by Maud Nordwald Pollock

Author of "From the Heart through the hands""Vom Herzen durch die Hande" Bedingungslose Liebe und Therapeutic Touch. Bauer Verlag 1994, "Dal Cuore atraverso le Mani" Amore incondizionale e Therapeutic Touch, Longanesi 1995, Zalinski 1994.

With the coming of fall we re-enter our more routine life. Going back to schools and work, means being and interacting with old friends, coworkers and meeting new people. We are confronted with the challenge of human interaction. The desire for recognition and approval from others is intensified. In the language of my work the word "approval" translates to mean love. Not the love we know as "being in love", or even parental love per se, but something similar. It is experiencing something, having a "feeling" that makes us feel good. A feeling of being valued, of being accepted, acknowledged. All of us think about love sometime in our lives and some of us speak about it. Today more than ever before there is a heightened interest in love. People want to understand what love is, experience being loved and loving. This new awareness of the importance of love and what effect its presence can have on us and society stimulated a plethora of books on the subject all over the world. As it becomes clearer what love is and what it is not, why and how to love, it follows logically, that the next step in the evolution of the experience we call love is the altruistic level of Unconditional Love.

In the late 80's,after many years of teaching a consciousness that stimulates and supports the ability to heal and the healing method Therapeutic Touch I was asked to write a book on the subject. As I wrote and tried to explain compassion, an aspect of unconditional love, the focus of my book shifted form healing others to healing one self. Love and its amplified dimension unconditional love became my focal point. I decided to call the book "Unconditional Love". Writing about any subject wisely, requires that the writing be based on personal experience. "Walk your talk" as the saying goes. Events in my life forced me to learn what it means to love unconditionally. This was a pivotal gift, that changed the way I saw life.

The idea that we are able to love unconditionally and that this can be learned via a tool and a shift in points of view touched me deeply. What a chance to help the transformative process. How wonderful! A book called "Unconditional Love" the world would surely snap it up. After all Unconditional Love represents a state that is the aim of all religions. Non judgmental acceptance. Something that had seemed so rare becomes possible for many. Imagine my surprise to discover that to some, the idea of "Unconditional Love" was not as appealing as I thought. To my astonishment my publisher decided to change my title. At a meeting of the publisher's marketing group, it was thought that the title "Unconditional Love" would be more threatening than enticing to the reading public. This kind of love might be associated with masochism.

When we live a certain reality and are convicted that reality is it, it can be hard to believe that others don't get it. And even more unexpected is the idea that to expand peoples ability could be threatening. I had forgotten about Galileo and co., and how their new ideas intimidated the status quo, that some were jailed and others killed. My awakening to group reactions come when I gave the first workshop on Therapeutic Touch at a nursing school in Germany. The prospective students had no preparation for this workshop. When I presented the ideas and stimulated unfamiliar experiences through my teachings and Therapeutic Touch, these seemed so alien to some of these unprepared individuals, that to they become threatening. I was flabbergasted by their reaction. In my enthusiasm at the opportunity of being able to teach them this method, I assumed they would be delighted to learn to use such empowering tools. Instead some of them became very aggressive, while others left the workshop out of fear. The ideas did not fit their limited world view. What I teach is natural and real to me, it is a fact. It was a revelation that to others the possibility of discovering and employing their own innate potentials was scary. This type of reaction in many variations has duplicated itself in my workshops over the years. I have learned to take these experiences into account as part of the participant's growth, or in some cases resistance to growth. I have come to understand that the idea of being loved or love unconditionally could be threatening.

