Living with Heart: From Birth to Death

By Dr. Chip Dodd & Bryan BarleySociety & Culture Religion & Spirituality Christianity Education Self-Improvement Relationships

Living with Heart: From Birth to Death episodes

September 16, 2025Season 8: Episode 85 - Parenting with Heart: The Four Responsibilities of a Parent
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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Parenting is the focus of this season on “Living with Heart: From Birth to Death.”
Some of the content of the following episodes connects to the book,
Parenting with Heart by Stephen James and Chip Dodd.

Parenting with heart is more about the parents than the children:
Parents know their own hearts’ feelings and needs.
Parents remember the struggles of being a child and the fullness of hope and imagination before “reality” tends to tarnish both hope and imagination.
Parents not only perform the great duties of providing and protecting; they are able to remain emotionally relatable.
Parents know that they themselves are only older, “growing up” versions of a child.
Parents are emotionally present as they continue to perform the tasks of love.
Parents face the reality that the best outcomes and greatest hopes still will be riddled with clumsiness, mistakes, and regrets, but continues to persevere with heart.

Parenting with heart is for young parents and grandparents, “failed” parents and “successful” parents, and couples who desire to be parents, but has nothing to do with the “perfect” parent.

The “perfect” parent checks a list to see if they have fulfilled some magical formula that guarantees “perfect” children who never mess up and never have to face pain.

“Perfect” parents attempt to produce an outcome that is for their own self-images.

Children want parents who can relate to the struggles and joys of being a child; they want parents who know the feelings of living and the needs that come with living.

Children also desire their parents to know how to face, feel, and deal with struggles, as they seek the joys of life.

Children do not actually want a perfect parent; they want a relatable, human parent who takes a long view of life.

It takes a lifetime to learn how to live:
Children need parents who know this truth, and this truth creates great tolerance for a child’s struggles.

A child just simply wants a “good enough” parent, a human parent who needs others and God, the same way a child needs them and God.

Two responsibilities of a parent:
Parents need to help their children “climb the mountain of their dreams.”
Parents need to help their children “hold the flag brave and true.”

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33 min
September 09, 202584 - Keeping Heart: The Equation for the Gifts of Feelings
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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart, a book by Dr Chip Dodd, is written in short sections that are self-contained as specific pieces. Each section focuses on a dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness.

Please visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource of the “Feelings/Needs Chart.”
The chart integrates the essentials of The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart that leads to experiencing the Gifts of the Heart.

The Equation for the Gifts of the Feelings
By practicing the equation, we can live fully; we can love deeply; we can lead well.

By practicing the equation, we discover that core feelings lead to genuine relational needs, which move us to admitting the desire of our hearts, as well as our longings and hope.

Feelings > Needs > Desire > Longings > Hope, as explored in Episode #80 and Episode #81.

The equation requires courage, that is, bringing your heart to who and what matters to you.

WILLINGNESS + PATIENCE + WORK + TIME = GIFTS
Willingness: Willingness is the courageous energy of allowing your heart to be given over to hoping again. Hope has become dangerous to many of us because of past experiences that turned out very differently than what we had hoped. Taking the risk of hoping again is fearful. We need help in risking hope, but we must take the risk if we are to experience new, better, or improved outcomes. Running from hope makes us sick.
Patience: Patience is ability to persevere amidst the struggle that comes with your desire to live fully. Patience literally means, “burden of hope.” So often what we seek and what we desire requires the ability to wait—to delay gratification—as we continue to move towards fulfillment. Waiting means that we continue to hope even though it is painful. Waiting requires feeling and needing, and means that our hearts carry the “burden of hope,” as we persevere, with the encouragement of others and faith in God.

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40 min
September 02, 2025 83 - Keeping Heart: Love's Demand (Part 2)
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart, by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections; each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource of the “Feelings/Needs Chart.” It integrates the essentials of The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart that lead to the experience of the Gifts of the Heart.

On page 23 of Keeping Heart, there is a sentence that shows the dark side of avoiding love’s requirements:
“Avoiding love’s demand, though, requires that we hide our hearts, and, therefore, remove ourselves from living this life.”

