Author: Ramloti Wood

Unconditional love is often recommended or strived for, but seldom given or experienced, leading many to believe it is not even possible. The definition of unconditional love is caring about the happiness of another person without wanting anything in return. With unconditional love, people are not disappointed or angry when we make our foolish mistakes, when we don’t do what they want, or even when we inconvenience them personally. Unconditional love fills us up, makes us whole, and gives us the happiness we all want.

Most of us suffer greatly from pain caused by the lack of unconditional love in our lives, and we use power, pleasure, money and pleasing others to make ourselves feel better.  But, sadly, those strategies don’t have lasting effects – they are very unproductive in the long run.  What will truly help us feel better – less stressed and more peaceful – is unconditional love.

Through learning about unconditional love we learn to identify our unproductive behaviors and see how self-sabotaging they are to our quest of finding deep peace and happiness. We begin to see how many times a day we lie, manipulate, judge, attack others, react out of fear, try to control others, blame our anger on others, play the victim, run, respond with passive-aggressive behavior, and use a myriad of other fear-based behaviors. We use these “coping behaviors” in an attempt to fill the void that is created when we don’t feel unconditionally loved. This emptiness in the world has become so prevalent and these “coping behaviors” have become so common that we often call them “normal”, but they are actually destroying our relationships, our families, and our societies.

This work for me has been deeply profound, and I am happy to share it with folks. For this reason I became an Unconditionally Loving coach. I run a weekly group in Crestone, CO, host a weekly conference call, co-host a 3-day Unconditionally Loving Retreat twice a year in Crestone, and facilitate seminars and retreats around the country.

For more information on the next Unconditionally Loving Retreat, please go to www.UnconditionallyLoving.com/online-retreat/ or just give me a call at 719-480-5514. Myself and other Unconditionally Loving coaches are offering this so that others too can experience a deep and lasting sense of peace and fulfillment that deeply satisfies and enlarges the soul. It is a sense of wellbeing that doesn’t go away when circumstances are difficult, but actually survives and even grows during hardship and struggle and when we share it with others.

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.