Disconnecting From Unconditional Love
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
“In order to develop love―universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it―one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad.” —Chogyam Trungpa
It is a necessary but often painful truth that we learn the most about a
thing by experiencing what it is not. There is no human emotion, no other
aspect of the human condition, where this is more the circumstance than
the unconditional love we give and receive. It is so often the most emotionally
challenging of lessons, so difficult to garner as to bring the word “heartbreak”
into discovering the heart’s true path.
Conditional love is to feel love for ourselves, others, and the world when
certain conditions are met. The first place that children often learn of
conditional love is through their parents, who have personal issues that
block unconditional love from being realized in their lives. Parents often
have wounded hearts themselves that have only experienced conditional love,
or a great lack of any type of love. They then often place conditions onto
their children, giving their children the experiences of feeling what love
can be like when it is withheld or confined.
The conditions that a parent puts on the child manifest as expectations, often undermining their ability to love unconditionally. The emotional baggage carried from having the parents’ needs placed upon the child can be taken into the significant relationships that the child will later engage in. The conditional love children receive from parents also manifests in feelings of unworthiness and lack of self-love. Children grow up and often use the template of their parents’ love to understand future relationships. The experiences that take place in a child’s relationship with the parent can in this way reverberate throughout the rest of the lifetime if they are not cleared.
Such experiences in childhood can lead us as adults to become distracted by our own fear and emptiness, which come from the void within us that cries for love. We then often react to others through this lens of fear and pain. We may do whatever it takes to fill this emptiness, including creating relationships for the sake of easing our pain. Relationships based on filling our emptiness through being with another can lead to behaviors such as clinging, attacking, acting like a victim, lying and running.
In the desperation to fill our voids of love, we also often search for a temporary relief that feels good in the moment. Imitations of love include praise, pleasure and power through such things as sex, money, alcohol and drugs. Greg Baer writes in his book, Real Love (2003), “An ocean of imitation love lacks the power to create the happiness found in a teaspoon of the real thing, but if we don’t know about real love, we’ll gladly fall for the deception of the imitation. That is the ultimate tragedy of life.”
Conditional love can be passed on throughout many generations. We may learn what conditional love looks and feels like and then lead our lives from this same state, conditionally loving ourselves and others. We do so because we do not know any other type of love well enough to create it in our lives. So, we love ourselves, others, and the world in limited ways. We may love ourselves when we feel happy or appear to be beautiful. We may love others when they make us feel good. We may love the world when it seems like a good place to be. We may also not feel love in our lives for ourselves, others, or the world, if it doesn’t seem like a good place to be. In this case, we may believe that we can only feel love when some future conditions are met. These may be having a romantic partner, having children, living in a certain place, or having a certain profession. It may also be once our bodies, minds, or emotions fall into a certain idealized state.
If we use the metaphor of love being a tree, the roots of conditional love live in the various conditions that we set up, and they are not very deep. It is then only when all of these conditions are met that our trees of love are able to grow and perhaps stay rooted long enough to blossom. However, life is always changing, and in this way, so are the conditions that we long for as being essential to experiencing unconditional love. Our trees may fall down when the roots are taken away, yet we may then feel that new conditions are what we really need in order to revive our trees again.
When we create conditions around the experience of love, we inevitably do not have our conditions met at all times, and our open hearts become hurt from not feeling enough love. The raw pain involved in feeling unloved reaches to the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. Margot Anand states in The Art Of Everyday Ecstasy (1998), “When we love, we give those we love the power to touch us at our core. We become delicate, transparent, as vulnerable as in childhood.” (208) When we experience sharp, raw pain, it can be too much to feel our emotions fully. In this way, the experience of emotional pain is often coupled with the resistance of it. Our resistance makes it so we do not fully experience and move through our pain, but instead block it off in order to not fully feel it.
These pains remain unprocessed within us as energetic blocks, which affect our emotional, mental, and physical patterns. While we were once open to life, we begin to contract toward it because of our pain. We may then become paralyzed by our past hurtful experiences and keep our hearts shut off to the world. While this is oftentimes not a conscious decision, in shutting ourselves off from pain, we also shut ourselves off from love.
The blockages that come from experiencing pain set up boundaries for how
much we are able to experience the energy of love. It may seem impossible
to the ego to love without boundaries. How could I love the person who raped
me? How could I love those who have murdered others? This is an extremely
difficult area for many of us. It is in exploring how far we can allow our
hearts to expand in love that we can connect with our boundaries of love
and then heal them. Where are your boundaries of love? How do you dissolve
them so that you can move into unconditional love?