Contact is not connection
We experience a vast array of what we call “connections” through all forms of technology that has given us the internet and its multiple forms of social media that offers the illusion of “connection.” We call it “interconnected.”

However, it does not actually give what it says. We are “inter-contacted,” not actually connected.

There are multiple forms of contact, but we still remain disconnected from each other, and even ourselves.

Sadly, loneliness and relational isolation are two of the most talked about forms of misery in our society today, even though we have more pervasive contact than ever before in the history of humanity.

When Caesar connected the Roman Empire with roads, it led to people groups being connected—for better or worse. The technology of today is not a road to connect us. It is the technology that actually keeps us from “facing each other,” which is where genuine connection begins.

Contact is like watching a movie. In a movie, we experience life vicariously, which means “not really in it.” Even more, if we watch it alone, we experience life vicariously in isolation. We do not share a lived experience in reality
True connection is a shared experience in reality.

Contact does not feed the heart. Connection feeds the heart.
Connection requires that a person shares the experiences of their emotional and spiritual lives with another who is capable of doing the same.

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33 min
August 26, 2025 82 - Keeping Heart: Love's Demand (Part 1)
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart, by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections; each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource that describes The Spiritual Root System. This resource identifies each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.

A path not a pill
So often, people offer a “pill” (metaphorically or literally) to a person who is struggling with life’s difficulties. The struggle could be anxiety, depression, or addiction. Most people, however, need a path instead of a “pill.”

This podcast is part of the path we are created to walk in life’s struggles.

The Voice of the Heart, Needs of the Heart, and Keeping Heart, also, are part of the path.

This podcast and the books speak to the need for relationship and its power to help and heal us through relational connection.

Communion connects to community
We quickly think of communion as a religious experience only. It also means to share; it is where we get the word community and communication.

We are created to be in communion with each other—a group of people who share the truth of their hearts.

In Genesis 2:18, God declared for the first time that something was “not good.” This declaration clearly made reference to a man and a woman. It also speaks to how we are created for fellowship; the fellowship of truth telling about our struggles and celebrations that connect us to each other.
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
Genesis 2:18 (NIV)

When Adam & Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, they not only hid their physical bodies, they also hid their hearts from God. In the cool of the day, God comes to His creation and asks them, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9) This phrase in Hebrew is “ayeka” which is a lament and a question.

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36 min
August 19, 202581 - Keeping Heart: Be, Do, Have
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart, by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections; each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Visit chipdodd.com to download a free resource that describes The Spiritual Root System. This resource identifies each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.

To read a short encapsulation of episode #81, go to pages 28-29 of Keeping Heart.

We are created to BE, DO, and HAVE
In order to live fully, love deeply, and lead well lives that leave behind good legacy, we must:
admit that we don’t control how life works.
we don’t have power to change how we are created as relational creatures.

We only find fulfillment by living fully in relationship with
ourselves
others
God
(The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd)

Surrendering to the process of how we are created occurs through three developmental movements:
Being - who we are created to be as relational creatures. We are created 99.9% like everyone else on an emotional and spiritual level. We seek connection through feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping. We are created to respond to life accordingly.
Doing - what we are created to do by participating in the actions of producing, shaping, making and caring about creating “good.” We take action in daily life by using our internal awareness; we are “response-able.”
Having - what we are created to experience if we live according to how we are created. We have relationships, connection, provision, bounty, and prosperity. We risk giving ourselves to and attaining the experiences of life that create relational and experiential fulfillments.

Be-Do-Have vs Do-Have-Become
If a person is raised in an environment that diminishes his/her essential makeup and places too much emphasis on performance in order to be accepted, the person’s worth becomes wrapped up in the constant need for approval of others and in competition with others.

Click here to continue reading the episode highlights.
41 min
August 12, 202580 - Keeping Heart: The Spiritual Root System (Part 2)
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections. Each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Please visit chipdodd.com to download the free resource, The Spiritual Root System. This resource describes and illustrates the specifics of each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.

