Blake Bauer – Unconditional Self Love
OMTIMES: Describe what you mean by “unconditional self-love” and why is it by your work?
Blake Bauer: Unconditional self-love means:
– We educate ourselves about our emotions, needs, and desires, and become present to them in the here and now, through practicing both body and breathing mindfulness.
– We honor and express our feelings, needs, and desires daily, especially in the situations where we’re scared of doing so.
– We act based on what truly feel, as opposed to always trying to please others.
– We forgive ourselves for past hurt we’ve caused ourselves or others based on unconscious reactions or patterning
– We are mindful of the food and substances we put in our body and because our inner emotional and mental life now matters to us, we then value our physical body more and learn how to best care for it.
– We take 100% personal responsibility for our lives, our actions, and what we say. This means we stop blaming others as well as ourselves, but rather come to compassionately understand how we arrived where we are and how we can transform any current suffering we’re allowing or creating.
– We stop betraying, abandoning or compromising ourselves in exchange for the conditional love, acceptance, companionship, support or approval of others.
– We commit to finding and engaging in meaningful, purposeful and fulfilling work that is aligned with our core values and feels good to focus on.
– We stop making ourselves wrong for feeling how we feel or for desiring what we do. Rather we learn to welcome and accept what we feel in each moment more and more, without allowing
guilt or fear to stop us from speaking and acting based on this inner truth.
OMTIMES: What in your opinion is the prime reason for human unhappiness?
Blake Bauer: Human unhappiness is multidimensional. In the present, wherever we are, most of us do not give ourselves permission to be happy because we feel guilt for desiring what makes us feel well, alive and joyful. Equally, we feel insecure and scared about not pleasing others anymore, which we must overcome to truly be happy in ourselves. Most of us are trapped in a vicious cycle of not wanting to be alone, judged, or lose the crumbs of love, approval, acceptance, companionship and support we might currently get from others. A large part of this is a result of the fact that many of us do not have emotional awareness, which means we do not know how to express our emotions, needs and desires effectively or respectfully in the present. Our deep unconscious fear of losing love, approval, or support, as well as our fears of being judged, rejected, or abandoned, create intense and constant insecurity, which supports a deeply rooted and self-destructive habit of rejecting our own emotions, needs, desires and dreams simply to survive; all of which constantly creates deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction, that we then deny as well, or pretend is not there, or numb ourselves to. In other words, as children, we learn to make our feelings, needs, and desires wrong, in exchange for love or to keep the peace, and we feel guilt and shame both for having these feelings and for hiding them. One could say that lying to ourselves and to others, or denying the truth, or living in fear of the truth, is very much associated with the causes of unhappiness. Another way of saying it is that unhappiness is the result of all the moments in the past that we have closed down inside and not related to ourselves from an open place of unconditional love, acceptance, kindness, forgiveness, and honesty, but rather related to ourselves from a place of judgment, criticism, aggression, insecurity and fear.
