Orient Yourself Around Love

“We lose sight of what’s right here. What’s the spirit of life within me telling me to do?” – Lola Wright

We are living in a fall and redemption paradigm, which teaches us that there is something wrong with us and we must work to fix it. Could you instead choose to follow a creationist paradigm, and know yourself as a blessing?

How much of your experiences do you actually hate? We don’t tend to ask ourselves questions like that, but we should. When we can see what we hate, and what’s holding us back, we can find our way back to love.

Listen in to Find Your Fierce & Loving to hear a talk I gave at Bodhi Center. This episode is full of exercises to help you identify your own inhibitors, and most importantly, the invitation to re-orient around love of yourself.

• (02:57) – Opening to love
• (10:53) – Finding your inhibitors
• (14:02) – Masculine and feminine

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.

If you’d like to receive new episodes as they’re published, please subscribe to Find Your Fierce & Loving in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. Your reviews help others find the show.

Lola Wright (00:01): Something is stirring. Maybe you’ve felt it. We are reckoning with the reality of injustice and binary thinking that feeds the political machine. Humanity is in the midst of a heartbreaking and painful paradigm shift. That is a good thing. My name is Lola Wright, and this is Find Your Fierce & Loving. This podcast is intended to help you disrupt, untangle and free your mind of personal and collective agreements, patterns and beliefs that are holding you back and weighing you down. We desperately need your fierce and loving purpose now more than ever. 

Lola Wright (00:54): Today’s episode of the podcast is one of the final talks I gave in a project titled House of Bodhi with Lola Wright. The talk is really about that which is awakening in the human condition. It was an invitation into the erotic, into a sense of aliveness. There really is an opportunity to move beyond the confines and limitations and trappings of our past. Matthew Fox is a great theologian that was really informative in my work, and he writes in his book, Original Blessing, “Joy beyond measure is part of everyone’s potential experience. It is part of recovering an erotic God who plays, takes pleasure, births, celebrates, and feels passion.” I hope you enjoy today’s episode of the podcast.

Lola Wright (01:58): I oftentimes tell the story… When I first started in my role at Bodhi, someone said to me, “Well, is this going to become the Lola Wright show?” And, I said, “It is, it is,” and that does not have to mean it cannot be the Ameerah Tatum show or the Simbryt Dortch show. But, what that requires is that you actually step into your fullness because if we create a construct where we have to stay small so that you feel safe, that is not the relationship that you want. That is called co-dependence. There are many programs that will support you in that, right? So, as I say yes to my bigness, it’s an invitation for you to say yes to your bigness. And, when you hang out with people like Ameerah Tatum that may just have it all hang out, then there’s a kind of permission. You know what I mean?

Lola Wright (02:56): So, this evening is about this thing called love, but I want to talk about a particular kind of love. I want to talk about this kind of love that’s called Eros. It is really the love of life. And, one of the great thinkers that I am deeply inspired by who really talked about this idea of erotic justice is a woman by the name Audre Lorde. And, what she invited us to do was to transcend a patriarchal model of gathering, of experience, of creation. We have been living in a long slumber of the masculine. There is nothing wrong with the masculine. I love some masculine.

Lola Wright (03:48): And, anything that gets exaggerated gets sick, and so what I feel very clear about is happening on the planet right now is a kind of erotic expression that’s ready to move through humanity. You have a kind of erotic energy. It’s your sexual aliveness. It’s your creativity. It’s your freedom. It’s your flow. And, we are not conditioned to feel safe with that. We have been conditioned. If you were birthed into this paradigm, which by virtue of being here, I’m imagining you were, you were birthed into something called a fall and redemption paradigm. And essentially, what that means is, we start with the supposition that something’s wrong with you, and we work from there.

Lola Wright (04:47): Long before there was a kind of fall and redemption paradigm, there was a creationist paradigm where, all of a sudden, we shifted from knowing you as an original blessing, one that is whole and holy into someone that is broken and wounded and needs to be fixed and saved. And, I’ve talked about this many times before. It’s probably one of the most important bodies of work for me, is to liberate that idea of wounded-ness, of brokenness, that requires and informs a kind of dominant structure. See, if you and I are free to our most powerful life force energy, then what could be possible? So, what happened for me was, six months ago, we launched this project called the House of Bodhi. And, there was something that was stirring in me, like, “Ugh, something is not comfortable where I am. Something new is wanting to come forward.”

Lola Wright (05:52): Audre Lorde calls it like this, “As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable in our lives, they become more and more intolerable. If we just once dealt with how much we hate most of what we do, there would be no holding us back from changing it.” This is true with any kind of movement. This is the way in which the philosopher, queen, the poet, warrior, leads. See, if you start to invoke, if you start to avail yourself to Eros, to eroticism… I’m not talking about a pornographic experience. I’m talking about a kind of disposition and awakening and aliveness. By the way, it’s your most powerful and dangerous power, which was the invocation of a fall and redemption paradigm. If you and I know each other as wildly powerful and fully alive, then what could we create?

Lola Wright (07:00): Now, if you and I sit and ask ourselves the question, “How much do I hate most of what I do?” Anybody do that as a regular practice? My guess is not. Most of us live inside of confines and constructs that are appropriate, that are socially acceptable, that make sense. They keep things safe. And, guess what? Your aliveness and your energy is thwarted. So, six months ago, when we started this project, I had the experience with you all, sitting in these rehearsal spaces, and all of a sudden, it was like something started to awaken in me, and I would speak to it, right? It was like, “Holy smokes. Oh, shit. Something is waking up over here, and that feels scary and dangerous, and I don’t know how to be with that.” And, most of us don’t want to face that because if you felt the full magnitude of your freedom, you would have no idea what to do next. And so, we breathe, and we breathe, and we integrate, and we breathe, and we integrate.

