The Ladder to Unconditional Love

Over the last year, I’ve uncovered an extremely powerful tool to eliminate suffering and cultivate love, compassion, ease, and enjoyment. I call it The Ladder to Unconditional Love. It’s based loosely on the Hawaiian prayer Ho’oponopono.

When we're dealing with a situation, person, or thought that leaves us with a stuck or uncomfortable feeling - like fear, anxiety, despair, frustration, anger, resignation, or hatred - we can place ourselves on one of the rungs of this ladder to increase our awareness and open us to a more compassionate and loving feeling.

It doesn’t matter which rung we go to, though I find that the lower rungs are easier than the higher rungs when it comes to dealing with stronger emotional reactions.

Here’s the ladder and the reasoning behind the first few rungs (there's an example of my use of the ladder at the bottom of this post):

“Forgiveness of Other”

We hold onto things that cause us suffering! We feel crappy, and then we blame others for it. It’s like drinking a poison and hoping the other person dies. This rung of the ladder loosens the grip on us of our judgments of others, and allows us to put the past in the past. A powerful result is that we open up to compassion no matter how other people show up. This creates space for us to engage with others intentionally by being responsible for our own feelings.

“Forgiveness of Self”

We hold ourselves to high standards, and we beat ourselves up in small and large ways when we don’t show up the way we think we should. We don’t realize it, but throughout our lives we’ve been building a stack of evidence for how we’re not enough. This rung of the ladder opens us up to self-compassion no matter how we've shown up in life. This creates space for us to show up authentically and responsible in our lives, and it gives us access to living a new narrative.

(Here’s a slightly deeper dive on forgiveness that I wrote last May.)

“Gratitude”

Most of us can imagine the value of gratitude. It not only opens us emotionally to a more loving feeling, but it also triggers our brain to release dopamine in even the most challenging situations. It trains our brain to associate challenging experiences as a reward, and it warms us to others and ourselves while moving us from being a victim to being a creative agent in our lives.

(Here's a slightly deeper dive on acknowledgment that I wrote in April 2021.)

This ladder isn’t meant to condone inappropriate actions. It’s not meant to let others or ourselves off the hook. It’s not meant to make things easier and more positive (though that usually happens). It’s not meant to avoid dealing with uncomfortable, awkward, or inappropriate situations. It’s not meant to keep us small and safe.

This ladder is meant to put us in a place of personal power. It’s meant to help us let go of what bothers us so we can access the deeper parts of ourselves - what we really want, what we really value, and what we’re really committed to.

As long as we live our lives as a reaction to situations, people, thoughts, or feelings, we are living our lives at the effect of our circumstances. Living at the effect of our circumstances is living a life of suffering.

The Ladder of Unconditional Love puts us in the driver's seat of our experience, and it invites us to generate positive emotions. Our mood affects our perception, so loosening the grip our circumstances have on our mood is a way to bring more of ourselves - our brilliance, our creativity, and our innate wholeness - to our circumstances.

Pick a rung, any rung. There's no right place to start. No rung is better than another.

The people in your life are worth it. You are worth it. Unconditionally.

Thank you so much for reading. ❤️

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Here’s an example of how I might use the ladder:

The other day, my son H said that his haircut looks terrible and that it’s my fault because of something I said to the barber. I immediately got defensive and angrily told him to stop blaming me.

(The irony of this - me blaming him for blaming me! 🤦‍♂️)

Forgiveness of other:

• I forgive H for blaming me.

• I forgive H for getting upset.

• I forgive H for directing anger towards me.

• I forgive the barber for cutting his hair shorter than he wanted.

Forgiveness of self:

• I forgive myself for getting mad at H.

• I forgive myself for taking his behavior personally.

• I forgive myself for judging H.

• I forgive myself for judging the barber.

• I forgive myself for judging myself as weak and immature.

• I forgive myself for being defensive.

• I forgive myself for modeling a blaming attitude to my kids.

Gratitude:

• Thank you, H, for showing me this growth opportunity

• Thank you, defensiveness, for seeking to protect me.

• Thank you, anger, for seeking to protect me and to teach H a lesson.

• Thank you, barber, for providing us this opportunity.

• Thank you, life, for always giving me insights into myself and others.

Gladness:

• I’m glad that happened.

• I’m glad I got defensive.

• I’m glad I got angry.

• I’m glad H got upset.

• I’m glad I got angry.

• I’m glad that I now see how I’d rather behave.

• I’m glad that I know how to apologize and leave the past in the past.

• I’m glad that I know how to grow in any experience.

Love:

• I love H.

• I love that H reacted that way.

• I love H’s perspective on his life, on me, and on his haircut.

• I love myself.

• I love that I got defensive.

• I love that I got angry.

• I love that we both got upset over something small in the big scheme of things.

• I love that life continually shows us where we have room to grow.

• I love that I’m a dad who’s committed to unconditionally loving my kids, my wife, and my life.

