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Speaker 1: Hey, fam, I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the Red Table Talk Podcast, all your favorite episodes from the Facebook Watch show in audio produced by Westbrook Audio and I Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review on Apple Podcasts. The eight Rules of Love, Ja Shetty says you must know. Say it again is highly anticipated. Findings are revealed now on this exclusive Red Table Talk. I'm very excited about I'm so glad you. Yeah, this was like home. You blessed the table so many times. So grateful you you blessed me of the opportunity. All right, So these are the facts we learned math, how to read. We even learn about the birds and the bees. But no one teaches us how to love. But now are very very dear friend and wisdom spreader Ja Shetty hopes to change all of that. Ja Shetty, whose mission of making wisdom go viral has taken the world by storm. This former monk is now a number one best selling author, hosts the number one health podcast, and as a social media following of more than fifty million welcome storyteller. His powerful message uses modern science and ancient wisdom. J has become a trusted advisor to countless people, including many celebrities like Alicia Keys, Jennifer Lopez, and John Legend. Now he's revealing his highly anticipated Eight Rules of Love in his brand new book, Sure to Become a go to guide. I'm loving this book. Let me tell you about this book. You had me at hello from the first paragraph the difference between life and love. I started to realize that there were so many different ways of breaking down love. And I was having so many conversations with so many different people where they felt incomplete because they didn't have love. The lack of love seemed to be the greatest pain point in everyone I was talking to. I don't feel love, I don't have love. I don't know how to love. You can find people in all stages of life, no matter whether they were winning or losing or whatever, love was the core thing that was causing them pain. So I was like, how can we not write about the thing that we spend our whole life searching for? So I want to start with the ashrams. You have four of them? Can you break that down? Yes, definitely, so that four ushrooms are the four stages of love. So you said ashraoms, and I always thought in Ashraom was the place that you go to kind of just like meditate and no God. So you don't have to limit the definition and ushram to a physical space. It could be an emotional space. It can be a spiritual space that can be created without four walls, almost like going to church. Correct, you don't have to be in the church building exactly right. So the four ushrooms are preparing for love, practicing love, protecting love, and perfecting love. And these are the four stages we all go through. We start life single. You don't start life as a couple with someone else. You start out single, and that's your chance to prepare for love. But most of us speed that part up. We don't want to prepare. We just want to get into a relationship. Then when we get into a relationship, which is the second stage, we don't think that we need to learn anything. We expect the other person to already know how to love us, and we expect we should already know how to love them, and we don't. We don't practice. We just think we already made it. Yes, And then the third step is protecting love. This is such an interesting one. It took me the longest to uncover this one. And I realized that that third stage was ning to protect yourself from the wounds that come from trying to love and failing. And so by that stage, we all start believing love doesn't exist. Love is not for me. I'm not worthy of love. Love failed me. But love is real. We just experienced something that wasn't love. And the final is perfecting, which is probably my favorite thing to talk about. It's this idea that we've put romantic love on a pedestal, and I think, again, I really believe you've put romantic love on a pedestal. We've created a hierarchy that says loving a romantic partner is the epitome of love, and that I know so many people who have a beautiful relationship with their children, but they feel incomplete because they don't have that with a partner. And so I want to encourage people to realize that let's look at love more broadly, more expansively, and more truthfully. So, Jay, let's break down your concepts of you know, these four us rams. The first one was preparing for love. So give us a couple of principles around how we can prepare for love. So we've made loneliness or being alone the enemy. So if you have a birthday party and not many people come over, your unpopular. If you turn up to a wedding and you don't have a plus one, it's like, oh poor you? Are you okay? Like there must be something wrong with you. And so we've made people feel that being alone is of lower value than when you're with someone. And Paul Tillick talks about how there's two words in the English Dictionary that describe being alone, and we only use the word loneliness. The other one is solitude, and he says, loneliness is the feeling of pain when you're alone, and solitude is the strength of being alone. It's the super the power of being alone. And so when we're preparing for love, we constantly believe that we will only be special, worthy, attractive when someone sees it in us. And actually the rule is saying, you've got to first see it in yourself. You've got to first build it in yourself, and being alone gives you the time the space to actually do that. When you start being with someone romantically, you're now outsourcing the ability to love yourself. Right. It's funny because I was just talking to my girlfriend. She's going through a breakup, and um, she hasn't really spent time alone, and I told her, taken this time for you. I think it's going to build your understanding of how to protect that which you find worthy about yourself and understanding what that is. I said, if you are constantly
