Unconditional Love

Today I would like to talk to you about unconditional love. It’s really an interesting subject, because we all confess to practise unconditional love, but do we?

Since I’ve aged a little, I’ve become much more aware of the teachings of Jesus and especially how much it meant to the world to have had such a great master as he. I know there have been many other great masters since him and I don’t want to get too focused on any particular religion or religious teachings but…you know, Jesus’ soul mission if we want to call it that, was to come to the earth, to teach us how to live.

There have been wonderful people like Mother Theresa and Ghandi who have been exemplary examples of putting his teachings into practise and that’s really what I want to talk about. So how many of you can truly say that you try every day to practise unconditional love?

Unconditional love is something that we’re born with knowing how to do and then somehow, we unlearn it and then have to start all over! So I would suppose that it really isn’t embedded in our DNA – can you imagine what a different world it would be if it was?

This then begs the question : what happens to us and how is it that something so simple, can become something that we find so difficult? As children our worlds are small and we’re not really exposed to too many outside influences and so it’s really easy for us to love unconditionally. Even children who are abused and neglected by their parents and care-givers, still love unconditionally which for me proves that this is something that we know inherently how to do.

Then as we grow older, we allow ourselves to be affected by outside influences and everything changes. People withhold certain emotional input from each other and somehow we learn that the only way to gain acceptance is to be the way someone else wants us to be. And I’m sure that this is how we lose the ability to love unconditionally.

We start to pass judgement on people based on our frame of reference as well as from our friends and families because of our need to be accepted. In so doing, we change the way we originally thought as small children and that is basically that everyone is inherently good. And we base our perception of people on our experiences whether good or bad and all these emotional triggers come into play and our world is forever changed! Can any one of you go back emotionally to your childhood? I know we can from a negative perspective, but can anyone actually relate or bring back the feeling of what it felt like to be a happy child in a rosy existence? No. And yet, I’m convinced that we’ve all been there and all experienced that particular feeling.

For those of us who are consciously on a spiritual path and who are consciously seeking to make ourselves better people, I have no doubt that we’re slowly beginning to put into practise, the concept of unconditional love. I use the word consciously, because almost everyone is on some kind of spiritual path, it’s just that some people place more serious focus on their spiritual existence and so work harder at it. This can only be a good thing and bring about great results for mankind.

So then what exactly is unconditional love? It is practising tolerance, acceptance and understanding for all human beings. It’s being totally non-judgemental in every possible way. It’s realising that we’re all the same and we all have the same wants and needs and it’s realising that whilst we’re all the same, we’re also all very different! I know that sounds a little ambiguous but what I mean is that we all do things differently and we all handle situations differently and that doesn’t make us any less or any more than someone else. It doesn’t make me right and you wrong and vice versa. It just means that we simply have different ways of tackling things or different views of the world, or different experiences that have affected us on an emotional level that causes us to act in certain ways.

It also means that we all have chosen a different path for this life experience. We have no way of knowing, at first glance, what life experiences someone else has chosen. If we get to know that person and understand him/her, we can get better insight into why they are where they are, and it’s possible for us to do that for ourselves as well. But judgement is something that we do when we first see someone or meet them for the first time. We base our initial judgement on how people dress, what they look like, and even on what car they drive and what material possessions they have. And when we pass judgement, we’re certainly not practising unconditional love. We make statements about people that make us feel superior to them and give our egos a boost. And we don’t stop to consider where they are coming from, what circumstances have put them where they are and what it is that they are working towards in this lifetime in terms of their spiritual path and growth. And yet, we expect this of others in terms of ourselves!

I wrote the first half of this article on a Thursday afternoon and then somehow everything else that I wanted to say kind of went out of my head, so I shut my computer down and thought I’d carry on later when everyone was out my house and things were nice and quiet. I eventually found out why I ran out of content – so to speak.

I want to share with you today what happened on the Friday afternoon. For a bit of background, my brother-in-law was battling a lung infection which started in the October and just didn’t seem to clear no matter what the doctors did. He was in hospital whilst they were away on holiday in the December, was released and told to go home and get as much rest as possible, but to report back to his own doctor if he still wasn’t showing signs of recovery. By this time, the infection had turned to pneumonia and he was admitted again to hospital on the Sunday evening and put into intensive care. The doctors were busy conducting further testing suspecting that he had lung cancer and sadly he passed away on the Tuesday evening.

The funeral was held the following Friday afternoon and my son was asked to read a letter to the family as part of the eulogies. Well, you can imagine what was going through everyone’s minds when he got up and read a letter that had been dictated by my brother-in-law to his son whilst he was lying preparing to pass into spirit. In this letter he addressed his whole family individually thanking them for the wonderful life that they had given him with a special message for each one of them. I thought this was absolutely amazing and whilst I sat listening to what he had to say I realised why I hadn’t yet finished off my article.

For me this is one of the most amazing displays of unconditional love that I have ever been witness to. The fact that in his last dying moments, he could think only of his family and what it would mean to each one of them for him to have a final message for them. Something that they would always cherish and that would leave them feeling not only consoled but so validated and appreciated for the part that they played in his life as well.

I invite you all to share with Spirit Connection, your experiences of unconditional love. Let’s get the energies of love flowing through and around us all. You are welcome to email me [email protected] and I will publish or you can comment at the bottom of this article. I leave the choice with you.