Conditional Love vs Unconditional Love: Why We Struggle to Experience Real Love
- fabioc
- May 24, 2025
- 11 min read
Updated: Mar 26
Hi Shinies,
Today, I wanna talk about love. I will go through an overview, to clearify what I strongly believe are the basics of love. This is like the first chapter of a series. In future posts I will expand on the basics and create a journey with more advanced levels of awareness.
Let's put out there that there are two type of love: conditional and unconditional. The majority of humans on planet Earth are stuck in conditional love, but love in it’s purest form is unconditional.
What does all this even mean?
Conditional Love
Conditional love is as easy as it sounds, it means: “I love you if…”
It goes down to: if you spend time with me, to if you behave in a certain way, to if you look a certain way, to if you make me feel in a certain way, et cetera. Usually, it shows itself as a push for change in the behaviors, habits, mind set, belief system, preferences and needs of the person who is “loved”.
Unconditional Love
Unconditional love is full acceptance of everything and everyone. A place of no judgment. It means taking something or someone as part of yourself.
Love is an emotion that lives in the heart space. It is the closest vibration to Source and has been spoken about for millennia in every way possible.
It is also the most powerful vibration. An example? Has it ever happened to you to fall in love with someone? Do you remember the sensation that everything is possible and that state of bliss? This is how powerful love can be. There are different degrees of love, but let's talk about it more in depth in another post.
This emotion, like all the emotions, is manufactured in the heart. Then it is sent to the body and through the vagus nerve, to the brain, which initiates behaviors, thoughts and actions.
We often hear that the amygdala is the center of our emotional response. When, in reality, it is associated with fear and anger, and they are not emotions; they are tools that belong to the survival instinct and used to push us to initiate one of the four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
They are made by a mix of hormones and electrical signals. But emotions have their original source in the heart. The heart sends a series of signals to the body and the brain simultaneously.
The heart chakra plays a role of sensorial center on perceiving and transmitting emotions between our higher-self and our soul, and then between our soul and our physical body. Emotions are produced in the heart, higher-heart and lower-heart chakras. The higher-heart and lower-heart have a bigger dimension than the heart chakra; they overlap with it, creating a Vesica Piscis in the middle of the heart Chakra.
The higher-heart chakra is located between the heart and the throat chakra. The lower-heart chakra is located between the heart and the solar Plexus chakra; it is also where empathy and clairsentience comes from.
The Vesica Piscis is located exactly where our physical heart is. Because this is not only a place where the energies of these three centers condense, these three chakras shape a very powerful geometrical symbol where manifestations become very strong and powerful.
This is a symbol that has the power of creation, life, rebirth, renewal, purity, protection, balance, fertility and divine feminine energy. It also holds the power to unify the “havens” (higher chakras) and the Earth (lower chakras).
In our process of living and creating our life, there is a specific cycle that is taking place. It starts from our emotions; because we always have an emotion first. Based on these emotions, the brain strategizes and organizes our actions to create an outcome in the outside world.
Now, if you combine all this informations, our heart it is not only our tool to keep in contact with our higher-Self, but it is also the essential jump-starter of every manifestation that we create, both consciously and unconsciously, while also keeping us aligned with our soul mission and greatest good.
Now, let's look at our social system. We repress and judge emotions, and we also know very little about our emotional system. This behavior creates a constant cycle of unprocessed emotions that make us stay in a perpetual survival response.
Because this has been happening for an extended period of time, we acclimatize to it and ultimately it becomes our normal state, even though in reality it is not. We literally forget what our normal state is.
We start to believe that survival responses are our emotions and who we are. All the emotions that rise from our heart are filtered through the lens of a survival response, and the experiences become an altered version of what actually happened. The brain processes information through separation.
Ultimately, the separation between us and others, and the world at large, is the actual signal that we are giving more power to our brain than we should.
I will make a practical example.
Let’s take the following physical sensation: butterflies in the stomach, sweaty hands, dryness in the throat and pounding heart in our chest. These are the same identical physical sensations of two very different emotions.
One, is being excited. The second one is having a panic attack.
