Blossom Your Awesome Podcast My Name Is Love With Troy Hadeed

Blossom Your Awesome Podcast My Name Is Love With Troy Hadeed

Troy Hadeed is yoga teacher who has been teaching all over the world for more than 15 years.

From Trinidad and Tobago he is a successful entrepreneur who's founded multiple businesses including the first hemp store in Trinidad.

He is also the founder of the finally nurturing a  yoga studio and community known as One Yoga Trinidad—recently rebranding as BeyondYogaTv.

He is the author of My Name Is Love: We're Not All That Different. 

To learn more about Troy click here.

ON THIS EPISODE

In this episode Troy shares how we all could use a little more love in our lives and how we need to look for the similarities rather than the differences that set us apart. 

• We are more similar than we are different
• consciousness and love are one 
• tapping into some higher source to find true meaning and self-centeredness in life 

KEY TAKEAWAY

We should all vibrate higher by elevating our own consciousness and through finding a connection with the vastness of something far greater than ourselves. Love is our superpower and once we see this and understand we begin elevating higher.

To see more of my work check me out at my website

Where I write and cover mindfulness and other things to help you Blossom Your Awesome.

Or follow me on instagram where I post fairly regularly and ask an inquisitive question or two weekly in hopes of getting you thinking about your life and going deeper with it.

My Instagram - i_go_by_skd

To support my work - my Patreon

To see more of who I'm talking to on the Podcast, to advertise your brand on the Blossom Your Awesome Podcast or just get in touch click here. 

Transcript

Sue (00:03.766)
Hi there. Today on the show, we have got Troy Hadid here with us. I am so honored and delighted to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Troy Hadeed (00:12.858)
Yeah, thank you for having me, Susie. You know, it's really, I'm so happy to be here with you.

Sue (00:20.166)
Oh, I'm so honored and delighted to have you here. Now, Troy, you are, this is so cool what you do. You have taught yoga all over the world for over 15 years. You've founded several successful businesses. You have a new book out. I just absolutely love the sound of this. My name is love. We're not all that different. That is the title of your new book and you are spreading

love and compassion all over. So give us the backstory here on the book and the work you do.

Troy Hadeed (00:58.482)
Yeah, you know, a book is... Sometimes when we say we love, someone can hear that title, and a lot of times we initially feel like it's a flowery, hippie-dippie kind of love. And that's not the love this book is about at all. Some of it, but it's important for us to recognize that it's a really fierce, uncomfortable, and sometimes confrontational love.

Because for me what this book is about is, how do we get ourselves out of the way to remember what it means to love one another? And sometimes that is deeply uncomfortable. And it means sometimes loving someone means walking away. Sometimes loving someone means having uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes loving someone means no.

And loving one another to me also means being willing to lose someone. So what this book is about for me, you know, it's a mix of reflections, introspection, philosophy, spiritual teaching, all kind of weaved together with stories from my own life. And then every chapter I invite the reader to ask themselves certain questions.

so they can understand what it actually means for them. Because I feel so in the, if you wanna call it the spiritual New Age world or that kind of realm of world that we live in right now, there's a lot of, we talk about certain things and certain theories and we say certain things and we post posts on social media and we read books. But I feel like there's so much disconnect.

between what we speak of, what we teach of, what we read, and what's actually happening in our lives. And this book for me is hopefully a way for the reader and individuals to just connect a little bit of those dots, you know? Yeah.

Sue (03:05.694)
Mm-hmm. That is beautiful, Troy. And you know what I think? This idea of kind of activating love, speaking about love, because like you say, the world is so kind of disconnected. And a lot of times we have trauma or hurt or things that close us off to fully expressing our love, right?

Troy Hadeed (03:28.242)
Yeah. Yeah, they are. You know, there's so much that gets in the way. And like we were mentioning a little bit earlier, Sue, is one of the biggest things that gets in the way of us being able to love one another is our sense of individual identity. It's this sense of I am Troy. This is what I represent. This is what I stand for. These are my opinions. These are my labels. These are my ideology.

