Love to Love you, baby

The deeper I connect with myself, the more I'm experiencing love. I feel it. I find that it is at the root of what catalysis me into more and more peace and growth in my life. Whether it is expansion on a physical or internal level, love is always present. The more I allow that feeling of love to move through me on every level, the more shift occurs, without what I would call, effort on my part. I live as love lives, no matter what I happen to be doing, feeling, thinking, or saying. There remains a part of me, glowing, growing, that unabashedly receives, appreciates, and allows all that I am, regardless of where the rest of me is at. There is a presence of care and affection. It's not that uncomfortable states have ceased to arise, it's that I find myself having access to love, safety, a sense of being supported, in spite of this uncomfortable state or situation. More and more I am able to be authentic with myself & others, set healthy boundaries, and able to move towards what I desire with more confidence and bravery. Synchronicities grow all around me like leaves on a tree and there is a deep sense of being guided, like Jen doesn't have to figure it all out, I will be supported no matter what!

Gradually my reactionary self calms down and knows it no longer needs to go haywire to get my attention. I am willing to be with myself no matter what I am going through. I feel what arises and love is automatically there to greet it, most of the time now. Where as before resistance, or judgment, was what would automatically await my "bad feels". It's not that I am resistance free, it's just that I feel the love for the resistance too! Instead of the resistance being the dominant energy relating to my uncomfortable emotions, now love fills that space. So even when resistance arises, it doesn't cause me to lose connection to my unconditional nature. With this comes a sense of being far more rooted and settled into myself, so to speak. Anchored. Loved.

So what is this Love thing, anyways? If self love is at the root of all congruent expansion, then how do we "do it"? That is probably the most important question of all, I suppose first we must have a handle on what self love is, and what it isn't.

What we have going for us, is that we have a thorough education on what love isn't, as most all of us have been raised in conditionally "loving" environments, at best, and 100% of us have been raised in a highly conditional, hierarchical, culture and society. While we have been taught to perceive failure, or the negative, as an all around bad thing, we forget that it is showing us what not to do, and also what is not preferred, which gives rise to a greater sense of what IS wanted and what DOES work for us, which catalyzes us to find alignment in our lives and selves. It's super helpful! So why doesn't that happen for so many people who try to move on from unfortunate circumstances? Because they are still being conditional with themselves and their past. We resist what was, and run in the opposite direction, and repeat the same patterns out of sheer resistance to experiencing the pain from the past. We don't break the cycle of abuse internally before going off and trying to create something else.

If we get lost conditionally focusing on what isn't or wasn't wanted, we will miss our expansion, and plunge deeper into those patters, consciously and prominently unconsciously. They say that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is what we are doing, and then wondering why the world is the way it is. By this I mean, we consciously/unconsciously repeat conditional self love patters that we inherited from our families and culture. We reinforce this corrosive way of being onto ourselves into adulthood to varying degrees. Why would we do this? Because we haven't known how to close the gap between conditional "love" and unconditional love. We move on, try to be better, focus positively, but without first moving through the wounding that has occurred. We keep trying to standardize, punish/judge, and push ourselves into wellness... and that just isn't getting results.

When we are conditional with ourselves, we send the message that somethings are ok, and other things are not ok about us. We train ourselves to be, or at least pretend to be, what is ok... and resist the hell out of any part of us that isn't ok, through varying avoidance techniques and defense mechanisms we gravitate to. We have to do that, avoid and defend, because being conditional with yourself is a highly unnatural state and requires a lot of denial, deflection, justification, detachment, disassociation, and numbness to maintain it. When you are conditional with yourself, you are bound to end up in some major resistance to your very nature. When you are conditional with yourself judgment is inevitable. Judgment is that inner critic that tells you Bad! Wrong! Simply not good enough!! This is the opposite message of love. While love allows space for all of you, conditional "love" forces you to cut off from these aspects of yourself, that are now rendered frozen in judgment. Now you not only have pain, you also have a resistance to pain, which causes long term suffering on some level or another.

