00:00:07 Archita: What if love isn't something we feel? When life is easy, but something we choose. When life is hard. Not the romantic kind, the everyday kind, the kind that shows up when we are tired, guarded, grieving, or just done. Today we are talking about starting a love revolution. One honest human moment at a time. Welcome

00:00:34 Archita: back to Inner Peace, better health. I am Archita. This is a space where we talk about real life and the inner work that helps us meet it with steadiness. Today I am joined by Kim Sawal, our best selling author, speaker, and humanitarian. Known for her honest, heart led approach to healing, grief and living fully human. And our topic is starting a Love revolution. Not the kind you post about, the kind you practice inside your body, inside your relationships, and inside your daily choices. If you have ever felt like the world is getting colder and you don't want to become cold with it, this episode is for you. So Kim, welcome to Inner Peace. Betterhealth. It's it's so great to have you here today.

00:01:22 Kim Sorrelle: Oh my gosh, it's it is my pleasure. I love your show. I think it should be on everybody's podcast list. You do such a great job. So thank you. I'm honored to be here.

00:01:32 Archita: That's that's so amazing to hear truly. And Kim, I'm really looking forward to have this conversation with you. So, um, before we define anything, I'm curious to know when you say, um, a love revolution, what do you mean in real life terms? Like what would we actually see or feel if it was happening?

00:01:54 Kim Sorrelle: Well, I think a problem that we're having in our world is, is that so often we leave love at home, or we reserve love for a certain number of people and we don't realize what love really is, but we don't necessarily take it to work with us, or we don't take it to school with us or wherever it is we're going. And so because of that, we're not necessarily leading with love. There's a lot of leaders out there that may be great leaders, but they're not heart led, love led leaders. And so Love Revolution would bring bring love into every area of your life, every part of your life, not just reserved for somebody you said I do to or the kids you're raising or your best friends.

00:02:45 Archita: That's that's absolutely true. And, um, you know, I, I love that you're grounding it in what's livable and not what sounds nice. Nice. Uh, let's, let's stay with that. You just mentioned, uh, that we should bring, uh, love in everyday, in everyday part of our life. But how do we exactly do that? How do we bring love into every moment that you're living?

00:03:10 Kim Sorrelle: I think it starts with understanding what love is. We're so often taught things about love that have nothing to do with love or things are demonstrated to us in the name of love, and they are not love or sad in the name of love. They have nothing to do with love. We're taught that love is a two way street. Or that you give love to get love. That love is somehow transactional, or that love is a feeling and emotion. But I don't know about you. But if I watch a scary movie, I go to bed that night and I hear every creak, every bang, every bump. And because of fear, right? I just watched a scary movie and now I'm afraid in bed. And the next night, I'm not so afraid anymore. Well, it's because fear is a feeling. It's an emotion. It comes and goes. Love does not come and go. Love is walking, talking, living, breathing, giving. Love is who you are. When you understand that it's not just one more emotion or one more feeling that that you give and take away, but it's actually who you are. It changes everything about love, and it's absolutely not transactional. Love is one hundred percent on you. How you decide to live, love and give love is one hundred percent on you. We don't control anybody but ourselves. Like I think about when I first brought my first baby home from the hospital, I had total control. I decided when the baby ate, when the baby had a bath, when the baby took a nap. But then six, seven, eight months later, my Tupperware was all over the kitchen floor and pots and pans were banging and I realized I lost all control and I never got it back again. We only control ourselves. So if we're giving love to get love, knowing we have no control over what love does or doesn't come back to us, we're setting ourselves up for heartache and failure and disappointment. But love is something that you should just live and give, no matter what is or isn't coming back your way.

00:05:17 Archita: That's that's so true. And you have you couldn't have put it in a better way, truly. Um, but you know, when people hear, uh, love revolution, some might think that it's, it's naive or soft or unrealistic, but what do you think is the biggest misconception people have about love, especially in a world that rewards being hardened?

00:05:41 Kim Sorrelle: Well, I think the biggest misconception is that love is somehow weak or soft, but it's not. Love is your greatest strength. Love is what makes a a great leader and a even better leader. It's what makes a person, uh, be warm and loving and, and somebody that you want to be around, somebody you're attracted to. Love makes life so much better in every way. Because you look at the world so differently when you look at it through the lens of love and love is strong. It is it. It isn't rainbows and unicorns. It can be hard work and it can be tough. And. And it can. There can be times when your love is tested and where your love is under fire. But it's through those fires and through that testing that our love refines and our love goes deeper. And our understanding of love grows deeper. And so truly love is your greatest strength.