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afraid of being by yourself, that kind of desperation, that secret language unconsciously that sits in your head that says I'm not valuable unless I have a partner, I said, well, then that's the one that that weakens your boundary making. That's the one that doesn't make you capable of self love. And so then you're just going to continue the cycle. But j is so difficult for people to understand. I think that idea of self love has been so that kind of overuse new age terms that people don't really understand what that is. So you're basically saying that solitude gives a person an opportunity to know themselves even once they get into a relationship. Like I am just turned sixty nine. I still struggle a little bit with doing activities by myself. Like not too long ago, Rodney and I went on vacation. He had to leave before I did. It was just one extra day that I insisted on staying. But that meant that I had to be there by myself. I had to eat my meals alone, and I was perfectly fine. I did it, and I would look how old I am just getting that's fine. Let me tell you something, Jay, That's a gem right there. That one is so important when you can sit in your solitude and deal with you, look at yourself, heal yourself, embrace yourself, and have to learn how to comfort yourself. You know how to learn how to be your best friend, how to learn how to be your confidante, versus thinking that your partner is supposed to be your therapist, your lover, your best friend, your daddy, your business partner. And I think that that preparation for love is so important in order to step into a relationship with more reasonable ideas and expectations of what that relationship is supposed to be. So what are some of the principles within the second ash ram we're talking about practicing lest Yes, this one's probably the most complex because I feel like we usually rushed the first one. So the actions are almost like levels in a game. If you try and skip level one and you can cheat your way to level two, life will keep putting you back to level one. So that's why, no matter how old we get, or how many relationships we've had, or how many times we've been married or divorced or broken up, life is still asking us to learn those game game points before we move forward. In the second one, you're now moving from dealing with one mind to dealing with two minds. Some of my favorite principles from this rule. One of them is people deeply understanding the roles they played in their last relationship. And we all play one of three roles in a relationship. We've either been fixes, we've been dependents, or we've been supporters. What have you been our three and exactly? You'll find that most of us have repeated a role again and again and again. So the fixer is I'm going to solve this person. I'm looking for a project. I'm looking for someone to sort and I get self value and self worth out of making something out of you. Dependent, Yes, and then the dependent is someone who actually goes I want a parent, I want to I just want shelter. You make me feel safe, you make me feel taken care of. I'm gonna give you the key to my happiness and life. That's the dependent and the support to is the healthiest out of the three, where it's like, well we're gonna support each other, but we remember we're still our own people. And so what most people do is when they get with someone, they are trying to force their version of home with someone else, rather than saying, I want to build a home together with bricks I picked from mine and bricks you picked from yours. Talk to us a little bit about karma. I think a lot of people think that karma means every action as a reaction. What goes around comes around. There's partly truth in that, but that's a very simplistic, surface level view of karma. Karma is based cycle that forms, an habit that repeats itself. So it's a cycle of I have an idea that if I am dependent on someone, they will make me happy. Now I find someone who I can be dependent on, and I let them do everything in my life and I get them to take care of everything. Guess what happens. You still feel unfulfilled, and then you're being asked by karma. Did I walk into that with the right motive? So karma is getting us to check ourselves. It's asking you to say, am I happy with why I did that in the first place. We actually have a question for you, j from Sydney, Australia, Luma, who has a question about this very