Conditional love is the punish/reward system in action. When you feel good, when you do good, when you are getting validation, you reward yourself there, or deem yourself acceptable there. And when you feel bad, when you do bad, when you're not getting validation, you punish and disapprove of yourself there. You put that part on a "time out" until it is acceptable, or worthy of approval. If you repeat this enough, you train yourself to go unconscious whenever discomfort arises, instead of moving through it to a better feeling state naturally.

Essentially most of us have no idea how to consciously recycle (process) our energy and emotion, and instead completely abuse our use of the trash bin (the shadow/unconscious). Instead of transmuting the energy, we automatically shove it down, down, down, into the unconscious. Negative emotion needs to be validated before it can let go, or feel better. So relating to yourself conditionally causes the inability to really feel totally ok, or safe, and so we then must pretend to be ok through a mask. And as they say, if you wear the mask long enough, you forget it's not your real face. We completely start to identify as the false self and lose even further connection with ourselves. Eventually our lives, our relationships, our bodies breakdown from this lack of presence with your true self, and all that was shoved into the unconscious, more and more overflows, and gets mirrored in your reality. Causing you to feel TRIGGERED and need more, and more to numb yourself. 

So... after conditionally "loving" yourself we get; 1.) pain, 2.) resistance to pain = suffering, 3.) a myriad of destructive avoidance tendencies, 4.) and a mask that creates further separation from self. Ouch.

We know that conditional "love" says some things are acceptable and somethings are not acceptable about us. Unconditional love has no such prejudice or discrimination. True love accepts, includes, and brings presence to whatever arises, be it negative thought, uncomfortable feeling, or body ailment. It can notice alignment or misalignment, but it does't judge and say, you are not ok as you are, and you need to change for ME, or I will reject you and deem you unworthy of acceptance, approval, and even my very attention. It embraces what arises without judgment and with utter thoughtfulness, respect, with validation, empathy, condolences, and compassion. Total inclusion. The good news is, you don't have to like something, in order to love it. Meaning, "while I don't prefer how this feels, or how this part of me acts, it is a part of me, and therefore deserves loving attention like the rest of me does".

Unconditional love holds you in your divine potential, even when that part of you has disconnected from it, and now seems very negative. Unconditional love has the space to allow for the negative part, to BE negative, without relating to it negatively, like with judgment, but instead with open arms like you hopefully would an upset child. It embraces feeling, thought, physicality, and spirit in whatever condition it is in, because it knows that something doesn't become negative, without first being deprived love. So anything that seems negative is just another divine aspect of myself that hasn't gotten what it needed in order to thrive, and is now calling my attention back to it through this negativity or pain. Nothing is wrong with me, nothing is bad. It just feels uncomfortable right now, because it hasn't gotten the loving attention it needs to find it's exalted form. I don't need this part to find it's exalted form for me to experience it as completely worthy of my loving attention because it is not bad or wrong. It is simply in pain. End of story.

So often we are told to stay positive, which in turn causes us to focus on the things we already feel positive about. This can only take you so far if you don't learn to focus positively on the negative. That is being unconditional. Unconditional love allows us to release resistance to our uncomfortable sensations, because it is free of judgment, so then we can actually fully feel them, embody them, which automatically allows them to flow, and raise up the vibrational scale all on their own, just by virtue of feeling or being with them as they are! Resistance, aka conditional "love", actually lodges negative emotional hooks deeper into us where they metastasize. Non resistance and loving presence allows them to have the space they need to find their alignment again.

It's like if you've ever had a really, really intense cry, where you bawl, and sob, and just let it all out until you can't cry and more... and then you feel better! Not because the situation that is making you cry has changed in and of itself necessarily, but because you allowed the sadness to come to a natural completion. This is how our emotional systems are designed. So when you honor the natural emotional system, which unconditional love allows for, the body then can then do it's job, start releasing the "happy hormones" in our brains, and we feel better! Only then are we resourced enough, and a vibration match to, creating actual positive change in our lives, instead of just running from the problem. When we move through the emotions brought on by painful events, we don't need to keep recreating them. But when we don't, by virtue of our unconscious/conditional focus due to unresolved wounds, we keep attracting the same situations in different forms, and the same person in different bodies, until we meet the pain with loves presence & awareness. When we do that, we start to attract those situations and people that can actually aid us in actualizing self love to an even greater degree and expression.