Two very different interpretations of an experience. Yet what makes the difference is how the brain decides in which way we need to decode that experience.
This means that our experiences are not lies, but perspectives unconsciously chosen. They are very real and need to be acknowledged and addressed in order to have a different vision of the world and to heal what makes us feel unsafe and powerless in the first place, so that we can experience positivity within an experience.
How is this connected to love?
If we are constantly in survival mode, love at its highest expression cannot be experienced, because it will also be filtered with a survival response. This is where we have a conditional type of love (If you want to understand this state more deeply, I explore it in detail in my article Healing the Survival State: Understanding and Working With the Root Chakra)
Love is not something we can achieve overnight. Monks meditate for their entire lives to understand and practice that level of love.
Do we need to be all monks? Of course not.
But we can work to reach a more optimal level in our day-to-day life, taking one step at a time.
Do you start to grasp where many of the problems actually are here?
Now, let's go back to conditional and unconditional love.
We need to know what love practically is. Love is similar to the energy of the element of water. Like water, we need to know how to be in the flow, to be in what I call radical acceptance, to be in harmony, and to practice togetherness and unity (which is different from oneness).
The flow
It is the behavior of any fluid and energy. Being in the flow means riding the stream of that flow.
There are two different types of flow: the inner and outer flow.
The outer flow
The outer flow is the flow of the universe. This flow is based on the amalgamation of the different energies that collide in a specific given moment. This energy comes from planetary and satellite positions, stars (especially the polarity shifting of our Sun and all its activities), asteroids in transit, celestial cycles (equinoxes and solstices, lunations, eclipses, et cetera), Earth cycles (seasons, night and days, weeks, months, et cetera), act of balancing from Gaia (weather conditions, pole shifting, et cetera), activities in Gaia’s energy system, collective human events (wars, calamities, festivities, et cetera), collective human consciousness, cultural human consciousness (every country has its own, and this is also present in the inner flow), lows that govern the universe, the desires of the universe, et cetera (If you want to understand these lows more deeply, I explore it in detail in my article The 12 Universal Lows).
This flow of energy is not something we can change or do something about for our benefit. Rather, it is something that we need to keep in mind inorder to work on the resistances that we have before we encounter the shifting of the flow and to remain aligned with ourselves.
Resistance is what stops us from being in the flow of the universe in the first place.
The Inner Flow
The inner flow is the alignment that we have within ourselves. What do I mean by that?
We came on this planet with a specific purpose, and I am not only talking about saving lives; I am talking about any type of purpose. Call them missions, call them lessons, call them contracts, but in and on themselves they are purpose.
So, if you are in resistance, again we are not able to align with our purpose (also this statement is not 100% accurate because there is an advanced concept here that comes into play, but to simplify what for me are the basics, I will talk about it more in future posts).
The inner flow is a state of alignment within ourselves. What I mean is: life happens for you, and everything and everyone within your matrix is a reflection of who you are. Therefore, it is the capacity to leverage all the tools and gifts that you've been given in this lifetime to live the highest path of your life.
This means: being on purpose and deeply understanding and expressing your uniqueness and choosing the reality that you want to experience from a place of expansion, intuition, self reliance, self-love, sense of connections between everything and everyone, authenticity, integrity and sovereignty.
When you are in your inner flow, you can be in the outer flow and ride that stream of energy. It becomes easier the more you work on the limitations that keep you stuck.
Visually, imagine a stream of water, and that stream is the outer flow. The inner flow can be either the rock in the middle of the stream or the leaf that has been carried by the stream.
The rock represents when we are not in alignment and we are stuck, therefore, unable to access the power of the stream and in a place of resistance towards it.
In the long run that stream will corrode the rock by destroying it, chipping away pieces little by little.
The leaf represents the place of alignment where we are led exactly where we need to be. What we need to do is float, and inorder to do so we need to maintain a state of alignment.
Love, like water, flows. It is a stream that we receive from the universe and it is meant to be a stream that flows out of our heart space, because water always moves and flows. It functions through exchange. You receive love, but you also need to give it.
