While we may strive for unconditional love, it is an ideal we can no more than aspire to until we have faced our own conditioning. And that can be the work of a lifetime. Finding and then facing our conditioning takes courage and devotion.
How can i love you unconditionally, without projecting any of my shadows or demons or angels onto you unless i have become intimate with them? Unless i know them in every dimension? Until i have freed them from being anything other than what they are? Than what i am?
What does unconditional love mean anyway? Does it mean nothing more than a non-negotiation? Is merely an absence of transaction? I don't think so, although that is how many people see it. I hear others talk about wanting to be loved by another who won't put terms on the relationship or who will love them just the way they are. In their words i hear the desire for both freedom and intimacy. In their eyes i see fear and pain and self-doubt. In their souls i see chains.
To me unconditional love, is really unconditioned love. The love that arises when we are at one with What Really Matters. With what Is. Whatever you want to call that, Spirit, Universe, God. And yourself. How can you/I love anyone until we can love ourselves. Fully. All of our disowned and unloved and ugly and inconvenient and imperfect and plain disappointing moments/parts/habits/behaviours/histories. Because these self-judgements arise from our conditioning. From the values we learned early, early. And they create our suffering. And our loneliness. And our unlovedness. Our joylessness.
I yearn for a love that is not based on objects. Me included. No wendy-thing. I feel an increasing longing, a pull towards a love that arises ever-fresh, in each moment Now, from the source of all-that-is. It arises as joy in my center--from my core. It arises all around me. And i believe that in relationship it is no different. It is merely the recognition of that ever-present arising in another. The beloved.
The beloved may be self, the beloved may be child, the beloved may be partner, the beloved may be Source. Love arises, unconditioned from the center. We are always held in that grace.
Breathe in the grit of this moment, breathe out a spark of joy. Breathe in the love of the sacred ground you stand on in this moment, breathe out a full-blooded breath HAH! and feel your feet on the earth.
What are the stories you tell yourself about love? What don't you love about yourself? Why? What parts of you have been colonized by the loveless lies of modernity? Where is joy? When did you feel it last? Look there. Then look deeper.
Unconditioned love arises in each moment for each of us. It's there. Always. Like the space between breaths. Hidden sometimes behind dragons we fear to confront. And so i yearn for it. Not having challenged all my dragons yet. The yearning itself grows sweeter each day. So i learn to love what is unresolved in myself. And take another small step closer to the joy that never fades.
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