Unconditional love is a spontaneous expression of the heart. It is available to absolutely everyone.
Nevertheless, it is often destroyed by the couple themselves when they overanalyze whether they can be together, communicate, date, or create a business partnership.
Unconditional love can be buried by an obsession with everyday, financial, and similar problems. So how do you preserve unconditional love in long-term relationships?
The answer is simple — learn to trust the heart. You need a concrete way to develop trust, not as faith or hope, but as your own lived experience.
A perspective on the concept of unconditional love
Western psychology generally denies any unconditionality. It views human consciousness through the lens of conditioning factors: instincts, drives, the stimulus-response model, genetic factors, childhood traumas, and archetypes.
In the Buddhist concept, the unconditioned awakened mind or heart — bodhichitta — is the central focus. It is the unconditioned part of us beyond all our ideas of who we are, only pure presence, openness, and receptivity to what is.
The unconditioned mind is not something special or an ideal to strive for. On the contrary, it is the “ordinary” mind.
Unconditional love is also “ordinary,” so it should not be viewed as a lofty ideal. Striving for it as an ideal will only distance you from it, obscuring its true nature.
See also Unconditional Love as a Healing Tool
Mindfulness practice for developing trust in the heart
To develop trust, use mindfulness meditation. Unconditional love for yourself is cultivated gradually, through the practice of attentiveness and awareness.
In meditation, you simply sit, without trying to concentrate on anything, or think about good things, and without even trying to get rid of thoughts, allowing thoughts and feelings to arise and pass away.
The practice consists of constantly returning your attention to the breath, which is a literal expression of well-being and presence even amidst the most anxious states of mind.
Through this practice, you can gradually realize that your existence is beneficial, simply because you are present, responding to life, and looking at the world with tenderness of heart.
Beneath all your misconceptions, you can see that the unconditioned in you — the willingness to face what is, head-on, and experience it.
Then you allow yourself to simply be, realizing that you don’t need to try to be good or prove anything to anyone.
Accepting your unhealed parts as part of the process of gaining the gift of unconditional love
The process of opening unconditional acceptance can be compared to purifying muddy water.
The nature of water itself is pure and clear. Likewise, the human mind is by nature pure and clear, but clouded by contradictory thoughts and feelings.
If you want to purify water, what should you do? What else but let the mud settle? Not trusting your own basic perfection is like doubting that muddy water is pure by nature. Trying to prove that you are good, you fight against the mud, creating even more mud.
Trying to perfect yourself out of a sense of insecurity is like adding bleach to water. By relaxing and trusting, you awaken the natural warmth of the heart.
When you begin to radiate love from an open heart, you inevitably encounter the unhealed parts of yourself and others.
Giving in to the temptation to fight against these parts will only stir up more mud. Even if you could get rid of all the impurities, you would also lose the beneficial substances and minerals they contain.
For the mud to settle, it is necessary to uncover neurotic patterns, connect with basic perfection, and accept the most unappealing parts of yourself (fears, insecurity, shameful experiences, negative emotions, etc.).
These unappealing parts of you are like children you have deprived of love, and they demand your attention. By identifying specific conditions, you place your love there, declaring: “I can love myself only if… I don’t have this fear, these needs, if I meet the standards.”
You build a complex system of dams and barriers and block the free flow of energy and openness to any experience.
But any part of you cut off from love will sooner or later become sick… After all, the circulation of the heart is the energy that nourishes the entire organism.
Circulation is a basic principle of the Earth. This manifests in the flow of water, which is the cradle of all life and predominates in the human body.
To remain pure, it must circulate, rise to the heavens from the ocean, and descend again onto the mountains, pouring down as pure streams back into the sea.
The circulation of blood in the human body removes toxins and delivers oxygen to the cells. Eastern medicine works with the subtle flow of energy in the human body, called Qi or Prana. The energy responsible for our physical health.
From a psychological perspective, the flow of unconditional love supports health. Every child intuitively knows this. As soon as children understand the conditions parents have placed on love, they stop loving the parts of themselves that do not meet those conditions.
These parts are cut off from attention and care, which leads to illness. In mythology, these parts are depicted as demons and dragons.
R.M. Rilke writes: “Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
In spiritual traditions, the alchemy of turning the dragon into a princess is transmutation. In the tradition of Tantric Buddhism, it is believed that any neurotic pattern has the potential for primordial goodness. Just as muddy water always consists of pure water.
A brief summary of how to safeguard unconditional love:
- Trust the heart
- Practice mindfulness meditation
- Accept and heal your wounded parts
To realize and accept your shadow, wounded parts, we invite you to take the course “Dance with the Shadow 3.0”. You will gain access to resources that help you cope with “past traumas”, transform them, and integrate them into your present experience.
How to Open Your Heart to Love
Intimate relationships promise healing because they can release a flow of energy to the cut-off parts of you that are wounded, disconnected, and deprived of care. However, the promise of unconditional love creates false hopes of a perfect union.
We are earthly beings with all our imperfections and limitations. Human relationships can never fully contain and manifest the unconditional love that we can know and feel in the heart.
The pain of the contradiction between unconditional love and the obstacles to its realization often breaks the heart in two.
The Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote: “The pain of love is the dynamite that splits the heart, even one as hard as a rock.”
The heart itself is soft by nature and cannot break. Only the wall you have built around it, trying to protect it, can break.
Perhaps the only way to enter intimacy without harming yourself is to open your heart where you most want to close it…
When you feel obstacles on the path of love — the tenderness of a “broken” heart — you are actually opening your heart even wider. By opening your heart to the pain and allowing it to be, you show tenderness and care for yourself.
You discover that you can give yourself the unconditional love you so crave and need. The bitter truth is that no one can likely give you what you want, exactly the way you want it.
When you use pain to connect with the most tender and alive parts of you, you stop depending on other people and uncover the richness of what is already within!
By touching the depth of feelings in your heart, you begin to touch other hearts more boldly, through all the flaws you may dislike.
See also: Why a closed heart is dangerous for you
The Mystery of Love
Opening the heart awakens the mystery of love: you simply cannot help but love others, regardless of what they do and how they behave towards you.
It is as if your heart wants to connect with their hearts and give them energy in their struggle to realize their basic perfection behind all imagined flaws.
Their imperfections are a support for your love. This is how you see what needs work.
Obstacles to love are what make the heart open and expand. Thus, unconditional love becomes a regular practice, going beyond the initial infatuation.
Opening the heart is a transformative force in the alchemy of love, allowing you to see the original goodness in people within all the limitations of the conditional self.
The unconditional and conditional sides of human nature are always intertwined, forming a single whole.
The fullness of an open heart begins with friendliness, then radiates as compassion for all living beings, for those with a tender heart, for those who hide a vulnerable heart behind a fear of pain, for those who need your unconditional love to awaken their hearts.
I would be glad if you share your insights and opinions on this topic!
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