Set On Fire

“What is your holy intention? This is an emergent, dynamic idea. You are literally speaking your life into existence in every single flipping moment—let this holy intention serve you, and you serve it.” – Lola Wright

During such a guttural time in human history, people have been experiencing a kind of apathetic love, rather than the love that ignites us. As you feel the pain of a suffering world all around you, you may be stuck in a survival loop. Now is the time to let go of fear and righteousness. Now is the time to feel your true desires and the love that sets you on fire.

We are in a pivotal time in human consciousness. While many of us feel trapped in the cycle of survival, taking the next step of growth requires us to welcome joy. By releasing what no longer serves us, we can finally grasp the love and peace that allows us to serve ourselves and others.

On this episode of Find Your Fierce & Loving, I invite you to embrace the radical truths of the life you desire. This audio is from the recent Set On Fire Retreat, when we came together to find the love that truly sets us on fire and interrogate what holy intentions come from that love.

• (5:38) – The great gift of 2020
• (13:21) – Ego as your friend
• (17:58) – Transformation
• (25:23) – You are whole

Do you want to unleash your inherent love and goodness, liberate yourself, and free humanity from the oppressive systems and structures we have created? We are here to support you in finding your fierce and loving life. Join us in Our Circle, a vibrant membership community rich in opportunities for engagement and transformation. Find out more at lolawright.com/our-circle.

You can follow Lola Wright, on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and learn more about my work at lolawright.com.

Chicago born and built, Lola grew up in wealth and privilege, yet always sensed something was missing. She sought out aliveness and freedom in music, immersing herself in the hip hop and house music scenes of 90s Chicago. After finding herself on her own at 23, as the mother of two young children, she became determined to create a new experience.

Lola is an ordained minister with a gift for weaving together the mystical and material, she served for many years as the CEO of Bodhi Center, an organization committed to personal transformation, collective awakening, conscious activism, and community-building. 

This podcast is produced by Quinn Rose with theme music by independent producer Trey Royal.

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Lola Wright (00:01):

Personal transformation and collective awakening involve being the most alive, brilliant, inspired creative, on fire version of yourself; a version that is not consistent with the status quo. My name is Lola Wright, and this is Find Your Fierce and Loving. This podcast is a wake-up call, a roadmap back to your holy purpose, an invitation to set fire to the box you’ve been living in and watch it burn.

Today’s episode is an excerpt from the Set On Fire retreat. I gathered about 70 human beings to complete 2020 consciously and enter 2021 creatively. It was a gathering of human beings, about half of which were from my Our Circle Membership Community, and then I opened it up to my larger community, and about half of the group gathered from there. Really, there were people all over the world. That was an incredibly potent and powerful space. You’ll get to hear personal sharing from Bethany and Jeffrey, people who really did their work. That’s all I ever ask is are we doing our inner work such that we shift the human experience that we are living in the midst of. We really are powerful creators of our reality. Our circle is an incredible space where people do that work weekly, and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. We’re really at a potent time in the evolution of human consciousness. I mean, we are not only at a potent time in the calendar year, but if you really look at where we are evolutionarily, it is quite a moment. We are amidst a great awakening. We love the idea of awakening as being fun and light and easy, and I think we can all agree that this year has not been rainbows, unicorns, and butterflies. It has been guttural. It has been visceral. It has been uncomfortable for many. It has been painful for many, and that is not true for all human beings. There are lots of human beings that are also having the experience of, even in the midst of devastation, even in the midst of destruction, something is coming forward. So there is no one way to paint the experience of this human encounter.

I believe that there is like a drought of a particular kind of love that is needed on the planet right now. I think that one of the things that we are experiencing in the human condition is a kind of apathetic love. It’s a kind of listless love. It’s why we love the Corinthians scripture that says, “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not boast …” Oh, don’t get too excited over there, and I actually think that that is a largely a perversion … We’ve sort of perverted that definition of love in the human experience. So I’m very inspired by the Aramaic word for love, which is hooba, and it comes from the Semitic root, haw or hav, and you’re going to hear me talk about this for the next few years because it’s like my jam these days.

The Semitic root for the word hooba, being haw or hav is the definition of love being to set on fire. That is a very distinct kind of love. That is a very different love than most of us were raised with. It is not a timid love. It is not a tentative love. What is the area of life that you are chewing on, digging in on, that your listless energy is not doing it anymore. Like this sort of like, “Well, you know, I mean, it would be great if …” It’s like, no, we are living on the planet at a moment that’s like, “Hello, wake up. Are you here with me now?”

