Unconditional Love is F*cking Difficult

I’ve been on a journey the past few months to discovered what true unconditional love is and what it looks like in practice.

When you make a concerted effort to love everyone you cross paths with without judgment, you become acutely aware of all the ways in which our society is set up to divide us. Most of our lives are spent deciding if we’re in group A or group B, and then we’re told we hate the “opposing” group.

This has gotten so out of hand many people are actively cheering for people who are harassing strangers on the internet. Hate and judgment of others isn't just acceptable, it's actively being encouraged.

Just look at the recent anti-child trafficking movement. I’d be hard-pressed to find a cause that should unite people of all beliefs more than child sex trafficking and yet I still see tons of division online because people aren’t using the right hashtag or their “conspiracy theorists” or they aren’t talking about it “in the right way.” I was baffled by how even someone as helpless and faultless as a trafficked child can make us look for a way to judge one another and divide against ourselves.

If you really want to get deep into the psychology of why we like to put ourselves in groups and why “othering” is such a big phenomenon - be my guest. I just need you to know how much my views turned upside down when I tried to stop othering and see humanity as one.

So many of our political and social movements ask us to pick a side and fight to the death. Are we Republican or Democrat? Do you support Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter? Are you a Covidiot or part of the sheeple? Pick a side. All or nothing. You're either with us or against us.

Of course most people hold a certain belief because they believe their side is the "right side." Most people are just trying to do the right thing - whatever that means to them. So this exercise forced me to re-evaluate: how much of my time is spent trying to create change and how much of it is spent demonizing the other side?

The truth is our experiences and the information we have shapes our beliefs. If I had someone else’s life experiences, I would probably make the same decisions they did. Plus, we all know that someone yelling at us or calling us an idiot for what we believe only makes us stronger in our convictions and yet we still do it. Why? We know that doesn’t actually help. It’s just how we’ve been conditioned to react.

Something interesting happened when I started to make an active effort to love people who disagreed with me - I stopped thinking of them as “morons” or “A-holes.” When I saw someone who didn’t have the same perspective as me, I started to think “oh, they just don’t understand.”

It made me realize that I don’t actually resent the people who disagree with me, I was just told that I should. What I actually felt was compassion and a desire to teach them.

Now I’m not saying I’m some saint. My immediate emotional reaction was usually anger or frustration, but trying to operate in unconditional love taught me to take a pause when I had a gut reaction like that. Just sitting with that emotion for a minute allowed me to process it and I was able to respond rather than react.

If you're up to the challenge of operating in unconditional love, you might be surprised to find out how much of your life has to change in order to actually practice it. It's a fascinating journey to say the least, but it helped me see that a lot of the anger and resentment was just how I was taught to react. What I actually felt was a lot of inner peace.

If you're bold and are willing to embark on this unconditional love journey, I just have one piece of advice - start with loving yourself.