And anything that makes us separate or different or apart from one another gets in the way of us being able to really understand what love is. I mean, even if you look at the what people would call the path, the path to spiritual awakening or spiritual realization, whatever that is, because to me it's the whole human experience never ends, right? But even that...

gets in our way of actually understanding what this is and what we are because it's almost like we as individuals, we attach our ego to these spiritual practices, whether it be yoga or church or meditation or silence or plant ceremonies or whatever it is, it's almost like the what

Troy Hadeed (04:57.71)
and says, well, I've been doing yoga for 15 years, so I'm more realized, I'm more enlightened. I've been going to church every day for the last four decades. So in some way, I'm closer to God than someone who hasn't. And that's just absolute BS. And they have all these things that we attach to as who we are, that we have this sense of identity in.

And I believe that they all, in some way, block us. They prevent us from really understanding what it means to love. And what really comes to mind for me, a story that I think represents it so beautifully, is my whole life, Christ has been, I've been really close to Christ, and I still am. I think this man, Jesus Christ, that we know of and we have.

And I refer to him and connect him outside the box of organized religion. But he is one of my greatest teachers. He is my greatest guru, you know, and what he represented for me is what I connect to deeply. And I remember a story, there's an Indian saint called Meem Kharili Baba, that a lot of listeners might have heard of. And I'm not really big on saints or gurus, but this, this

Nirmakarul Baba is one of the saints or gurus I can look at and there's no doubt in my mind that he was connected to something, that he channeled something. And one of the beautiful things about him is from my understanding, because I never met him in physical form, is that he never really taught anything to do. He never gave anyone any yoga poses, any breathing practices, any meditations. If somebody asked him, well, how do you find God?

He would say, well, save people, feed people, love people, tell you truth. And that was it. Remember God. That was his instructions, you know. And there's a story that I'm sure he was also Ram Das's guru and Krishna Das's guru for anyone listening who knows of them. There's a story they tell when they go to him and they say, well, Baba, how do we find God? Tell us how we find God.

Troy Hadeed (07:21.386)
and he looks at them and he says, well, you meditate like Christ. And they get all excited because he finally gives them something to do. So they run off now and they're all chatting and talking excitedly. And then someone says, well, how did Christ meditate? So they go back to him and they say, ba ba, he told us to meditate like Christ, but how did Christ meditate?

And his story goes that he paused for a moment before tears began to run down his face. And he said, he lost himself in love.

Christ lost himself in love. And you know, you would see that and I think our initial reaction might be, I don't wanna lose myself. I wanna find myself, right? We always use that language. But I think in reality, to really understand what love means, what God is, we have to lose this attachment of who we think we are.

the attachment of I am Troy, and this is what I represent, this is who I am. To the second I do that, I separate myself from everyone and everything.

And that's why that this name of the book which only came six months ago the name of the book was called something else for four years and then all of a sudden this came and it just resonates so deeply to me that I'm not Troy had even and love I'm not my opinions and not my ideologies and not my sexual orientation I'm not my religion. I'm not a yoga teacher because I won't always be teaching yoga

Troy Hadeed (09:09.29)
So I'll be doing other things. I'm an author. I can be anything I want to be. But what I connect to most is love. And if I had to identify with anything at all, it would be love.

Sue (09:23.178)
Oh my goodness, that is so beautiful, Troy. And I just love everything you've shared in the story about Neem Kuralibaba. I'm very familiar with him. He's actually, and I know you said, you know, gurus, he is one of my gurus. And I, you know, just as I tap into his energy and his divinity and the, you know, his book, A Miracle of Love, it's just stories about him sharing, you know, having people embody love.

I just, I think that's so beautiful. Now, let me ask you, so, you know, for you personally, this need to want to express love and put that out there in the world for people, did you always feel this from a young age or did it come about as an ex, you know, from an experience? Where did that need come from within you to want to express this more?

Troy Hadeed (10:22.481)
That's a tough question. I would say Sue that in order.

I've always been somewhat inclined to, let's say make a difference in the world. To impact the world in a positive way, right? From a really young age. But to answer that question, I would have to use the word that is sometimes a bad word, privilege. And I use that word confidently because I was born short.

