As an office manager, I was responsible for a young woman who had just had twins. She was twenty. Not long afterwards, her partner left, and childcare for two babies cost more than she could earn. She came to see me distraught, having already decided she would have to give up her job.
Another leader and I put our heads together and found a way for her to work from home at night while the babies slept. It would need to be done very differently today, so I am not offering the arrangement as a model.
What I remember is that she didn’t have to persuade us she deserved the help, and she couldn’t repay it. We never wondered whether she was worth the trouble. We simply wanted her to be all right.
She wasn’t family or a close friend, just a young woman on my team whom I liked but didn’t know very well. I’ve thought about that many times since, because at the time I wouldn’t have called it love.
Times We Have Already Loved Without Conditions
If you look, you will probably find examples of your own.
A moment with a child when nothing was required of them. Sitting with someone who was suffering without needing them to feel better. Helping somebody because you could.
Most of us have experienced moments like these without recognising them as unconditional love. Nothing was being asked of the other person, and nothing was expected in return. We loved. Whatever else they were, those moments were not tiring in the way our more careful loving often is.
What Is Left When We Remove the Conditions?
So, what remains when we begin removing the conditions we unknowingly attach to love?
As I suggested at the end of the last article, unconditional love is what is already there once we remove the fear, need, expectations and judgements we have placed around it.
One of the most important lessons I learned from A Course in Miracles was to stop looking for more love and start noticing what I was putting in its way.
For years, I thought of this as a beautiful idea, but I now see it as something to practise.
Letting Go of One Expectation
I worked with a client some years ago who, as she put it, had met the man of her dreams. When I saw her again some months later, things were very different. He had other commitments and demands on his time, and he wasn’t as available or supportive as she had expected.
My client had more choices than staying or leaving. She could stay and continue to resent him for not being the partner she wanted. She could leave and blame him for the relationship’s failure. Or she could accept him as he was and then decide what she wanted to do.
She looked again at the expectations she had brought to the relationship and asked herself which of them really mattered. Some did. Others didn’t.
She eventually stayed, but she could equally have decided they wanted different things and left without blame. What changed was that she stopped needing him to become somebody else before she could love him.
We don’t have to remove every condition at once. Sometimes recognising one is enough to begin seeing the relationship differently.
Love Beyond Specialness
As human beings, we cannot have close relationships with everyone. Our time, attention and energy are limited. Unconditional love doesn’t mean feeling the same affection for everyone or treating every relationship in the same way.
What it does mean is that someone’s place in our lives does not determine their worth.
Families give us plenty of opportunities to practise this, because they are also where we tend to have our greatest expectations. Can I love you when you disagree with me? Could I love you when you disappoint me? Can I love you when you choose something I would not have chosen for you?
Our relationships can remain special. We begin to remove some of the conditions we have attached to that specialness.
Why Unconditional Love Can Feel Less Secure
Conditional love can feel safer because it gives us a reason.
I am loved:
- Because I am kind.
- Because I am useful.
- Because I am a good parent.
- Because I am always there when people need me.
If we know why we are loved, we think we know what we have to keep doing to hold on to it.
Unconditional love removes the because. Strangely, this can initially feel less secure. If I haven’t done anything to earn your love, there is nothing I can point to as the reason I deserve it.
But a love that depends on a condition can also be lost when that condition changes. We get tired, make mistakes, stop being useful or change.
Ironically, the conditions that appear to make love secure are what make it uncertain. This is worth knowing, because it means that letting one of them go is not a loss of safety, even though it can feel like one at the time.
Why It Can Be Harder to Receive Than to Give
Giving can feel easier than receiving because we are in control of what we give. When someone gives to us, we can feel uncomfortable, as though we owe them something in return.
When my son was born, a friend with a very busy life took the time to make me a gift. I was delighted, but instead of simply enjoying it, I worried about how long it must have taken her and immediately felt I should give her something in return.
Looking back, I can see that I found it difficult to accept her kindness without feeling I had to deserve it. She had given me something freely, and all I needed to do was receive it with gratitude.
What Changes When the Conditions Come Off
When love becomes less conditional, one of the first things to change is how much we keep score.