thing. Hi, Jada, Willow, Gammy and ja I posted a three months of going through Heartbreak video documenting the experience of going through the worst breakup of my life. I keep wishing that he'll text me or call me and tell me that he misses me. I don't know if anyone will ever love me. I don't know if it's my fault. Every single part of me wants to call him right now. I just felt like it's wrong with me, like why how could this person just leave? One thing I do still struggle with is the fear of history repeating itself and never really fully trusting that you know, someone might just stay and not leave me like that, And I'm not going to go through this kind of heartbreak again. So I wanted to ask you guys for some advice on this. Hi, Hi, thank you for being so vulnerable with us. One of the things that stuck out for me when she said she never wants to go through that kind of heartbreak again, I can just say I feel you. But let's let's talk about how realistic that is. Yes, studies showed that the activity in the brain that gets triggered when you go through a breakup is the same as detoxing from cocaine. So you can actually have a craving for that person that feels like that same sort of craving, and the other active atreas in the brain are the same as physical pain. So when you feel like your heart breaks, that idea is very scientifically shown. I think the challenges when you break up with someone, all of our language is about getting over them, as opposed to understanding why we got there. And so when you start saying I
want to get over them, all the energy goes on to that person and now it becomes about them. But if you focus on how you got there, you may find that you fell in love too far. You may find that you didn't follow some of these stages that we're talking about of did I know who I was? Did I really know who they were? And you go, We'll wait a minute. Maybe I don't want a fast love. Maybe I want a slow, thoughtful, mindful love. And that's how you avoid the same thing happening again. So when you look at karma, it requires you to go backwards and go where did I kid myself that we had found love? I think we jumped from like to love and we missed this level called learning. And that's where I feel like we're going wrong. So I would encourage you to go back and say where did I rush things? Where did I really overtrust? Where did I give someone my trust rather than let them earn it? And how does she learn to trust again? I want to take a second of breakdown trust because I think that's such an overused word. And so there are four stages to trust, trusting any one. And so you have to understand that when you meet someone, no matter how impressive they are, no matter how well spoken they are, no matter how attractive you think they are, you start at zero trust. The problem is, when we see someone we find attractive, studies show we find them more trustworthy. If we find someone more intellectual and thoughtful, we find them more attractive. Therefore we find them more trustworthy. So we constantly trick ourselves into trusting people who haven't yet earned our trust. So whoever you meet, no matter who in the world is you have to start at zero trust. Then the next step is called transactional trust. Transactional trust is when I do something for them, they do something for me. If they say they're going to show up at three pm and they show up at three pm, great, I have transactional trust with them. The reason why we don't like this is because we want love to be magical. We want to love to like. We don't want stages jay, I just want I just want to feel love. And that's where we make the mistake because we don't want to say, oh, okay, I now can trust them transactionally. So the third stage is resist, a brocal trust where it's like, you know, if you love this person, you'll do something for them. You're not doing it to get anything back, and they'll do something back for you anyway, right right. And then the fourth stage is unconditional trust, which is so rare and practically doesn't exist completely. And we usually start there when we think we're in love with someone. We're like, I'm giving you my unconditional trust. And now the higher trust you give, the bigger you have to fall. And so if you gave someone number four unconditional trust, then now you're falling back to zero trust. You've fallen down four steps, right, Luma, does that help you? Yeah, went to number four? Were fully trusted him? And yeah, Like obviously, going through break up is really hard.