So I want you to bring this love energy that is fierce, that is ferocious, that tears through the areas of life that are sort of resigned and sleepy. I mean that in the realm of consciousness. What that doesn’t mean is that you now have to go make some long-assed task lists around what you need to go do. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about getting radically honest with yourself about the life you desire and the world you want to call forward, because we have been apathetic in the human condition. We’ve been sort of like accepting of that which does not serve us and the great gift of the disruptive nature of 2020 is that any place that we’ve been asleep is like, “Oh no, you did it.” We’re not sleeping anymore, folks, and that is really good, and so it incredibly uncomfortable. I am noticing for me the ways in which I still look out here to the world to validate and have me feel a sense of safety. Like that’s part of the human condition and it actually creates our loop of suffering.

So I want to set on fire with great love the areas of life, where I’m still like a hamster addicted to my game of suffering. That’s what I want to invite you into is that whatever game of suffering, whether it is around food, whether it is around sex, whether it is around money, whether it is around self-criticism, whether it is around control. That’s like my favorite game: control. I love, I love, I love control, and it creates so much suffering where I am. So I love it in the short-term. I don’t love it in the long-term.

So what is the area of life that you are going to bring this fierce love to, to set it the fuck on fire? Because the bullshit that human beings keep recycling is actually delaying our spiritual maturation. You and I are actually here inside of our own maturation and the extent to which we are really willing to get honest around our own maturation is the extent to which we are contributing to the maturation of existence. Everything that we are seeing on the movie screen of life is a reflection of our consciousness because nothing exists in isolation. So that is the opportunity for us to look at. It’s not about blaming ourselves. It’s not about criticizing ourselves. If that’s what you want to do, that’s just actually the very thing we’re calling out.

Like it’s actually, it’s unbelievable, quite frankly, you and I have manifested a reality where there is significant economic inequity. There is arguably some of the most toxic politics in the human, in the modern history. There is an exposure of systemic racial injustice that has been in existence since this country’s formation. There is a global pandemic. I mean like it’s literally like, “Wow, you really create all of that for your learning and growth?” If you are not being challenged right now to find your center, the truth of reality versus the facts and the stories of reality, like you must already be awakened and you need not be here. Because I think every human being is being brought to their knees right now. There is not like a mystic, a sage, a guru, or whatever on the planet that isn’t like having a mind bender of a moment.

So what is that for you? What is your growth edge right now? I am noticing, for me, like I have deconstructed the concept of God so significantly that it actually can feel like, well, there’s nothing then other than this material reality, and yet I know that there’s something far greater than this material reality. That’s my growth edge. So if I deconstructed a paternalistic notion of God, if I no longer believe in a separate self that we are being brought to our knees in the human experience right now, and a literal interpretation of existence is going to be you in a perpetual existential crisis. I want to just underscore that. You and I in a literal interpretation of reality is synonymous to an existential crisis. So when we are perceiving all that is occurring in our lives literally, it is going to yield pain and suffering perpetually.

So it actually, as simple as it is, it is a radical flipping act to say in the midst of a global pandemic, in the midst of economic inequity, in the midst of racial injustice, in the midst of toxic politics, in the midst of whatever drama you are having in your own personal life, in the midst of that, to say, as you’ve heard me say recently before if you’ve hang with me, get ye behind me. That is where those old school scriptural references come from. It is not like there’s a little red man running around with a dagger trying to get you. It is a state of consciousness. Get behind me. Get out of the way.

This is why … Michael Beckwith will call this a blissipline. You must make the discipline of the thinking mind joyous. Adrienne Maree Brown talks about transformational justice. If justice does not have a school of play to it, there will not be enough interest in doing it. If justice is heavy, if it is oppressive in and of itself, if it is exhaustive, if it spits you up and chews you out, or chews you up, spits you out, you know what I mean? If it does that, nobody’s going to want to play in it. If you are engaging your partner in wanting more intimacy and your strategy is through complaining, it may not work, for example. We can have compassion with ourselves and go, “Oh my gosh, this is what I do. This is what I do. This is what I do, honey,” and then we love ourselves. Can we love ourselves through our absurdity?

You want to be more alive. You want to unleash your inherent love and goodness, liberate yourself and free humanity from the oppressive systems and structures we have created. We are here to support you in finding your fierce and loving life. Join us in our circle. This is an affirming and radical space that we’ll gather weekly on demand or live, whatever works best for your life. For more information on how you can engage in our circle, visit lolawright.com/our-circle. I’d love to have you with us.

Bethany (13:21):

My scenario is about a career change and to give, so it feels very artificial for my truths to be wholly selfish, to be holy about what they fulfill for me and not inclusive of what they would hopefully do for others, because part of my desire for a change and part of what I hope my intention will manifest as and what I will bring forward, is to fulfill my passion of being more supportive of people at end of life. So it feels like there’s like a dissonance for me of the radical truth as being all about me.