What is this love that could scare us, yet ultimately we desire above all? What does loving unconditionally really mean? Many people have thought of unconditional love as a kind of sacrifice, a giving up of themselves for the sake of the other. It is not becoming a martyr or letting oneself be trampled upon like a carpet. It is not resignation. "Oh well I can't change it anyway!". Sometimes unconditional love includes setting boundaries. It starts with loving our selves unconditionally. Unconditional Love is a state of being. It is an experience in consciousness, stimulated by our being whole, by connecting with the divine within our self. It is not love as we think of in the case of loving someone possessively, protectively, desiring them or needing them. "I can't live without you" kind of love, or even euphoric "in-lovedness". It is a state of non judgment, of allowing the other to be, without expectation or desire to change them. Which is not a giving up. It is deeply felt acceptance of them unconditionally. A challenge Oh Yes! Possible? Absolutely! Unconditional Love is total understanding. It is empathy without pity. "There by the grace of God go I." It is loving one's neighbor as one would one self, as a wise master once said, not sometimes but always.

The key to unconditional love, is self love. When we can accept ourselves for being neither "good" nor "bad" but both, and that we are OK that way. In some case some are more "good" than "bad" and others more "bad" than "good" or so it seems from our human vantage. When we understand that we are made up of strengths and weaknesses the same as others, then it becomes possible to accept others. We need to realize that the aspects we reject in others, are ours too and that in rejecting these, we are in fact rejecting parts of ourselves. We express these rejections through judgments. We have tended to judge, because we have been taught to do so. The collective habit of being judgmental explains our inability to accept the shadow side. It is natural for us to strive to be perfect, because we have been afraid that we were not perfect. On the other hand we haven't understood that things are perfect as they are. Our feelings and beliefs make the world imperfect.

Never the less we have projected our longing to be perfect onto others. They should think the way we think, act the way we think they should act. Is this freedom? We would like to control them so that they behave like we want, from the politician to the baseball referee. Since we are all individuals, most have not measured up to our expectations, so we in our minds we effort to change them. They should change, not we, which was not accepting them as they are. Not accepting them unconditionally, and vicariously not accepting ourselves as well. This behavior is understandable we have not known better.

As new tools become available it becomes possible to practice and live unconditional love. Now there is a possibility for change. But why would we want to. For our personal peace and harmony. To stop our suffering. Our "human" nature has been dominated by emotion until now. No matter how detached individuals attempted to be, usually motivation is based on emotions. Having emotions is part of being a human being, having our emotion run us, is becoming obsolete.

The ideas taught by Spiritual Psychology make it is possible to surmount emotions. We are able to practice compassionate detachment and arrive ultimately at non judgmental Unconditional Love. I feel that the most profound shift in our world view is, that we accept that we are "spiritual beings" having a human experience, not the other way around. It is important that we understand that we are multidimensional. That we are beings of light, manifesting as vibrations and our consistence is not limited to dense matter. Spiritual Anatomy teaches that we have different "light bodies." Each one of these like our physical organs has a specific purpose. The parameters of these light bodies can be felt with the hands, seen with clairvoyant vision. We have a name for these bodies, we call them Aura. Understanding our spiritual form enables us to identify why we have been subject to our emotions until now. The light body that influences emotions the most is called the "Feeling Body." Energetically this light body is a container of all our current and past feelings. The feelings good, bad, or in between, collected in this "Feeling Body", affect our thinking. If we think of this light body as having a quality, a vibratory frequency, then it is energetically at a denser/lower level than that of the next layer. Called our "Mental Body" or thinking vehicle. This light body is the container of our thoughts. All our thoughts have to pass through the vibratory "feeling layer." Like water going through an old clogged pipe. The more grime and grit the less water gets through. So these thoughts become feeling conditioned before entering the transformer that decodes and interprets this vibratory information, our body and brain. We feel feelings with our body, our brain decodes the thoughts. A thought and a feeling produce an emotion. Unresolved feelings accumulate, create density in the feeling body, with the result that our thoughts are subjective. Subjective to our feelings.

We would like to think that we are not affected by our feelings that we are able to think objectively, and sometimes we can. For example pure science, engineering or mathematics produces objective thinking when it concerns the work, yet in their personal lives these specialists are just as affected by their emotions as everyone else.

