The essence of your life experience is really about learning how to give and receive unconditional love. This is your life story!
Receiving unconditional love as a child is a gift that lays the foundation for you to manifest your own unique expression of this love and essentially pass it on in service to the collective. However, we all have different experiences and thus degrees of receiving unconditional love as children which shapes your unique perspective of yourself and the world around you. The level to which your parents were able to provide this vital resource depends on their own degree of connection with it and so on.
Parents who lack authentic unconditional love pass on this pattern. This is how ancestral patterns are created that can go on for many generations. An example of one of the most detrimental patterns is sexual abuse. Most abusers are actually victims and through their own trauma experience become programmed to become abusers. It’s a vicious cycle requiring strong free will of one to break out of the pattern.
Furthermore, even if such an individual breaks the cycle to not abuse the residual physical, emotional, mental and spiritual wounds often continue to play out in other patterns (such as those listed below) and perpetuate through future generations until they are fully healed. We see this in many of our clients who have a parent or grandparent who was sexually abused but they themselves were not.
What we have discovered is that when you trace back to the source of any of our experiences of suffering it essentially stems from a disconnection to unconditional self-love. This is what your life journey is all about where along the way you discover yourself!
Even though you may not have learned how to give and receive pure unconditional love in your life, you have the choice to direct your life force and intention towards finding it. The secret is that it is always within you, sourced within your soul essence. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to access it.
When you do not truly love and accept all dimensions of yourself you use different strategies to compensate and adopt distorted perceptions of yourself. Here are some common narratives that you may take on if you don’t have a secure connection to this divine resource. Keep in mind that we all take on some versions of these patterns within the shadow aspect of ourselves. A critical aspect of your journey is fully facing and reconciling these parts of you. As you read through these, try to reflect on whether any of them resonate with you and your story thus far.
- Overachieve, overdue, overwork as you derive your self-worth based on your achievements and productivity.
- Perfectionist-Anything less than perfect is unacceptable and intolerable to yourself.
- Overly giving, helping and rescuing another to the detriment of yourself.
- Saying yes when you really mean no as you don’t want to be negatively perceived as this is where you self-value is based.
- Self-absorbed and centered (narcissist pattern) with difficulty empathizing with others to compensate for an unstable foundation of self-esteem.
- Unable to accept criticism or judgment as it is perceived as an attack on your inherent value.
- Overly critical or judgmental of others as you project onto them what you cannot accept or tolerate within yourself.
- Self-sabotage choices and behaviors as you subconsciously do not believe you are worthy of making decisions and actions that support your well being.
- Being attracted to friends and partners who do not treat you well, tend to take advantage of you and don’t value you as this is how you actually perceive yourself and what you believe you deserve.
- Not taking responsibility for your life choices and overly relying on others to take care of you because you do not believe in yourself and/or if you did take accountability for your past behavior it would be too painful to acknowledge.
- Selling out or making choices that dishonor yourself and integrity.
- Addictive behaviors and distractions (food, drugs, stimulants, sex, exercise, social media scrolling, electronics, etc) to help fill any void of self-love.
- Is there any other pattern you can identify in your life that relates to an underlying belief that you are not enough?
Resourcing Unconditional Love Meditation
- Get into a comfortable position in a space without distractions and close your eyes.
- Tune into the center of your chest, your heart space.
- Reflect on a person or pet whom you have the most love for and allow yourself to feel this love in your heart space. You may include more than one if you would like.
- Continue to focus on this person or animal as the intensity of this love grows.
- Once you feel as if it can’t get any higher and has reached its peak, reflect it back to you.
- Direct it throughout your body as you are now channeling this love to yourself as unconditional self-love.
- Allow yourself to fully feel and experience this love for yourself.
- This love does not judge you and accepts all parts of you, including your shadow aspects, unconditionally.
- Move this love wherever it needs to go within you.
- Continue this experience until it feels complete and when you have finished you may set the intention that you will continue to unconditionally receive and give this love within you to power your life’s purpose.
Self-Love Reflection
- Reflect on your current patterns of giving and receiving unconditional self-love
- How did your unique childhood experience of receiving or not receiving unconditional love shape your current ability to receive and give?
- How might your parents’ childhood and life experience influence their ability to give and receive love to you?
- How might other experiences or traumas in your life shape the degree to which you are able to give and receive unconditional love for yourself?