00:06:50 Archita: Wow. I so agree with that. I mean, it's just like you said. I think so many people have this misconception that showing emotion, especially love, it's a weakness, but it could be your biggest strength. And when you think about it, I think if if the world's leaders today were a little bit more capable of showing love, I think the world would be such a better place now. So definitely that lands because. Because love isn't the absence of boundaries, it's what informs them. Uh, okay, so if love is isn't just a feeling, then the next question is what blocks it? And let's, let's go a layer deeper. I'm curious, um, what are the hidden reasons people struggle to choose love? Um, not because they are bad, but because something in them learn that love isn't safe.

00:07:46 Kim Sorrelle: I think that that you just hit the nail on the head. I think that's so true. Is that through life experiences, if there have been things that have been done or sad in the name of love to you, and you think that that is love, then you can grow so hard and so callous against love, and afraid to open your heart and afraid to love because you're afraid of, of what's going to happen to you. But it's because you've learned it wrong. Like, I think we're born knowing what love is. But then things happen and people say things and do things that they pretend is love. Or we just assume that there are certain people in our lives that should love us, right? Like our parents should love us and our friends should love us. There's certain people that you assume just should love you, and when instead they're showing anything but love, then it's it's really hard to work out in your mind what love actually is and what love actually looks like. But when you understand that those things are not love, that I just believe truly that that if you, if you love the way love is meant to be. I went on this year long journey of diving into figuring out the true meaning of love, and I was in Haiti most of the time that I was working on it. And so it was an interesting journey being in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, While I'm putting together the pieces of What is Love? And, uh, it took me more than a year to really figure out all of the different parts of love, but when I did it, it changed everything. I used a two thousand year old poem that here you hear it a lot of weddings. Love is patient, love is kind, does not envy, does not boast, etc. and there's fourteen ISS and essence of love in there. And I decided I would take one word or phrase a month and figure out, well, what is love that is patient, what is love that is kind and etc. and since there's fourteen, it did take me a little longer than a year. But if I would have stopped at the first month, my life was changed and that times fourteen truly changed everything in my life. But like, love is patient. Like I thought, oh, this will be easy. I know what patience is. You know what patience is? You're not honking your horn if you're stuck in traffic, you're not yelling at your five year old because they can't find their boots and you gotta go out the door. But that's patience. I learned that if you put love is or love is not in front of any word or phrase, it changes the meaning. So love that is patient is different than patient's love. That is patient recognizes that this moment right here, right now is the most important moment of your life. What's in the past is in the past. What's in the future is yet to come. This is the most important moment of your life. And so then knowing that whoever you're with should have one hundred percent of you, and you should be fully present and fully engaged with whoever it is that you're with somebody at the grocery store, your spouse, your best friend, whoever it happens to be, you should be fully there, one hundred percent there. And I'll tell you, I stunk at this. I was horrible, I thought I could be in fully engaged in conversation and think about what I was going to make for dinner and who had to get to soccer practice or what? A meeting later that night, and I realized I am not that grand multitasker. I had to practice and practice and practice this to be one hundred percent present, one hundred percent there. But when I did, everything changed because I heard things I never would have heard. There's so much language that's nonverbal that you miss if your mind is on something else. I learned that I used to make assumptions about what I thought people were going to say, or I thought they would respond. And, uh, they don't always say or respond the way you think that they're going to. So when I stopped talking and started listening and really focusing and being one hundred percent engaged, that's another thing I did was do a lot less talking and a lot more listening. And that's what love is. It's love that is patient is being fully there. When you're not fully there, you're not showing love that that you might be there, present. You might be there in body, but if you're not fully engaged and fully with the person, then then that is not love.

00:12:21 Archita: I love that perspective. You have put it so beautifully. I think that yes, love, at the end of the day, it's all about staying when things get hard. And I think patience is one of the main characteristics of love that you've just described so beautifully. And also you're naming something so important how pain doesn't only hurt, but it also teaches and sometimes it teaches us to protect ourselves, um, in ways that quietly isolate us. So let's talk about how this actually shows up day to day in everyday life. Um, work, family, friendships. What does love going offline look like? Like, uh, what are the small signals that we're living from defense instead of love.

00:13:10 Kim Sorrelle: Well, kind of going back to control, but that you don't control anybody, but you do control yourself. So often it can be so easy to respond in a negative way to something that's sad. Like sometimes we read between the lines and we assume that they really meant something worse or their voice is elevated. So we're going to respond in that negative way. And really, we shouldn't let anybody control our emotions. We shouldn't let anybody control us. And so we have the choice to, if things get a little heated or elevated to respond that way or, or not. We can keep our cool and just respond in a nice level voice. We don't have to raise our voice. We don't have to get angry. You don't have to let your blood pressure go up. You know, I think about like two people in the same traffic jam and the traffic isn't moving at all. And one guy is in his car and he's honking his horn and he's beating on the steering wheel, and he's yelling out the window, and his blood pressure is rising, and he's getting angrier and angrier by the moment. And whoever is going to meet that guy next, if he's on his way home or on his way to work, I pity that person because he's going to walk in that way while next to him in the very same traffic jam, there's a guy in a car who turns on your podcast and is just sit back and listening, realizes there's nothing they can do about the traffic jam. They just have to wait it out and they're calm and cool and collected, and it's the same situation. They're put in the exact same situation with two completely different responses. So the response you choose is yours. You, you get to define that. You get to choose your response.

00:15:03 Archita: Yeah. So at the end of the day, it's, it's up to us how we see things, how we react to things. That's that's definitely true. And, uh, it's, it's fascinating to know how these things show up in our day to day life. And that's so relatable. It's because it's really one big dramatic moment. It's the slow tightening, the short replies, the assumptions, the anger, the frustration, the I'll do it myself. Uh, so if someone is hearing this and thinking, okay, I see myself, where do they start without forcing it?

00:15:42 Kim Sorrelle: Uh, I'd say start by taking a breath. You know, when you, when you feel yourself getting upset or getting angry about something, stop and breathe for a second and then think to yourself, why is it that I'm getting angry? And should I really be getting angry? You know, sometimes we get angry. I mean, that's just normal, right? But are you getting angry because you're letting somebody make you angry or are you getting angry? Like it's justified. Like there's a situation that's not good and it's like justified anger. But if you're getting upset because somebody is upsetting you, that means you're letting somebody upset you. And you don't have to let anybody upset you. And if you keep your cool, chances are so much greater that they will also. And they'll respond in a better way. And so instead of a confrontation, you have a conversation and instead of yelling, you keep things at a at a good tone and listen. Listen more than you talk is just a great way to know what's really going on in a conversation and where somebody's really coming from. You know, nobody's walked in anybody else's shoes, right? Like we're all unique, we're all different. And every day we've lived up until today has led us to who we are, what we believe, how we think, how we react, how we do things. Today is a result of what we've already lived. And so a lot of times you don't know what's going on with somebody, what they've been through, what they're going through and why they're reacting in in a way that, uh, is tough to watch or tough to handle. And so giving each other some grace and realizing we all have days that are not as great as other days. Or I remember after my mom died going to the grocery store and I was just looking around and I was devastated losing my mom. And I was looking around and I was looking at everybody and they were just going about their day like they had no idea the pain I was in. They, they, of course, they had no idea. So they're just grocery shopping and they're just doing their thing. And I got so overwhelmed by that that I ended up leaving my grocery cart and going to my car. I couldn't even finish shopping because of the pain that I was feeling. So if I were to run into somebody at that point in time, I might have started crying. I might have gotten really upset if somebody ran into me with their cart because I was fragile in that moment. And so you don't know what's going on with somebody, why they're reacting the way that they are. But quite often the way you react in return can bring things to a better place for them.

00:18:28 Archita: Yeah, I love that. I love, uh, that's such a great advice because, you know, uh, I've also talked about this to a lot of people and they have said the same thing, uh, that, you know, yeah, nobody can make you feel something that you don't want to feel. It's, it's up to you. And a lot of people don't realize that. So yeah, I think it's all about being in the driver's seat of your own emotions. You get to control them, not someone else. That that also brings me to the next question. So if you want to start a love revolution, but we're exhausted or grieving or burnt out. What's a gentle first step like? What tends to be the most realistic way to rebuild love from the inside? Especially when life still feels heavy?

