Thirty years ago, 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 had done nothing 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 Why Love Feels Like Something You Have to Earn, I looked at the conditions we unknowingly attach to love. This article 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.
The quotation at the beginning of Love: The True Nature of Your Higher Self says that our task is not to seek for love, but to find the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it.
For years I thought that was a beautiful idea. I now think it is an instruction.
What Removing a Condition Looks Like
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.
It means someone’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? Or, 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.
- It’s 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 onto 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 actually what make it uncertain.
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 Unconditional Love Looks and Feels Like
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 Why Boundaries Get Easier When You Stop Blaming. 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 your closest relationship if you stopped keeping score of any kind. Not forever. 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 now see more clearly that every part of it has been leading us here.
The Higher Self, self-awareness, unity consciousness and inspiring ourselves and others may look like different subjects, but they are all ways of moving towards love.
Self-awareness helps us recognise the beliefs and judgements that get in its way. Unity consciousness asks us to look beyond separation and recognise the same worth in others. The Higher Self gives us another way of seeing when fear has taken over. And when we inspire rather than control ourselves and other people, we create the freedom in which love can be expressed.
The tools have been doing the same thing. Earth School treats what happens to us as instruction rather than punishment. The two thought systems give us a choice about which voice we listen to. Our emotional guidance system tells us the moment we have stepped away from love. And our relationships show us, repeatedly, what is still waiting to be released.
So perhaps these forty-five articles have been a tutorial in love all along.
Not how to become more loving by trying harder, or how to turn ourselves into some ideal version of a spiritual person.
How to recognise what gets in the way of the love that is already there.
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.
Welcome Home
We began this journey looking for a different way to experience ourselves, other people and our lives.
In the end, perhaps there was less to find than there was to remove.
The fears, beliefs, judgements and conditions we gather through life can make it difficult to remember who we are. But underneath them, nothing fundamental has changed.
We don’t have to learn how to become love.
We have been learning how to recognise what gets in the way of it.
And perhaps that is what living from your Higher Self was always about.
Welcome home.
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