Transcriber: Letizia Ferrari Reviewer: David DeRuwe
OK, let’s do a little audience participation
because I’m on the stage, and I can.
Raise your hand if you have ever had a beloved dog.
Thanks for playing. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been afraid to love.
Come on, everyone. Raise your hands. Let’s stay with the second question.
Have you ever been afraid to open up your heart and love?
Humans are under the impression that love makes us vulnerable.
And to a certain extent, that is true.
Whether it’s a romance or a friendship,
new or old, relationships come with a lot of uncharted territory,
and humans tend to shy away from unknown waters.
But when we look into the eyes of a dog, something in us expands and grows.
We don’t focus on the “what ifs” of that relationship
because we believe there’s no cause to be alarmed.
And listen, it’s not that dogs have any special capability to love
or be in relationship with humans.
According to dog experts,
they have a special ability to be in relationship with everything.
Let’s be truthful, we could learn a lot about love and relationship from dogs.
I did.
I was a cat person all my life.
I learned three major things:
Love can be our natural state, love is available to us,
and love is about letting go.
Me, the cat person, was shocked to know and realize that my soulmate
is a 25-pound Australian blue heeler called Roxy.
(Laughter)
The first time I met her, she jumped out of my boyfriend’s car,
ran up the three flights of stairs, looked at me, and went, “Hey, I know you.”
That was the moment I knew we were made for each other.
I wanted to know everything about her.
I spent days studying her, from her smell, which is the odor of corn chips,
to the little heart-shaped spot on her left leg.
I was wild and crazy about her,
and she licked herself and others in inappropriate ways.
I want to be like her.
She expresses love without fear or hesitation.
Love is her zone of genius. Love is her natural state.
What if we welcomed in love?
What if we didn’t let our biases and our beliefs code our relationships?
What would you be capable of? What would humanity be capable of?
I get it. I, too, was afraid to open up my heart in love.
And yet ...
every time I looked at her, I caved.
I melted.
We cave. We are supposed to cave to love.
But yet we sit in loving profoundly and being profoundly loved.
And we sit and we sit in our fear.
Roxy doesn’t care if I love her. She’s going to love me no matter what.
It is who she is. It is who you are.
So how do you let go of being afraid of everything, including love?
Ready for another audience participation?
Close your eyes.
Take a moment to tune into that space within you that is unlimited.
Then notice that you are enough - that loving is your natural state.
It's a choice that you have to make every day.
Me and Roxy, we became like an old married couple.
We had our routines.
And then one day, she broke our routine - she died.
She got hit by a car and died.
One moment she was running up the stairs to her house;
the next, she was chasing a rabbit across our busy street.
For her, it was over in seconds.
For me, it lasted hours on that street,
feeling all of the love drain out of me, feeling so alone.
But in reality, I wasn’t. All of the neighbors came out to help us.
And they continued to support us
with love, cards, flowers, homemade treats, for days.
I kept waiting for some profound statement from the universe,
and there was just silence until I took a look around my house,
and I saw the offerings from strangers and loved ones.
It was a physical representation of the love that was available to me.
How often are you lying to yourself that love is absent in your life?
It is your choice to look around and see the love within your reach.
One day I picked up her lot, her blanket, you know,
to smell the corn chip smell, and a flutter began in my heart.
Roxy opened up my heart to love, and I wasn’t going to let it close.
My boyfriend called the breeder.
Yeah, I have a boyfriend. I don’t mention him a lot, but I do.
(Laughter)
And Roxy’s cousin had puppies, and there was one available.
We named her Hart.
Hart came to us two weeks later.
See? You can get your heart back.
The first part of our relationship, mine and Hart’s, was a little complicated.
I kept comparing her to Roxy.
When you’re in your natural state of love, there’s no comparison.
And it all stopped one day, 4 a.m.,
when I was searching for the missing bundle.
Miss Hart was looking at me with that profound sense of embarrassment
as I’m searching the ground with my flashlight for that missing poop.
And I’m keenly aware that if I find this poop,
then I truly believe that I will have back everything that I have lost.
And it hits me how I've been struggling to let go.
And because I’ve been struggling to let go,
I’m losing the love that’s available to me.
Sometimes you just lose stuff,
and you have to be willing and accept there’s something deeper for you there,
that you’ll be taken care of, and that you’ll be safe.
A couple days later, I was walking in the dog park.
This guy was, poop bag in hand, searching for the missing bundle.
And I said to him, “You lost the poop, didn’t you?” and he said, “Yeah, I did,”
and I said, “You know what? Sometimes you got to let it go.”
(Laughter)
“And don’t worry, it will find you.”
(Laughter)
You know researchers, in studying dogs’ brains,
noticed that reward centers lit up more
for “Your owner is present” than “You’re going to get sausage.”
And that tells me dogs know something that most of us don’t -
that love is the reward itself.
I learned three things from my time with Roxy and Hart:
Love is our natural state,
love is available to me,
and love is about letting go.
What are you going to learn?
Are you going to start to see the world
through eyes that know that love is all around you?
Are you willing to let go of the pain
and stop letting pain be your North Star and turn towards love?
It's really all up to you.
I know you can do it.
And when you can’t, Roxy’s rooting for you.
Thank you.
(Applause)