Leading With Love 💕

Hello, Cadre Sphere. I'm usually in bed by now, but today is a different day. So I'm gonna wait to see if anyone joins. But while we're waiting, I'll let you know that I am in the car. I am just leaving. Oh, you can see it's still cold in my car. Just. Just leaving a school, all school meeting. Hello, hello. Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's good to meet you. Please, please. I think it said drugguns. Maybe I got that right. Let me know in the chat. Kyle, buddy, welcome. Give me a shout out of where you are hanging out tonight.

I am making sure I'm in park. And as you can see, I'm coming to you live from my car. I am Anila. I am someone with an Alphabet soup of mental health conditions. So if you're new here, I'll tell you a little bit about me. I have compulsive hair pulling, which is called trichotillomania. And I used to pull from my eyebrows and my eyelashes since my. Since I was a young kid. And I also have had premenstrual dysphoric disorder, anxiety, depression, ocd. Hi, Shannon. You're in your car too. It's good to see you here.

So thanks for listening. Don't keep your eyes on the road, not on me. But yeah. I joined the Cadre sphere because I truly believe that love is the answer. And I know it sounds so d*** cheesy. Love is the answer. That's what people sing about and that kind of thing. But the more and more I read, you know, different scriptures from all walks of life, from all religions, all of these inspirational speeches from peoples of the past, it's all about love. It comes down to love. And the opposite of love is fear.

And we are living in a society that is so afraid and so today. Hi, Jules. Nice to see you. Got home from a four hour drive. Oh boy. From Fargo. Oh, yeah. That's a long drive. So I hope you're warming up by the fire with a hot cocoa or something after that drive. Getting. Getting ready to get some good rest. So leading with love. It is so incredibly difficult, especially in times like these when we are bombarded with things that make us feel anxious and scared and fearful of what's to come of the future.

And not everyone's feeling that way, which is a good thing. We don't want everything, everyone to be feeling that way. We need people to feel some hope right now. And we need to talk to those people and see what they see and understand what they see and why they see it. And that's leading with love. That. Not cutting these people out, but asking them and talking to them and trying to get down to what is it? What makes them feel so secure without the assumption of they are a certain type of person, if you will.

I'm talking, I think, a little bit in tongues right now, maybe partly because I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say right now, although I think I. I think I am sure, but I think. I don't think people are gonna want to hear it. And it's that we need to come together. And I know it's scary, but what I also have seen from the previous four years of Trump being in office is that a lot of it is just a show. It is just to rile us up. It is just to get us to feel this way. And when we resist that, that is how we lead with love, and that is how we stop this madness.

This guy can sign all the executive orders he wants, but we need to trust and have faith. That is the thing that every time in my life where I have gone awry is when I left my path of faith. And I'm not speaking to you about a specific religion. I'm speaking to you about a path of faith in the sense of just trusting that we're gonna be okay, that I'm gonna be okay, that my family's gonna be okay, the people around me are gonna be okay. And that keeps extending, right? Each one of us is a tiny drop in the ocean that adds up to the ocean.

You know, just today, the reason I'm sitting in a car right now is because I was in three hours of class school meetings. So my first son, my younger son's class meeting, then an all school meeting, and then my older son's class meeting. And in the all school meeting today was a alumni panel. So our school goes till 8th grade. My kids are in a private school, but it's not that kind of private school. I always have to kind of qualify it. We chose this school because it is giving our kids. It's giving our kids what we can't.

And it's been an education for me as a parent and an education in rebirthing myself as well. I'm learning so much about my own childhood through this work and through the partnership of myself and the teachers at this school. And so that's why we love this school. And so today was an alumni panel, and I'm going somewhere with this. The alumni panel is meant to. The school goes up to eighth grade. And around now, my older son's in fifth grade, around now, people start questioning, okay, middle school, do we stay?

Do we go? Blah, blah, blah. So the alumni panel is really there for parents to get a sense for what is life like in the middle school. And where do those kids wind up right after middle school? Do they adjust into the real world, if you will, for context? My kids go to a Waldorf school, which is a special, a different methodology of learning through whole body learning, it, meaning learning through the senses, learning through art, learning through movement, learning through rhythm. So my child, my 8 year old, 7 year old, can do the 9 times table because he's learned the song that goes with it and he gets it.