Lola Wright (14:03):

Okay, so great. Number one, Michael Beck, with another favorite quote, “You can’t be the light of the world if you can’t pay your own light bill.” So, like, it should be all about you. If you aren’t making life all about you, then I’m not sure who will, and only in the binary dualistic mind do we believe that in making life all about me, that occurs at the exclusion of other human beings. So what if making life all about you is in service of other human beings? Many of you have heard me tell this story before, but when I first stepped into my role at Bodhi seven, eight years ago, I met with a whole series of leaders at the time. One of the leaders at the time said, “Well, is this going to be the Lola Wright Show?” Because it has been the Mark Anthony Show who was the founder of Bodhi. I said, “It is going to be the Lola Wright Show. It definitely is going to be the Lola Wright Show.” It is only in your mind that you believe if it is the Lola Wright Show then that somehow means it cannot also be the Bethany Perkins Show or the Sarah Conway Show or the Neely Ben Show or the N. Ross … Like that is the scarcity consciousness that humanity is in the grips of and it comes out of puritanical framework. It comes out of a fallen redemption theology that says there’s a finite amount of resources; that what goes up must come down. That’s actually not true in the realm of consciousness.

What’s true in the realm of consciousness is that life is only ever expanding and it’s not linear. So life is only ever expanding. It’s non-linear, which is why we perceive that, which is occurring on the planet right now as going backwards. We aren’t going backwards. We are definitely moving forward and we have to deal with our unconscious state as our evolutionary progress occurs. Yes, so there actually is no such thing as you being selfish when you are moving in truth. Selfish is a game of the ego and it is only a problem when you are over-identified with the ego. The ego is not going away. The ego actually is our ally. It serves us in extraordinary ways in the human experience. You actually would be very lost without your ego. Thank God for your ego. But when your ego is running you, that’s when we create from scarcity. That’s when we create from a dualistic model and framework.

So I would just love, Bethany, and this is great for all of us, you are not selfish. Your desires are not selfish. They are not. If they are coming from your intuitive nature, from your … Like you are just fundamentally not selfish. That’s just not who you are. You are a glorious demonstration of the infinite. You are this cellular make up of divinity. If there is no such thing as evil as bad, if that is only a delusion of the mind, then how could you be selfish? That feels very exciting to me. I love transformation. It’s literally like my favorite thing. Some people like Chicago Bears. I love transformation. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love to look at a reality or a perceived reality, and then flip it. Rise above the form. That’s what the word transform literally means, to rise above the circumstance and condition.

There are circumstances and conditions in your life. There are circumstances and conditions in my life. There’s nothing that I’m trying to get away from. This is the great paradox: how your life is, exactly as it is, in this now moment is perfect and you can hold multiple realities at the same time. Your life and this global experience can be necessary, right, and perfect, and you can want something distinct. Different, more, altered in the quantum field of existence. See, what you’ll say is, “Well, no, no, no. If you knew the trauma that I experienced, I would actually need to see a somatic therapist. I would need to see a hypnotherapist. I would need to see a talk therapist. I would need to have some level of psychiatry including medication.” All that may be very true, that’s just not what I’m talking about. I’m actually talking to your soul. I’m not talking to your thinking mind. I’m talking to your soul. I’m talking to our spiritual nature.

Remember, at the beginning of this, we said your I am nature. We could call you I am. That actually would be a more accurate name for you than Robin or Sarah or Melanie or Stacy or Yolanda. It’s like, what if we just called you I am? Like, what if we just called you Christ? Neely Christ. That’s my favorite. I love that. She’d be like, “I don’t think my parents would be too into that. That’s not really what Glencoe girls go by. As a fellow Glencoe girl, be a little weird, don’t call me Neely Christ. My parents might have a problem with that.” But if you actually knew what the word Christ meant, it wouldn’t be a problem because all it means is the awakened one and it actually long proceeds this guy called Rabbi Jesus.

So if you were awake to your whole lead nature, then the suffering loop would not have such a grip on us. That is why we provoke play, because if we can get playful with our suffering, it can loosen. That is one of the great challenges in some of these global systemic justice issues. They become so serious that we get locked into our survival strategies and no transformation is possible. This is the paradox. How does something that has grave implications not be taken seriously? That sounds pretty messed up. But this is why we have to speak from our spiritual nature, not our physical nature.