Spiritual Rot System (SRS) = Feelings - Needs - Desire - Longings - Hope

Basic premise of The Spiritual Root System:
Feed the roots of a tree, it will grow to produce much fruit.
Moving the metaphor to human behavior, a child reaches out to be affirmed as belonging and mattering by connecting to his/her caregivers.
The need to belong and matter is met by his/her caregiver responding by reaching back and affirming and attending to the child’s heart, made up of feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope.
This process grows the child’s confidence in being created as a feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping creature.
Through the confidence of being able to depend on connection, the child grows into a competent human being, who can use his/her mind to express their heart’s makeup as they grow into their giftedness.
Every human being is gifted and the world is in need of the “fruits” of those developed gifts.

Understanding the connections of the roots:
Reading the “roots” from left to right:
Feelings awaken a person to needs.
Needs connect to desire within the heart
Desire moves a person to longings
Longings draw a person toward hope.
Hope will return a person to feelings; hope is wishing or planning to achieve something a person doesn’t know for sure will happen. Hope requires the action of risk, which circles back to the need to deal with feelings.
The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart offer specific details about The Spiritual Root System, as does this podcast Living with Heart: From Birth to Death.

Click here to continue reading the episode highlights.
43 min
August 05, 2025Season 7: Episode 79 - Keeping Heart: The Spiritual Root System (Part 1)
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections. Each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Please visit chipdodd.com to download the free resource, The Spiritual Root System. This resource describes and illustrates the specifics of each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.

The Spiritual Root System (SRS) explains:
When we “feed” the “roots” of how we are created, we will grow the “fruits” of a full life, one that blesses one’s self and others.
We feed the roots through relationship. That is the most complete nutritional support for human beings.
The nutritional support encourages us to “keep heart” amidst an exhausting pace that can wear us out, drain us, and lead us to experience the discouragement of “losing heart

Spiritual Root System = Feelings - Needs - Desire - Longings - Hope
Feelings awaken us to being fully alive, and they push us toward our needs.
If I feel, I will need.

For example:
When a person is sad about a loss, they often need comfort, or they need a listening person in their lives to help them.
When a person is fearful about some difficulty or danger, they often need help to deal with a challenge, or they need to be rescued from a danger.

The identification of feelings, leads to the needs of others and God.
Having needs lead a person to communicate their desire. Desire moves a person to ask for some form of connection that brings them to greater capabilities of living fully and loving deeply, even when life hurts.

The book Needs of the Heart describes the many essential emotional and spiritual needs that we are created to have met through expressing them.
Desire expresses the inborn energy of our craving to survive and even more, to thrive. We desire survival, of course, but we were created for more. We were born to crave a level of fulfillment that we can numb or deny; however, it still remains a part of how we are created.

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44 min
July 29, 202578 - Out of the Pit: Living in Recovery
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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

The Pitfalls of Leadership are descending steps, one connects to the other with predictable effects.

Some leaders have referred to the descent as a “chain reaction.”

The descent can be stopped at any time, with an intervention from others who the leader listens and healthily responds to, or a cry out from the leader in descent who is heard and responded to by others.

The Five Pitfalls:
Work becomes confused with one’s worth.
Performance begins to be valued more than one’s presence.
People become things.
To be an example to others, the true self is isolated.
Secrets sap one’s passion and purpose.

These pitfalls can destroy careers, friendships, reputations, marriages and families—unless one is freed from them.

Living in freedom from the Pitfalls is work. It is a daily activity and a lifestyle.

In the Pitfalls, we are driven by what we are running from. Essentially, we are running from:
Feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope that expose our vulnerability;
Telling the truth about our hearts that expresses our need of others;
Trusting a process that we are not in control of, which expresses our distrust of God.

The daily activities that become the recovering leader’s lifestyle are:
Confession - the acknowledgment of my own healthy shame, and need of others and God.
Admission - the full awareness that I do not have control over life, and the more I attempt to get control, the more unmanageable my life becomes.
Surrender - practicing believing and trusting that God has control; therefore, I give myself to God and the way God works, because my attempt to control life hasn’t worked.
Acceptance - the practice of turning my heart and life over to God who cares for me, knowing that whatever happens, God wants good for me because I am loved.

Daily activities have to be practiced until we see the results and their benefits;
The daily practices become a lifestyle.
The leader eventually desires for his/her life to be different and adopts the new lifestyle because it is “better” than what life was like in the Pitfalls.

