As an office manager, I managed a young woman who had just had twins. She was twenty. Not long afterwards, her partner left, and childcare for two babies came to more than she could possibly earn. She came to see me distraught, having already worked out that 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 were asleep. It would need doing very differently today, so I am not offering the arrangement as a model.
The arrangement wasn’t really the point. She didn’t have to earn our help, and she could not repay it. The question of whether she was worth the trouble never came up. We simply wanted her to be all right.
She wasn’t family or a close friend. She was a young woman on my team who I liked but didn’t know particularly well. I have thought about that many times since, because at the time I wouldn’t have called it love at all.
Most of Us Have Already Done This
If you look, you will probably find examples of your own.
A moment with a child when absolutely nothing was required of them. Sitting with someone who was suffering without needing them to feel better. Helping somebody simply because you could.
Most of us have experienced moments like these without thinking of them as unconditional love. Nothing was being asked of the other person, and nothing was expected in return. We simply loved. And 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?
In the last section, I looked at the conditions we unknowingly attach to love. This one is about what is left when we begin removing them.
Unconditional love isn’t another kind of love we have to learn how to create. It is what is already there when we remove the fear, need, expectations and judgements we have placed around it.
One of the most important things 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 this was a beautiful idea. I now think it is an instruction.
Removing One, in Practice
I worked with a client some years ago who had met, as she put it, 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 him to be.
My client had more choices than simply 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 failure of the relationship. 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 that isn’t the point. She could equally have decided that 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 a close relationship with everyone. Our time, attention and energy are limited. Unconditional love doesn’t mean feeling the same affection for everybody or treating every relationship in the same way.
Equal love does not require equal relationships. What it does mean is that somebody’s place in our life 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? Can 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 simply begin removing some of the conditions we have attached to that specialness.
Why Unconditional Love Can Feel Less Secure
Conditional love can actually 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, that 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 simply change.
The conditions that appear to make love secure are what make it uncertain. Which 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
When my son was born, a friend with a very full life of her own took the time to hand-make me a gift. I was completely bowled over and accepted it gratefully.
But underneath my gratitude, I worried about how long it must have taken her. I also felt I needed to find something to give back. Somehow, I wanted to earn what she had freely given me.
I think many of us do this. When someone gives freely, we can feel uncomfortable simply receiving. We minimise what they have done, wonder why they did it, or quickly look for a way to give something back.
If we have learned that love has to be earned, receiving something with no conditions attached can feel surprisingly difficult.
Sometimes the only response required is to receive it.
What Changes When the Conditions Come Off
Most of the difference is in what stops.
There is less judging, less monitoring what comes back, less trying to manage other people so that we can feel all right. Most of us know that quiet accounting well enough. Noticing who made contact first. Registering that we made the effort last time. We don’t need to keep proving our love or asking other people to prove theirs.
There is more acceptance of people as they are rather than as we would like them to be. That doesn’t mean we approve of everything they do or choose to have a relationship with everyone. It certainly doesn’t mean tolerating harm, and I wrote about that side of it in the article on Unity Consciousness. It means they don’t have to become somebody different before we can recognise their worth.
There is also more freedom. We can choose our relationships, say no, disagree and make decisions about what is right for us without needing to make somebody else wrong.
And there is more peace. If we aren’t continually checking whether we are loved, valued or getting enough back, there is much less to defend.
It is worth asking what would actually be different in our closest relationship if we stopped keeping score of any kind, not forever, but just for today.
And Towards Ourselves
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 the mistake stops being evidence of our worth.
We don’t have to correct everything about ourselves before we are entitled to our own kindness. We don’t have to reach another standard first. The critical voice may still have plenty to say. We simply 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 Earth School may seem like separate subjects, but they have all helped me understand how to live with more love and less unnecessary suffering.
I did not discover these ideas in the order you have read them. My journey began with a feeling that there was a better way to live, although I could not have explained what I was looking for at the time.
As I began to understand how my beliefs were shaping my behaviour and the choices I made, I realised how much of what I had accepted about myself had been learned. Some of those beliefs had helped me, but others had limited my life in ways I had never recognised. Understanding that gave me the opportunity to choose differently.
I wanted to share what I was learning, and that eventually led me into coaching. I hoped I could help other people understand themselves and find some of the peace and freedom I had begun to experience, without having to spend as many years finding their way as I had.
Along the way, I also found God, or rather, I discovered what God means to me. It was nothing like the rigid ideas I had grown up with. My experience was of a loving presence that had been with me for as long as I could remember, and I gradually came to understand that presence as my Higher Self.
For a long time, I was reluctant to talk about it. I worried that people would think I was trying to impose my beliefs on them, and I did not yet have the words to explain what I was experiencing. So I kept much of it to myself.
About ten years before I wrote this series, I began mapping out the structure of what has become this series. I could see how the different ideas fitted together, but I still worried that some of them might sound far-fetched. I knew what had helped me, but I also knew there was much more I wanted to understand.
That was when I began studying neuroscience. I was interested in how the brain supports the ways we think and behave, and how those patterns can change. Learning about neuroplasticity helped me understand why repeated ways of thinking become familiar and why practising different responses can make change easier over time.
Neuroscience did not prove the existence of my Higher Self, and I do not claim that it does. What it gave me was a practical way of explaining some of the changes I had experienced. It also helped me see that people did not need to share my spiritual understanding to benefit from the tools I was using.
That realisation gave me the confidence to begin writing this series. I could share what I had learned without asking anybody to believe in God, accept a particular philosophy or see the world exactly as I do.
These ideas have helped me live an ordinary, everyday life with more peace, compassion and love. I still have difficult days, and I still find myself reacting from old beliefs at times. But I now have a way of understanding what is happening and choosing differently.
Looking back, I can see that my search was always about love, even when I did not know that was what I was looking for.
My hope is that something in this series helps you discover more of that love in your own life, in whatever way makes sense to you.
These ideas have helped me live an ordinary, everyday life with more peace, compassion and love
Try This: Remove One Condition
Think of somebody you love and identify one thing you regularly expect from them.
It might be appreciation, agreement, attention, reassurance, affection, or simply behaving in a way you think they should.
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