So now here we are. We have determined our facts. We have determined our stories. Now, what is the truth? What is at the essence of this existence, this struggle that you are experiencing? This is where you perhaps have heard people say, “There’s only ever love and fear and actually love is the only thing that’s real. So how is it that great devastation could happen from love? That doesn’t seem to make any sense. But if you understood love the way that person understood love, it would make perfect sense why they did what they did. I feel as if this is a missing link in the human experience and particularly in Western culture. Particularly in Western culture. I believe that the kind of love that is needed on the planet right now is one that sets on fire. I believe that that is true in your personal experience, and if that is true in your personal experience, that must be true in the collective experience because nothing is happening in the collective that is not first located in your personal experience.

So we are living in an apathetic love that is adolescent. It’s like we’re 10-year-olds. Reading like Sweet Valley High or something. Do you remember the book? There was like a book series, Sweet Valley High, I read this in a middle school. I don’t know what your version might have been of your generation, or like Beverly Hills, 90210. It’s like, if you could just give me that kind of love from Dylan … Was that his name? It’s like he was so hot and sexy, and like, “If I just had that then everything else …” I mean, that’s all we need. Come on, that’s all we need everybody. It’s just some Dylan love or whatever your version of that is. But that is why we keep looping this drama, because we’re like 10-year-olds seeking a love that is useless.

You’re here for a way bigger love. You’re here for a love that sets you on fire. You’re here to be alive. Imagine speaking from your pelvis. Your pelvis is wanting to wake up. It is wanting to wake up. It is wanting to wake up. Your desires live in your loins. Your desires do not live in your mind. That’s actually kinesthetically true. Your desires live in your loins. So what desires do you have for 2021 and how is that necessary for humanity? How is that necessary for the evolution of existence? What is your holy intention? This is an emergent dynamic idea that you are literally speaking your life into existence in every single flipping moment.

Let this holy intention serve you and you serve it. As you bring your awareness into this thresholding consciousness, we are in a threshold in consciousness, independent of the calendar year, and it is amplified by the calendar year. We are literally … it is like we are at a crowning moment. It is like human beings are in the birth canal of existence and the cervix is dilating, and that’s where we are. So we are in a threshold moment in consciousness. What are you noticing? What are you noticing? What the flip is coming up? Something’s coming up. This birth is going a kind of way.

Jeffrey (25:23):

So like one of my facts is I’m 39 years old. Stories are, just in brief, like, “You’re too old to be going out and doing the things you do. You should be resting more often. You shouldn’t have this much energy. You’re acting like you’re 21. Stop being Peter Pan.” When I get to the truth, I’m just like, “Is that just one of those truth qualities?” Or, do I start talking back to it there? I’m thinking of too many of my cognitive therapy sessions, but just clarity on the truth part.

Lola Wright (25:55):

Yeah. So just really, really quickly, what’s the problem that you see?

Jeffrey (26:01):

I have this like, because I’m almost 40, I have these attachments to what 40 I thought was growing up and I’m still worried about I’m old now. I needed to be more calm and not be doing the things that a 21-year-old in my mind should be doing when I’m 40.

Lola Wright (26:18):

Independent of your age, do you want to be doing the things that you’re doing? 

Jeffrey (26:23):

Yes. I’m having a blast.

Lola Wright (26:25):

Oh, that’s really fun. So the challenge is the inner critic, is that right? That’s just like, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, that’s not what adults do.” Well, I would guess that there are some people over 40 that would have a thought about that. Number one, let’s just start by saying if living over 40 starts to become no fun, that sucks for like 80% of the people on this call. I mean, or maybe 70, maybe 70. I don’t know. So number one, I’m 42 and I feel like I’m just beginning to actually know what fun is. So I just want to, to the extent that that’s of service, just blow up any idea of what fun is and when it’s appropriate to happen. The quickest way to exhaust your immune system is to have a life of no fun. Like, quite literally, like a great fast track to a compromised immune system is have a life of no fun.

The quality that’s coming up for me and you can play with it yourself, but it’s like wholeness. I mean, that’s just a quality that comes up for me is like who you are is whole, holy, perfect and complete. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong or flawed about you. All of that self-criticism requires a belief that something about you is wrong. So you could just keep playing with that. Like, wow, “I want to look at all the ways I believe something about me is wrong. I want to look at all the ways I believe that something around me is wrong.” Because if we jump over that and we just jumped to, “I am whole, holy, perfect and complete. I am whole, holy, perfect, and complete. I’m whole, holy, perfect, and complete,” we haven’t actually gotten to the underbelly.

If you enjoyed this show and would like to receive new episodes as they’re published, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and consider leaving a review in Apple podcasts. Your review helps others find this show. You can follow me @lolapwright on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and learn more about my work at lolawright.com. This episode was produced by Quinn Rose with theme music from independent music producer, Trey Royal.

Come on, that’s all we need everybody. It’s just some Dylan love. Was that his name?