The Freedom Of Unconditional Love

Hello,

And welcome to this talk on the nature of freedom and love.

My name is Julie E.

Grace,

And I am honored that you are spending this time here with me today.

Thank you.

So just before we begin,

To note,

This talk is based on an essay that I wrote in March 2019,

Which was published by Kripalu shortly thereafter.

So thank you for that,

Kripalu.

And this talk,

In many ways,

Is a follow-up to the essay and the talk about my dog,

Janie,

Entitled My Dog the Zen Master.

So if you are interested,

You might want to check that talk out first,

Though it is by no means a requirement.

Let's dive in.

If you love someone,

Set them free.

If they come back to you,

It was meant to be.

Like all cliches,

The saying exists because there is a dose of truth in it.

Yet from a yogic perspective,

The second half of the sentence might be better lopped off,

Leaving us simply with,

If you love someone,

Set them free.

Recently,

My 14-year-old rescue dog,

Janie,

Began what appears to be the dying process.

For the past six months,

She has lived stably with chronic kidney disease,

Though last weekend she took a sudden turn and was unable to hold down any food.

When her veterinarians ran her blood work,

They were aghast.

Two of her results were literally off the charts.

The vets didn't understand how this little being was functional,

How she was alert,

Walking around,

Or even drinking water.

After an IV drip was unable to bring her kidneys back,

They sent her home with me for the night,

Expecting that she would either die overnight or need to be euthanized the following day.

But Janie,

As ever,

Has continued to defy the odds.

For over a week now,

She has persisted despite her biochemistry.

She has not yet given me the signal that she is ready to leave this earth.

Instead,

She still buries her face into the crook of my arm and follows me into the bathroom,

And to be honest,

I have not peed alone for over a decade now.

Because of course she still looks at me curiously every time I enter the kitchen.

Nonetheless,

When she was particularly lethargic one day,

Surprising us again later by perking up,

I stroked her head and her sweet bat-like ears,

And crying I told her that she did not need to stay in this body for me any longer.

That she had already given me everything and more.

I have told her some variation of this every day,

With as few tears as possible,

Because I love her.

And because I love her,

I mean every single word.

I want nor need anything from her.

Janie teaches me what it means to be human,

To be conscious,

To be compassionate,

And mostly to love unconditionally.

My love for her is not dependent on her achieving or behaving a certain way.

It is not even conditional on whether or not she is alive.

All week she has been coming to my yoga classes and sleeping in her basket next to me while I teach.

As a result,

It only occurred to me now that my animals have no idea what I do for work,

Or what work even looks like.

My value to my pets has nothing to do with my status,

My appearance,

Or my station in life.

My value to them comes from our energetic exchange,

And admittedly that includes keeping them fed.

And the love between us is as timeless and boundless as any earthly love can be.

When Katy Perry's hit song,

Unconditional,

Hit the airwaves a few years ago,

I scoffed at the time.

The song is part of a larger cultural storyline about romantic love that,

Well,

Likes to be viewed romantically.

Listening to the words of the song,

I thought,

If he cheated,

Would you still love him unconditionally?

If he killed your dog,

Would you still love him unconditionally?

If he,

If he,

If he.

My best human friend and I both have in-laws who were arranged into marriages.

Our spouses were the products of those unions.

And while neither of us condones forced marriage in any circumstance,

And just to be clear,

Not all arranged marriages are forced,

Though many still are.

In discussing the differences of romantic versus arranged matches last week,

We noted that it is far too easy to herald love matches as the only way to happiness,

When in fact love matches by their nature are incredibly conditional.

We love our partners based on the person they are at the time when we either marry them or just get together with them.

You don't have to be married to have a long-term partner.

And we love them not necessarily based on the person that they might become.

And we certainly love them not as the person we ourselves might become.

Rationality often takes a backseat to emotionality.

In wedding ceremonies,

We typically make lofty promises about faith and love,

When really it would probably be healthier and more honest to make promises about practicing forgiveness,

About accepting change and challenges,

About seeing love as an ingredient in a diverse set of needs in any relationship.

So often we actually neglect the fact that marriage is a legal contract,

Which is not particularly romantic at all.

Perhaps if we step back from our love-tinted storylines,

We might make clearer choices about the partners with whom we ultimately bind ourselves.

We might even make different choices about whether or not we wish to marry at all.

To understand our conditions in a marriage or any relationship is to be honest in a way that few are actually honest about romantic love.

I once quietly and deeply loved a man with whom I could not be for altogether too many reasons.

At the time,

I thought he was everything I desired in a long-term partner.

He was extraordinarily intelligent,

Wise,

Handsome,

Driven,

And gentle.

And from this,

You can see that my conditions about a mate are already becoming clear.

We all have conditions.

My favorite days of the week were the days I knew I would see him.

My heart swelled each time he entered the room,

And once in a meditation,

I was startled when an image appeared of him holding a small child in a lavender snowsuit that seemingly felt like our child.

I wondered if somehow we were meant to be together.

This meant-to-be-together storyline is another one that has haunted me since I was a small child.

