What is Unconditional Love Really?
It was three o’clock in the morning and Morty awoke with an insight that rocked him to his core. We were in Costa Rica and I had just done a parenting talk. He looked at me and said, “You can’t love unconditionally if you judge someone.” I said, “That’s not true, I love unconditionally and I sometimes judge.” He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You may love unconditionally, but when you are judging someone the person you love won’t feel unconditionally loved. So therefore in order to really express unconditional love, there has to [...]
What is Unconditional Love Really?
It was three o’clock in the morning and Morty awoke with an insight that rocked him to his core. We were in Costa Rica and I had just done a parenting talk. He looked at me and said, “You can’t love unconditionally if you judge someone.” I said, “That’s not true, I love unconditionally and I sometimes judge.” He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You may love unconditionally, but when you are judging someone the person you love won’t feel unconditionally loved. So therefore in order to really express unconditional love, there has to [...]
Why Do People Have Prejudice?
Just as we in 21st Century America look back at cultural practices of years gone by with a combination of repulsion and amazement, future generations probably will look back at the prejudice that runs rampant in the world today with similar reactions. Just as it is almost impossible for us to understand the Roman thinking that feeding people to lions is a spectator sport, in a few years people will try to understand why millions of otherwise sane individuals would consider some people “less than” others because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their sexual preference. Rather [...]
What is Unconditional Love Really?
Why I'm Re-Posting This Article I [Shelly Lefkoe] wrote the following post before my beloved husband passed on Nov. 11, 2015. It was three o’clock in the morning and Morty awoke with an insight that rocked him to his core. We were in Costa Rica and I had just done a parenting talk. He looked at me and said, “You can’t love unconditionally if you judge someone.” I said, “That’s not true, I love unconditionally and I sometimes judge.” He looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “You may love unconditionally, but when you are judging someone the [...]
How can you end negative feelings without the danger of suppressing them?
Some time ago, I said to an acquaintance "It's possible to give up having negative emotions" and he said, "But if you suppress your feelings they'll just come back when you least expect them. They'll mess with your mind and make you sick." This wasn't the first time someone has responded that way to my message. Many people assume that "not having a feeling" means really having it but suppressing it. They think you can only push a feeling out of awareness not change it. Because a few of you might share this idea (or at least know people that [...]
What makes you good enough?
Sometimes when a client has a difficult time acknowledging that she has a negative self-esteem belief that I am certain she has, such as I’m not good enough, I ask them a question: “What makes you good enough?” Before continuing, ask and then answer this question for yourself. You’ll see the value of doing so in just a moment … This is actually a trick question, because if they say anything other than “nothing,” they are acknowledging that they need something to be good enough, which logically means they think they aren’t good enough to begin with. Once they have [...]
How to improve the quality of your life
I’ve said on many occasions that all of us at the Lefkoe Institute are committed to helping you improve the quality of your life. But I don’t think I’ve ever defined what I mean by “improving the quality of your life.” It is possible to have a life where you are surviving very well, in other words, you have plenty of money to meet your needs and plenty of friends. In such a situation I would say you are surviving very well, but that doesn’t mean you are necessarily thriving. You might not be depressed or be run by anxiety, [...]
How to create the space for others to grow around you
A guest post by Shelly Lefkoe As most of you know my beloved husband Morty has been through quite a journey. He was diagnosed with lymphoma some time ago and a few months ago became very, very ill. At that time our daughter Blake flew in from Hawaii for an indefinite stay to help care for him (she stayed three weeks); my other daughter Brittany came in from San Francisco where she now lives to spend a few days with us; my best friend of 50 years came from Nashville to stay with us for a week. During the week [...]
Does it really make a difference what we choose?
During a session last week, a client was trying to decide between two alternative paths for her career. She listed the pros and cons of each and tried to decide which one would be the best choice. I recognized that the principles I wrote about in last week’s post about our obsession with results was relevant to her thinking. I realized something else: There was no way to know for sure which choice would turn out to be the best and there was a very good chance that her second choice, if that’s the one that she ended up being [...]