I honestly think the hardest part is when you realize that them coming back is no longer the solution for your pain, like they Yes, that is for that's fantastic, that's beautiful. Well, Luma, thank you so much for joining us. Take this time for yourself. Yes, don't worry about jumping into anything else right now. We're wishing you the best. You were talking about unconditional trust. What are your real thoughts about unconditional love? Because I'm not sure there's such a thing. It's so rare that it feels like there is no such thing. But I think we get glimpses in it when you look at the love a mother has for their child. I don't think I've ever seen unconditional romantic love in my life. If you look at the greatest acts of love in the world, they were not romantic. Romeo and Julia is not a true story, and it wasn't a huge act of love in that sense. So I think the challenges. We've romanticized love and put romantic love on the pedestal, missing out on all these beaut that are as fulfilling, if not more, but we see them as less that And I think that that's unhealthy because some people may end up without a partner, maybe through natural loss. Someone may end up through a partner because they went through a divorce or breakup, and they may be single. Momays tell my girlfriends, let's just move in together when we're old and get a bunch of cats. Never we do have, but if we do have boyfriends, great, they can come over sometimes we can see them whatever, but let's be together and not like, oh, we have to just be old and gray with our significant other. Give us your thoughts on how saying I love you impacts relationships. So some people say I love you and it means they want to spend their life with you, and some people say I love you and it means I want to spend a night with you. But the problem is when someone says I love you, you you don't stop to asking go wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? What do you mean right? Studies show that men say I love you on average in a t eight days a t eight days and women take one thirty four days on average. Men say quicker, but it doesn't last is long. And the reason I bring that up is because it's not that that person necessarily lied to you or misled you. They were just living up to their definition. Yeah. So I'm not telling you to stop someone from saying I love you. I'm saying I hope that before you say that. There have been some conversations around what does love mean to you? Is I really love spending time with you, and that's aware that I love you means I really love spending time with you, not I want to spend time with you for the rest of my life. Yeah, And you know what, that is really important because not only do people have a misunderstanding around the world I love you. But what does marriage mean to you? I tell people all the time, just because somebody's cute and they're great in bed, and you're gonna have cute kids, it is not necessarily the reason to get married. I don't think that there's enough conversation around marriage. And the cost of weddings are going up, yes, and the amount of time being married is going to so we spend so much time planning for a wedding, You get a wedding planner, you have a guest list, you put a budget aside. What do we do for our marriage? We don't think about a budget for our marriage, like we plan so much for one day when you've just promised to live one life with someone. And you know what's really interesting when kids are growing up. I don't know if you ever did this with with Willow and Jaden and Trade. We put them up against the wall and then you mark where they are, and then at one one time, you just stop measuring. When you stop measuring, I mean you forget you're growing now. And that's what we kind of do. We think our wedding day is where you start measuring. You draw that line and you never have to draw a higher line ever went down. And so the mindset want to give people with love is that love ends because patients ends, kindness ends, compassion ends, judgment starts, criticism starts. Right. Love doesn't end because it just withered away. It ended because you stop practicing qualities that built it in the first place. A plan and your I was just doesn't die because it felt like dying. It died because you stopped watering it. It's that simple, it really is. Yeah. And so let's talk about the third ash root protecting love. Yes. Well, one of my favorite principles that I found really helped me and my wife in our own relationship is something I call fight styles, right, like, is your partner and then they or they wrestling, they are the king. When I read that part of the book, it was so eye opening from me, right because Rodney says I fight to win. Yes, I fight to win instead of fighting too like to solve the problems, I gonna let him break it down. But it was so revealing from me. I was like, wow, Yeah, So I found that there were three fight styles. Yeah. One is venting, where we're like, let's talk it out, let's figure it out. And I want to just vent. I want to express how I feel and we've got to figure it out. But it's very much trying to force a solution. The next is hiding, where someone just goes, I need to be in my cave. I don't want to see you. I just need to take some time out. And the third is exploding, where it becomes like it's all your fault, it's blaming, it's it's kind of critical and I discovered this actually through me and my wife. So I'm a classic inventor. I want to talk it out and figure it out right now. I'm not gonna explode, I'm not gonna blame anyone, but I want to figure it out right now, and we have to talk about it. Rather, he's a hider. She just wants to think about it. She doesn't want to talk about it right now. She needs time and space. When we first started dating and started arguing, which is normal, and that's the other issue. Whenever anyone tells me we never argue, I don't think that's a healthy sign of a relationship. It's natural to have disagreements.
