Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Many Benefits of Unconditional Love (and how to get there)


Love. We crave it, we cling to it, we wrestle with it. We are like clowns juggling bowling pins in relation to it. But the only kind of love in which we find ongoing joy and freedom is unconditional love.

Most people are familiar with the experience of unconditional love only in relation to their pets, creatures from which they make no demands and consequently are freed up from all the needs and resentments we often hold for those other sentient beings, humans, that we engage with in the otherwise complicated act of loving.

“Perhaps if he (or she) would just stop talking,” we say to ourselves, “then I could love my partner as much as I love this furry creature that waits adoringly at my feet.” Perhaps, as it is through language that we mediate most of our needs and desires. But there is another, more simple, prescription for loving our lovers, partners, spouses unconditionally than them being suddenly struck dumb. And that prescription is unconditionally loving ourselves.

When we begin the daily practice of loving ourselves, of recognizing the autonomous and divine spark in our own being, of nurturing and expressing tender affection for ourselves, then we do not need to enter our relationships with our partners from a place of needs or demands. We are already complete.

And it is from this place that we are able to—as Mary Oliver invites us to do in her poem Wild Geese—“let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Utterly, unconditionally. And before anyone else, what it loves is you.

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