like armor, and this week we're going to talk about how… The post Week 22: Putting Stories Before Opinions [Loveable 023] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Anger isn't an inherently bad thing. Anger becomes a destructive thing when we allow it to become a reactive thing instead of harnessing it as a guiding thing.”   In Episode 21 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on what to do with the anger around us and the anger within us. How do we know when… The post Week 21: Finding the Fear Underneath All the Fury [Loveable 022] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Walls are everywhere in our world…We build them so big they are the only things we create that can be seen from space. It's like we're advertising to the universe, ‘Walls matter on this big, spinning rock!' But perhaps the biggest walls, the most important walls, are the ones that cannot be seen at all…the… The post Week 20: What to Do with Your Walls [Loveable 021] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

There are two kinds of loneliness. The first kind is a natural and inevitable part of being human—it exists because you exist. The second kind of loneliness, however, is a loneliness of our own creation. And that's good news, because if we can create it, we can also uncreate it.  In Episode 20 of The… The post Week 19: From Limping Lonely to Loving Together [Loveable 020] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Places of belonging are not meant to be places where our loneliness is taken away. They are meant to be places where we reveal our loneliness to one another…Once you have made your loneliness available to one of your people, you will no longer need to eradicate it. You will be able to touch it without fear and… The post Week 18: A Kid Named Lonely [Loveable 019] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Experiencing our worthiness does not lead us to believe we are self-sufficient; it helps us to be at peace with the knowledge that we are insufficient. We are interconnected. Interdependent. As big as a limitless soul, but as small and as fragile as a human body.” In Episode 18 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus… The post Week 17: The One Illusion We Cannot Afford to Believe In [Loveable 018] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Grace is what happens when someone or Someone sees through our many masks, recognizing and celebrating the innocent little one that still resides beneath all of our disguises…Grace is the assurance that everyone is of equal value and equally worthy, so all you have to do to be loved is show up.” In Episode 17… The post Week 16: The Fear (and Joy) of Removing the Masks We Wear [Loveable 017] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Ann Lamott once wrote, ‘The grace of age is radical self-acceptance.' Life is messy and we human creatures are messy. Life isn't about eliminating the mess; it's about embracing the mess.” In Episode 16 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on accepting our messy selves by first accepting the chaos of everyday living. It's fun… The post Week 15: The Mess Will Set You Free! [Loveable 016] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Guilt is shame redeemed by grace. Shame tells us we are lousy; guilt tells us we did something lousy. Shame whispers, “Your mistakes define you,” but guilt proclaims, “We are defined by redemption, not by transgression.” In Episode 15 of The Loveable Podcast, we are focusing on clarifying the difference between shame and guilt, because it is the difference between… The post Week 14: The Life-Changing Difference Between Shame and Guilt [Loveable 015] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Perfection is overrated. Competition makes us common. The game is over. You are here to be unique. You are here to be you. Enjoy the freedom of that.” In Episode 14 of The Loveable Podcast, we focus on not just accepting, but embracing, our quirks and flaw and idiosyncracies and wounds and weirdness. When shame… The post Week 13: Embracing Your Valuable Flaws [Loveable 014] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Grace isn't just acceptance of the status quo. Grace contains the status quo—all of our struggle and pain and mess—and embraces us and values us anyway. Grace demands that nothing be changed for love and connection to happen, and that kind of love has power.”  In Episode 13 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about… The post Week 12: The Voice of Grace [Loveable 013] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Maybe growing up and growing healthy is as simple as discerning which voices to allow in, and learning how to keep the rest of the voices out.” In last week's episode, we began to focus on the voice of shame all of us hear on the inside of us. Now, in this twelfth episode of… The post Week 11: Choosing Which Voices to Listen to Around You [Loveable 012] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“There is a place inside of you where a better voice is telling a better story about you. Let the next chapter of your story be about listening for that voice.” In Episode 11 of The Loveable Podcast, we define shame, describe how it can be recognized in our experience, and explore how the concept of story… The post Week 10: Why Shame Is the Beginning of Your Story (Not the End of It) [Loveable 011] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“Embracing your worthiness is up to you and you alone—we cannot truly receive love until we have embraced that we are worthy of love. However, we all need someone to walk with us as we do so. We don't depend upon this person for our sense of worth, but we can lean upon them when… The post Week 9: What to Do When Your Heart Feels Like a Jungle [Loveable 010] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

Emotional healing and spiritual growth are not about eliminating our pain; they are about approaching our pain. Rather than moving away from our pain, we learn how to move toward it, enduring it, learning from it, transforming it, and eventually moving through it, to where we find our true self. In Episode 9 of The… The post Week 8: The Small Gate and Narrow Road Back to Your True Self [Loveable 009] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“This is the promise of your pain: to relate to it properly, you must learn how to observe it, and as you learn to observe it, you begin, for the first time, to fully inhabit the soul within you that is doing the observing. This week, begin to inhabit your soul once again. Welcome home.” … The post Week 7: You Are Not Your Thoughts (You Are the Observer of Your Thoughts) [Loveable 008] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

“You already are what you are becoming. You don't build what you are; you chip away at what you are not. We are, each of us, like blocks of wood, and becoming our true self is the gradual process of carving away the excess and steadily becoming more and more the shape of what we… The post Week 6: Unbecoming Who You Are Not [Loveable 007] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

What is the only thing worse than not getting what you want? Getting what you want. Because after you get what you want, you will probably realize it wasn't the hoped-for solution to all of your problems. And then what? In Episode 6 of The Loveable Podcast, we talk about our search for a solution… The post Week 5: Letting Go of the Solution to All of Your Problems [Loveable 006] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

What if all our efforts to improve ourselves are actually keeping us stuck, because, sometimes, self-help is just cleverly disguised self-rejection? And what if, sometimes, self-acceptance is the most helpful, most transformative thing of all? Welcome to Episode 5 of The Loveable Podcast, in which we read and discuss Week 4 of Loveable's companion book, … The post Week 4: Self-Acceptance Is the Foundation of All Self-Improvement [Loveable 005] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.

What if pain is an inevitable part of being alive, but suffering is not? And what if you could begin reducing your suffering right now, with a few simple practices? Join us for Episode 4 of The Loveable Podcast, as we read and discuss Week 3 of Loveable's companion book, which is available nowhere else…… The post Week 3: Replacing Suffering with Presence [Loveable 004] appeared first on Kelly Flanagan.