Unconditional Love: Loving Others, Loving Ourselves

The concept of unconditional love is one of great interest and curiosity for me and; I am quite sure, I am not the first mind to ponder the emotional logistics of the very idea of what it means to love unconditionally.

I think love, however miraculous, can be a very confusing experience. We experience throughout our lives, varying degrees of love. Emotional love, spiritual love, physical love, intellectual love, etc. Sometimes these many degrees of love vary in temperature, ranging from explosive and passionate to utter detriment and dysfunction. There are also so many different ways to experience love, which we all define differently.

But for however confusing it might be, we all hold great capacity for love. I believe it to be at the intrinsic core of humanity and this is based on how we love one another, within daily life, strangers and best friends alike. We are driven to love one another, to bond, to hold passion and affection and contentment for one another. We thrive when we are supported, loved and nurtured. Thriving promotes success and we are all driven to succeed, or in other words, survive.

As children, we learn first learn how to love from our families. We absorb how our parents love one another or their respective partners if that parental partnership has ceased. We unconsciously takes stock of how our parents, grandparents, siblings, friends and other various sources love one another and how they love us directly. We learn how to give love in return, what it means to hold emotional attachment to another individual. We learn what it means to feel a sense of compassion and connection with someone we love and often, we learn what it means to feel pain and/or disappointment from that source of love.

Many of us also learn a great sense of love for the Earth and all it's inhabitants when we are small and this love is just as sacred and real as the love that two people hold for one another. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that this is widely accepted in our culture, the idea of teaching children to love and respect the Earth in the same way that we teach them to love and respect us as their parents or primary caregivers. My hope is that with time, our children will be highly encouraged to explore their feelings and emotions about the Earth, perhaps this will motivate each generation to care for it more completely?

I believe that our senses, from the moment we are conceived, are flooded with numerous concepts of love and relationships. We are innodated with messages about attachments, relationships, giving and receiving affections, and so on. Some times these interactions are exceptionally complex from their inception and other times, we get just get along well with this person or that person and there is little, if any strife. Though, I've yet to find any one single relationship in my life that does not carry some measure of conflict. I'd say this is also due to the fact that with all of our capacity for love, we also have a great capacity for ego. Besides, conflict resolution is also an important life skill and I think we learn much about this from our relationships with others, at least when we are younger and haven't yet attended our first professional "Conflict Resolution" training:)

So into adulthood, we create bonds and relationships and continue to pursue our biological need for connection. As adults, our need for love transitions in all sorts of different fashions, of which I believe are mostly formed by our attachment and love experiences from our youth. At least initially, how else do we know how to have relationships other than what has already been demonstrated to us? Some of us are very capable of giving and being content within our adult relationships and many of must learn or retrain ourselves to love in a healthy manner for all involved.

I also think that as adults, we can begin to contemplate the idea of unconditional love. Meaning a love that has no specific outcome in mind, it simply is what it is. I think we all crave this and some of us search our whole lives, looking desperately for something we hold within our very selves. I think it is not until we are adults that we can begin exploring the notion that unconditional love is possible. When we are children and very young adults, we are naturally self-absorbed. It takes us all a while to figure out that the Universe, do not in fact, revolved directly around us. For some of us, it is a spiritual journey that begins the internal investigations about what love really means to us, for others it is a union of some sort, for me it was the birth of my son. Loving something else so completely that I would sacrifice anything and everything, knowing that love is what began teaching me and prompted my own internal journey on the subject.

As I've gotten older and my idea's about love, relationships and attachments have evolved, I find myself blooming and able to promote genuine authentic love. Not only for others, but for myself, for life. I'd like to think that I have made the conscious decisions to choose the love that fills me for all things as a path in my spiritual travels. Daily, I am taking time to reflect on this choice and it is beautifully exciting. One subject that does continually present itself to me regarding this topic is "boundaries." How can I love others unconditionally and selflessly without sacrificing my own sense of boundary? I do not believe that unconditional love is giving of yourself to someone, no matter their behavior. But I do believe unconditional love is free of judgment. It is a slippery slope. I struggle with the balance as I know that sometimes, in caring deeply for others, one MUST draw boundaries for the sake of sanity and personal mental health. Allowing others to bring negativity into ones life is not benign, that negativity does have a huge impact. However, I am very invested in the idea that the boundaries drawn are rational, appropriate and fair and not based on personal judgment of another's behaviors/choices OR simply reactionary behaviors. I think we should all be a little more invested in how we love one another, how we treat each other in our daily interactions.

I wonder often about Universal love and how the energies of the world affect our ability to love one another and the Earth. I wonder why my heart can ache in one moment and then filled with such great joy, all in the name of love. I struggle with my attachments for my loved ones as I believe very strongly that attachments can be selfish and needy, co-dependant behavior I wish desperately to avoid. This topic, how I love the world and each unique individual in it is a constant in my mind. I am blessed at this time in my life and I wish to immerse myself in every moment and be able to reflect when I am older about what I've learned.

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Thomas Merton