I have privileges beyond I can count, right? One, I'm male, one, I'm light skinned. I was also born into a family that is financially comfortable, at least some would say relatively well off. But those are necessarily privileges I'm referring to. I think the greatest privilege of all in our world is the privilege of knowing what love is and the privilege of security and safety. And those are privileges that

me shape an individual beyond anything else. And I feel we need to talk more about those privileges, right? Because if someone has grown up never feeling safe or secure or knowing what love is, then how can they then tend to reciprocate that and share that with everyone else, right? They don't fully understand what that is. And one of the greatest things we can do for anyone is to make them feel seen.

safe and love. Before we attempt to influence someone's perspectives or shift their way of thinking or their way of acting or any of that, the first thing we need to do is make them feel loved, seen and heard. And I bring that up because I grew up with immense privilege my entire life.

Troy Hadeed (12:21.338)
And I think, you know, at a young age, I always say, in writing this book, I discovered so much about what shaped me, right? And I think when I was younger, I grew up in Caribbean, of course, born and grew up in Trinidad and Figo. And there was a huge influence on my life from reggae culture and Rastafarian culture. And I think what that did for me was expose me to a reality outside of my comfortable little bubble.

It exposed me to a reality outside of what I was growing up in. And I remember sitting down and I would, my dad would watch the news every afternoon at 7 p.m. and I would sit and watch it with him. And I would see a lot of what was going on in the world. And in a nutshell, so I think a lot of us are ashamed of privilege and I grew up for a long time being ashamed of all of my privileges.

But then I realized and it became clear in writing of this book that as long as we're ashamed of our privilege, it benefits no one else but ourselves.

But if we create a space and are confident enough to say, yes, I am privileged in these waves, that's when we can now use our privilege to save something greater than ourselves.

So to answer your question indirectly, I think at a really young age is when I realized that I had all these, all these circumstances, all this love, all this opportunity, and my life was very different and there are so many people who did not. And there are so many ways in which the world could be better that I felt privileged to me almost.

Troy Hadeed (14:13.266)
Well, not almost. It comes with a responsibility. And I think while I did not realize it at the time, I think from a really young age that it's a responsibility that I felt drawn to, which is to make the world a better place in every way I can.

Yeah.

Sue (14:33.119)
Wow, I just think that is so empowering and so beautiful and we need more people like you because it really is, I believe, the answer to almost everything, right?

Troy Hadeed (14:49.294)
Yeah, yeah, it is. Sometimes when you see that, so I'm so careful because I try my very best not to talk in esoteric words and ways that maybe go over someone's head or they might say that guy's in the clouds. And I know seeing something I love as the answer can be like that.

It's like, well, this guy said disconnected. He doesn't live in a real world. But it is the actual truth and reality. But we need to now look at, well, what does it mean to love? And what does that really mean? What kind of love are we talking about? Because here's the reality. There are things happening in a world. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what's happening in Gaza, Palestine, Israel right now.

There are things happening in a world that are absolutely immensely, creates so much suffering and pain and disconnect and separation and inhumane in so many ways. And it's not that we can't avoid that. You can't walk into situations and say that, oh, I just love one another. Like we have work to do, but that's what we've come here to do. Right. And I go as far in my book suit to say that.

And I know it's a bold statement, so I'm going to explain it briefly afterwards. That I believe that love and God exist everywhere.

that there's no situation in our world where love and God don't exist. I understand that someone may say, well, how in the world can he say that? So I think with regards to love, I think one of the questions we need to ask ourselves is instead of asking ourselves, is this love or is this not love? We need to ask ourselves, what is being loved?

Troy Hadeed (16:56.046)
Because if we look at a situation that has immense pain and suffering and we see this situation is devoid of love Well, then it's dead No love can go there any longer because we've condemned it to darkness But if we ask the question what is being loved then we might discover that there is love But it might be love of power love of grief love of money

And we realize that there is love, maybe it's a self-serving love, a love of personal desire and satisfaction. But we can now identify that love is misaligned or misdirected or selfish. And if we can identify that there is love, but that love is just misaligned, then we can realign that love and work towards realigning that love.

and directing it outwards towards everyone rather than just our own selfish needs. And to me that holds a lot more opportunity and possibility than simply saying a situation is devoid of it.

Did that make sense?

Sue (18:08.386)
It does. And yeah, it makes perfect sense. Now, let me ask you the difficult, obvious next question is how do we do that? What is your guidance for people to be tapping into this more and more?

