Marci Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason, sits down with Dr. Oz to explain the three basic love themes in our life: to love who were are, the purpose of love, and the portal of love. Marci says we catch the emotions of the people around us like we catch a cold, and explains how we can all remove the blocks that get in the way of developing lasting love. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Everyone that I interviewed said that, you know, we think we need to go get love, but the reality is love is who we are.
It's our essential nature.
It's stated in every major spiritual tradition that, you know, we are this love.
And basically we just have developed, we have these blocks to experiencing it.
it.
So we need to remove those blocks.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. podcast.
Lisa's with me in the studio today.
Marcy Simov's our guest, and she's won a bunch of awards, written a couple of runaway bestsellers, Happy for No Reason, Seven Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out.
It's one of them.
She's got a PBS series.
Of course, she's written a bunch of this chicken soup for the Women's Souls books.
But she's here today talking about her new book, Love for No Reason.
Marcy, I got to say, you write about so many things so beautifully.
But love is an interesting topic because it's written about a lot.
Why do you want to add to that literature?
Yeah, you know, there are a lot of books out there about love.
And what I find is most of them are about relationship love.
And that's wonderful.
Nothing wrong with that.
But I wanted to write a book about the kind of love that I call love for no reason, which is an inner state of love that doesn't depend on another person or situation or romantic partner.
and it's the kind of love that we can feel in any kind of circumstance.
And I started running into people.
I started asking the question, you know, the times I felt the really most fulfilled in life were when I was in love.
But that doesn't always last.
And I started wondering, can people experience this independent state of love without any particular person?
And I started running into people who are living in this way and I do what I do, which is I interviewed them and I found that they didn't get there by luck, that there are things that you and I and everybody can do to actually live more and more in this state of love.
Do you find there's a huge overlap between the idea of being happy for no reason and being a loving person?
I mean, does being loving and loving for no reason lead to happiness?
Are your books connected in a way?
Very much.
I mean, absolutely.
If anything, I would say that love is kind of the higher level of happiness, that it's taken to the extreme.
I interviewed 150 love luminaries, people who were living in this way, and I found a number of really fascinating things.
One of the things that they all said was that love is really the purpose of our lives, that it's why we're on the planet.
And if you read all of the accounts of near-death experiences, many of them will include a life review.
They say that we have a life review at the end, and in that life review, there's one question.
And that's our final exam question at the end of life.
And the one question is, how much did you love?
And I think it's really interesting that that's the main question.
And if that's the case and love is our job here on the planet, I think it's one of those tests you can't cram for at the end.
Marcy, talk to us a bit more about the science in the book.
You touched on it earlier, but there's a fair amount of hard concrete data.
It's not just this airy-fairy stuff.
I love people just to think through this a little bit before they write off love as being one of those things that, you know, it's hard to do when we're having economic challenges.
You're either laid off, you're worried about your job, or your bills are coming in too fast.
What's the hard data behind love?
Yeah, what I'm talking about is not Hollywood or Hallmark kind of love.
It's really grounded in the body.
And there's a big growing field of research in this, but the one group that I... Talked with a lot with the Institute of HeartMath, and they have done a lot of research into the heart and how our emotions, positive emotions, and how they affect us.
And what they've found is that when we're experiencing positive emotions, they found that the heart does much more than pump blood.
It sends really powerful commands to the brain and the body.
And when we're in powerful emotional states like love, the communication between the heart and the brain is the best.
It's when...
When we're functioning the best.
And in fact, they have these devices.
They're called the M-Wave.
They're little pocket-sized things that you carry around with you.
And they can help you determine.
They can help you train yourself to be in heart rhythm coherence.
And people in the...
Athletes are using this.
And people in the military right now are using this to perform better overseas.
To also get over...
Most traumatic stress syndrome.
So there is real correlation between what they're finding scientifically and what we can feel emotionally.
How do you know if you're a loving person or not?
I mean, if you're a listener right now, because we all love something, right?
We love the people in our family.
We love our french fries.
I mean, how do you gauge if you have enough love in your life or if it's something that you really need to work on?
Well, I think, you know, I have a self-assessment that you can take to see how much you are living in this state of love for no reason.
But it's When your life is working, when you feel open-hearted, it's evident.
Most people are feeling a lot of pain.
They're feeling heartache.
They're feeling some kind of separation.
If you're feeling...
Some people will say to me, oh, well, I love really well.
My problem is I love too much.
Well, that's not really love either.
That's probably trying to get love back.
We walk around as though we're love beggars.
We're looking for love.
We have these little cups, and we're going around looking for love, when in fact what we're missing is that we are love, And that we have that love inside of us.
And what I found is that these people became, these love luminaries were like love philanthropists rather than love beggars.