What Does Your Life Represent?

What does your life represent?

- Your survival instincts?

- Your parents’ ideas of how you should behave?

- Your teachers’ assessments of your capabilities?

- Your culture’s ideas of what’s successful?

- Your memories from when you were young?

- Your friends’ ideas of what’s cool?

- Your conditioned thoughts on what’s possible for you?

- Your insecurities of not being enough or not being worthy?

We grow up in families and cultures that train us how to live - what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, what’s good, what’s bad.

In addition to that, we have a 3.5 billion year evolutionary training in how to survive, and it largely runs the show for us in physical, intellectual, social, and spiritual contexts.

And there are great reasons for both of these! They serve us and our society well in many ways. I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with any of it.

But at what point do we take it too far? At what point can we finish the chapter on Doing It Someone Else’s Way and begin the chapter on Doing It My Way?

* Our authentic way.

* The way that has integrity for us.

* The way that aligns with our own inner knowing, our own experience of truth.

* The way that most cleanly honors our own spirit, soul, atman, life force, Buddha, inner Child of God.

* The way that best serves us, others, and the world?

There’s a training in the empowerment of the self that is missing from nearly all K-12 education.

This training is the development of tools, skills, and perspectives that frees the mind and our emotions from unhelpful and detrimental constraints. It’s training in How to Thrive in Life no Matter the Circumstances.

This is the key power of adulthood that most of us never learn. Instead, we live conditioned lives that fit someone else’s mold, and we live lives at the effect of our survival instincts.

Those molds aren’t a problem and the survival instinct doesn’t have to be limiting. But we often experience them that way. They’re problematic and limiting because we haven’t baked into our society a promise of emotional, spiritual, physical, and social well-being - no matter the circumstances.

We’re complex creatures, but our emotional, spiritual, physical, and social selves are not very complicated.

So, dear reader: What does your life represent?

What would you love for your life to represent?

- Unconditional love?

- Passion?

- Exploration?

- Curiosity?

- Creativity?

- Discovery?

- Inspiration?

- Courage?

- Compassion?

- Well-being?

- Generosity?

What might become possible if you committed to living your life from there?

Yes, students should learn the things that schools think are valuable to learn. AND, all of us would profoundly benefit from learning what schools haven’t yet seen to be valuable...

Perhaps the most valuable of all possible lessons: How to Thrive in Life no Matter the Circumstances.

Thank you so much for reading. 🙏❤️

P.S. If you're ready to move beyond living your life as a representation of someone else's beliefs - and into living life as an expression and creation from your own spirit, integrity, and relationship to the Divine - schedule a call and let's see what working together might look like. 🔥

Learning How to Think Academically Isn't Enough

Likely all schools pride themselves on teaching kids not what to think but how to think. Teaching students how to think helps them/us creatively solve problems, accurately analyze situations in context, and effectively argue for our perspective.

The unseen gap and limitation in this goal, however, is that "teaching kids how to think" is actually only meant in an academic context. Sooo much more of our lives is impacted in positive and negative ways by thought, and we're never taught the nature of Thought or how to harness it.

For example:

1. Teaching kids how to think academically doesn’t translate into understanding how our thinking limits our experience and self-expression.

2. Teaching kids how to think academically doesn’t translate into understanding the limitations of our thinking: rumination, worry, monitoring behavior, inappropriate coping, and complaints.

3. Teaching kids how to think academically doesn’t include effective strategies for optimizing our creative thinking, limiting ineffectual or detrimental thinking, or seeing beyond our thinking to live fully in the present moment.

Thought is arguably humanity's greatest asset, but most of us never learn to harness the full power of Thought to help us achieve what we're committed to achieving, access the feelings we're seeking, and create a life and a world that matches our deepest and most authentic desires.

There are only three things we ever experience in our lives:

• Sensations through our 9 senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, sound, temperature, body awareness, and balance)

• Emotion

• Thought

Can you point to anything else in your experience that doesn’t fall into one of those categories?

While Thought appears like it’s just one of the three, it actually wields a mostly invisible power to create and affect our emotions, actions, and results. Furthermore, our sensations, the raw data from our senses, are always filtered through thought in a way that obscures them.

As a transformational life coach, I help people access and develop their innate brilliance to have their thoughts and emotions work for them in all circumstances. That’s always the intention behind the genius of being human, but the vast majority of us have never learned where Thought and Emotion come from nor how to experience them with well-being and creativity.

These are crucial lessons missing in our K-12 schools, and this has broad impacts on our individual lives, our culture, and our society. A major part of the challenge is that most teachers have never learned this important lesson either.

This lesson, development, and growth is how we learn to thrive in life no matter the circumstances, and sharing the insight and power of this is my life's work.

Thank you so much for reading. ❤️

P.S. If you're ready to fully experience, love, and use all parts of you in service of living your best life, reach out and let's talk.