Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Unconditionality of Love
I share why you can’t make someone feel your love...and why that’s liberating. When you offer presence and kindness, their body has to feel safe enough to receive it; your job is to love without controlling their response. This is where boundaries get stronger, not softer: limits set without resentment are clearer, kinder, and more effective. We talk about body image, marriage, parenting, and the everyday moments when conditional love sneaks in....and what it takes to shift toward abundance rather than exhaustion.
For high‑functioning Muslim women, this conversation lands close to home. Achievement often masquerades as self‑love. We practice returning to the baseline, “I love myself because I exist,” and reflect on faith: moving from loving Allah only for blessings to loving because we were created capable of love. The mind will try to rationalize even this; we learn to notice, soften, and return to experience over analysis. By the end, you’ll have language, examples, and a repeatable practice to make unconditional love your default, rooted, spacious, and deeply alive.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Code School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Domal Utler.
SPEAKER_00:Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today we're gonna talk about the idea of unconditionality of love. Love just because you can. It sounds radical because it shifts the entire direction of love. From something you give outwards to something you generate inside. We often assume that when we love someone, the main benefit is for them, that our affection, attention, and the care we provide somehow fills their emotional tank. But what's actually happening is that love fills you. When you love, your nervous system releases oxytocin. Your mind expands. When you feel love towards someone, it's actually giving you nourishment that you feel first. It's only nourishment for someone else if they decide to accept your love. When you allow yourself to love freely without waiting for the other person to earn it or reciprocate it, you give your body permission to live in the most abundant fuel there is. While you might have been enculturated and programmed to believe that you love someone because it's a reward that you hand out in your own relationships, especially in the relationships that you think are deserving. When really love is a declaration of your own aliveness and your own evolution. It's when your nervous system says that I'm safe enough to feel love even here and anywhere. Whether you're loving your spouse through his moodiness or if you're loving your child through their rebellion, and especially even if you're loving yourself through your imperfections. Every time you choose love, you expand your own capacity for peace. So when you love, don't think of it as a transaction that improves the relationship. Think of it as an exercise that improves you. Love that way becomes an act of worship. Your way of saying to Allah, Ya Allah, you gave me a heart capable of love, and I use it fully and completely. So my son recently got baby chicks. Now they're very big now, but they came from a hatchery and they were just so cute and fuzzy. I could just squeeze them, they were so cute. I mean I wouldn't actually squeeze them because that would be bad, but they're just so squeezable and cute. These loving, happy feelings that I'm feeling towards these baby chicks while they have no idea what's going on. I feel the love for these baby chicks and I enjoy the feeling. I get to experience it. I get to be happy about them, with them, around them, and I get to enjoy the whole experience. I get to enjoy my kids having fun with them, taking care of them, being responsible, learning responsibility. I just love the whole situation. I am enjoying the feeling of love in my body. This way, love is not a substance that travels between two people, like pouring water from one cup into the other. Love is an experience that happens inside each individual nervous system. When someone feels loved by you, what they're actually feeling is their own body's response to the safety, kindness, and the presence you provide. Their brain is releasing the oxytocin and the serotonin and any other concoction of hormones of love, and that entire physiological and psychological experience belongs to them. Your love doesn't physically move into their body. It just creates an environment where their own capacity to feel love is awakened. And the same is true in reverse. When someone loves you, what you feel is your nervous system's response to their tone, their attention, their affection, their energy. It's your own inner chemistry that lights up through your own thoughts. And understanding this dynamic changes everything. It frees you from trying to control whether someone feels your love. You offer love generously, and at the same time you can't make another person's body or heart receive your love. You can speak softly, kindly, and wholeheartedly, and they may still not be loved because in their own nervous system something else might be true. Their own mind might not yet be open or regulated enough to register your love. And all of that is fine. Your responsibility is not towards ensuring that they feel your love at all cost or trying to manipulate them so that they know that they're loved. Your responsibility is only towards loving them unconditionally, regardless of if they feel it or not. So my invite to you in this podcast is love anyways, not because you can guarantee that it will be felt, but because the act of loving keeps you alive, keeps you in spiritual abundance. The purpose of love is not to make someone else feel something, it's to keep you connected to the best part of your humanity. And it so happens that when you unconditionally love like that, they for sure will be attracted to that energy, and they will come on board. As humans, we are experts at attaching conditions to our love. We're trained to measure worth before giving any affection. We say things like I love my body because it's healthy, or because I can still run after my kids, or because I look good today. Notice how fragile that love becomes. It depends on continued performance of your body for you to be able to love it. And the moment it aches, gains weight, or it can't