About Us
Our Approach
At Love Liberates, we are eager to connect with those who want to engage in the work of personal, interpersonal, and collective healing and liberation. We are committed to collaborating with individuals, couples, and organizations who are curious about what is possible when we decide to intentionally move toward liberation. We understand that much of the harm that we experience occurs in relationship and that our healing occurs best through deepening our relationships (to ourselves, to one another, and to our communities).
We believe that we can move toward greater and more sustained wellbeing when we practice understanding, interrupting, and replacing the beliefs and behaviors that keep us asleep to our own power and “enoughness”; when we recognize that much of the distress we experience is not due to shortcomings or failures on our part, but the result of the many ways that oppression (which can create the symptoms that we often define as pathology) denies us of our right to access and experience wholeness, rest, connection, care, and real love.
Why Love?
We believe that one of our most direct paths to liberation is through love - love for ourselves, love for one another, love for our communities, love for all beings, and love for our planet. When we speak of love we are not referring to a “Hallmark” or romantic sort of love. We are referring to a type of love that Martin Luther King Jr. described as “strong, demanding, and costly” - a love that requires practice and discipline - a love that invites us to understand and unlearn all of the ways that we have been told that we are unlovable (meaning undeserving of care and safety), or that anyone else is undeserving of, or beyond love. We are referring to an unconditional type of love that does not require our own or anyone else's suffering.
Within this understanding is also a belief that truly loving ourselves and one another requires the creation and maintenance of clear communication, boundaries, and discernment. In our work we create space to examine and practice the paths toward cultivating a love that enables our own and one another's healing and liberation.
Why Liberation?
Ancestor Grace Lee Boggs would often ask: “what time is it on the clock of the world?” There are, of course, many ways to answer this question. For many of us, however, this is a time when, as Adrienne Maree Brown said, “the veil is being lifted” and we are developing a deeper, collective understanding of the myriad ways in which individuals and groups continue to struggle under the weight of sustained systemic and structural oppressions.
More and more people are coming to recognize that we’ve had to work hard to survive, as intact as possible not just in our own lives, but in most cases, for generations. When we are able to slow down to extend real curiosity to our beliefs, feelings, and overall experience (personally and within our relationships), when we practice meeting ourselves and one another with open hearts and minds, when we move with greater intention and awareness in our behaviors, we deepen our capacity to confidently move closer to our own and our collective liberation.
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. ”
