What Makes Love Unconditional?
by Kypris
February 25th, 2010
In earlier parts of this True Love blog series, I shared with you my thoughts and experience of True Love, Safety and Trust, and Ease. In this blog, I’d like to share with you about my experience of the third step up on the true love pyramid: Unconditional Love.
Love is one of those words in our language that confuses me sometimes. I love my cat, my son, my roomie, my girlfriends, my beloved, my lover. Each of these relationships is unique and they each evoke a set of unique feelings. But what they have in common is an expansive joyful feeling.
In the past I was deeply confused about romantic love. Instead of that expansive happy feeling, I was looking for a feeling of intensity. As I grew and learned about what love could be, I felt both shocked and cheated. How come I never knew what was possible?
It turns out that like many spiritual things, unconditional love is a paradox. I have to hold it within my own heart before I can receive it from the heart of another. If I am full of fear, or anger, or sadness, it leaves no space in my being to receive love. I have to work at creating this space by rewiring my brain and my emotional responses. For me what works is daily meditation and other spiritual practice, like shamanic journeying. After committing to daily practice, I quickly began to see a huge shift in my old patterns of victim, self pity, and rage.
Unconditional love starts from willingness to open my heart and be vulnerable. This means I am willing to share with my partner my inner emotional reality—how I am feeling about things, and be safe that he won’t make me wrong for sharing, or judge me. It means I am willing to hear HIS inner reality without interrupting or trying to fix him. When I am able to hear and to share in this way, it creates a feedback loop for both of us. The more that both of us share and have a positive experience of being heard, the better we are able to go deeper, to stay focused on each other’s best and highest good, instead of worrying that each choice the other makes is going to take something away from us.
Having the foundation of Trust and Ease with someone lets me be vulnerable and know that I can step lightly through even things that are difficult. I used to have emotional discussions with my partners that included a lot of weeping and intensity and telling them why they were wrong. Also, these discussions would go on for a very loooooong time. Yes, it was pretty uncomfortable. It wasn’t until I started to come into partnership with men who were willing to hold strong intention to communicate and share differently that things began to shift. Just this last weekend I had the experience of navigating through several potentially challenging conversations about emotions with real genuine ease., and in a fairly short time. It’s not to say that I didn’t have strong feelings or opinions in those conversations, but what was different was that I wasn’t judging my partner or needing him to change. Instead I was able to talk about what I was feeling and ask for what I wanted. And that was the end of the conversation. What a difference.
With this kind of safety, vulnerability and ease, sexual desire naturally begins to erupt in me as a way to express more closeness, and slowly a deep Passion begins to open that has a chance of burning for a long time.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
“…the better we are able to go deeper, to stay focused on each other’s best and highest good, instead of worrying that each choice the other makes is going to take something away from us.”
This really spoke to me. Related to this kind of fear is the fear that I might actually take something away from my partner. Its easy to internalise eachothers fears. I am scared that my lover will work too hard and have no energy left for me. He says “trust me and trust god”. He trusts himself. I’ve learnt how important that is. Whenever i do trust, he comes home energised from the creative work he does and shines all of that inspiration and passion all over me.
He is scared of me becoming dependant and in the past I have let in the same fear and worried about becoming dependant. I could hardly speak my love without putting a million caveats on it to make it clear that “no- i will not die without you, no i dont need you.” I would pull back and not communicate or express quite so much. However lately I find myself saying more and more confidently “trust me- you know my strength” whenever he gets scared of that. I know what dependance looks like and it doesnt look or feel like love.
I trust the part of me where my love comes from to know the difference and to know when I maybe am getting dependant. I know myself well enough and trust myself to acknowledge it before it does too much damage and do something about it. I suppose what I’m getting at is the role that trust in your own higher self/ god can play in quelling the fears of you partner and allowing them to trust it too.
I hope he comes to trust in this too. We are not there yet. Do you have any insights about vulnerability vs dependance?
blissings and blessings,
Rose
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Dear Rose,
Thank you for sharing so deeply and openly with us. It sounds like you have spent a lot of time and awareness in cultivating unconditional love with your beloved.
You ask about the difference between vulnerability and dependence. I can speak only from my own experience. For me, vulnerability is the willingness to share what is moving through my emotional field at times when that information is important for my beloved to know. Most especially, if he asks me what is going on for me, it’s the ability to say, for example, ” I’m feeling afraid that you will leave me” or “I’m feeling scared that your work is more important to you than me”, or whatever it is.
Dependency is different, because it comes with a lot of “have to” in it. It is based on Need, rather than Desire. A need is something that you must have or die. A desire is something that you wish to have to make your life more joyful. In dependancy, we make another person God. We give them all the power to determine whether we are happy or sad, and usually it revolves around how much attention they are giving us. Vulnerability is different. When I am vulnerable I simply move through my life and my happiness or sadness or serenity comes from inside me. It doesn’t depend on what anyone else is doing.
Hopefully this helps you in interpreting your own life experience.
Namaste and Many Blessings,
Kypris