Precociously from the age of five,

I kept a diary,

And my five-year-old diary professed love for my kindergarten crush,

Nick Bentovolio,

Who kissed me on the last day of school,

After which my family moved away.

Until the age of seven,

I wondered about him in my scribbled musings in my lock-and-key puppy diary.

I even wrote him letters,

Which I asked my mother to post for me.

Admittedly,

I even found his email address when I was 18,

And I wrote to him,

And though he replied kindly,

He did not remember me.

Our cultural stories ask a lot of love.

Our stories ask love to be romantic,

To be timeless,

To be unconditional,

To even be destined.

And by asking these things,

They place the very conditions on love that they seek to avoid.

So let me just repeat that.

By asking love to be romantic,

To be timeless,

To be unconditional,

To be destined,

Actually places the conditions on love that they seek to avoid.

When we insist that something is destined,

We actually limit our capabilities for love.

We leave the hard work to fate,

Only to then find that fate jumps ship after love sets sail into the sunset.

We never see what happens once the prince and princess are in a routine domestic life.

Human love is not easy.

It is not even a singular occurrence.

Like forgiveness,

Which often is intrinsic to love,

It is something we must choose over and over again.

And then,

When we don't choose love,

We have to learn to practice acceptance.

Or when someone else doesn't choose love,

Again,

We have to learn to practice acceptance.

When we insist that something remained past its expiration date,

We diminish our capacity for love.

It becomes easy to stagnate and to judge ourselves amongst other limiting cultural stories that might not even be our own.

My heart began hurting daily over the man from the meditation.

For me,

Our connection was so strong that it felt unfair that we would not have an opportunity to be together.

I wished I had met him in another time,

In another way,

In which our love story could have played out.

I utterly lacked the yogic precept of santosha,

Or acceptance,

Contentment.

Like so many,

I was heavily invested both in my feelings and in the love stories that have passed me culturally since childhood.

Then one day,

While walking my dogs,

Those beings that teach me the most about love and about being present,

I understood that to really love this man,

I had to let go of the desire to be with him.

To love him,

To really love him,

Meant to need nothing from him at all.

Personal love truly is a state of being.

It is not a negotiation.

It is not fulfilled in kisses or rings or promises.

So to love someone and set them free is as much about our own freedom as it is about theirs.

To let go of what could be,

To let go of what was,

This is what it means to love.

This is how we come back to gratitude for what is,

And how we appreciate others for exactly who they are,

Both as individuals and for the diverse roles that they play in our lives.

There is also a grace in not being actively involved in a romantic relationship with someone.

Whether it is a relationship that no longer exists or a relationship that never was,

We are given a greater opportunity to practice unconditional love,

To open our hearts and transcend human desire when we need nothing from one another.

In this way,

We get everything from our connections just as they are.

Again,

Love becomes a state of being.

To love unconditionally is to become love itself.

This to me is the yogic way,

Which also happens to be the way of the dog.

So in the days after writing this essay,

Janie passed away from her earthly canine form.

She had a natural death at home,

And she did not suffer,

Nor was she in pain.

Merely,

She went through the dying process.

She left her body early one morning while lying in bed next to me,

Where she had slept for the previous 12 years.

My partner and I held her as she took her final breaths.

There were birds singing outside.

In the week before her death,

I wrote to my ex,

Who was part of her earlier life.

And living in Australia now,

He was unable to see her again in the UK before she died.

I told him that I knew she was grateful,

That she was grateful to him too,

And that I had absolutely no doubt about this.

In writing the email,

I thought to myself that the love I feel for my ex now is more universal and unconditional than anything I ever experienced when we were a couple.

It seems as if the act of loving and parting led us back to a purer state of love.

His reply came with a rush of grace.

He said his life was better for having known her,

For having known me,

For having been part of it all.

He affirmed everything I felt.

That love forgives and transcends.

That love simply is.

In the week leading up to her death,

I prayed over Janie Daly and told her everything I needed to say.

Everything she already knew.

She waited for my partner to return before she died,

As he had been abroad at the time when her acute illness presented.

She waited 10 days and then passed 18 hours after he returned from five weeks working in India.

Her love for us was unconditional.

And I miss her fiercely.

There are times when the deep wells of grief in my heart feel all-consuming.

So I have to believe in a teaching I learned from Ram Dass.

No being comes to this earth a minute too soon,

And no being leaves this earth a minute too late.

I have to believe that she taught me everything I needed to know to live without her.

Though sometimes this still feels impossible.

I also have to paradoxically believe that love is like life.

That love flourishes and dies all in due course,

But that love is also timeless,

Transcendent,

And not bound by our mere human existence.

I choose to believe in meaning.

I choose to ascribe meaning to her life which was so intrinsically meaningful to mine.

By the sheer act of breathing,

We live in a connected world.

Each of us has connections that sustain us,

That haunt us,

That teach us.

Janey was a connection that sustained me,

That allowed me to get through the dark periods and exalt in the joyful ones.

It is my hope that anyone who has ever been positively touched by my life can see that they too are connected to her.

And that by extension of this,

We are all connected to one another,

To every living thing,

And even to the dead.

Thank you.