They were overflowing with love rather than just trying to get it from the outside.
There's last more to come after the break.
It's interesting, as I read through the book, you talk a little bit about the love continuum.
And just for everybody, there's no love, love for bad reasons, then there's love for good reasons, and then ultimately love for no reason, which you argue is the goal.
Can you walk us through each of these?
Sure.
What's no love?
Let's start there.
No love is what we know as heartache, as feeling disconnected from things in life.
When people are depressed, when people are...
In pain, that's no love.
Love for bad reason is when we turn to addictions, when we turn to other things outside of ourselves to fill ourselves up, but it ends up being empty in the long run.
So, you know, I love my food or I love alcohol or I love shopping, and that ends up being just a cover-up for the pain that you're feeling.
Then there's love for good reason and that's what most of the talk is about and most of the books are about which is let me feel love for a good reason because I love a person or I love my job and those are wonderful things but the ultimate state is this love for no reason which is just being able to experience love no matter what's going on no matter what challenges you're facing being able to actually still experience love and it's You know,
can we walk people through a very quick experience of what we're talking about?
Because, you know, I think experience is worth a lot of words.
So this is a technique I'm just going to share with you from the Institute of HeartMath.
It's called the Inner Ease Technique.
And it moves you from the stress response to the love response.
And it takes about a minute.
So three steps.
The first step is to put your hand over your heart.
And you can do this with eyes open or closed.
It doesn't matter.
Just putting your hand over your heart releases oxytocin.
Oxytocin is the love hormone, which makes us feel bonded and connected.
So just first step, hand over heart, oxytocin release.
It feels like I'm saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
Yeah.
Okay, so second step.
Second step is to breathe.
Imagine you're breathing in and out through the heart.
So just picture or feel your breath coming in and out through your heart.
This is called heart-focused breathing.
And then the third step is to imagine when you're breathing in on all your inhales that you're breathing in care.
You're breathing in ease, compassion for yourself, appreciation.
Sometimes it helps if you think about somebody or A beloved pet that stimulates that feeling of appreciation or love.
Just breathe that in with your inhale as though you are breathing in through your heart.
And take one more deep breath.
And open up your eyes if they're closed.
Now that took a minute, not very long.
Did either of you feel any shifts?
I must say it was interesting when I first put my hand over my heart, and you mentioned the word oxytocin.
I don't know why, but you sort of felt the goosebumps, and I haven't done that in a while.
It is interesting that we actually do that iconic move when we say the Pledge of Allegiance, but also if you're standing before a sports event for the National Anthem.
Do you know what the history is of that move?
You know, that's a great question.
I don't know the history of that move, but I think it's an instinctive thing that...
When we're feeling something, often you'll find that people will put their hands over their heart when they're feeling something.
And, you know, you see a new little baby, and it stimulates that feeling of love, and often a person will put their hand over their heart and look down at the baby and say, oh, how cute.
So it's, you know, what I find is that we have so many, we have infinite opportunities through our day to shift out of this I'm very practical.
I don't want...
I want things to get results for me.
So I am really into these tools, and I include 14 tools in Love For No Reason, that people can use to quickly access this state of love, or to remove the blocks to experience a greater state of love.
Take us through a couple of them, Marcie.
Well, you know, I'm going to share with you, this is a wild one, but I've used it so remarkably, and I've heard so many people use it so remarkably, and it's called Ho'oponopono.
It's a lot easier to use than it is to say.
Oh my goodness.
Ho'oponopono.
It's an ancient kahuna Hawaiian technique of forgiveness.
And I'll tell you a little bit about the history of how it became popular in the last 20 years.
It's a wild story.
There is a psychiatrist named Dr. Iliakala Hu Lin, and he was a psychiatrist for the Hawaii State Hospital.
And the psychiatric ward had criminally insane patients, and he Very dangerous.
People were afraid of being attacked by them.
They were often in shackles, heavily medicated.
He went in and didn't even meet with them personally.
He sat with their files, and he sent them this forgiveness practice or technique.
And it just simply goes like this.
It's four sentences.
If you've got a piece of paper, you want to write this down.
It goes, I'm sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
I'm sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
And he would, in his heart, send that message, those thoughts, to these inmates.
He did this for about three months.
Within three months, many of them had gone off their medications, had been unshackled, and within two years, almost all of them were released.
And within three years, the entire ward was closed.
It's just such a simple...
Now, I tell people, just try it out in your own life.
You know, don't take my word for it.
Just...
We all have people for whom we feel resentment.
We feel anger.
We feel a lack of forgiveness.
So, just for the next week, practice for a few minutes a day.
I'm sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.
And see what happens.
Use your life as an experiment.
It doesn't matter whether you're the injured party or the person who did the injuring.
