Unconditional Love
I was talking to a good friend of mine who was feeling confused about where the term unconditional love sat with them. It sparked a great conversation of which we both challenged our beliefs and ultimately learned a great deal about our perception of unconditional love.
Unconditional love to me is often confused with our immense array of emotions we feel throughout our experiences and relationships in life. One day we unconditionally love our friend or lover, then for no reason other than a behaviour we’ve experienced or a situation, we no longer feel that familiar feeling called unconditional love. Therefore, this must mean it was never unconditional, as the very words suggests there are no conditions upon this love, so it has to be felt forever…right?
For me unconditional love does exist regardless of whatever I’ve experienced. Simply put, love is unconditional and behaviour isn’t, this is because the love I feel is in me. Some of us feel immense levels of love whilst others say they don’t feel much at all. It comes back to the old saying, if you don’t love yourself then how can you truly love anything or anyone.
Love, by the true nature of the word, has to be unconditional. It's not love that questions and forms distrust. The love I feel in a related state ultimately comes from myself, the other in which I’m experiencing it with is simply my mirror, reflecting that of which I’m capable of feeling right back at me. There are some people we have connections with that we have never felt before and possibly won’t feel again. It seems there is something within these soul connections, where we abandon fear, let down all our barriers. We feel an exceptional trust and the love we already have inside us grows beyond measure! Then for more reasons than we can count, the relationship may come to an end and we feel that that unconditional love is no more. For me I feel it’s more the behaviour or situation that has the conditions placed upon it but not the love itself. We often feel tremendous pain through our experience of love; the relationship that was in place is perhaps no longer but the love that has grown within us is clearly there hence the pain; we don't worry about losing something that we don't care for.
Love is unconditional, it is always there no matter what we throw at it. We all have different expectations of how we would like to be treated and various exceptions of acceptable behaviour of which we will subject ourselves to. These differ from person to person, continent to continent and culture to culture so let’s not confuse this with unconditional love.
Love Jenn
The Art of Living