Gotten An institute did a study that showed that the number one skill in a long lasting relationship was learning how to fight. When you're playing sports, you don't hope the other team doesn't attack. No, you think, all right, well when they attack this way, this is how we're going to respond. You want to do that as a couple. So when I would vent and Rady would hide, I would think she doesn't love me, not realizing she was just speaking a different language. So I started to realize, Okay, when we argue, I may want to talk about it now, and she may want to talk about it tomorrow, but we might have to schedule it to be in six hours to be in the middle of what that means rather than forcing her to fight on my battlefield or getting me to fight on hers. And so to me, learning fight styles protects love because you stop doubting love, and you stopped doubting your partner realizing they're just wired differently. When you were saying that you fight to win, here here are the scenarios and how fights go. If I win, it means you lose, which means we both lose because we're on a team. And really, what you want to do is you want to put your energy into soul being the problem together, not trying to fight with each other. And so we're making the person the enemy when the actual issue is the problem that we're dealing right. Gerald and Sheryl are from Los Angeles, Jay, and they have a question for you about fighting styles. What's up, Brad Table talk? Fam. I'm Gerald and I'm Cheryl and we've been dating for ten years and we moved in together and recently got engaged. We've realized over the years that we definitely have two different ways of communicating and arguing. When we disagree, we kind of both shut down and say it's fine or it's nothing, when a lot of the time it really isn't. And you know, eventually we want to grow together and start a family, but we don't want our small problems to turn into big ones. So what's your advice? Hi? Hi? It sounded like you both have a similar fight style and that you both like the clothes off but pretend nothing's really there. Am I right? Is that is that accurate? I kind of identified a lot with the I'm a venor but I'm a hider at the same time, And I think we both want to get to the root of a lot of the problems and come to a solution. But a lot of time, like I don't want to hurt each other's feelings, will end up hiding and kind of just brushing it off, And so you don't want to rock the boat too much, right? I feel like for me, I always kind of want to be right, and I know like if he's going to disagree with that, then I'd rather shut down and just not talk about it. The challenge becomes it's it's a five two egos rather than two people on the same team approach every issue, approach every problem is if you are trying to solve it together as a team. And so when it when it comes to whatever the issue may be, there's a few things that help us argue better. You really have to get to the root of the problem, because often you're arguing about something really tiny, which isn't the real issue. You're pretending to argue about the fact that you haven't made the call to get the oven fixed, and that isn't really the issue, and so much time is wasted on you left your socks out. You don't do this on the weekend, and that's not it. You're just overall not feeling like someone's in it with you. And so figure out for you personally, what is it that I'm really trying to work with right that's step one. Step two is we have to change our language. If our language is about being right, that means the other person is wrong. That's not an inspiring place to change from. Like you're meant to be partners, we have to use us and we, not you and me, because it really builds a collaborative environment in what your seems to be a healthy relationship and the third step, set a time to figure out how you're going to argue before you argue, Set a place to argue. Most people just wait for their partner to walk through the door at night. Bang, that's their place and time of argue never works, by the way, in a million years. Set a time when you know that person can digest it. And then the final step, which really blew my mind. If you're sitting opposite each other on a table, which is like a square or rectangle that actually mentally puts you against each other. They said that when people were having conversations where they're walking in the same direction, they were able to find better solutions. So next time we argue, going to walk, walk side by side, sit side by side and have a conversation, sit at a round table, which engages dialogue of equality. And now it's not about this way or that way, it's about us and we again. So I hope those principles give you some practical steps and how to actually argue. Probably well, I hope that was helpful to you guys. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. These are things I've learned in my own relationship. We take one thing up, partner does and we scale it across everything. So I have a value that came from my mom, which is if you're not early, you're late. So to me, being on time is really important. I've married someone who is rarely on time, right, and I'm ending about her now, Michelle, here we go and and it's really interesting because for years I literally felt like my wife didn't care or value me because she wasn't on time. So not only am I judging her off of just one metric you're not on time, that means you don't love me, but I realized I would ruin our night. I would be just so angry with her internally that she was late again, and I stopped myself from having a great night with her, not realizing that the qualities I love about my wife that she's spontaneous, She's got this like vibrancy. And I realized that part of being spontaneous and vibrant means you don't manage time as well. And so I realized that actually, if I wanted my wife to be more like me, I would be stripping her of the best qualities that I love about her and
