The Path to Unconditional Love

I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday morning next to a baby girl who I’d guess to be around three months old. She was curious about the world from the security of her mum’s arms. Each time I looked around and smiled at her, she would take great delight in this and reward me with a beautiful smile right back.

​To get my attention, she would make an “ouh” sound with her mouth and I’d look around again and we would exchange smiles and she would get all giddy and cuddle into her mum’s shoulder. Then another middle aged man came into the waiting room and sat opposite, he too was soon engaged in this happy little game.

It’s a scene I am sure will be familiar to you, happy babies tend to have this kind of effect. At the same time I was aware of my own beautiful daughter sitting on the other side of me but, in that sharp contrast, I can see just how encumbered by life she has become in her short years.

She was anxiously awaiting her natural therapy appointment, which deals with ailments seen and unseen – physical and emotional. Although we had been there before, I could see she was worried there might be some judgment involved because she has a lot of big feelings to process at the moment and has already learned from the world about what is deemed good and bad behaviour. So she feels ashamed of her emotional outbursts and is understandably reluctant to talk about them.

In contrast, while babies may feel anxious when they are apart from their mum (or haven’t been fed, or have a wet nappy or desperately want to shut out stimulation so they can sleep) those feelings of judgment and shame are just not part of a new baby’s world.

But there comes a point, I think it happens not long after an infant becomes mobile, when society appears to expect a child to be trained. The prevalent form of training in our society is punishment and reward. Punishment may be in the form of something taken away (including the withdrawal of the parent’s positive attention) and in the form of something dished out (like a chore of some sort, a physical rebuke or a verbal attack).

As a parent I could always feel judging eyes upon me in scenarios just like that, in waiting rooms, where my then infant daughter would be climbing on things she ought not to, and exploring places she shouldn’t. The reason I could feel those judging eyes is because I too had been trained as a child, indoctrinated in the ways of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and I too had become a judge.

Based on all I have experienced, observed and read about, it seems to me that there are very few of us experience unconditional love for anything more than that first few months of our lives, if that. Yet I have arrived at the conclusion that in order to thrive in this world, feeling unconditional love is essential to our wellbeing and so we must learn to give that to ourselves.

The work of Lise Bourbeau, who compiled 20 years of research in the field of metaphysics and it’s physical manifestations in the body into her book Your Body is Telling You “Love Yourself”, repeats this advice over and over. Forgiving the origins of our shame that has no conscious memory attached to it even, and other emotions like fear, anger and insecurity that get triggered within us, are all easy to understand in the context of the waiting room example.

As some of you may know, I’ve also been fascinated with the work of Dr Gabor Maté lately. As a revered physician and author who has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) himself, Dr Maté explores the myth of ADD as a genetically-based illness in his book Scattered Minds and demonstrates it is a reversible impairment and developmental delay.

Being a physician his book is full of academic references and dives into the world of neuroscience, epigenetics and psychology, but in the final sentence in his book he concludes “If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder”.

In fact, as I read his book, I could see that the very journey I’ve been on personally, the journey to authenticity, is a journey to love. Figuring out who we are beneath the layers and layers of beliefs that began to shroud us in those early years of our lives as we met those first expectations put upon us, is a journey that every single person on this planet would benefit from.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a journey that each of us would not only benefit from, but that it would also benefit us hugely in terms of evolving our society and its archaic systems and it would lead to a healing of the planet itself.

As grandiose as that all sounds, I for one know this is not an easy journey.

When this beautiful child of mine was born, I was working in a corporate environment where I was experiencing a lot of resistance to the role I was put in. This was being played out predominantly by a colleague who kept trying to discredit and undermine my work. Much of my time there was overshadowed by this dynamic. I was constantly infuriated and distracted in trying to remain professional. 

You can imagine that as a mother with a young toddler and new baby, a household to run and senior work role to carry out, there was very little in my life that got positive attention never mind unconditional love, certainly not me.

It was the turning point, with two children physically acting out the meltdowns I was having inside, I felt no choice other than to turn towards myself. I knew I had no more to give unless I could figure out who I truly was underneath all the layers of expectations that had become mixed up in my psyche over my lifetime as beliefs.

As patient as I was with my children much of the time, there were inevitably moments that I erupted in sheer frustration. And, as beautiful as my children are, I was simply unable to give them the adoring and unadulterated attention they needed to build a healthy self concept.  

A few years on, with much of my journey recorded through these articles, I have found my way back to love and understand much more about my authentic self. There is still some work to do, I imagine that to be a lifetime, but I am at a stage now when I am able to be the parent that I feel my children deserve; one who is able to more consistently give them unconditional love.

There is little joy for me in knowing my children are able to honour others if they don’t know how to honour themselves. Here too, there is work to do in unraveling some of the inadvertent damage caused along the way. But here I am, able and thrilled to be able to turn more wholeheartedly to the task.

Earlier in life I thought unconditional love was something I would find in other people, but I can’t see something in others that I haven’t got in myself. That love had been obscured under layers and layers of expectations and beliefs, and I’ve now gone a good way towards seeing and feeling what lies beneath.

A tip I heard a long time ago is to ask “what would someone who loves themselves do right now?” when I am faced with options, expectations and demands; it has served me well. It firstly means seeing that I have choices and then it means responding to things in new – often uncomfortable – ways.

But as I have become more practiced at putting myself in the line of love, I feel more loving towards others and I’m able to help people in ways that work for both parties rather than only one. Rather than seeing myself as separate, I now see everything as separate expressions of the one. So if I take from one, I take from all, but if I give to one, I give to all.

Far from being selfless, loving ourselves unconditionally is a reclaiming of our authentic perspective. It is this perspective through which we can best serve ourselves and the world around us.

If you enjoyed this you might enjoy Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? Contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information if you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog