Exploring Unconditional Love

The scenario that I most commonly associate with unconditional love is someone and their children or pets. Often pet owner make comments about the benefits of a pet, because they offer unconditional love.

What is unconditional love? Continuing to be loved no matter what… including what they say and do, no matter how you are being treated?

I don’t think so. Often parental love is felt when one is following the rules, behaving, or doing well at school. I was a people pleaser/rule follower in general so not sure that I fully got to test this one out. Given a 2ndgo at it, I think I’d test my bounds WAY more.

I don’t have children, but I have had pets…fully enjoying them really depending on good potty training and them not tearing up furniture and floors.

What about with people…well, I certainly tried but I can tell you from experience that this feels next to impossible unless someone is being nice back or not pushing you away…which does not make it unconditional.

But I kept trying because I totally thought it was something I was supposed to understand and experience in this lifetime.

During this time, I was totally bummed that I had never felt unconditional love. I really thought I’d like to experience being loved no matter what I did. A place where I could have an outburst, where I lashed out fully, and someone fully embrace me after, with nothing being held against me.

Could I even accept unconditional love without believing that someone had a motive? Probably not. In general, I’ve had to work really hard to receive love fully since it makes me a little uncomfortable. But I’m working on it.

After at least 2 years, I really sat down to think about the effort I’d put into this. See prior to exploring unconditional love, me and self-love took a long trip and I’d worked so hard on self-love, self-confidence, self-worth and these things all seemed to be greatly challenged when I went to step 2, unconditional love.

Here is where I realized I took a complete misstep on this tour of self-discovery and healing…I immediately assumed that unconditional love was about giving it to someone else and I totally forgot to give it to myself first.

See I’d already figured out with self-love, that others would not give me what I did not give to myself. And I wholeheartedly believe, that I cannot love others more than I love myself. So, loving myself more gives me more capacity to love others.

You have to live in your body, with your thoughts and deal with your mistakes, failures, and consequences of your choices. I needed to not only love myself but love myself unconditionally.

And what I learned from trying to love others unconditionally absolutely applies to loving myself unconditionally. It’s hard to love me when I beat myself up, when I’m mad at my body, when I judge myself, when I’m disappointed at how I’ve behaved or said something I wish I had not. I can’t get away from myself and anything that I dislike, disapprove of, of wish I could change I can only choose to do it differently in the future. Me and this brain and body are in it for the long haul…no breaking up, separating, or taking some time away. So I’ve got to love myself no matter what I do or say, be understanding, forgiving, and kind to myself. I need to be a refuge for myself, love myself unconditionally, no matter what.

So my journey of unconditional love moving forward is going to be focused on maintaining trust, honesty, kindness, understanding, gratitude, compassion and forgiveness with myself.