This Weeks Believe Better Stories Blog: Learning to Live in Unconditional Love

Trish Heitz
Oct 6
4 min read

Discover how emotional healing, mindfulness, and belief transformation can help you open your heart to unconditional love, for yourself and others.

What We Think Love Is... and What It Really Means

Most of us think we understand love. But the truth is, many of us only learned conditional love—the kind that has to be earned, proven, or performed for. When love feels conditional, our brains associate it with approval instead of connection.

So as adults, when genuine, unconditional love is offered to us, we often don’t recognize it. We question it. We analyze it. We pull away.

“Why are they being so kind? What do they want from me?”

This quiet skepticism is more common than you think—and it’s a sign of something deeper: a belief system that says love isn’t safe.

Why We Resist the Love We Crave

If you grew up in an environment where love was inconsistent, transactional, or withheld, like I did, your nervous system learned that love comes with conditions. It became tied to performance, approval, or meeting someone else’s expectations.

When that happens, unconditional love feels foreign and confusing.

Without realizing it, we fall into a subtle victim mentality, replaying old emotional patterns that protect us from pain but also block us from love. We might have people around us who genuinely care, but we don’t engage with that love. We keep it at arm’s length.

That was me for many years.

When my husband would demonstrate love, I’d find things to pick apart; little annoyances that justified keeping my heart closed. Because if something was “wrong” with him, then I didn’t have to receive his love. I could stay safe in the old belief that said, I don’t need love. I’m fine on my own.

It took me years; and deep belief work, to realize that I wasn’t rejecting him. I was rejecting love itself.

Meditation: The Doorway Back to Love

When I began learning meditation, as I explained in earlier writings, I found it frustrating becasaue I couldn't shut my brain off. It took lots of practice and giving myself some grace to do it in minute by minute segments. When I started "getting it" feeling calm, more peaceful, I had expected to feel better. What I didn’t expect was love.

The first time I meditated on what love might feel like, something in me broke open. What followed was a flood of emotion; not just a few tears, but a wave that felt both beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. I cried because the feeling was so pure, and beautiful… and because I realized how much of my life I had lived without it.

I had felt moments of love before; like watching my sleeping child, or when my son ran to me saying, “Mommy, I love you.” But those were brief sparks. This was different. This was being love.

Through meditation, I began to understand that love isn’t just an emotion between people. It’s a universal energy; that exists in everything, including us. It is the same life force that makes grass push through the soil, turns a cocoon into a butterfly, and opens a flower toward the sun.

It’s the energy that heals wounds, keeps our hearts beating, and fuels everything alive.

This universal love had always existed within me, but survival mode had muted it. Once I learned to quiet my stress response and breathe into love, I realized it had always been there. I had just stopped allowing it.

Allowing Love: The Practice of Emotional Safety

When I shared this realization with one of my coaching clients, something clicked for her. She said,

“That makes so much sense… ALLOWING love!”

Exactly. Allowing love isn’t about chasing it; it’s about feeling safe enough to receive it.

When we’ve lived in survival mode for most of our lives, the brain sees love as unpredictable. It’s wired to protect us, not open us. So we unconsciously create distance, by overthinking, finding faults, or minimizing affection, because we’ve learned that connection equals risk.

But love and safety can coexist when we retrain the brain.By practicing mindfulness, meditation, and belief transformation, we can teach our nervous system a new comfort zone; one where love feels safe, steady, and unconditional.

Unconditional love has to be learned if we never experienced it before. And like anything new, it becomes real only through repetition. The more we allow it, the more our brain learns it’s safe to stay there. This is when real healing begins.

Living in the Energy of Love

When I had that first experience of truly feeling love in meditation, I made a promise to myself:

Never lose that connection again.

I began to create a way to access it anytime I needed; a practice that allowed me to reconnect with that energy of love within my body whenever I chose to slow down and breathe.

That’s how Love’s Meditation was born.It’s a gentle way to reconnect with the energy of love that’s already within you; breathing it into your heart and releasing anything that isn’t love.

If you’d like to experience it for yourself, I’d love to share it with you.

When you fill out my contact form, you’ll receive my recorded Love’s Meditation as a free gift; a gentle reminder that unconditional love begins by allowing yourself to feel it.

Breakthrough Cue

Where in your life are you resisting the love that’s trying to reach you? Can you pause long enough to allow it in, without questioning, without judgment, just love?