If we are in resistance like the rock, we are not flowing because we close that stream to come in and/or going out. Therefore, we close ourselves to everyone and everything in existence and to the energy of love.
This brings us to the next topic.
Acceptance
Love, like water, has the property to embracing everything and everyone. It doesn't know judgment.
I want to give the same example that I heard that explains this concept perfectly.
If you throw a rock into the water, the water does not push the rock away, but rather takes the rock in as part of itself, and water will adjust itself around the rock in such a way that the rock becomes part of it.
Love doesn't ask the other person or thing to change, just like the water did not try to change the rock. They change because they have been touched by unconditional love that helps the person or the thing that is open to it to heal, and the change becomes a natural consequence of it.
I said open to, because we are in a system where free will is important and to actualize any change you need to be open to it and ready.
It is an acceptance that manifests in support, exactly like water that holds our weight when we are in it.
Can love be too much?
It is subjective. In potentiallity, no. But everything comes down to our traumas and wounds.
We may find love suffocating because we associate love in this way. Maybe our mother was over-controlling to the point of limiting our experiences. Or maybe we associate love to the necessity to fend for yourself because you were emotionally neglected as a child, et cetera.
Sometimes, it is the very thing that threatened our sense of individuality. An example is when, after a while in a relationship some people experience a sense of losing themselves, as if they don't understand where they end and the other person begins anymore.
All these cases have been created from a conditional type of love that did not allow the person to feel supported, respected and accepted in a healthy way.
You will be triggered by being loved unconditionally at first, because you will not find a match for the motives behind the action and behaviors.
You will try to read through the lens of your experience, but something will always seem off, giving you a sense of being disoriented because you do not know how to handle it.
Harmony
Love brings harmony between things. Thanks to the acceptance, it is able to harmonize, bringing coherence to everything and everyone.
Harmony has to start first within ourselves.
Because we live in a mirroring reality, if we have a war happening inside, we will automatically manifest that in the world outside us.
It is paramount that we start to work with all the parts of ourselves that are in dissonance with each other and work towards bringing these parts onto the same page without compromise. And no compromise means that every part needs to have exactly what it want at the same time.
Only, and I say only, then you are able to create harmony within yourself.
And always because we are in a mirroring reality (to know more about that I wrote an article on 12 of the universal laws that govern the universe) the harmony within will manifest as harmony in the outside world.
Togetherness
It is quite literally the convergence of all the aspects that we talked about before.
What does it mean?
I will make a pre-statement: we hear all the time in spirituality about going back to oneness. But the truth is that before reaching oneness we need to master togetherness.
Oneness literally means one of something, a single unit of something.
Togetherness is multiple things that are in harmony and operating in a love based dynamic.
Do you remember when at the beginning, I said that love is taking something or someone as part of yourself?
This means you care for that thing or person and you take their best interest as part of your own best interest. Therefore, you cannot hurt the other without hurting yourself.
This will automatically end any type of zero-sum game in favor of a win-win scenario and bring things into harmony. This is the doorway to oneness. Because only when we harmonize can we experience that we are one.
We cannot experience the state of oneness with all that exists if we are struggling to connect with, accept and care for one of its parts.
It is like saying, regarding an apple pie, "I love these two slices of the pie but not those two."
Togetherness is about taking accountability for how your actions, words and emotions can impact the world around you.
In order to do that, you need to be open to seeing the world and accept the good, the bad and the ugly.
This means opening your heart to deeply understand how others are the way they are, feel what they feel, and see the world the way they see it. It is a place of pure empathy and consideration.
Because everything is oneness, we have by default the gift of empathy. Its development depends on how much resistance we are in.
Why is this important?
Because what you do has an impact on the entire ecosystem.
As we said, everything is one. Quantum physic call it quantum entanglement.
Even if you don't see it, anything that happens to one of the parts of the whole spreads to the entire system.
This is also the reason why it is important to heal and become the better version of ourselves. By changing our vibration we will automatically change the word, creating a domino effect.
Now you have a basic understanding of how many things come into place when we talk about love. I will leave you with a question.
What type of first domino do you want to be?
A hug from the deep.
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