say, with me, she never complains that I always have to be on time. So I think recognizing that sometimes the things you don't like about your partner or because of the things you love about them. Well, our next couple is going through a difficult breakup and has a question. So Josh and I have been together for five years. We have three children together. We're content creators that share our life pretty openly on social media to our hundreds of thousands of subscribers. So, needless to say, everyone was pretty shocked when we had broken up recently. And when Josh and I argue, it's an explosion. I am extremely emotional and sometimes I have to walk away because my emotions get too high. I like to face the situation head on and try my best to come to a resolution. But I think we have come to a point where our fighting has caused irreparable damage to our relationships. So we're struggling with the breakup. We love each other very much, but I think we both know that staying together isn't the answer. So I guess our question is how do we go about consciously uncoupling? That's real? Yeah, hi guys, Hi, Sorry, I watched the video again and I started crying. I know it's okay, I mean this is very commendable. This is my best friend. What do you mean? That's beautiful. It's really special to see you both supporting each other through this. It's a really mature way of trying to make this better for you both in the future. We want to do that, especially because we have three children. We've been listening the whole time, and all I've been thinking was where you guys a month ago? Right? You know you? You you guys are amazing and it's learned a lot already. Thank you, Thank you so much, And I really appreciate you bringing out that term conscious uncoupling because it puts you in a great position of strength for your kids. The biggest thing is setting boundaries of what you physically and emotionally can and can't do with each other anymore, because now you're separating yourselves. And the biggest mistake we make is in separating. We either try and cut everything or we keep things too blurry. Right, So we either say like this is the end of everything, We're never gonna talk to each other again, We're never gonna call each other ever again, or the other is we'll just see how it goes and we'll figure it out. And then that becomes really unhealthy because feelings and emotions creep back. So I would love for you both to look at the areas of your life where you still go across the physical, emotional, financial, i'm guessing as well, and spiritual and sit down and genuinely communicate your personal boundaries. So do this separately, don't do this together. And you're right down, this is where I'm a financially, this is where I'm not mentally, this is where I'm at emotionally, And then you're going to come back and share those same points with each other from the same areas and give each other that space to hear where that person's boundary is and make a commitment to respect that boundary because you said it yourself, You're like, we're best friends exactly, and if we're best friends with someone that we want to respect their boundaries and have them respect ours and remember boundaries on to keep someone else out there to make sure you don't cross that boundary too. I promise you if you do that, with the love you have, you can consciously on couple and do this in a respectful, admirable way that you both be proud of and your kids will be proud of We accept your challenge. I love that attitude. It is a challenge. It's not easy, but you've already done the hardest past. Thank you so much for that. I wishing the two of you the best. Yeah. Oh no, I get the sense that they're not done. Yeah I got that too, and that's okay too. But I've also seen people who consciously on couple and are the best of friends are better in that form. So it's all about just finding the form that works for you. So we have USh from for this is perfective, This is perfect affecting love. Yes, And the reason why I put perfecting not perfect is because it's an ongoing PROTOCEPST, you're always perfecting it. We've been trained to believe that love is something that people give you, it is something that you receive. It's something that we should want from other people. But when someone chooses to give love and to share love with everyone they need, they experienced the greatest form of love at any given time. And that's what this rule is really about, is that why could we not share love and express love with everyone, from the person who opens up the door at the store to someone who's serving us at the cash desk to the person that we bumped into on the train or the bus, Like, why couldn't every interaction be an expression of love? And that doesn't mean you're going to give them your whole life. You could express pure love to someone just through a smile of just looking through them in the eye. At I have to say that I have experience just last weekend and my girlfriend UM said that I was very critical. I had said a snide remark about somebody I think and Um, she said, you're so critical, And I was like, wow, I let that sit in my head for a minute, and I was like, okay, critical, judgmental. I know that that's a character defect of mine, to be judgmental. And I thought that I was working on that and I actually thought I was being funny, but she did not take it that way. And so I'm replacing the word love with just kindness. Yeah. I just keep telling myself, can you just be kind And that's a great word because sometimes love can be a lot and then when you practice kindness, you get exchanges of love exactly. That such a beautiful point. And so the mindset want to give people with love is that love is a daily practice and daily, well slip me. Thank you all the spiritual teaching and the friendship that you have developed with them. They are passing that on. Thank you. You've just been such a great friend to us. So you know, thank you, I know you do. We love actual special family, special people. We love you so much. Jay's new book, Eight Rules of Love is available for preorder. Now do yourself a favor, get this book. Thank you. It might just change. Willow has told me so much. And of course it has been like watching Willow on her Jenny and and now Jennie is just inspiring to me. I'm trying. You know that you have my heart. Willow just such an inspiration in so many ways. You know, I couldn't give that right back to you were just mirroring. I want to thank you. To join the Red Table to Talk family and become a part of the conversation. Follow us at facebook dot com slash red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of Red Table Talk podcast produced by Facebook, Watch, Westbrook Audio, and I Heart Radio.