WASHINGTON, D.C. – When Jay Shetty was preparing to officiate the wedding of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck last year, his wife suddenly stopped his rehearsal.
“That’s terrible. … You’ve got to change that,” Radhi Devlukia-Shetty told the former monk, now a famed multi-hyphenate self-help guru beloved by many in Hollywood, including Bennifer, Khloé Kardashian and Oprah Winfrey.
Some might see their partner’s blunt distaste for their work as a personal attack. Shetty saw it as an act of love.
“She just wants me to be good. … That’s all she wants,” Shetty explained on a recent episode of the “Berning in Hell” podcast – if you feel like you’ve been hearing his name a lot, he’s been making the interview rounds in promotion of his new book, “8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go,” and subsequent “Love Rules” world tour.
“We care so much about what (our partners) think, but we don’t realize … them saying: ‘Hey, I think you can be better at this. I know you can do better. I know how great you can be.’ That is the deepest form of love and care – not someone pretending that you don’t have something in your teeth.”
Who is Jay Shetty?
Shetty, 35, first learned about what it means to be a monk at a thought leaders event in college. He attended reluctantly but walked away feeling he had discovered his path in life. After graduation, 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 bring the lessons he learned to others. His first book, “Think Like a Monk,” offers practical tips on how to apply ancient wisdom to the everyday modern world. He offers workshops, courses, live speaking events and hosts a podcast, “On Purpose,” that has welcomed 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 celeb crowd he mingles with. So what are they learning from him?
Jay Shetty’s 8 rules of love
The fourth stop on Shetty’s more than 30-show world tour brought him to Washington, D.C., where a crowd of nearly 2,000 gathered at the Warner Theatre on Monday for a discussion on what love means, how to cultivate it and how to heal from heartbreak.
Shetty’s book covers his eight rules of love – here’s a closer look at each one:
Rule 1: Let yourself be alone
“We’ve been made to believe that if we’re not with someone that we’re inadequate or unworthy in some way,” 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, showing us where our choices have led us,” Shetty writes in the book. “Instead of unconsciously allowing the past to 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 it, feel it 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 could 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 one night with you,’ and everything in between those two definitions.”
Rule 4: Your partner is your guru
“Your partner should be someone you want to learn with and learn from and learn through, and vice versa,” Shetty writes. “If we choose a partner we can grow with, then they are always teaching us.”
Rule 5: Your purpose comes first
“We romanticize the idea of making sacrifices and devoting ourselves to another person, and there are beautiful ways to do so. But I’ve seen people who put their own purpose aside and years down the line feel lost or misled,” Shetty writes. “Your purpose has to come first for you, and your partner’s purpose has to come first for them. Then you come together with the positive energy and stability that come from pursuing your purposes.”
Rule 6: Win or lose together
“Conflict has a bad reputation,” Shetty writes. “We want to think we can be the couple who understands each other deeply and never fights. We’re special. We’re different. But no matter how compatible a couple is, to live in conflict-free bliss isn’t love, it’s avoidance.”
Rule 7: You don’t break in a breakup
“A lot of us have looked at life waiting for someone … to love us to feel we’re lovable,” Shetty said. “With empathy and compassion, I ask you to ask yourself: Why? Why are we letting our self-worth be defined by someone else? Why are we outsourcing our value?”
Rule 8: Love and love again
“We spend our whole life wishing, waiting, wanting, hoping to get and receive love,” Shetty said, “but when we take a step toward giving love, sharing love, expanding love, we get to experience it right then and there.”
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