CONVERSATIONS THAT CONNECT • EPISODE ONE
Following What Lights You Up
One of the first breadcrumbs Love remembers finding appeared in a magazine while she waited for a medical appointment. An article asked whether the reader deserved a doula. Love had never heard the word, but as she read, “everything in me lit up.” She went home, researched what it would take to become certified, and began serving clients while completing her undergraduate education.
That first step led to another. While supporting a client in labor, Love met a certified nurse-midwife practicing in a hospital. Once again, curiosity became action. She researched the path and began the next part of her journey.
Years later, that trail led somewhere she could never have planned.
The Daughter at the End of the Trail
Love had long carried a desire to have a daughter. At 43, after years of hoping, she finally released the dream and resolved to live the rest of her life as fully and joyfully as she could. One month later, a patient planning an adoption asked Love whether she would care for her baby.
Love not only became the child’s mother; she delivered her. She was the first person to lay hands on the baby who would become her daughter. After two days together in the hospital, birth mother, baby, and adoptive mother left the unit accompanied by nurses whose eyes, Love recalled, were filled with tears.
The doula article she had once picked up in a waiting room had led to midwifery, and midwifery had led her to her daughter. “You never know what one simple act will develop,” Love reflected. The memory continues to remind her to follow the trail, especially when life feels uncertain.
From Cannabis Curiosity to Cannabis Nursing
Love’s relationship with cannabis was also shaped by waiting – and by freedom. As a child, she questioned how a plant growing freely in nature could be illegal. Military service required her to remain cannabis-naive, even restricting products containing hemp. Retirement finally gave her the freedom to revisit the question that had stayed with her for years.
Learning about the endocannabinoid system brought both frustration and exhilaration: frustration that something potentially beneficial had been demonized, and excitement about a system involved throughout the body. For Love, cannabis education is ultimately about helping people receive clear information, exercise autonomy, and patiently discover what works for their individual bodies.
Listening Beyond the First Answer
That respect for individuality shapes the way Love begins a conversation. She asks: “Tell me about yourself. Tell me what’s important to you.” Then she listens. When the person seems finished, she asks, “What else?” -sometimes more than once- until she understands where they are and where they want to begin.
This is a deceptively simple practice. In a healthcare system organized around limited appointments, rapid questions, and predetermined tasks, spacious listening can feel almost radical. But Love believes relationship, presence, consistency, and keeping one’s word establish the trust upon which meaningful care depends.
“Some people will want to be your best friend just because you listen to them,” she said. The difference is whether the clinician is genuinely listening or merely waiting for a pause in which to speak.
The Discipline of Silence
Love’s approach to listening includes something many people find uncomfortable: silence. After asking an important question, she waits. She does not rush to rescue the person from the quiet or fill the room with her own words. She allows time for thought, feeling, and insight to emerge.
A question such as “What are the reasons you made that decision?” may be the first invitation a person has ever received to examine the origin of a life-shaping choice. Given enough room, the answer may reveal conditioning, fear, longing, or truth. “That question alone can change a person’s life,” Love said. “What can come after that is just extraordinary.”
Compassion Without Matching the Harm
For Love, compassion does not mean excusing harmful behavior. It means refusing to match it. When others are angry or difficult, she centers herself, asks questions, and tries to understand the hurt beneath what is visible.
She recalled colleagues warning her about supposedly difficult patients. Love chose to enter each room without inheriting someone else’s judgment. Again and again, the encounters others predicted were not the encounters she experienced. Presence changed the relationship.
Love sees herself as a conduit – someone who holds up a mirror so people can remember their worth, recognize that they are enough, and discover a way through pain. It is an approach shaped not only by professional education, but also by her own difficult experiences. Challenge, she believes, can deepen compassion by helping us recognize what it means to walk a hard path.
Serving from the Overflow
Love offers nurses the same care-centered challenge she offers patients: show up for yourself. That requires rest, boundaries, and the courage to say no without turning the boundary into a defense argument.
“I show up for others, but I have to show up for myself as well,” she explained. Caring from depletion is not the goal. The goal is to fill one’s cup so that what others receive is the overflow rather than the final reserve.
For nurse educators, Love recommends modeling this principle and asking students to do one thing each week solely for themselves. The practice can begin with five uninterrupted minutes. What matters is teaching future nurses that self-care is not separate from their capacity to be present; it helps make presence possible.
Know Thyself
When invited to leave one final piece of wisdom, Love offered two words: “Know thyself.”
Before making a decision, she suggested, pause long enough to ask whether it comes from conditioning or wholeness – from external noise or something that feels deeply true within. Then pause long enough to receive the answer.
This is the thread connecting Love’s work as a nurse, midwife, coach, educator, advocate, and mother. Listen beneath the noise. Notice what lights up. Ask what else is waiting to be heard. Follow the breadcrumbs.
The next step may appear ordinary: a magazine in a waiting room, a question asked without judgment, or a moment of silence that lasts a little longer than expected. But, as Love’s life reminds us, one simple decision can change the trajectory of everything.
Watch the Full Conversation with Dr. Love Hawkins