Troy Hadeed (18:20.361)
Yeah.

Troy Hadeed (18:25.172)
Well...

First, I want to say I use the word God a lot. And for listeners, I want to, because I know a lot of people have this resistance to the word God, and in the very first chapter, my book is entitled, Redefining God. So I just want to say for a moment that when I use the word God, I'm speaking to every individual's own unique understanding of God. And that was something I got from a teacher of mine, Sean Korn, who's a yoga teacher, and she's in Topanga, California.

When she was a physical yoga teacher, I ever witnessed bring God into the practice room and that changed my life in so many ways, but not to digress. So I want to answer your question. How do we do that? I think we've got caught up identifying ourselves with our physical body and everything that surrounds it. And in doing that, we identify everyone else with their physical body.

and everything that surrounds that and their identity, including their actions, their words, and their thoughts.

But the perspective I would invite someone to consider is that is not who they are. That is someone's conditioning. That their experiences and their conditioning have shaped them to act, to behave, and to think in a specific way. But that is not who they are. And if we can see one another beyond our...

Troy Hadeed (20:07.906)
surface identities, even beyond our actions, words and thoughts. It doesn't mean like see one another, then see that there's a spark of God that lives in everyone and everything, and interact with that spark of God rather than anything else. And I'm not saying that we accept someone's misaligned behavior or negative thinking or harmful actions. No, we condemn them.

but we condemn them with love. And it's different to condemn those actions, thoughts and perspectives. That is very different from condemning someone else. And I would also offer this too, that everyone is a certain way because of their condition and experiences, as I've mentioned. And if I want to, there's a difference between wanting to judge someone and make them wrong and condemn them.

That's very different from wanting to help them reprogram and recondition and change their ways, their actions, their perspectives and their ways of living and showing up in the world. But if we have any intention of helping someone reprogram and recondition, then the very first thing we need to do is understand where their conditioning comes from. We need to make them feel safe.

loved and supported and then we can help them reprogram and recondition.

Sue (21:48.218)
Okay.

Troy Hadeed (21:48.254)
So that is what I would invite us to try to do in all our relationships. But I also wanna put a pin here. I acknowledge and speak of these things, but believe me, it's not easy to do. I'm still governed by human emotion and my own conditioning. And sometimes I have to look at my own reaction to people in my life and I'm like, wow.

Where did that come from? I thought you were past that, right? You know? So it's our ongoing practice.

Sue (22:22.449)
Mm-hmm.

Sue (22:25.702)
Wow. And then what are you doing, Troy, to embody this? You know, what is some guidance or practical tips for people, right? Like, how can we day in and day out kind of do more of something to embody it more?

Troy Hadeed (22:43.09)
All right, well, I'm sure by now we're getting close to the end of time, because I talk a lot. So feel free to cut me off. But I think all of these things, like this whole identity I've been pointing to for our entire conversation, it revolves in the mind, right? It's what we call the ego. Ego is anything that makes us believe that we are separate, that there is an I that actually exists.

That is your ego to me, right? And that lives in the mind. It's in narrative. It's our programming from the day we're born. I am Troy, visit my body. That's when it begins. And people start calling us by our name. That's where it begins, our sense of individuality, right? But that lives in the mind. And practices like yoga and meditation.

Those and a lot of other practices as well, right? Those are just my practices that I am familiar with. Any practice that helps us cultivate a relationship with our mind.

allows us to see when the mind gets overactive or reactive. Right? Ego has its place. It's not that the ego is bad. To see ego as bad would be to condemn human experience. It's useless. And that's a whole other for our conversation. But it's not about condemning thoughts and condemning mind or ego. It's about being in relationship to it. So that...

we can see when it has a hold on us. We can see when it's getting reactive and it's unconsciously dictating the way we navigate our lives. But practices like yoga and meditation, if practiced with intention, intention is key, but if we do these practices with intention, then it allows us to cultivate.

Troy Hadeed (24:52.086)
not only a relationship with our mind and our thoughts, but a relationship with our sense of identity and a relationship with our breath. And you know there's a teaching in yoga by B.K. S. Iyengar, he says mind is king of everything, but breath is king of the mind.

