Author and Healing Medium, Annemiek Douw, shares her view on unconditional love and setting limits. Does it exist and if so, how does it work?
A week ago a friend of mine told me he didn’t think unconditional love exists. “Well,” he said, “perhaps from a mother to her child in the early years but that love also gets tainted very quickly”. I fully disagree and have decided to share my view on this subject today, because I believe unconditional love is essential in our lives.
Being Loved Without Reservation
Most of us dream of a relationship in which we are loved unconditionally. We picture ourselves loved, no matter what. Even on days with bad tempers, mood swings, stubbornness, hangovers, arguments, pimples, bad hair … all our flaws are as equally loved as our perfect features, the things that are easy to love about us.
Of course, we ourselves love the good parts of us too but, if possible, we would like others to also love the parts we don’t particularly love about ourselves. A clever way to try and solve a personal issue of lacking self-love.
Some people don’t believe it when they are loved unconditionally. They can’t wrap their minds around the fact that they don’t have to jump through any hoops, they don’t need to go places with you in order to win your love – they really don’t have to do anything special in order to be loved. They are loved for who they are, instead of for what they do.
Like my friend said, as children, most of us experience unconditional love in our early years. As a baby, our parents are simply happy, proud and excited with everything we are and everything we do as we develop. But as we grow older, they start setting boundaries: applauding us when we do something right and correcting (and sometimes even punishing) us when we do something wrong.
Punishment tends to come with disapproval and then we feel a strong change in the energy: it feels as if we’ve lost the love of our parent, at least temporarily, and we try hard to get it back. Then we adapt to their standards, losing part of our uniqueness by doing so. We trade our ‘Being’ for ‘Love’ and this way it seems that unconditional love no longer exists.
However, although it may seem to us that unconditional love disappears, most of the time that’s not really the case. There is a difference though between conditional love and the boundaries that sometimes need to be set.
For instance, each of us needs to express how we want or don’t want to be treated, making sure it happens in the right way for us. That’s why we set boundaries: “I’d love for you to call me, please do so after 9 am and no later than 10 pm.” The other person can choose to honour or ignore my request (or boundary), thus creating dynamics that will colour our relationship. If he calls me at an inconvenient time, it doesn’t automatically mean I don’t love him anymore, it simply means I don’t like that particular behaviour.
So you do need to set some boundaries in how you want to be treated. You need to talk about what you want and why you need it, so the other knows how to treat you well. That’s necessary because loving someone unconditionally doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want to you. Relationships need to be nurtured too.
Unconditional Love
Unconditional love means that you love the other wholeheartedly, including the ‘perfect imperfections’. The depth or amount of love isn’t influenced by what the other says or does. It’s there; you simply love because you love. It’s a connection from Soul to Soul and the love and the energy flow freely.
Of course the basis for any loving relationship is the relationship you have with your Self. That needs nurturing too. Being gentle with yourself and honouring your own feelings while leaving room for improvement is a start. If you accept who you are and where you are in your life and still want to move forward to become the best version of you that you can possibly be, then you can love yourself unconditionally. You don’t have to become someone else first in order to be loved by you. And just remember that, from the Soul perspective, you are already perfect!
Another way of being loved unconditionally is by someone else, your lover. But if you miss your Soul partner because you’re not in an active relationship at the moment, you might not feel that loved. You might even feel alone within a relationship for that matter. One way of dealing with this is to turn to your earthly friends and family, but they’re not always available or expressing their love for you.
Your Guides on the other hand, the Souls that accompany you throughout your life, are always there. 24/7, every day of your life they are there, loving you unconditionally. Probably more than you can imagine. So, if you need to feel that nurturing love, do please turn to them and ask them to fill you with their love for you.
Or, you can connect with the members of your Soul Group, the group you belonged to from the beginning, your special Soul Team. You don’t have to know their names, you don’t even need to connect to the ones that are incarnated and live on Earth, you can simply meditate and visualise your connection to the not-incarnated members of your Soul Group and feel your pure connection with them and their unconditional love for you. It eases the pain and can help with the loneliness, and it will help you reconnect with your Self and experience unconditional love.
And if you want, you can also connect with God, or the universe, Source, Allah. Then you will experience the purest form of love there is.
Declined Love
Yet, since we live on Earth, we spend most of our time with other people. And sometimes our love isn’t received as openheartedly as we would wish.
When that happens, you know three things:
- The object of your love doesn’t really love him (or her) self unconditionally.
- The love you give will not be fully accepted yet because your loved one doesn’t think he’s worthy of it. What happens then is that you, as the giver of love can feel the loving energy flow bounce back. This can be somewhat unpleasant, but if you realize that it’s not about your love but about the others ability to receive it, it gets easier to experience. You don’t have to take it personally.
- Your loved one doesn’t yet fully connect with his Self, his Soul. When he does, he will feel the purity of your heart and therefore your love and will be more than happy to receive it. In this case, please be gentle, for forcing your love upon him will not solve the issue. Love simply because you love and let that unconditional love do its healing work. Even from a distance it’s a beautiful gift.
You’re loved
So no matter whether you are loved from a distance, are loved by tangible beings nearby or by creatures you can’t see and only know are there, one way or another you are loved without reservation. Please try to love those you love the same way!
Read more?
Are you interested in reading more about unconditional love and the boundaries we set? My new book 21 Layers of the Soul: Healing the Karmic Ties with Friends, Lovers, Family and Enemies contains 101 real life cases. 21 Layers of the Soul is out now!
Alternatively, the Dutch version and the English version for Dutch readers are available here.
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* I hope to make Skype sessions available to you around March 2014. So please, when you order your copy of the book do subscribe on www.21layersofthesoul.com so I can send you the information!
ANNEMIEK DOUW, MSc is a management coach, energetic therapist, lightworker, medium, trainer and author. Coming from an unlikely background in engineering, Annemiek has always been interested in how people think and grow at a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level. In her work within the government and business sectors, she began to see how illness comes into people’s lives, often making it unpredictable and seemingly out of control. This influenced her to start exploring bioenergetics and other alternative therapies, eventually leading her to complete a 3-year course at the Natural Medicine Academy South-Netherlands to become a paranormal therapist. In 1998 she dedicated herself to this work full-time. She later fell ill herself for an extended period of time, which allowed her to gain first-hand insight into the human experience of illness, and to learn how the soul is an internal compass that continuously guides. Probing more deeply into how this compass works, Annemiek discovered 21 layers of the soul that influence our ability to grow and to heal in our bodies, minds and relationships. This discovery became the foundation of her unique healing style, and today Annemiek helps clients heal at many levels, and teaches them how to read this compass for themselves. Wanting to share this unprecedented work with a wider audience, she published the Dutch language book De ziel in het licht van haar hogere auralagen in 2011, which now available in English under the title 21 Layers of the Soul: Healing the Karmic Ties with Friends, Lovers, Family and Enemies.
Visit this page also to buy the book.
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