Welcome to the Picture Love Podcast. I'm your host, Kris LeDonne. In this space, we believe that love is something you can choose to see because it lives within each of us innately. Picture Love is a practice, a way of seeing with your heart, not just your eyes, a way of showing up as the love you wish to see in the world. Each episode offers encouragement, soul-led conversations, and gentle tools to help you reconnect with what matters most, to live, to create, and love with more presence. I'm so glad you're here. Now let's get started. Welcome back friends. I'm so glad you are here with me right now. Right now, I really need to share a little bit of a story for somebody I love very much, and this person has truly embodied the definition of courage for me. And if you look in the news or you just simply listen to the pulse of our society, there is so much courage being shown in today's day and age because there are so many things that have been dealt like a really tough hand of cards to instill fear. But the person that I am lifting up right now with so much love is a young person who saw in herself an authenticity that was being denied by staying put in the familiar in a relationship. And this young person Stopped laughing out loud. Stopped expressing creativity and the joy and the colors and the delight and the play that is innately the nature of This person was trying to wear shoes that were two sizes too small so they wouldn't hurt somebody else. And I'm sure all of us have had some moment in our lives where we have made ourselves smaller to try to protect somebody else from hurt feelings. But it took deep courage to dig down, be honest with one's self, and to say, "This no longer fits. I need to go, and you need to let me go," whether it's a job or a relationship or a home or a perspective or maybe even a belief, like a religion, for example, a culture. I really believe that humans are meant to grow and expand, not just grow up as an infant to a child, to an adult, to an elder. I don't just mean that kind of growth. I mean the kind of growth that comes from expanding awareness through experience, through relationship with oneself, relationship with nature, relationship with humans. And this young person took so much courage to say goodbye to a relationship that was holding on white-knuckled. This person is a beautiful soul. All souls have great beauty, but this particular one occupies a lot of my heart. And the hurt that I'm witnessing today of the grief of leaving a relationship that was really good and happy at first, but had run its course, it's hard to watch somebody you love grieve. And yet, this young person is so courageous to be honest about it, to validate it, to go to the lengths of expressing through words, through actions, through movement, through getting out in nature, through all of the ways and, and relying on the ones who are closest to this person, to, to trusting them to hold space while thoughts are unpacked and debriefs take place. And you know, I'm sure we've all been in some experience where after the fact, we have all of these thoughts of things that didn't occur in the moment. Like the conversation that didn't unfold the way you wished it would, and you're like, after the fact maybe thought of two or three other more productive things that could have possibly come out of your mouth at the moment to accomplish the outcome you were looking for. But what's done is done, and we have to come to a point of peace and reconciliation with what is done, and all is well. And one of the ways that I have seen myself through a transition like grief like that is through creativity. Whether it's high-volume music or movement or making something creative or getting quiet with myself and doing something really, easy, whether it's coloring or walking or a puzzle or getting lost in a book or just crying until the tears stop. These are all ways that we move energy, and by creating something and being willing to knock it down when you're done and just appreciate the experience of moving through it, that's just, to me, that's where growth can continue to happen because there's nothing more stifling than staying small when you have something big that needs to be expressed. So today, I wanna ask us What is the next best thought? What is the next easy step? What is the one thing that you can do moving forward to stay in authenticity? And that one thing that you can do to stay in authenticity, it can be being still. Something that I'm working on personally. So I was writing in my journal the other day, and my heart is saying share it with you right now. And it's all under the umbrella of love, because when we love ourselves, we get to be honest with ourselves. One of the ways we can love ourselves is to own our authenticity and not shove it down, or sweep it under the rug. Love changes things. Love opens space for change to reveal maybe the mess that allows us to find what's next. And my wish for all of humanity, all of the souls that exist on this earth and off, my wish is that we all love ourselves fully and independently without having to rely on someone else to make us feel loved. Because when we come to a relationship of any nature fully as ourselves, we don't need to rely on somebody else to validate us. We get to come with our cups full, and those relationships where there's a balance of love within ourselves that can be expressed in the presence of other people who also know the truth of the love that they are, that's where beautiful gardens grow. That's where beautiful music takes place. Sometimes it's really loud and messy, and sometimes it's smooth and it's peaceful. But if you're like me and you love to meditate or journal or set some intentions for your day or simply intentions for a walk or simply intentions before you go to sleep in hopes that they take root while you sleep at night then maybe this entry will me- be meaningful to you. And I titled it "Love Changes Things." Send love to the earth, the soil, the crystals, the stones, the plant life. Send love to the mountains, the volcanoes. Send love to the waters, the lakes, the ponds, the oceans, the rivers. Send love to the shifts, the transitions The water levels that rise, that lower Send love to the quakes, to the tides, to the winds, to the currents. Send love to the flames, to the lava, to the magma through the flames and the fire in our hearts. Change is always unfamiliar. New beginnings cannot happen without the unfamiliar. Inner peace is the energetic balance to keep your boat upright when the waters become choppy. And a steady boat does not guarantee others won't tip, but it also gets to be seen so that others can know that it's possible to stay above board in these turbulent waters May we all have the courage to be the love that we are, to honor the changes that come, the courage to remember the curiosity and the wonder of all that this life offers us, whether it's between humans or just within one's self. May we all have the courage to honestly love ourselves, others, and this experience, and may we have the courage to see with wonder the gifts of even the heartbreak and the places that call on our courage. Love changes things, so how are we being that love today? When I started shifting the topic of Picture Love away from helping people preserve their family photos into more literally picturing love in ourselves, it was a very conscious shift. It was a conscious change that I made. I want this to be a place where we can all openly find space to remember the love that we are. I want to explore this space, hold it with you, the space where we can freely picture love courageously without fear of being small, being not enough, without fear of judgment, without fear of forgetfulness. Let's all come together and remember ourselves. Let's remember the love that we are. And when we picture it in the world, we're sending out the intentions. We're reflecting that love light in our hearts outwardly. We're letting ourselves, we're letting our hearts be lighthouses in those choppy waters And I'd like to invite you to Sit down and reflect, whether you're driving, whether you're walking, whether you just have a peaceful moment outside under a tree, and ask yourself, How am I picturing love for me right now? How easy can it be to picture love in myself today? How easy can it be to picture the love I already am?" When we know it in our hearts, it's so much easier to see it in others So without further ado, I'm gonna leave you to those thoughts today How easy can it be to picture love today? I hope you don't have to be that courageous, but I hope courage is something you naturally do and you celebrate in yourself every time you call on it cause you are the love that you're picturing in the world. Take care, friends. I love you. Thank you for spending this time with me. If today's episode touched your heart, I invite you to share it with someone who might need a little extra love. Your support helps our community grow and keeps the Picture Love movement thriving. Until next time, keep picturing love