We judge less. Also, we stop tracking who contacted whom, who made the effort last time, or whether we are getting enough back. We no longer need to keep proving our love or asking others to prove theirs.
We become better able to accept people as they are. That does not mean approving of everything they do, staying in every relationship or tolerating harm. It means recognising someone’s worth without needing them to become a different person first.
We also have more freedom. We can say no, disagree, set boundaries and make choices that are right for us without making someone else wrong. And there is more peace. If we are not constantly checking whether we are loved, valued or appreciated enough, there is much less to worry about.
A useful question to ask is: what would be different in my closest relationship if, just for today, I stopped keeping score?
Loving Ourselves Unconditionally
The same thing applies to how we love ourselves.
We get something wrong. We handle a conversation badly, make a poor decision or let somebody down. The mistake still matters. We can understand it, learn from it and put it right where we can. What changes is that we no longer treat the mistake as evidence of our worth.
We don’t have to correct everything about ourselves, or reach another standard, before we are entitled to our own kindness. The critical voice may still have plenty to say. We don’t have to believe that everything it says determines who we are.
It Was Always About Love
Looking back over this series, I can see that everything I have written has been leading towards love.
The Higher Self, Self-Awareness, Unity Consciousness and the tools of Life School may seem like separate ideas, but for me they are connected. They have helped me understand how to live with more peace, more love and less unnecessary suffering.
I did not discover any of this in the order you have read it. I began with a feeling that there had to be a better way to live, even though at the time I could not have explained what I was looking for.
As I began to understand how my beliefs affected my behaviour and choices, I also saw how much of what I believed about myself had been learned. Some of those beliefs had helped me. Others had limited me without my realising it. Once I could see them, I had more choice about whether to keep them.
That eventually led me into coaching. I wanted to help other people understand themselves and, where possible, find some of the peace and freedom I was beginning to find for myself.
Along the way, I also found God, though not in the way I had understood God when I was younger. For me, it was more like recognising a loving presence that had always been there. Over time, I came to understand that presence as my Higher Self.
For many years, I hardly spoke about this. I did not want to impose my beliefs on anyone, and I was not sure how to explain something that felt very real to me without making it sound like something other people had to believe too.
Mapping Out The Ideas
About ten years before writing this series, I began mapping out these ideas. I could see how they fitted together, but I was still unsure how some of them would sound to other people.
That was one of the reasons I began studying neuroscience. I wanted to understand more about how our patterns of thinking and behaviour are formed and how they can change.
Learning about neuroplasticity gave me a practical way to understand some of what I had already experienced. Repeated ways of thinking become familiar, and with practice we can strengthen different responses.
Neuroscience does not prove the existence of the Higher Self, and I do not claim that it does. What it gave me was another way of understanding change, and it helped me see that people did not need to share my spiritual beliefs to use the ideas in this series.
That mattered to me. It meant I could write honestly about what I believe while leaving you free to decide what makes sense to you. These ideas have not given me a perfect life. I still react from old beliefs. Sometimes, I still get things wrong. I still have difficult days. The difference is that I now understand myself better. I can usually recognise when fear has taken over, when an old pattern has been triggered, or when I have lost sight of what matters to me. And I know I can choose again.
Looking back, I can see that this whole journey was really about love, even when I did not know that was what I was looking for. I hope this series helps you find more of that in your own life, in whatever way makes sense to you.
“Looking back, I can see that this whole journey was really about love, even when I did not know that was what I was looking for.”
Try This: Remove One Condition
Think of someone you love and identify one thing you regularly expect from them.
It might be appreciation, agreement, attention, reassurance, affection or behaviour you expect of them.
Choose something small and, for one week, try letting that one condition go.
Don’t tell them you are doing it, and don’t expect them to notice.
Just notice what changes in you.
Articles in Love
Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self
- Why Love Feels Like Something You Have to Earn
- What Unconditional Love Looks Like in Everyday Life
Enjoyed this article? Add People Development Magazine as a preferred source on Google:
Enjoyed This? . This Essential Guide brings the whole framework together in one place, free to download.