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46 min
July 22, 202577 - Out of the Pit: Returning to Being Human and Productive
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

The Five Pitfalls:
Work becomes confused with one’s worth.
Performance begins to be valued more than one’s presence.
People become things.
To be an example to others, the true self is isolated.
Secrets sap one’s passion and purpose.

These pitfalls can destroy careers, friendships, reputations, marriages and families—unless one is freed from them.

Out of the Pit
Hopeful Truths:
Freedom is not only possible; we are created for it.
The descent into the Pitfalls can be stopped at any time. When the leader who is descending into the pitfalls experiences an intervention from others whom the leader listens to and healthily responds to, the descent can be stopped. Also, if the leader comes to an awareness of his/her descent and cries out and is heard and responded to by others, the descent can be stopped.
There is a path that takes us out of the Pit; we can ascend. Freedom is not only possible;
we are created for it.
The people who dare to “come back to life” are some of the greatest blessers in this world:
They have humility and passion.
They have compassion because of empathy.
They are doers who are relational.
They are witnesses to what God can do with a person who dares to be in need.
Their “loss” can become many others’ gains.
They are witnesses of John Newton’s hymn, Amazing Grace.

That which we think has destroyed us has opened up a future before us. Listen to Episode #26 “Becoming a Portable Sanctuary.

The woundedness of the leader, coordinated with their healing, becomes the leader’s newly discovered productivity.

Liberation from bondage is available. If there is breath, there is hope.

Recovery from addiction to control begins with:
Confession: the recognition of and “fessing up” to being human, which means that I feel and I need more than I can handle or manage without relational help.
Admission:
The acknowledgment of powerlessness over life
The profound awareness that the more I have attempted to do it alone, the more unmanageable my life has become.
In these two beginning steps, the impaired leader must admit the specific nature of his/her secrets in order to get relief.

Click here to continue reading the episode highlights.
37 min
July 15, 202576 - Pitfalls of Leadership: #5 Secrets Sap Passion and Purpose
Click here to read the episode highlights.

The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Remember that the Pitfalls are descending steps; one connects to the other with predictable effects.

Some leaders have referred to the descent as a “chain reaction.”

The descent can be stopped at any time, with an intervention from others whom the leader listens and healthily responds to, or a cry out from the leader in descent who is heard and responded to by others.

The Five Pitfalls:
Work becomes confused with one’s worth.
Performance begins to be valued more than one’s presence.
People become things.
To be an example to others, the true self is isolated.
Secrets sap one’s passion and purpose.
These pitfalls can destroy careers, friendships, reputations, marriages and families—unless one is freed from them.

# 5 Secrets sap the leader’s passion and purpose
Once the leader’s true self is isolated, the “getaway” or “cure” is usually a closely held secret.
A secret is anything one withholds from appropriate people because they
fear rejection, judgment, censuring, or being controlled.

Secrets:
require a person to withhold emotional and spiritual struggles from the people who hunger to know them and care about them.
block the intimacy, or “into-me-see,” that is an essential part of human encouragement and fulfillment.
make a person sick because they are not connected to relationship with others.

At this point, a leader begins to survive in a cycle of work, performance, isolation, and secrets that increase toxic shame and guilt.

To dissipate the shame and guilt, the leader tries to work harder, perform better, which cycles into a repetition of isolation and secrets.

As the cycle continues, a leader will begin to experience symptoms of burnout, depression, excessive anxiety, addiction, and other forms of impairment.

Jesus says in John 10:10, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (NIV)
To many leaders who are caught up in the swirl of Pitfall #5, this scripture reference seems like a long-lost illusion.

By Pitfall #5, the leader is far away from everything they had once hoped and believed.

Jesus also says in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” (NIV)
This reference is a living, breathing experience for the leader. He or she is being robbed of every blessing they were created to experience in the passion, struggle, and joy of getting to do what they were created to do.

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36 min

About Living with Heart: From Birth to Death

From the publisher's feed

Dr. Chip Dodd’s ”The Voice of the Heart” is one of the seminal and most practically impactful books of the last several decades in the counseling, coaching, and mentorship space. In ”Living with…