My spiritual teacher, Bhaktivedanta Swami, said Unconditional Love is most closely represented in a mother’s love for her child. This love is given without expectation of personal gratification and offered simply because the child exists and needs love and care.
Unconditional Love is
- absolute, complete, unadulterated, without limit, steady, authentic, given without expectation, and due every living being because, as spiritual beings, everyone is worthy and has value
- exalted and is the core element in the relationship between the Divine and souls
To fully re-enter our relationship with our true selves and the Divinity requires developing qualities that support the ability to express and receive Unconditional Love—unceasingly and without limit.
You might surmise this could take a little practice.
We have long focused on the mind-body, instead of the heart, as the channel into spirit. In The HeartMath Solution, Doc Childre shares his experience counseling serious spiritual practitioners who have focused their spiritual attempt on the mind—“Even longtime meditators get only limited benefits unless the heart is deeply engaged, so they’re often frustrated with their progress.”
Heart as the Entry Point into Spirit
Bhakti acknowledges our whole self: mind, body, ego, and heart. The path shows us how to live in the world working with all of them in balance, with specific care to developing a heart-based life.
Your daily life, with all of its mundane details, when approached with Conscious Heart and its natural expression unconditional love, is the spiritual practice that leads to full spiritual awakening.
This focus is important because it recognizes our inherent, unchangeable nature. Bhakti, the Path of Unconditional Love, says the soul’s nature, in the material and spiritual spheres, is the same:
Humans are emotional beings
(emotions override intelligence, intuition, and instinct)
Happiness is the empress of emotions
(that’s why we all want it)
To achieve spiritual awakening and lasting joy, emotions should be mastered by practice in real-life situations: in our relationships with the Divine and with people in local and global communities.
To deny our emotional nature, or omit it from our equation for a spiritual life, is folly. Such recklessness will not open all the spiritual doors that need to be unlocked on our journey. Is this why so many seekers are still seeking?
Emotions have a reputation for being a sign of weakness and inferiority. However, labeling the expression of the heart like this, we have missed a great treasure and secret: the mystery of life lies in the mastery and expression of emotions.
It is with heart, with unconditional love, that we enter into the final spiritual awareness of ourselves and God. We reawaken our spiritual heart with a directed expression of our material heart through loving acts of devotion and service to God and others—and to ourselves.
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