do what you're used to it doing, then the conditional love starts to fade. Compare that to unconditional love for your body, where you don't wait for your body to behave perfectly. Your love towards your body is not a reward for good function. It's a simple, truthful acknowledgement of the divine design. Your body deserves love simply because it exists, because Allah chose to breathe life into it. You can love your body when it's strong and when it's tired, when it's energized and when it's in pain. Even if you say, I love you because you're the vessel that lets me experience life, it lets me learn, it lets me worship. All of these sound so amazing. They're all amazing reasons, but they are still conditions. Conditions of you loving your body because it performs, otherwise you don't. Again, the invite here is for you to love your body because you can, for you to love anything and anyone because you can. Especially your love towards yourself because you can. I myself love the baby chicks because I can. I love them because they are. When I love them because they're cute and fuzzy, I am attaching conditions. Loving yourself just because you can is the highest act of mercy. It releases you from the lifelong negotiation of I will love myself when dot dot dot. And it invites you into the present moment of I love myself now. All conditionalities are lifted. This really is the main and maybe the only ingredient to release shame, releasing generational patterns of self-blame. This type of love creates a lot of softening and healing for your nervous system. It rewires entire patterns of self-criticism, and it roots you into gratitude of the now rather than the performance. And it's all based on just one recognition that love is not something you earn. You don't earn it from yourself or anyone else. It's just something you allow. That level of unconditional love is the most abundant and extremely freeing. When love is conditional, it becomes exhausting. It depends on outcomes, on other people behaving a certain way, on your own performance, on aging perfectly or staying flawless or getting married at the right time, or getting divorced at the right time, having the right amount of children at the right time. When you love yourself without a reason, you step into the deepest form of abundance, lifting all of these conditions, because nothing outside of you can increase or decrease it. And when that happens you stop waiting for validation or reciprocation. You love because your love itself is expansive. It multiplies simply by being felt. You no longer love to control, fix, or possess, you love just for the sake of it, for the sake of your own wholeness. While transactional love has its time and place, and I recognize that, that place is rather narrow. It still feels good, but it is not anywhere close to being as abundant as non-transactional love. Unconditional love is the highest form. That is the kind of love that lets you self-correct much easier when you fall short of your expectations, that lets you give without depletion, that lets you forgive when other people make a mistake, which they invariably will. Other people are human beings, they're designed to make mistakes, and your forgiveness through unconditional love for yourself only benefits you. This kind of love mirrors divine mercy, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's Rahmah, which is a characteristic it is also present in you as a human. This is what flows through you not because it's deserved, but because it simply exists. Even a smallest drop of that kind of love will free you. So I came across this idea many years ago in the book by Dr. Shirzad Shameen Positive Intelligence, and since then I've turned this into a little ritual with my kids, where every now and then I ask them, why do you think I love you? In the beginning, their answers would be because we keep our rooms clean, because we do our homework, because we don't fight with each other. All adorable and very valid reasons, technically true reasons for me to love them, but also completely missing the point of non-transactional unconditional love. Multiple times I've had to remind myself and them that my love isn't tied to any of these conditions. I love them even when their rooms are messy and they forget their homework and they get into a fight. So then as a part of this practice, I would remind them that I love them because they are them, not because they're my children, not because I'm supposed to love them. I love them because just because they exist. Okay, and then afterwards, of course, the evolution and growth focused self that I am, Alhamdulillah, I started to take it a step further. I would then intentionally ask them misleading questions. I would deliberately attach positive conditions to my questions and ask them if that is the reason I love them. I would say things like, is it because you learn to swim so fast? Is it because you're kind to your friends? Because you say salam to all of the adults at parties? Is it because that you put a prayer mat in your room so you can remind yourself to pray on time? And of course initially they would trip up and say yes, because these are all amazing qualities. Why wouldn't their mother love them because of these qualities? And technically, yes, I do love them because of all of this, because of everything that they do. But the answer to my original question, which implies unconditionality, my trick question asking them if these were the reasons I love them, the answer would still be no. Because that is not the answer I'm looking for, and I want to teach them this about the unconditionality of love I have towards them. I want to teach them this skill so that they are able to produce it for themselves when they're adults. So I keep doing this exercise because I want to remind them I love them just because I can, because they exist, because they are who they are. And I would have to remind them of this over and over again. Now they're at the stage that even if I ask them, do I love you because you listen to your parents, because you're memorizing Quran, or because you get straight A's, they know the answer is no. I do not love them because of it, I love them despite of these qualities. They know the answer is that I love them because they are, they exist, and the fact that I can love them. And for sure after enough