Friendship: the love, the heartbreak and the hierarchy we need to get rid of!

🎧 You can also listen to this and all of our other podcasts on Apple Podcast (iTunes) and Spotify.

We have a fresh new episode for you today and we can’t wait for you to hear it and get involved in the conversation with us over on instagram. Because today we are looking at a topic that we have all had strong experiences in: friendship.

Our friendships have the capacity to give us every bit as much love, connection, pain, heartbreak, growth and belonging as our romantic relationships and when it comes to friendships between women, there is plenty of research that proves that close female friendships are essential to our happiness and health.

So in this episode we looked at the power of friendship, the pain that can come with friendship break ups, how to make new friends as an adult and how to deal with the ‘friends’ that you realise aren’t treating you right and, perhaps the juiciest of all, how to handle the relationship hierarchy that seems to be at play in our society that relegates friendships to bottom rung once partners and kids come along. It was one of the biggest topics that came up when we got this conversation started over on instagram and the Love Zone last week. And it’s time we challenged that hierarchy and brought an end to it. It’s no good for anyone!

So hit play above or over at Apple Podcast and then carry on the conversation with us over on instagram @loveprojectlove

Oooooor let us know what you think of this latest episode (or the podcast as a whole) over on Apple Podcast (a 5* review would make our day ;) ).

Lots of love,

Selina & Vicki

A lesson in goddess archetypes and what they can teach us about ourselves

Ooh we’ve got a great podcast for you this week!

We invited the gorgeous Helen Johnson, founder of Goddess Acumen, to talk to us about the fascinating topic of Goddess Archetypes and what they can teach us about the way we live and love.

Every time I hear Helen talk on this topic I walk away with profound new insights into myself and the world around us. And this podcast was no exception.

We explored how the goddess Aphrodite (goddess of love and sexuality) and goddess Demeter (goddess of motherhood) are in crisis in our society and the HUGE impact that has on us as women and how the Archetypes can be used as a practical tool and guide to help us bring those aspects of ourselves back into full power.

The way Helen illuminates the world we live in through the goddess archetypes is fascinating. I dare you to have a listen and NOT take something valuable for yourself from it!

Have a listen and let us know what you think.

AND if you are in or near London on 21st November then come and join us for our next Project Love Salon with Helen ‘The Goddess Within: how to use goddess archetypes as a practical tool in life and love'.

Grab your early bird tickets here and we’ll see you there!

x Selina and Vicki

If you read just ONE book on love, make it this one

This book was given to me by a friend as we lay on a beach in Goa, while I was single and Project Love was in its infancy.

That same copy is now sitting by me as I write. It's now dog-eared with half of the corners turned down, paragraphs underlined throughout and notes in every margin.

It had a profound effect on me.

And since reading it I've recommended it to almost everyone I know.

And now I'm recommending it to you.

The book?

Zen and the Art of Falling in Love by Brenda Shoshana

So what makes this book so special?

Well for me it totally transformed my whole understanding and approach to love.

It offers a deep wisdom about love and the nature of it that I believe we all instinctively know, but have forgotten.

It showed me that I had been doing it all wrong: I had been looking for love on the outside to fill me, when what I actually had to do was to open up to the love that already existed within me, so that it filled me up with love and flowed outwards to connect me with other loving people. It was about opening up to love, not finding it.

It introduced me to so many subtle, gentle and profound new ways of looking at love that's it hard to really summarise it, but what I can say is that it shifted me into a whole new space when it came to love and I've remained there ever since. That is the power of the book.

Throughout the book Brenda Shoshana, a psychologist, relationship expert and Zen practitioner, draws on the principles of Zen practice in a way that offers new insights to love, relationships and communication. You don't have to know anything about Zen practice and she's not telling you to go on a silent retreat to change your love life (although by the sounds of it it does seem to help!). What it does is offers a totally fresh way of looking at love and relationships, grounded in the lessons of a wise and ancient practice, that sets you free from the limited and fear-led way we're brought up to approach love and relationships in modern society.

It's no exaggeration to say that this book set me free. And I have seen it do the same for numerous other people that I've recommended it to.

Here's a little quote from it to leave you with, but what I recommend is that you just order it right now and get stuck in. And if you've read the book, or once you have read it, please come back here and let us know what you think by leaving your comments below!

"Now with a little patience it's only a matter of time before the person who knows how to love starts emerging from within. This person knows how to discover the 'right relationship' and how to thrive in it completely. Isn't it time you let her free?"

x Selina

From not enough to thank you very much

We've all been there. Incredibly overwhelmed by that lurking feeling of not being enough.

"I'm not liked enough", "I'm not loved enough", "I'm not popular enough", "I'm not thin enough", "I'm not asked out enough", "I'm not promoted enough at work"....

You get the picture, you feel that something is lacking.

Leo Babauta of the fabulous Zen Habits, asked his Twitter friends “What fear is holding you back?”. Their responses included:

• Failure
• Abandonment / Rejection
• Intimacy
• Success
• Being broke
• Not being good enough

According to Leo, the fear of not being enough is actually at the root of all the others. And we tend to agree with him.

We're living in a culture of scarcity, focusing on what we lack rather than what we have.

In her book, "Daring Greatly", Brene Brown shows the extent of this on a daily basis. We start our morning thinking that we didn’t get enough sleep, we go through our day worrying about how little time we have to get everything done and then we fall asleep feeling anxious that we failed to tick everything off our to do lists. And it goes on and on.

What if we could wake up and go to sleep with a feeling of gratitide instead? Well we're starting just that with a 30 day gratitude exercise. The Gratitude Journal App is designed to make gratitide a habit, which is perfect because we love our habits.

Basically, you write down 5 things that you're grateful for each day to train your brain to be happier, By practicing awareness of the things we're thankful for (the good stuff), we fight off the brain’s natural tendency to spot the bad stuff. As a result, we train our brains to be more positive and thus happier.

Give it a go and let us know how you get on!

V x