Chuck’s Place: Unconditional Love

The highest form of love is love without condition, the total embracing acceptance of all that we are.

This is the welcome that we all seek as our birthright into life in this world, loving acceptance of all that we are, simply because we are. This is the love the child longs to see mirrored in its parent’s eyes to help fortify a deep sense of worthiness, confidence, and lovability that encourages the journey to individuation, to becoming all that we truly are in this life. This is the love we seek in partnership, a loving embrace of all of our body self, all of our virtues as well as all of our sins.

Shadow partners... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Shadow partners…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

In our time, the longing for unconditional love has come to be felt as an inalienable right, an entitlement. If one does not experience unconditional love immediately one feels empowered and righteous to end a relationship or marriage rather quickly. However, relationships are cauldrons where confronting the unacceptable, in both self and other, is part of the process of growing. If one exits a relationship due to unmet acceptance too prematurely the opportunity to experience the coveted “unconditional love” may be missed.

The first challenge in achieving unconditional love is to unconditionally love the self. The process of socialization we all encounter growing up leaves us with a huge shadow self, a rejected part of the self that we are taught must be forsaken due to its unacceptability.

Do we know that shadow self? Do we hate it as it has been hated? Do we expect a partner to remedy our disdain for a part of ourselves that even we do not love, expecting another to lovingly accept all of us?

Can we actually turn over that unwanted shadow self to another to make it wanted? We can try, but we’ll never fully believe the outcome. Even if a partner claims love for that which we hate in ourselves, it will not be redeemed. We will either need constant reassurance to silence our inner doubt or we simply won’t believe our “naive” partner. We will retain the “true knowledge” of our unacceptability.

In other ways, it might just be that parts of ourselves deemed unlovable might indeed be immature, with a limited capacity for relationship. Young children are far more concerned with themselves—primary narcissism, it’s called—than the needs of others. This may be quite appropriate at an infantile stage of development, but it is hardly adaptive to adult relatedness, which requires a fuller knowing and appreciation of another, as well as of self.

Our challenge might be to love that very infantile part of ourselves but realize that it is also anachronistic, non-adaptive to adult life, and unacceptable when acted out in adult relationship. This may be a case where we need to access the loving but firm adult/parent within ourselves that sets boundaries upon the demands of an infantile part of ourselves. This may allow for adult connection with another where we can share the fullness of ourselves but don’t burden the relationship with expectations that need to be grappled with within the self.

When Buddha speaks of loving compassion he speaks equally of detachment. Unconditional love—acceptance of all—does not mean attachment to all. (Attachment in this sense meaning having to engage in the acted-out entitlements of another.) In detachment, we can fully love and accept another yet insist that they manage their own infantilism.

Unconditional love is not unconditional license. Unconditional love is full acceptance of what is, while assuming full responsibility for integrating it into the self and into life at a level where life can receive it and help it to grow. Ironically, the key to unconditional love is complete loving acceptance of self while facing the conditional reality that we must grow up!

If we have been failed by those entrusted to connect us with unconditional love we must pick up the mantle of finding our way there on our own, beyond blame and bitterness. Our truest parent, Mother Earth, entrusts us with this journey as she evokes a healing process that requires deeper connectedness and love for that which has been rejected. If we are here we have been invited to partake in this great healing crisis, our own and that of the world now. It all begins with the journey of unconditional acceptance of the self.

Lovingly,

Chuck

 

Soulbyte for Wednesday June 22, 2016

Change may be painful as the old sloughs off and the new takes its place. Do not fixate on the pain but let its presence be a time of gratitude, your transition a period of thanks, for it is in the moments of pain that the deepest truths are often revealed. Let the changing times be your holiest hours, your transitional bridges and gateways through the sacred grounds of healing. Let your pain burn away in the cleansing rituals that naturally shed the old and bring you newly primed into more fulfilling life. Like the phases of the moon your own phases of change will bring you through the necessary times of transition and into the fullness you seek, a shining new you. Be grateful, for your pain signals that you are alive and evolving. And that’s what it’s all about!

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Tuesday June 21, 2016

The body holds its secrets, just as the mind does, just as the heart does. In one form or another they will be revealed, in sickness or in health, in fear or in loathing, in times of good and times of bad. Eventually, what is stored inside must come out. The body is nature and nature is of its own mind, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake. Sometimes there are calm seas, sometimes rough. Like the changing winds the body changes too, bringing both stillness and storm. Learn how your body speaks to you and prepare to meet its changing seasons with serious concern, with patience and fortitude, for if you are receptive to it it will teach you what it holds and fill you with its knowledge, the truths within. And that is never a bad thing!

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Monday June 20, 2016

Ground yourself today. Know that because you are there upon that earth that you belong there. You have as much right to life and survival and possibility as the next person. Own your life, your breath. Feel your heartbeat in the wind, the sun and stars, in the waters and the moon, in all that surrounds you. For you are one with nature, your pulse pulsing with all else; even that which you fear and detest is energetically part of your world. Do not fear and detest but love and abide together as the one being you all are, struggling to figure it out. Have compassion but move always forward and onward to that which brings you stability and joy, to the heart of life. Find in your own life the greater fuel that will catapult you to greater knowledge of all that is, to love that is as natural as the air you breathe and all that it is truly capable of. Seek to awaken that love within and your life will have its own great fuel to give and carry you forth each day of your life. Gotta love!

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne