Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today, we’re talking about unconditional love in relationships, and my guest today is Adam Guzman-Puell.
Gissele: who’s a holistic relationship counselor, coach, and existential therapist, and the author of the Amazon bestseller, Lessons on Love.
Gissele: He draws on 20 years of apprenticeship in spiritual traditions from around the globe, including indigenous elders, Buddhist teachings, and yogic philosophy, integrating their wisdom with modern psychology to help couples and individuals build conscious, meaningful relationships rooted in the sacred. When he’s not working with clients, you’ll likely find him having fun with his son,
Gissele: Arjuna and his wife, Adrienne, mentoring a young person or volunteering at a local permaculture garden in Bali, where he lives for the majority of the year. [00:01:00] Please join me in welcoming Adam. Hi, Adam.
Adam: Hi, great to see you, Gissele. Pleasure to be here.
Gissele: Oh, good to see you too. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited for our conversation, talking about, relationships and how challenging and also amazing and beautiful they can be, especially trying to unconditionally love people.
Gissele: I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work.
Adam: So gosh where to begin? I guess the journey of love is a, a journey of a lifetime. I think we all know that, right? But it’s,
Adam: For me, one of the, opening doors, the big opening doors of, finding love started actually in my childhood, and we’re talking about unconditional love, right?
Adam: This love and, I grew up with a little bit of a, a rough childhood. I was a little bit of a, a crazy teen, a little wild. Lots of some problems with the law and problems with drugs, alcohol. [00:02:00] And when I was 16, I was blessed to find the loving presence of an indigenous elder over on Algonquin territory in Ottawa, Canada.
Adam: And she was a beautiful woman, and she had this power of just, one of the greatest gifts of love is being able to see somebody. To see past, who, the, the mud and the conditioning, and seeing through to the heart. So she saw past what society may have looked at “Oh, here’s this messed up kid who’s like this and like that,” and she saw me at my core, right?
Adam: And so that was like, that allowed me to step into who I truly was, and that started the 20-year apprenticeship with, different indigenous elders, teachers through the p- process of meditation. And that was like the beginning of the opening of love and that’s… Yeah, that, that was the beginning of that part and, there’s other chapters and I’m sure we’ll get to those, but oh, yeah.
Gissele: Yeah. [00:03:00] I love that story. And I also wanna point out how key what you just said is unconditional love is the ability to see people as their true essence, and from my perspective is the divine within them. And so if we could truly love people, we can see them beyond their flaws, beyond what they’re portraying, beyond that, the hurt behaviors. But it’s … it can feel difficult to do that when we ourselves probably don’t see ourselves that way.
Gissele: Can you tell me a little bit about what you’ve learned from what are the, the core teachings from all of these different trad
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