So what does this mean? It means we cultivate love. Love who is present, inclusive, allowing, attentive, compassionate, and ready to serve in the most thoughtful and respectful way possible. This doesn't mean that we condone harmful unconscious behavior in ourselves or others, it just simply means, I hold the divine in you, I know you are not inherently bad or wrong, even when you have forgotten that, and have now felt and done imbalanced things. We dedicate ourselves to focus from that space, take responsibility for this pattern of conditional "love" within us, and create a new healthy base line pattern. To do that you have to commit to a new, conscious way of relating to yourself, VS being on autopilot mode in the conditional, unconscious relationship. This requires you to take conscious, intentional command of your focus and how you relate to the object of your focus. Like any muscle, it takes practice and process to really get it down, so to speak. Like riding a bike, at first we tend to fall off and lose our balance. This is true of being unconditional with yourself. And guess what, that's ok too! You can't do it wrong. When that happens, that is just the next part to be loved when you get back on the bike. You say "I love you part of me that went to judgment town for two week and resisted the fuck out of life by totally going into avoidance patterns! I love you. I am here with you now. I am sorry I lost my space. How can I serve you? What do you need? I'm sorry you're in pain. You have every right to feel that way, think that way. There is nothing you can do that will turn me away from you. I am fully here with you now. I love you. I love you." as you breathe, feel, and settle into your body.

By consciously choosing a more loving, or at first perhaps simply a more neutral perceptive (aka meditation), you can relate to yourself differently. Many people don't even realize that you actually can chose what you focus on and how you relate to it. If you come from openness, presence, allowance and a unconditional perspective, you are more spacious and able to question thoughts, or be compassionate and empathize with your emotions, VS being at the mercy of the negative perspectives your thoughts and feelings have accumulated, with no one there to love them and guide them. In the old way of being, a thought emerges, it's God. A feeling arises, you lose yourself to it. Without your heart, without your presence, there to relate to these aspects of ourselves, they end up running the show. We make some progress focusing positively on positive things, and then BAM! We're back in the lowest of the low, wondering why we keep ending up here? It's because we don't know that we need to love our fears and pains, to fully move beyond them.

How many times has the inner critic run your show? Meaning how many times have you related to yourself harshly, or coldly, like you were somehow bad, wrong, not ok, not enough, needing to be better to be ok? This is the result of conditional love. Wouldn't you rather have a compassionate, resourced, present, inclusive aspect of you running your show? This is what happens when you embrace your unconditional nature. When you see through the lie of conditional "love", and or, break down to the point of no longer having the energy to resist yourself, either by way of death, or conscious expansion in your life. In death we take nothing with us, nothing we externally gain, be it money, a romantic relationship, car, status, a white picket fence. What we do take with us is our internal growth. And as it turns out, when we prioritize that in our lives and start cultivating self love, all the external things that we spend so much time and energy trying to create, flow to us more naturally, often in ways far better than we could have ever planned anyways.

I write all of this to you from the bottom of my heart. There is no part of you that is unworthy of love, validation, respect, thoughtfulness, presence. No thought, feeling, action, or word that renders you irredeemable. No matter what you have done, or what has been done to you. You are completely worthy as you are right here in this moment. As you read these words you are loved completely. You do not have to do, think, feel, or be different in any way, you do not have to earn it, you are completely loved.

The question is, do you feel it? Think it? Do it..be it? The more we take responsibility for our focus, and relate to ourselves unconditionally, the more space we have to every day, more and more, to be, think, feel, and do...as Love does.

Ask yourself, how deep is your care? How boundless is your love? Would you take yourself on a 30 day self love challenge, just to see what happens? 

It might be time to start treating yourself as God does, with unconditional love.

I Love you.

Always.