00:19:17 Kim Sorrelle: Well, I think that one of the best things you can do is sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and write down who you are. Who? Who are you? And. And not the. I'm a mom. I'm a sister. Not not that kind of a thing. But I'm empathetic. Or I'm generous or I'm funny. I like to laugh a lot. You know the things about yourself and. And take a look at that list and see. Know that you know yourself. And because when you can understand yourself, then you can also love yourself. And so often self-love is like this little catch phrase that kind of gets passed around and people go, oh yeah, self love, self love. But the reality is self love. Loving yourself is the most selfless thing that you can do. If you can appreciate and love yourself for the unique human being that you are, you can look in the mirror and go, man, I, I'm okay. Like I'm smart, I'm capable. I'm I did it today. Like I got things done. Whatever it is, love and appreciate who you are. Loving yourself means that you're then free to love others in a whole different way. Fully, completely love others when you first love yourself. So first, know who you are. Understand who you are, and then love that person. Love that person and realize that in doing that, you are opening yourself up to so much more joy and happiness because of then the love you're able to give to those around you.

00:20:56 Archita: MM. So the first step is really to love yourself. That's, that's a, that's actually pretty great. And I really appreciate that because you're not asking people to perform positivity, you're inviting them into honesty. And honesty is where love can actually breathe again. So thank you for sharing such amazing advice, uh, with all of us here today. So Kim, this has been amazing. And I, I, I truly appreciate everything that you've said today. It has helped me on a personal level a lot. I'm sure it has helped a lot of our listeners too. So Kim, for the listener who feels like our love has become too painful, maybe because they have lost someone being betrayed, or they are just tired of being the one who cares. What would you want them want to say to them? Uh, so they don't confuse their protection with their identity?

00:21:52 Kim Sorrelle: Yeah. Well, you know, one thing that I think people sometimes get confused is, is like, if you're in a relationship that is really unhealthy, that, that there's verbal abuse or physical abuse or, you know, something unhealthy going on in the relationship. I believe the most loving thing you can do if you truly love that person, which again, I just think you should just love everybody. And if you love that person, which you should, the best thing you can do for them is to walk away. Because if you stay in that relationship, you stay there and, and take the abuse, take whatever is bad in the relationship and going on. You're not giving the other person any space to change. They're going to continue that behavior because you're there, but you walking away gives them a choice to either remain in that behavior or look at themselves and change some things. But love would say run. Love would say walk away. So don't ever feel like you have to stay in an unhealthy relationship. It's not not good for anybody. And love shouldn't be so hard. Uh, love shouldn't go away because you've lost somebody. Love. Actually quite often amplifies because you realize how precious the people that are still here are to you and how time is so precious. And, and so your love can really actually amplify during times that you're down or times that you're grieving. And love shouldn't be something that comes and goes, you know, you might not like somebody like and love two different things. Infatuation. You know, that butterflies feeling that you get when you first meet somebody and you know you can't wait to walk down the aisle and say, I do the that the butterflies might go away, but the love stays. You still love the person. And so understanding what love is and then walking it out the way it actually is, is what changes life from just living to an amplified, beautiful, glorious life.

00:24:00 Archita: That's so powerful. I mean, definitely, I, I, I definitely agree because a lot of times people don't realize it that sometimes, um, the, the thing that you can do for the people that you love is just walk away because like you just said, sometimes it's, it's for the best. So yes, uh, it is, it's definitely true. And here's the heart of it. A love revolution doesn't start when life becomes safe. It starts when we choose to stay human anyway. So, Kim, if people want to stay connected to your work, your writing, your speaking, and the humanitarian work you're involved in, where can they find you?

00:24:47 Kim Sorrelle: Well, my name is unique. I'm literally the only Kim Zahraalh spelled my way in the entire world because my last name has way too many letters. It has two hours and two E's and two L's. It's s o r r e l l e. So, Kim's com is my website, and everything is on there.

00:25:10 Archita: Beautiful. So we'll add all those links in the show notes so people can find you easily. And yeah, if this episode stirred something in you, maybe don't rush to fix it. Just notice. Where has your heart been asked to harden? And what would it mean to soften it by one degree? Thanks for spending this time with us on inner peace, better health. If you want more conversations like this real, grounded and healing oriented, follow the show and share this episode with someone who's trying to stay human in a loud world. I am, and until next time, take a breath. Come back to yourself and let love be something you practice one moment at a time.