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Many of us who practice the principles of Unconditional Love experience feeling loved for who we really are — flaws and all — for the first time in our life. We discover that we are worthy and lovable. We begin to learn new Truths about life. We learn that our worth isn’t earned. And that we are lovable — no matter how many mistakes we make.

At first you may feel invincible and loved all the time. Eventually something happens that reminds you of your past and Bam! you’re back to feeling like a child who’s living in a world where you are alone and unloved again. You start to believe old lies without even realizing it. You believe you are stupid for making a mistake, or bad for not trusting and feeling loved all the time. You feel unlovable and ashamed, so much so that you may even want to run and hide from the people who say they love you unconditionally.

The lies feel like Truth or actual reality because we were told they were true hundreds or even millions of times in our early years. We were told with words or sometimes only with the unloving actions of our caregivers. Our brain gets confused. It seems like it must be true because we believed it was true our whole life, until recently. We were told by parents or caregivers that we weren’t good enough. We were given the message that we needed to change in order to be loved. We needed to be better and stop making mistakes or love would be withdrawn from us. Or we were taught the biggest lie of all — that there’s something inherently wrong with us and we’ll never be lovable.

The work that we get to do, if we want to be happier, is to replace the old lies with the new Truth. And that’s not easy! Let me emphasize that we don’t need to change to be lovable, but if we choose to make some changes, we can definitely learn to be happier.

Learning to change the old lies in our head is sort of like training a dog or other domestic animal. They don’t get it the first time they are told how to do something new. They need lots of repetition, combined with lots of love, to learn new things. And so do we. An animal will revert to bad behavior when they get scared or overly excited. And so do we. Not because the animal is stupid, but because it’s instinct to bite, chase, jump etc. And for us humans we learned very early on to protect ourselves with behaviors that almost felt like instinct. They aren’t really instinct though. The behaviors are something we learned from the adults around us. Lacking any other role models to learn about life from, we think it’s the only way to survive. Like animals survive by reverting to their old instincts.

But we are teachable, just as much as any animal. Childhood lies that lead to emotional wounds can heal. We CAN change!

Lasting change takes work and requires a lot of repetition with loving support. We can choose to be gentle with ourselves during this process of healing and change, with recognition that no creature changes a lifetime of behavior habits quickly. When a dog makes a mistake, it doesn’t help to yell at it and call it bad. It will just cower and get scared, and probably try to hide its bad habits in the future. It’s most effective to talk firmly and kindly, with understanding, while reminding it of the happier behavior choices.

We can learn to talk to ourselves that way also. Gentle and firm, compassionate, kind. Reminding ourselves of what’s really True.

And if we can’t remember what’s True, then we get help from someone else who can. This is when it’s helpful to have a coach to support you while you’re making changes and the old lies are pulling at you. You can also get on one of the weekly conference calls, or try reaching out to a loving friend, and tell them about the lies you are believing.

Maybe reading this blog will help you remember the Truth about how lovable you are, that you’re already good enough! We all need help remembering what’s True many, many times. The old lies were taught to us so often, when we were so young, and probably continued our whole life. They are so deeply ingrained in us that we don’t even recognize them as lies. They just feel like “what is.” This is why we need each other on this journey of healing and change.

It may take your whole life to heal, but that’s no problem. There’s no need to do it by yourself and get it right.

You’re perfectly lovable Just The Way You Are, right now. Any place on your journey. You are worth loving ❤

Kim Grindell, Unconditionally Loving Guide

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.