...and the journey begins. Episode 1 is just a brief introduction to your host, Robyn Rose and the reason she created this podcast.
Robyn opens up by laying her cards on the table. With refreshing transparency, she shares why she struggled to let her light shine for so many years and describes the encounter she had that started to turn things around.
From Sesame Street references to Marianne Williamson, this brief tour through Robyn's heart will help you understand why she created this podcast and the message she'd like to share.
Email: robyn@lovemeanyway.site
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:05 Host speaks: Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Love Me Anyway. I am your host, Robyn Rose and I’m so delighted to have you here with me. I’d like to take the opportunity during this first episode to tell you a little bit about myself and why I created the Love Me Anyway podcast.
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:23 Before we get into that, however, I’d like to get things kicked off with our song of the day. I hope it brings you as much joy as it brings me and it’s so appropriate for this occasion because the song is titled Welcome to the Party by Norah Jones. It’s the 50th anniversary celebration song for Sesame Street. I don’t own the rights to the song so I can’t play it for you and you certainly wouldn’t want me to sing it to you, but I will share some of the lyrics. Of course, she says “welcome to the party. Thank you just for coming and thanks for all the good things we’ll share in come what may”. That is exactly the sentiment I’d like to express to you: thank you for being here and I look forward to what will take place in this podcast.
01:06 Now I’d like to tell you a little bit about me and why I created the podcast. Love me anyway is a phrase that came to me several years ago during a spiritual experience I had. I am Christian. I know many of you listening may not be Christian and may not practice any particular religion at all, I totally respect that. I just want to give you a little bit of backdrop about why this moment was so pivotal for me.
01:33 It was a point in my life when I was really trying to get closer to God, trying to strengthen my relationship, get to know Him more, be a better Christian, a better person. And I had committed to reading my bible everyday and spending time in prayer everyday. And things were going well and I was that type of person where, often, my mind would drift when I was praying, especially if I wasn’t praying out loud. So I got to the point where I would physically get down on my knees, kneel down on the side of my bed and speak my prayers out loud so I could stay focused, where it would feel like I was actually speaking to God in the room with me. And that was very effective in keeping my mind from drifting.
02:15 One evening, as I was preparing for bed, I had just gotten in from a date that went physically farther than it should have since I was attempting to improve my relationship with Christ and I just felt a lot of guilt. And I had just spent some time reading the bible and I was getting into the prayer position, kneeling on the side of my bed and I couldn’t do it. I could not get on the floor and kneel before God and ask Him for forgiveness when I knew that if the man I was dating called me the next day and asked me to go out again, the same exact thing would happen. I just sat down on the side of my bed and I cried. And I was apologizing for being disobedient. I was apologizing for a lack of faith. I was apologizing for not being strong. I was apologizing for not getting it right. And in that moment, it just seemed like Jesus himself, wrapped his arms around me, kissed me on my forehead and said “I love you anyway”.
03:24 I never forgot that moment. I never forgot that feeling; that no matter what I did, no matter how weak I felt, He loved me anyway. He loved me in spite of anything I had done. Although that was the first time the phrase “I love you anyway” presented itself to me, it wasn’t the first time that I’d wanted to express that desire of having someone love me anyway.
03:56 I was very young when I “lost my innocence”. An older man did inappropriate things to me when I was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12. And I blamed myself for it. And I didn’t tell my parents about it until several years later and there were several reasons why I didn’t tell. First and foremost, in my mind at that age, was because I knew if I told my parents, they’d never let me go back to that friend’s house where it happened. Two, I was afraid if I told my parents, my father, in particular, might do something to punish this man, hurt him, maybe even kill him and end up in jail and, God forbid, I certainly didn’t want that to happen. And three, I was afraid I’d get in trouble because I allowed it to happen. I knew what he was doing wasn’t supposed to happen but I didn’t have the courage to stop it. So I blamed myself. I blamed myself for not being strong enough. I blamed myself for not being vocal enough. I blamed myself for so many things.
04:57 I started carrying that guilt around at a very early age and I started keeping secrets, namely from my parents but also from other people. I didn’t want to tell my friends or other family members that I had allowed something like that to happen. Fast forward a few years and I got pregnant at the age of 15. Not only did I get pregnant, I decided not to keep the baby. So now add on a little more guilt, a little more shame, a few more secrets because I didn’t tell my friends about this. I did tell one friend but I certainly didn’t tell most of my friends. None of my other friends were going through any of this and if they were, they certainly didn’t tell me about it. So, in my mind, I’m feeling like I was the only person in the world who was going through this so I must have been the most horrible teenager ever.
