Hollywood’s favorite ex-monk on tour
WASHINGTON, DC — As Jay Shetty was preparing to officiate Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s wedding last year, his wife suddenly interrupted his rehearsal.
“That’s awful. … You need to change that,” Radhi Devlukia-Shetty told the former monk-turned-hyphenated famous self-help guru loved by many in Hollywood, including Bennifer, Khloé Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.
Some might take their partner’s outright dislike of their work as a personal attack. Shetty saw it as an act of love.
“She just wants me to be nice… That’s all she wants,” Shetty explained on a recent episode of the Berning in Hell podcast — if you feel like you’ve heard his name a lot, he has that made rounds of interviews to promote his new book 8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go and the subsequent Love Rules world tour.
“We care so much about what (our partners) think, but we don’t realize they’re like, ‘Hey, I think you can do better than that. I know you can do better. I know how great you can be.’ That’s the deepest form of love and caring — not someone pretending they have nothing between their teeth.”
Who is Jay Shetty?
Shetty, 35, first learned what it means to be a monk at a thought leadership event in college. He reluctantly attended, but walked away feeling that he had discovered his path in life. After graduating, Shetty lived as a monk in India, meditating for hours a day, sleeping on the floor and serving his community.
When he left there a few years later, Shetty set out to share the lessons he had learned with others. His first book, Think Like a Monk, offers practical tips on how to apply ancient wisdom to modern day life. He offers workshops, classes, live speaking events and hosts the On Purpose podcast, which has hosted some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Kendall Jenner, Drew Barrymore, Kevin Hart and Selena Gomez.
Many A-listers swear by his advice, as evidenced by the celebrity crowd he mixes with. So what do you learn from him?
Jay Shetty’s 8 Rules of Love
The fourth stop on Shetty’s 30-plus-show world tour took him to Washington, DC, where nearly 2,000 people gathered at the Warner Theater on Monday to discuss what love means, how to cultivate it and how to heal heartbreak.
Shetty’s book covers his eight love rules – here’s a closer look at each one:
Rule 1: let yourself be alone
“We’ve been told that if we’re not with someone, we’re inappropriate or unworthy,” Shetty told the audience. “But being alone can actually be an incredible time to discover your personality, discover your values, and discover your goals.”
Rule 2: Don’t ignore your karma
“Karma is a mirror that shows us where our choices have taken us,” Shetty writes in the book. “Rather than unconsciously letting the past guide us, I want us to learn from our past to make decisions. … When we learn from the past, we heal it.”
Rule 3: Define love before you think, feel or say it
“We all have so many different definitions of the word love,” he said. “It means so many different things to so many different people. Someone might say ‘I love you’ and it means ‘I want to spend my life with you’. And someone else could say ‘I love you’ and it means ‘I want to spend a night with you’ and everything between those two definitions.”
Rule 4: Your partner is your guru
“Your partner should be someone you want to learn with, learn from, and learn from, and vice versa,” Shetty writes. “When we choose a partner to grow with, they always teach us.”
Rule 5: Your purpose comes first
“We romanticize the idea of sacrifice and dedication to another person, and there are beautiful ways to do that. But I’ve seen people put their own goals aside and spend years feeling lost or misled,” Shetty writes. “Your purpose must come first for you, and your partner’s purpose must come first for you. Then you come together with the positive energy and stability that comes from pursuing your purpose.”
Rule 6: Win or lose together
“Conflict has a bad reputation,” writes Shetty. “We want to think that we can be the couple that understands each other deeply and never fights. We are special. We are different. But no matter how compatible a couple is, living in conflict-free bliss is not love. it’s avoidance.”
Rule 7: You don’t break when you break up
“A lot of us have looked at life waiting for someone to… love us to make us feel lovable,” Shetty said. “With empathy and compassion, I ask you to ask yourself: Why? Why do we let someone else define our self worth? Why are we outsourcing our value?”
Rule 8: love and love again
“We spend our entire lives wishing, waiting, wanting and hoping to get and receive love,” Shetty said, “but if we take a step toward love, share love, expand love, we can.” experience it right then and there. ”
More tips for your love life
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