What happens is when you shift your energy, it shifts the energy in the whole relationship.
We have lots more questions to get to.
But first, let's take a quick break.
Talk about the love set point.
Well, yeah.
You know, when I did the research on happiness, we found that there's a happiness set point.
And that no matter what happens to us, whether good or bad, you can win the lottery, you can become a paraplegic.
Whatever happens to us, within about a year's time, we tend to return to our original happiness set point.
So it's really the set point that matters when we're trying to shift our happiness level, not changing the outer circumstances in life.
So if you keep going back to the same set point, and you want to be a happier, more loving person, how do you shift your set point?
You do it incrementally.
Small steps on a daily basis over time will create these shifts.
And that's what they found with the happiness set point, that it's a matter of habit.
And we can change our habits to change our set point.
It's like turning up the thermometer, turning up the thermostat at home to get warmer.
You just turn up the thermostat.
Well, we've found that the same is true with love.
That we all have a love set point or a ceiling or an upper limit on the amount of love that we can experience.
And when we start to experience more love than that, We often will sabotage it because we're not comfortable with it.
We're not used to it.
It sounds crazy, but it's true.
So what we're talking about here is how we can raise our love set point through changing our habits in very small steps at a time.
You know, it's the beginning of a new year and people are setting all these resolutions, which is a wonderful thing.
But when you take small steps on a more regular basis, rather than trying to do it all on the first week of January, you'll have greater success.
So what I suggest in Love For No Reason is that you take one new habit, and I've got 14 of them in there.
We take one habit, you do it for a week or two.
Then you practice another habit.
And within a month or so, I've found that people experience major shifts in their lives.
And it doesn't just shift them, it shifts the people around them as well.
You know, there's something called emotional contagion, that we catch the emotions of the people around us like we catch their cold.
And so if you want to best affect the people around you, when you start experiencing more love, the people around you will experience it as well.
That's beautifully stated.
You know, you distilled hundreds of hours of interviews with different love luminaries and took those transcripts and converted them into three basic main love themes.
And I'm just going to read this off of the notes I took.
One was to love who we are.
The other is that the purpose of love is to expand love.
And the third is that the heart is the portal of love.
Can you walk us through these a little bit?
Sure.
Everyone that I interviewed said that, you know, we think we need to go get love, but the reality is love is who we are.
It's our essential nature.
It's stated in every major spiritual tradition that, you know, we are this love.
And basically we just have developed, we have these blocks to experiencing it.
So we need to remove those blocks to experience a more open heart.
And the second is that the purpose of our life is love, and we talked about that earlier, that it's really our job description.
And then the third is that the heart is the portal to accessing this love.
And the Institute of HeartMath, there's also a group out of Stanford that's studying compassion and altruism.
And a lot of this research is showing how the heart is really Fundamental to our experience of love.
And let me just share with you a story from one of the people that I interviewed, a woman named Sally Sals, and it's quite a remarkable story.
Sally was about a month before her 50th birthday, and Sally was rushed to the hospital, violently ill.
Turns out she had liver failure, and they gave her three days to live unless she got a liver transplant.
Now, this was completely unexpected.
She had no family history of it.
She didn't drink.
She was completely out of the blue.
Towards the end of the third day, they basically, she had hours to live.
They found her a liver transplant, and she had the surgery.
Her body accepted the new liver, and she did very well for a year.
A year later, she goes back to the doctor for an exam, and he said, your liver is destroyed.
It's going to fail again.
It's failing again.
You need another transplant.
And she was horrified.
She noticed on that visit that there was a woman there who had just had her third liver transplant.
And this woman was the most angry, negative, dark cloud person.
She said no amount of medical science could help this person's negativity, you know, could overcome her negativity.
And it reminded Sally of how in Chinese medicine...
They say that each organ is related to a particular emotion and the liver is related to anger.
And Sally thought, well, that's true for the other woman, but I don't know about me.
And then she started examining her own life and realizing while she wasn't angry on the outside, she did carry a lot of anger towards herself.
That she'd grown up in a very critical environment and was always beating herself up.
So she made a commitment to herself to start practicing self-love.
And she did all of these things.
Techniques to help love herself and give herself greater care and stop beating herself up.
Four months later, she went back to the doctor to get ready for this transplant.
The doctor did the exam and said, we have no idea what happened.
Your liver is perfectly healthy.
It's completely healed.
It's a miracle.
And you don't need a transplant.
That was 18 years ago.
She's Absolutely perfectly healthy.
Has never needed anything more with her liver.
She's met and married the man of her dreams.
She is one of the most love-filled people I've ever met.
And she said she was actually happy that her liver failed because it's what taught her that she had to live with self-love.
It was the only thing that was going to actually help her survive.