And the way that they, they learn with physical, through physical touch, through drawing, through making clay, through all these different motive methods that use both left and right brain and keep them present in the moment. And so that's why we're at this school. But it's a very different methodology than the real world. And so there is that concern of like, should we, is it time now to go to the real world as fifth grade, sixth grade, as middle school starts? So this alumni panel was meant to help ground the parents.

And there were two alumni on the panel today that were very much out of college. C. and then four of the other people on the panel were still in high school here in Minneapolis, where I live. And everyone said I turned out fine. And everyone also said, and the kids that I met in the high school that I went to also turned out fine. We worry about things we cannot see. We worry about things that are not there but may be there in the future. And when we do that, we create so much fear inside us and these scarcity mindsets that a lot of us are living with.

So I have to keep reminding myself every day to stay in faith that something good is going to come from all of this, from all of the pain that a lot of people have to go through or will go through, or may go through, or may put, choose to put themselves through, some good is going to come. And so the idea is to lead with love, to trust that process to still do the work. You know, we're gonna need to, to have the lawyers. As soon as something happens, boom, that lawsuit's got to get out there, right?

Like, there's gonna need to be that supportive system of who's doing the work and who can we support and how might we be doing the work and serving our communities. But we Also need to recognize when we are truly acting from a place of fear of the unknown versus love for what is right in front of us. And the closer we can stay to the now, I think the easier the next four years will be and that a lot of what we are gonna see and hear in the next four years is theatrics, is showtime, is the wrestling.

And so that is what I want to leave you with. And I also want to know your thoughts here. So tippy type, type away. I may be wrong. You know, I mean, this is just my one opinion and I'd love to know what you're thinking and where your head and heart is at. You know, like I said, like, some folks are sitting feeling good, feeling hopeful already. And those are the folks I want to talk to because I want to get there. I want to try to understand why some folks feel right and feeling good in what's happening in the world.

And I understand why some folks feel scared and feel unsure of the future and, you know, and not safe or just worried in general for either themselves or their loved ones. Like, I get it on that side and I want to understand on the other side. And Shannon, you, you exactly what you say. There's always a where fo a way forward. And you know, I'm listening to a lot of self help type stuff and right now I decided I'm gonna gift myself masterclass wanting it for a while. And right now I'm listening to Robin Roberts story.

She's a news anchor who had breast cancer and then got another difficult diagnosis with another type of blood cancer after a few years past the breast cancer. And she has this line, that's the mess is your message. And I have to believe that there is a higher power that is guiding every single one of us and that every challenge we are faced with, we are faced with it for a reason. And I say that. And as I say that, I am thinking about family who's, you know, in LA and still not sure if they have a house or, you know, people that I don't even know in Gaza who definitely don't have a home.

And it kind of feels really, really icky to say, oh well, that's happening for a reason because it's so, so, so unbearable. And I'm reminded by my therapist because I went into her one day crying about that and she just grounded me back to the Buddhist theology of suffering is inevitable. And to that I say, challenges may be inevitable, but we have a choice in the suffering. Like, take myself, I had a breast cancer diagnosis three years ago. And there were definitely days and moments where I went down that rabbit hole of, I'm going to not be here tomorrow, and this is gonna be h*** for me.

But on the whole, I took it as, okay, what are you here for? What am I supposed to do with this? How am I supposed to use this? What is my mission? The mission wasn't, you know, like, the challenge was there to help me become closer to who I'm supposed to be. And that's what I have to believe. I have to believe that we're all going through whatever we're going through, because on the other side of that is who we're meant to be. And we can only do that work if we have faith and if we have love guiding us, because the fear is gonna keep us in the dark, and we are not gonna get to who we need to be.

And I know that because for the first. For the time I was 12 years old to the time I was 30 plus years old, I was in that dark space, and I was running and running and running from every challenge that was pushed put in front of me. So I went on lots of tangents. I need to get home because it's very cold in this car still. And if you're still with me, give me a thumbs up or a little heart. And if not, that's all right. I'll see you next Wednesday. I'm wishing you love, strength, and awareness.