E211 - John Wineland: Love, Safety & Desire - What Your Wounds Are Deciding for You

André Duqum (0:00)

You say that love is evolving.

John Wineland (0:01)

Yeah.

André Duqum (0:02)

What is it evolving into?

John Wineland (0:03)

Love now is asking us to heal, it's asking us to expand, but there's a problem. Most of us think that if we find the right one, everything will work itself out. But if we were raised in a household where we experience neglect of love and care, that wound comes with us. Any unhealed part of you that is still transmitting is going to be a beacon for somebody with the opposite, so that you guys can play out the childhood dynamic you both were raised in. And the deeper you love them, the deeper the wound. It can be painful and confusing.

To be honest, I've been leading men's programs for over a decade, and I'm still f***ing dealing with this thing. Me. And I'm supposed to be the relationship guy.

André Duqum (0:44)

Would you be open to sharing a bit about what Claire taught you about love?

John Wineland (0:48)

Yeah. Yeah, Claire was my daughter who died eight years ago.

Man, she was 21 Claire taught me to love unconditionally, knowing that I was going to lose her. There's no end to grief because there's no end to love. We heal in relationship. We're here to liberate love in each other. You can either evolve into that power struggle or use that moment to become more devotional to love itself. So the first thing I'll do is...

André Duqum (1:19)

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a best-selling author, a Buddhist practitioner, a men's group coach, an intimacy coach, and for nearly 20 years, he's been teaching people how to actually come deeper into intimacy and truly love one another. John Wineland, thank you for being here, my friend.

John Wineland (1:37)

Thanks for having me, André. It's my pleasure.

André Duqum (1:39)

I'd like to dive right in. You say that love is evolving.

What is it evolving from? What is it evolving into?

Let's set the stage here.

John Wineland (1:48)

Well, let's just say love itself has been love itself since the dawn of time, right? That's a part of our humanity and part of sentient beings, right? Like animals love, we love, right? So love itself has been this ocean of the highest expression of consciousness and energy that is known, right? But how we love is evolving, right? How we are being asked to love is evolving. And if you think about, you know, the history of humanity, we went from, you know, procreation-driven relationship, right? And to love, I guess, and then into, you know, sort of a survival mode of where we had to till the soil, and we had to have a group, you know, for family and security, you know, love became, relationship became about security, about, you know, being able to survive and make food and all of that, to into the last, you know, 50, 60 years ago, really, you know, self-expression and pleasure. And up until, you know, tinder culture, right, has been about expression, right?

What love is asking us to do now is to deepen that relationship. Like, what are we, what are we using relationship to evolve into versus to just have pleasure or survive or procreate? And love now is asking us to heal. It's asking us to expand. It's asking us to create better families and children, right? If you think about, you know, the generations of children that came up over the last 100 years, many of them came through dysfunctional families, right? And so as we learn to love from a different place and using different sort of approaches to love, as a healing modality, for example, as a meditative and yogic modality, for example, we expand and how we love, our capacity to love expands, and then how we raise our children will change, right? And so we're literally, as a species, evolving through the, let's call it, transmutation, evolution of relationship, right?

And if you think about it, it makes sense in evolutionary terms, right? Like, so the flowers, I use this example in the book I'm writing, which is, you know, the flowers that got brighter and smelled better actually attracted the bees, whereas the ones that didn't evolve didn't and they died off eventually. So that's what I think is happening with humanity. That's what we see with the in-cell, you know, population and these groups that are not going to be able to, you know, spawn children, to be honest, right? And their lines actually are dying off, whereas the people in, you know, we're in a sort of a bubble community, but this is happening on the fringes, where people who are looking at love and relationship from a deeper lens are actually going to evolve, going to attract partners who are doing more healed partners, more evolved partners, or we're going to have more evolved children, and we're already seeing this, you know, we're starting to see this in certain communities. So that's a framework of love's evolution that I'm seeing, and I think that there are, what I write about is that there's certain pillars that we need to adhere to in order to sort of live into this evolutionary call.