05:47 Even when I was dating as an adult, I was still keeping those secrets. The men that I dated didn’t know a lot of that stuff and so there was a part of me that was never fully exposed. People don’t need to know your entire life story. Some people aren’t even entitled to your entire life story. But when there is something in you that is unprocessed, that is not healed, it can cause further problems down the line. And I didn’t go to counseling at the time. I wasn’t even talking to friends and family about how to process what I was going through so this was just stuff that was sitting in me and not getting dealt with.
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06:26 If you’re listening at this point and you feel like, ok, well none of that happened to me. I didn’t make bad decisions. This podcast isn’t for me. I would ask you to not turn it off just yet. There may be someone in your life who needs to hear this because I created this podcast for the person that I was when I was 15, when I was 20, when I was 35. I want to share resources that have helped me start to love myself. I want to share stories that have been instrumental in me seeing myself in a different way.
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07:05 I want to share with you an exercise that I was taken through by one of the staff pastors at my former church. He asked me to identify a woman I pictured as the perfect 10; the ideal woman in my mind. Claire Huxtable is a perfect 10. She’s beautiful. She’s articulate. She’s educated. She’s ambitious. She’s successful. She’s fit. She has a great sense of humor. She’s willing to role play to teach her kids a lesson. Her and her husband have this great affectionate bond; they can’t keep their hands off of each other. It’s just awesome. She is this perfect 10.
07:42 So he said “on a scale of 1 to 10, with Claire Huxtable being 10, what number would you give yourself?”. I said “somewhere between 3 and 6”. So he said “I want you to get a piece of paper and write down everything about you, every quality you have, that’s positive. I wrote down every quality I had that was positive, maybe 9 or 10 things that I felt were positive about me. And then he told me to write down everything about me that was negative. Next, of all the positive qualities I wrote down about myself, he told me to give each one of them a number value between 1 and 10. And all of the numbers that I put next to those good qualities were all between 6 and 10, many of them were 8s and 9s. And so he said “how is it that nothing was lower than a 6 but you gave yourself a total value between 3 and 6?”. I had put so much weight on the negative things that I didn’t even allow the positives to show through in my own self evaluation. [It] didn’t even matter what other people thought of me because most people didn’t know everything that I knew. In my own self assessment, I was between a 3 and a 6. It was because I weighed so heavily the bad things that I saw in myself.
09:12 Then he gave me this illustration. At the time, the Chicago Bears were doing great. I think they were number 1 in the league. They had the worst offense, I believe, but the best defense. And they were number 1. And he said even they will not allow their weakness to overpower their strengths. Even with their weakness, even with them having the worst offense in the league, they were still dominating. And even though you have things that you don’t like about yourself, they don’t outweigh the good. And what I came to realize was that I didn’t need those men to love me anyway. I needed to love me anyway. I needed to know everything about me and still accept the fact that I was a child of God, that I was loved, that I was cherished, that I still had value. And that none of my mistakes made God love me any less. And if God can love me no matter what, how can I not love myself? And it gave me the freedom to let go of some of the shame, let go of some of the guilt, see me for the person that I was, the person I wanted to be, the person I was striving to become. And that is what I want to give through this podcast. As I interview other people and we get to see unconditional love in all of its forms, I want to show that no matter what your situation is, you are worthy of love unconditionally.
11:07 Some of the people we’ll talk to didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t commit any crimes, they didn’t commit any sins. They were just in a particular situation and that situation caused them to feel unloved or unlovable. And then someone came along, loved them unconditionally and gave them hope. And their lives are much richer because of it.
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11:35 I’d like to end with this. It’s a very popular quote by Marianne Williamson that I’m sure you’ve heard. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not, our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others”.
12:42 For so long, I allowed my guilt and my shame to keep me from shining. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else. If sharing these stories of unconditional love can help just one person understand what true love looks like and how true love can empower and liberate, my mission will have been accomplished. And I hope that along the way, something you hear from this podcast will help you understand how valuable you are and how valuable the people around you are. This is about loving unconditionally. And there are some times that we’ll cry, but there will be a lot more times when we’re laughing. We’re laughing at the recognition of ourselves in others. We’re laughing from relief because we see that we’re not in this alone and that somebody else out there has experienced something we’re experiencing and has gotten through it. I want this to be a place of hope and healing and happiness. So, I hope you’ll come with me. I’m so glad you’re here and I look forward to our next time together.
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