Jay Shetty tells Chris Evans about his 8 Rules of Love

Virgin Radio

6 Feb 2023, 11:58

Podcaster and former monk Jay Shetty has a new book, 8 Rules Of Love, which aims to help readers develop the skills to practise and nurture love. 

Joining the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch to talk about the book - which is out now and follows on from his best-seller, Think Like A Monk - Jay told Chris: “I really feel like my work wants to help people make the biggest decisions in their life. And so Think Like a Monk helps you decide how you feel about yourself. And the next biggest decision we make is, who do I love? And who do I receive love from? And so that's what this book helps you do”.

The new book sets out steps, and focuses on the entire relationship cycle, from first dates, to marriage, and also to breaking up and starting over. 

There are four ashrams - or schools - which Jay works through; preparing for love, practising love, protecting love and perfecting love, and, in turn, eight rules. Watch him explain about the four ashrams here:

When talking about one of the chapters of his book, How Your Partner is Your Guru, Jay - who spent three years living a Vedic monk lifestyle at ashrams in Mumbai and London - told Chris: “I talk about your partner is your guru, which if you read that, you go, ‘No, my partner's annoying’, right? No-one thinks, ‘Oh, yeah, my partner’s my guru, I'm gonna learn from them’. 

“Your partner sees the most intimate version of you. Because they see you in all your flaws and everything else, they actually get to be your best teacher, because they're the one person you can't lie to, you can't hide anything from.

"When your partner's your guru, the idea is, you don't do that through criticism and judgement. I think one of the greatest gifts my wife's given to me, is she never criticises me or judges me for my mistakes. 

“My wife will call me out if she thinks that something's not in integrity, or I'm not being authentic, or she'll call me out if she thinks I need to work harder on something. And I think that's a beautiful thing. We need to let our partners be people that can challenge us and make us better.”

On the subject of arguing, Jay - who also has a highly successful podcast called On Purpose - said: “Everyone argues. Every single person in the world who's in a relationship will argue. And you will have that friend that says, ‘Oh, we never argue’. And I'm like, well, then maybe you can't have uncomfortable conversations with your partner.

“There's three styles, I call it venting, my one, which is, ‘I want to talk right now and solve this right now’, that's my fighting style. My wife's flying style is what I call hiding. She wants to go into a room, she wants to ignore me for two days, and then she'll come back and have digested it all and you know, be able to talk it out or whatever it may be.

“I used to think, ‘Well, because you want to hide, that means you don't care as much as I do, you're walking away from solving the problem, which means I care more about the relationship than you do’, which isn't really true. It's just that she fights in a different way. She needs time to digest. I don't. So now we meet in the middle, we say ‘Look, you need two days, I need now, let's meet in 12 to 24 hours and figure it out’. And that creates a healthier balance rather than this issue that turns up.” 

On people having different fighting styles, the former monk explained: “It's almost like someone wants to fight MMA, and you want to box them, or you want to wrestle. So when your fight styles aren’t matching, you can't, you can't really figure it out. So you have to have the same not the same fight style, you got to be aware of how someone fights.”

Jay, who is also embarking on his Love Rules World Tour later this month, also spoke about expecting love versus expressing love. “I think love is something that we wish for, we wait for,” he said. “We hope that the person is going to smile at us when we get on the bus. We hope that the receptionist is going to greet us in a wonderful way. We hope that the person we bump into at work has good news. And it's almost like we're waiting for waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. And we don't realise that you could greet someone with a smile. You could open the door for someone, you could say a kind thing to a stranger. You could say ‘I love you’ to someone else. And I think when you lead in that way… you don't realise that when you say ‘I love you’, and you say ‘I appreciate you’, when you say ‘I'm grateful for you’. that simple expressing love means you're experiencing that loving exchange right there.

“I know we struggle with it, we think, ‘Oh, that's a bit soft. And that's a bit sentimental’. You know what it is, I have too many friends who regret the last thing they said to a family member they lost, or regret the last conversation they had with the parent before they lost them. And so, you know, not to live life in a morbid or depressing way, but to live life in a way of like, ‘I really value this person, I want them to know it every second they're alive’. I think that's a good way to live.”

Talking about solitude, Jay told Chris: “I think we've been made to believe that being alone means you're unworthy or inadequate. And it's like, oh, well, you know, you turn up to a wedding without a plus one. It's like, ‘Oh, poor you’, like ‘You next’. It's this idea that being single is a bad thing, and actually, when people do it properly, you're actually feeling all the benefits of it. And now, if you were to meet so many, if you ever want to do that, you'll never settle for less than you deserve… which is so beautiful.”

During his conversation with Chris, Jay also spoke about a meditation that “actually changed my life.” He explained: “You close your eyes, you spend some time and you revisit your 10-year-old self. And you ask yourself, what do you need to say to your 10-year-old self that maybe your 10-year-old self never heard from family, from parents, from friends, from teachers? What is that that they haven't heard yet, or they haven't digested yet, and you say it to them?

Because we don't realise there's a 10-year-old inside of us right now. Most of our adult tantrums are all from our 10-year-old inside of us that was never pacified or satisfied. So tell your 10-year-old self, everything you wish you were told when you were 10 years old? And then take a moment and say what advice do you have for me? What wisdom do you have for me? What did I forget that I knew about myself at 10 years old that I left behind? What wisdom do you have for me, and if you just take a few moments to do this… I promise you, you'll leave there with a really profound thought from your 10-year-old self, not from me, not from some other power, just from within yourself.”

8 Rules Of Love is available now.

For more great interviews listen to  The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with cinch weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or  catch up on-demand here.