A friend, who has been using the principles of unconditional love, emailed me saying: “Yesterday, I read that the inability to tolerate an honest hindsight keeps many people from growing and learning. I believe it! It is so easy to see, how in the past, the awareness of my flaws and mistakes, followed by the harsh self-criticism, and the guilty feelings that followed that, lead me straight to overeating, or blaming, or feeling like a victim, or some other self-sabotaging behavior rather than learning.
“Because of the unconditional love I have received, I can now tolerate this honest hindsight. I don’t think I’m bad, no matter what the old parental voices in my head might be trying to say. And I know that when I reach out, I can find some one to love me unconditionally – with no expectation of me changing or being a certain way. This gives me the strength to look at myself honestly. It also helps me see that most of my time in all the self-help and growth programs I have been involved in the past, has focused on trying to see myself clearly with eyes that were blind because they didn’t have enough love. I was blinded by my fear of being basically bad. I had the cart before the horse. Well, I see this differently now.”
I could so relate to what my friend wrote. I answered her with the following: “Yes, yes, yes, this is all so right on. I spent a lifetime doing every growth thing available, including living and practicing at my Ashram for 28 years. It was not until I began to believe that I am loved and worthwhile no matter what mistakes I made, that I could actually live the teachings and techniques that I had studied so diligently. “Cart before the horse” is a good way of putting it.
What this is all about is unconditional love (the horse). I came from a big family, about as good as they get – I am grateful. It seemed that my parents loved me. But somehow I understood that I had to do things as they wanted or I would get in trouble or even worse, they would not love me. As a child, my parents’ love was everything to me, so to avoid losing it, I tried to always be “perfect”, “good”, and basically “please” everyone. That got me a lot of positive strokes and made life easy for those around me. It left me, however, with a terrible legacy of living for the approval of others and believing that if I did not make everyone “happy”, I was worthless. It was a very fragile self-esteem – it took a lot of ongoing work, and it was pretty exhausting to worry about everyone else’s opinion.
So with those debilitating beliefs, every technique or teaching I learned would fall by the wayside when I did not get enough positive feedback from others. The ironic thing was, however, that when people told me how great or holy I was, I would hear inside, “if they only knew who I really was, they would not say these kind things”. So when things where quiet, I could feel how empty and afraid I was, a pretty terrifying realization. It is no wonder my relationships and work situations often turned out badly. Now that I can see more clearly and have unconditional love in my life, my relationships are very different, and I am much happier and much less exhausted – no more trying to be perfect all the time!
I invite those who may share some of these feeling to explore this website. There are weekly loving calls on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Everyone is welcome to join whether you speak up or not.