Ken: You teach about the importance of loving the parts of yourself that are hardest to love. Could you talk about how you personally came to this insight?

Gay: I had come to a place in my life where I realized that I had never been able to find the love I wanted. And I'd always located the problem outside myself. That it was a failure on the part of the women that I'd brought into my life. That they hadn't loved me correctly.

And so one magic day in 1974, I was walking around out in the woods near a cabin I was living in. And I asked myself a question which turned out to change my life. I kind of posed it to the universe: "What is the one thing we humans are doing wrong, that keeps us from attracting the kind of love we need?" And to turn that around positively, "What is it that we need to be doing on a regular basis that would allow us to have the kind of love we want and need?"

I had gone looking for that question in a thousand different books, but I had never really just turned it over to the creative powers of myself and the universe for an answer.

And so I did that and I got the most amazing answer-on an unexpected channel. Instead of a kind of intellectual text answer that printed out in my mind, I got the answer in the form of an energy experience. I felt this real deep benign rush of powerful positive energy through my body. And after that subsided--it probably lasted for minutes-I just stood there and enjoyed it and let it flow through me.

And it left behind an answer in its wake: The reason that human beings, myself included, don't attract the kind of love we want and need is because we haven't loved a part of ourselves. And the unloved part of ourselves does the attracting unconsciously until we learn to love it in ourselves. And then we can attract what we consciously really want.

Up until then our love life is being run by our old unconscious programming that may have been dipped in a bath of abandonment, or dipped in a bath of divorce and conflict. The unconscious aspects of whatever you got bathed in while growing up start attracting people into your life that fit this matrix.

For example, I've probably counseled two or three hundred people who said that because of growing up in a family where there was addiction, they automatically attracted an addict into their life as a mate. And then the addiction became a big struggle, even though the person themselves may not have been a practicing addict.

So that time in the woods was the big moment of realization for me. On the spot, I just started loving all the parts of me that I had never loved before. I remember wandering around out there for probably a half an hour, just loving things--like anger, or the fact that I was overweight--that I'd never allowed myself to accept or love in myself. Or the fact that I was not in a relationship at the time; that I was lonely.

Up until that moment, those things had been sealed away somewhere in me. But once I got this idea that they could be loved and accepted I just kind of brought them out, each one at a time and practiced loving each one.

And so an hour later I felt like I'd been totally reborn. And in a sense I had, because immediately things started changing very rapidly in my outer life. I think that the principle that's so important for people to know is this: If you can open up and really accept and love the previously unacceptable and unlovable parts of yourself, then suddenly you don't have to keep attracting things that trigger those mechanisms from the outside world.

Ken: Can you offer readers a process they could do to learn to love those qualities in themselves--even if they've never been able to do that before?

Gay: Yes; here's the central process that I talk about in my book, Learning To Love Yourself. If one of your readers was sitting in my office, this is the process I would lead them through:

First of all, ask yourself a wonder question. And a wonder question is a question that usually begins with a kind of sincere "hmm, hmm?" And it needs to be a wonder question because it needs to be a question that you don't know the answer to, but are sincerely interested in.

So here would be the wonder question to open the door to this area. "Hmm, what it is it in myself that I most need to learn to love?"

Ken: Great.

Gay: Hmm, what is it in myself that I most need to learn to love? And to sincerely wonder about that. And don't worry about if you get an answer right away. It's the kind of question that you really need to kind of wonder about for a little while before you start getting the good stuff that bubbles up.

But I guarantee you; I haven't seen anybody yet that didn't have things begin to surface after a few minutes or a few hours of wondering about that; the real issues that were troubling them inside that needed to be loved.

So, step one is to open the gate with the wonder question.

Step two is to think of someone you know for sure you love right now. Or maybe if you can't think of someone, think of something that you love. Like walking on the beach at sunset, or horseback riding. But preferably think of a person that you know right now for sure you love.
.
Now, in step three, give that same love to that unloved part of yourself. Love that unlovable part of yourself just like you love the person you picked.

Ken: What if, in doing this exercise, you feel things like pain, numbness or grief instead of love for that part of yourself?

Gay: Well, that's wonderful, because it should invite up any of the feelings about whatever you find unlovable. There are only three or four basic things that people feel unlovable about.

For some people, their unlovable feeling doesn't really have much of a name to it. It's just a feeling of being fundamentally wrong, or fundamentally bad in some way. Or that they've done something wrong. So it's more of a generic, "I've done something bad" feeling.

But then there are some specific ones; for example, people that have gone through abandonment. That was a big issue for me due to the circumstances of my early life. So down inside me was this old loneliness that caused me to overeat. I'm no longer overweight, but there was a time when I weighed 320 pounds. And I came to find out that all of this was driven by this feeling of gnawing loneliness; of being left alone. And then trying to eat to make that feeling go away.

But when I loved that feeling, when I actually just welcomed it out into the light and loved it, it lost its grip on me. And so it didn't propel me to the refrigerator anymore.

Ken: So for some of us, this exercise might not necessarily lead to an immediate feeling of liberation and love like it did for you. It could be something that you need to do again and again, in waves and in steps. Is that right?

Gay: Yes. I also want to let you know that since that one magical day in 1974, I've found thousands and thousands more things that I hadn't loved about myself as I go along through life. And so it's a lifelong process. It's not a one time immersion in the baptism of consciousness and then you're saved for life. It's a process; you're always going to be coming up against things that you find unlovable in yourself in the outside world.