Sue (25:10.719)
Mmm.

Troy Hadeed (25:11.454)
And funny enough, the word spirit, like Holy Spirit, comes from the Latin word spiritus, and it means to breathe.

So I relate to breath as an intelligence of God, and a divine intelligence personally. But I think these practices, or any practice to answer your question, that allows us to cultivate a relationship with our mind and our breath, so that we can live our lives more intentionally rather than being more reactive, it will help us get over ourselves.

It will help us begin to live our lives in service of something greater than this I, me, me.

Sue (25:57.934)
Mm-hmm. And I just, I absolutely love what you said about breath being the king of the mind. And it goes back to that idea of divinity and this higher consciousness that we can be tapping into in a kind of a state of surrender, right? Where we can let go and that's like the flow state.

Troy Hadeed (26:21.886)
Yeah, yeah, and you know, surrender, you know, I love that word surrender because so often we think of surrender as weakness, right? As like giving up. And I invite in a book I mentioned what I call conscious surrender. And to me, conscious surrender is the ultimate act of faith.

is the ultimate act of faith, to trust in something larger than ourselves, beyond our control, and to know that we are held and guided and favored, and that even if we have to trot through battlefield, even if we have to move through immense suffering, pain and loss, even if we do that for an entire lifetime, we understand that this body is not who I am, that this will pass.

and that on the other side of that is growth and transformation, it's realization that I am going through these things for a reason. And that understanding of faith and conscious surrender, it doesn't mean we step back and we hold our hands up and we say, oh, everything happens for a reason. No, we have to engage. We must engage. But it allows us to suffer and to hold faith. You know?

Sue (27:45.39)
Mm hmm. Wow, that is you have shared so many powerful things, Troy. Can you talk to us more about this idea of conscious surrender? I think it's so enlightening and so few. No judgment. But I really believe it is the point and why we're here. Right. It's the ultimate. That's how you kind of that's the liberation. That's the transcendence.

but so few of us are doing it and living in that way. Cause like you say, the ego is that need to control and right, attachment and holding onto things and labels and all of that. So give us a little more insight into this idea of conscious surrender, what that looks like being in that state.

Troy Hadeed (28:37.363)
Yeah, I wish I lived in that state. It would be nice. I try from time to time. I'll say a few things. Well, you know, we often, like it's no news to anyone, right? But there's only, let me put it this way, maybe I'll learn differently. There's only one certainty in life. That is that we will leave our bodies.

Sue (28:40.462)
I'm sorry.

Troy Hadeed (29:01.458)
That is the only certainty in life, you know. It is the only thing we know for sure. So at some point, we are going to have to surrender. We don't have a choice, right? But something we don't often recognize or some dots we don't always connect is that at some point along the timeline of human existence

No one will remember our names. No one is going to remember what we did, what we said, or our achievements, or how good of a time we had or not. We're not gonna remember either. It's all going to dissolve into this collective consciousness of humanity. And there will be no proof of our individual existence.

And I think just thinking on that a moment allows this act of surrender to be a little bit more accessible. And you know, we love to control all the time. We want to plan, right? And that need to plan or to control is rooted in our sense of identity. Because if I allow myself to believe that I am my physical body,

then naturally when my physical body ceases to exist, then what I'm unconsciously telling myself is that when my physical body ceases to exist, so will I.

So therefore, naturally, if that is my unconscious programming, then I am going to do everything in my power to preserve my physical body, or to try to, to preserve my sense of safety and security, even to defend my opinions and my ideologies, which I believe is also who I am. All of this becomes part of our conditioning.

Troy Hadeed (31:10.834)
And that's where our need for control comes from. We wanna control everything and we wanna avoid anything that is uncomfortable or potentially makes us feel like down or unhappy or pain or suffering or discomfort. That's where it all comes from. It's rooted in that. But for me, if we can...

begin to reprogram ourselves, remind ourselves that this body is not who we are. That this human experience is actually priority of it, is not rainbows and butterflies. Sure, joy, laughter, happiness, love, those are things that should be everywhere. And we pray that God will experience those more than anything else.

