Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
“Unconditional love is not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object” — Ram Dass
I loved my conversation with Monique Williams on this week’s Insightful Conversations show. Monique is a 3 Principles Practitioner, Certified Rewilding Guide, Peace Officer in the California Prisons system, and the daughter of Beverley Wilson Hayes, one of the original students of Sydney Banks.
I asked Monique what was it like growing up in the 3 Principles community and, in particular, what was it like having Beverley Wilson Hayes as her mother. Monique described her mother as “pure love” and said that she had a blessed childhood, where she felt loved, accepted, and nurtured. She remembers her mother always telling her that God had made her “perfect just as she was.”
Monique also described how impactful it was to have the 3 Principles understanding, guiding her throughout her high school years. While most teenagers struggle with their identity and succumb to peer pressure, Monique did not fall into that trap. With her solid foundation and unshakable sense of self, she knew at the deepest level that everything she needed was within her.
It touched me to hear Monique share what it was like to grow up feeling loved and accepted for exactly who she was. What a gift it must be for a child to hear that you are perfect just as you are. To believe that there is a benevolent god that loves and supports you and always has your back. To know that you are unconditionally loved. To grow up, feeling confident in yourself as you navigate the challenges of life.
Unfortunately, this is not the case for everyone. Many of us grew up without the unconditional love and validation integral to becoming happy and healthy individuals. Instead, we received the message that there was something wrong with us. That’s where the seeds of self-doubt were first planted. We grew up believing that we were flawed and needed to fix ourselves to be worthy of love and acceptance. We internalized the negative comments of our parents, and they became our inner critic, feeding us a constant barrage of commentary telling us what was wrong with us.
Then as adults, we jumped on the self-improvement bandwagon, hoping that one day we would be good enough to earn the love and acceptance we so desperately craved as a child. In hopes of filling the void within, we become outer referenced, searching for external approval and validation. We looked to others to give us the unconditional love we had yearned for all our life, not knowing that looking in that direction was futile. That the bottomless pit of need can never be filled from the outside in.
For those of us who grew up in this type of environment, it’s essential to remember that our parents did the best they could, given their state of mind and level of consciousness at the time. What’s more important for us to remember is that it’s never too late for us to experience unconditional love. That’s because unconditional love is an inside job. It’s our birthright. It’s what we are made of. It’s who we are at our essence.
The more we look in the direction of the Principles, the more we see that we are so much more than our personalities and our physical bodies. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. At our spiritual essence, we are pure love, pure peace, and pure joy. We are all created equal, made from the same spiritual energy that created all living things.
Love is not conditional. We don’t have to change or improve ourselves to be loved. We don’t have to abandon ourselves to be loved. We don’t have to do or be anything other than who we are to be loved. We are perfect, just as we are — every one of us, deserving of unconditional love.
With love and appreciation, Del 💕