Lola Wright (08:17): And, I guess the thing that I want you all to know is that this project was created by artists, activists, musicians, and mystics because I believe those are the four people, the four personas that are most here calling humanity back into its wholeness. It’s the arts. It’s awakening, awakening, awakening, awakening, awakening, and you all did that for me. I was asleep. I was living inside of constructs that kept my life neat and tidy and made sense, easily described on LinkedIn.

Lola Wright (09:06): But, there was a heaviness, and so this group of human beings literally played music to awaken me. And, the thought that I’ve had over the last couple weeks is, “I feel as if you all have midwifed me. You’ve midwifed my awakening.” And so, I find that when I’m in an awake state, and I bet you could ask yourself the same question, when you are in an awake state, your capacity for discomfort becomes less and less. You cannot tolerate the intolerable any longer because you’re rising in your vibratory essence and your frequency in this unified field of awareness. You’re rising.

Lola Wright (10:08): 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 will 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. 

Lola Wright (10:53): You’re transcending a previous state of consciousness. So, I invite you, if you would, for just this moment, take a deep breath and close your eyes. This evening is about love of self, love of another, and love of humanity. See, the love of another, and the love of humanity will never come until love of self occurs first. So, just check, in this now moment, what are the top three ways that I thwart my freedom and my aliveness? What are the patterns of behaviors? What are the agreements? What are the activities that I do out of my own obligation, my own fear, that keep my aliveness contained, my freedom contained, my Eros contained? Just see if you can find your top three inhibitors.

Lola Wright (11:59): I shared, when we were together here last month, that three of my top inhibitors are control, success, and accomplishment. I have oriented an entire existence around ensuring the security of those three things. And, for me, as I begin to untangle from those, my life feels increasingly messy, and messy feels unsafe, so I wonder how that could be true for you. Might you be willing, in this month, to orient yourself so boldly around your love of self, such that you’d be willing to get honest about how much you do that you hate, and then perhaps consider eliminating some of those agreements?

Lola Wright (13:15): Now, that does not mean that we don’t have lives where we’re committed to things that we don’t always like. Anybody who has had children, most human beings are not passionately devoted to the exquisite experience of diaper changing, and yet, it’s part of the experience of parenting, and so we do that. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kind of “ugh” experience where you know you’re doing something that’s not yours to do. See, this thing called Eros, love of life, is an awakening practice. It doesn’t make sense. We are living in thousands of years of dominance-based constructs, oriented in fear, and it is literally an opportunity now… I have an aversion to the masculine-feminine spectrum, mostly because most of us think of male, female. We don’t understand we’re really talking about polarities and energy.

Lola Wright (14:29): But, I will just say, for me, I have gotten as far as I know to get inside of a masculine construct. When I became pregnant at 18, that was what I knew to do. Tighten up. Go to the bank. Get a job. And, keep it together. And, I’ve been doing some version of that for 22 years, and I’ve hit my max of what’s creatively possible inside of that. So, there’s some limit that we can each find ourselves in. There is this really brilliant theologian by the name of Matthew Fox. He’s a former Dominican priest, one of my very favorites. He wrote this book called Original Blessing. He was too radical. The Catholics were like, “Please leave now. It’s a little much for us.” The Episcopalians picked him up, sort of like a free agent, and he wrote this book that really is all about this awakening practice through creation narratives.

Lola Wright (15:46): He writes in this book, “Eros has the power to wake us up, to see passion happen again, feeling return, hope, and transcendence come alive.” See, the masculine disposition is cognitive. It’s logical. It’s from the neck up. It’s highly valuable. The challenge is, we’re living there 90% of the time, and we have forgotten our capacity to feel. And, would you be willing to consider that the chaos that is occurring on the planet right now is, in fact, an invitation, a provocation for feeling, is an opportunity to practice noticing what we hate, paying attention to that which is intolerable, allowing our hearts to break in the process, and inviting our feelings to move through?

Lola Wright (16:49): That’s what’s happening right now. You’re being called. I’m being called to integrate our parts, to notice where we have a kind of hyperactivity in one area and look for integration. If you are one of the rare humans in the room that’s operating in a largely feminine construct, maybe your opportunity is to invoke the masculine. If you’re living inside of your body and your feelings in a way that feels really yummy, delicious, juicy, and some people are like, “That’s enough juice, baby,” a little of this would serve you. Some of us up here, that might be true for. I don’t know, right? It’s about integration.

Lola Wright (17:39): But, most of us are living like this, “Okay, what’s next? What does the Google Calendar tell me? What is the time? Where are we to be? What does she tell me in the car? What is everybody telling me to do?” And, we lose sight of what’s right here. What’s the spirit of life within me telling me to do? Lola, the places and spaces that you feel scared, and you’re holding yourself back because it feels safe. Please, beloved, please, please. You’re here for more than that. You’re here for more than playing it safe. You’re here to have an erotic experience of life. You’re here to have a love of life. Your nature is holy. Your nature is whole. It is perfect. It is complete. It is the presence of all that is. You’re the individualized manifestation of the most high. You are the universe. This is just one part of that.

Lola Wright (18:58): 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 at Lola P. Wright 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. 

Lola Wright (19:44): It is a radical act to come together and be intentional. We so often walk through our lives in a kind of comatose. So, thank you for coming together inside of an intentional practice to wake up. This experience is about waking up to the big idea of life as you.