For eight years, in the course of many workshops I have developed and refined a new tool, I call it "Feeling Dissolve"©. If we incorporate this work into our daily lives, make it ours, we are able to think objectively. We learn how to dissolve our feelings. We become aware how our feelings affect our thinking. We discover what happens to us and how others react when we dissolve feelings. How to be able to think in a detached manner is taught in Spiritual Psychology.

Spiritual Psychology is the psychology of the soul. It is a holistic psychology that preoccupies itself with all the parts of our multidimensional self. Through it we learn to understand our purpose here on planet earth. We become conscious of our creative powers. We are freed from what I call our "victim consciousness.

Free from believing a very popular thought, promoted by certain religions, that we failed, are guilty of sin and are victims of circumstances. We come to realize that we co-create our reality. We are responsible for the events that affect our lives. The feelings that we hold on to, affect our ability to make the clear decisions about these events. We understand that our feelings have been the most difficult barrier for us to overcome. In mastering our feelings we are able to own our true inner power. Power that can only manifest when Unconditional Love is present. We learn to take action out of love. We stop doing things as we have until now, out of fear or anger. As long as we have not mastered our feeling, others have been able to master us by stimulating those unresolved feelings. Through lack of self love that transforms into pain, fear, guilt, and arrogance, others have been able to manipulate us. Lack of love of self made us weak, it enabled others to mesmerize us, they have influenced what we thought and ultimately how we behaved. As we learn to recognize and dissolve our feelings, we become master of ourselves. We are able to make decisions based of true insight, access our inner all-knowing part, move ever more into the state of oneness. We understand that as part of the collective unconscious of this planet, we are all things and all beings. We attain an attitude that says "That too am I", instead of thinking "that I am not." Deeply experiencing the state of "That too am I" allow us to accept others unconditionally, with the result that vibrationally and emotionally the other feel truly accepted. What a gift! The feelings transmitted help the other to become trusting, to open up and reinforces constructive and creative interaction. The key to peace, harmony and freedom is Unconditional Love. It is a love practiced in the heart, a felt state of unconditionality. It is only possible when we free ourselves of the encumbrance of our unresolved feelings. Unconditional Love is a clear feeling, a free state of being. It is possible through self discipline and attention. There is no suffering or self denial connected with this state, since feelings are the illusion that kept us imprisoned in their, until now, existence. Dissolving our feelings leads to Unconditional Love, freedom, clarity and understanding. Unconditional Love is power, creativity, at-onement, it is being in a state of spiritual love and doing because of the abundance of love. Unconditional Love is fullness.

How do we recognize a feeling? To help this I created seven categories of feelings that are energy consuming. It cost us energy to keep these feelings at bay, under control. These energy consuming feelings are: Hopelessness, pain (emotional), fear, guilt, desire, anger and arrogance. Once we dissolve energy consuming feelings we experience feelings that reflect an abundance of energy, they give energy. These are: valor, acceptance, harmony. How do we deal with these feelings? First we identify them. Then we find them in our body. We then use our creative imagination to give them a form. The first image that comes to mind. A shape that has size, may have a color, quality like thick or thin, density. It may be a container that has a content, like a bottle, a pot with a liquid in it, etc. Since by nature we avoid feeling feelings, giving a feeling a context is paying attention to it. Then it becomes tangible. Now something can be done about it. Using the exhaling breath or your hand to sweep the energy out of the place where the feeling is, breathing out as you sweep out, until the image has completely disappeared. Then fill the empty space with light, preferably white. If this does not happen, then there is still part of that feeling unresolved. Or another feeling came up behind it. Another sign that you have dissolved your feeling, is a sense of relief, a deep sigh, being able to breathe better. As a last validation check your attitude about the person or situation that triggered the feeling in the first place. Your attitude should be one of detachment, indifference, the situation seems to become unimportant. Try it and you will see it works. Keep it up and it will works for you in the family, at school and work. With friends and foes alike.