But this life is also about growth and transformation to me. That's the only way I can make sense of any pain and suffering in our world is that it has to be at the very foundation of this. It has to be some kind of spiritual school of sorts where we've come to learn and grow and transform, which means that we have work to do. That work is sometimes uncomfortable. And I think with this concept,

concept of conscious surrender, because I know I could go off on tangents a little bit, so I'm trying not to. It's about acknowledging that we have work to do. So it's not about this avoidance or disassociation when things don't go as we planned and we hold our hands up and we say, oh, everything happens for a reason, I'm just gonna go with the flow. The whole concept of going with the flow is avoidance.

That means we're not engaging with life. We're not interacting with the discomforts of life. It means we're just sitting back and we're gonna see where life takes us. And sure, that's cool. Sure, that's what someone wants. But I also feel there's an element of that. If we don't engage with the uncomfortable, it means that there's an element of transformation and learning and growth.

Troy Hadeed (33:30.162)
that we're avoiding in doing that.

So I think to put this conscious surrounding in a nutshell, it's not giving up. But you know what I say sometimes is a very thin line between resilience and ignorance. And I think even when we are overly resilient and we're just pushing, pushing against everything that gets in our way, that can become ignorance.

Because maybe what light is trying to do is just say, yo, chill out for a moment. It's not time yet. There's another plan. There's something you need to learn or experience before that happens. And sometimes, you know, the universe of God has a much larger dream for us than we can dream for ourselves.

Sue (34:24.631)
Oh, I love that. And that's so true. You know, because so often we have like things show up in our lives that we never anticipate, right? And that's kind of that divinity or something higher working in our best interest.

Troy Hadeed (34:36.155)
Yeah.

Troy Hadeed (34:44.428)
Yeah.

Sue (34:46.134)
Wow, oh my goodness. Okay, so a couple of things, Troy. First and foremost, I just wanna say you have been so amazing and so insightful and I've just loved all of what you've shared and I think people are gonna have so many amazing takeaways from what you've shared here today and I'm just so honored to have had this time with you.

Troy Hadeed (35:07.638)
Yeah, thank you, Sue. And before I go, I just wanna say, you know, I like to mention for listeners, every podcast I'm on, I don't think podcast hosts get the recognition they deserve because I've now been on almost 70, 80 podcasts, maybe 70 in the last year or so. And I recognize how much work it takes and commitment it takes.

to actually have a podcast show and be a committed podcast host. So I just wanna say thank you. And if your listeners don't recognize it, I invite them to really appreciate what you guys do. So thank you for having me.

Sue (35:50.294)
Ah, that's too sweet. That means so much to me. Thank you so much. Now in closing, let me ask you, you've already said so many beautiful, amazing, incredible things, but if there was just one message, your hope for everybody, what is that closing message you want to leave us with?

Troy Hadeed (36:12.238)
Wow, we had to put me on the spot. There's so much. I would say this, Sue. There's so much people in our world that have moved away from God or spirit. And I can understand why. I understand why. If you really have a honest, authentic look at the history of...

Sue (36:14.678)
I'm sorry.

Troy Hadeed (36:38.382)
organized religion or a way in which God has been presented. And even some of you, don't get me wrong, there have been beautiful things done in the name of God and spirit, but there have also been immense misalignment in the name of God and spirit. And so I can understand why someone may choose to move away from that. And I would just invite individuals to create a space in which they can connect to their own understanding of divinity.

and God. It doesn't matter what they call it, it doesn't matter what it is. It can be silenced, they can see it in a tree, they can see it in the eyes of a child, they can see it in animals or dogs or they can sit with their breath and see it with their breath. It doesn't really matter. But without an understanding of some form of divinity or relationship to some form of divinity, then we are all going to remain separate.

we are all going to remain individuals. And this understanding or relationship to a bigger consciousness or divinity or God or whatever you want to call it, it's the one thing that connects us all and makes us he seen. So I would just invite every individual to not let history or whatever happened to rub them of their relationship.

to what I call God.

Sue (38:13.263)
Oh my goodness, that is such a beautiful, powerful closing message. I just love it. You've been so wonderful. Thank you so much.

Troy Hadeed (38:22.81)
And thank you for having me, Sue. Love.

Sue (38:25.826)
Thank you.