repetition they finally got it. Now if I ask them why do you think I love you? They roll their eyes and they say because I am me. And this is the practice I learned from this book that may seem small and even silly, but it is deeply transformative. Once you expand it beyond your children, towards your spouse, your friends, your body, especially yourself, it becomes one of the most healing things you can ever do. All of this is not an invite for you to start unconditionally loving everyone. If you're trying to forgive someone and have not been able to do so, then maybe unconditionality of love is not an option here. I don't want you to force yourself into loving somebody unconditionally because that's the examples I give you here. I want you to be creative and apply it to your own unique situation. All I'm saying is when you do decide to love someone like this, unconditionality starts to mean that you stop making somebody's flaws the price of your affection. Then some of the objections I hear is that I can't do that. That's carelessness. And I'm not asking you to be careless with it. You can definitely deliberately choose the people you want to love. You can choose them intentionally, but when you have a list in mind, unconditional love is not carelessness. It's not blindness, it's choosing to see the whole picture, the good, the messy, the inconvenient, and still saying that yes, I choose to love this person in my life. When you know your husband has a habit of interrupting you mid sentence or forgetting important things, you know in your mind that you still have the option to love him because you value connection over his perfection. Your child might not listen to you, speak abruptly or slam the door, you still have the option of loving them. Even your parents who might have carried generational rigidity and emotional distance, you can still love them without waiting for them to become self-aware. Now, loving someone despite their shortcomings does not mean you stop holding boundaries. It means your boundaries are no longer coated with resentment. When you create boundaries outside of resentment and judgment, they are much more effective and stronger. All along, what I'm trying to teach you here is that love is not a contract for good behavior. It's a reflection of your own maturity, your ability to let other person be a human without needing them to meet your requirements, and you evolving to that level. Unconditionality towards your spouse might sound like your brain always attaching some sort of precondition to the love for him because let's say he provides, he brings home a paycheck, or you say I love him because he loves me, or because he comes home to me, I love him because he's a great father. Again, these are all excellent reasons for you to love somebody. But then loving him just because you can, just because when he falls short of any of these expectations, loving them not because they did everything in your checklist to deserve it, not even because they're doing everything societally or religiously correct, but because you can, you have the capacity, and at this level you're only expanding your capacity for abundance, not his. This level of rewiring does take time because as Muslim women we are otherwise deeply conditioned to love specially because of someone's positive attributes, when they meet our preconceived notions. Again, not a bad thing. I do love my husband for all of these qualities, but loving somebody unconditionally is a whole new level of love. So it is my sincere hope and prayer for you to experience unconditionality in your love and whoever and to whoever you're giving it to, even if it's baby tricks. With all of this practice, what you will notice is that eventually you will start to see the unconditionality in the love that Allah has for you, and the love that you have for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You might have a tendency to think right now that you love Allah because of all the countless blessings He gave you. You are breathing because of Allah's mercy. You have a house to live in, and I can only try to start listing all of the things that you can be grateful for. There's no way I can finish that list even if it takes me a lifetime. These are all blessings and attributes that you can assign to him to be able to justify your love. But what about loving Allah because you can? Because you exist? All of this helps you recognize his countless mercy towards you, his abundant and unconditional love towards you. Ironically, even if you start practicing the mindset of I love because I can, a hyper thinking brain can immediately sneak through the back door with the justification of yes, I'm loving because it feels good to love, it feels good in my body because it benefits me. And on the surface, that of course itself sounds harmless and even wholesome, but it is still a condition. You're loving because it gives you something in return, even if what that gives you is peace or joy. And that's how sneaky the human mind is. It keeps you trying to intellectualize something that's just meant to be purely experiential. And if your mind gets trapped in that, that's okay. Do not create judgment of that type of thinking. Your brain is a meaning making machine. It wants to label, explain, rationalize everything, including love. It might feel unsafe in the mystery of loving just because. So when you begin to practice this unconditionality, you're gently rewiring one of the oldest programs in human evolution. The habit of attaching reasons rationality to your emotions. And when you find yourself doing that, a simple awareness is gonna correct your path. And it's all about these small recognition. Over time, loving without reason becomes a muscle memory. Especially in real life, it's very much needed because when you don't parent perfectly and you're still in debt even when you have goals of financial independence, or your child leaves their lunch untouched when you packed it so lovingly, these moments unconditionality feels like the last thing on your mind. But with practice, this becomes a part of you. It becomes the default self. Unconditionality in your love will start to come habitually to you. And if you forget it, that's okay. It does not mean that you've failed, it just means that you're human. Your job is to keep remembering to return to that baseline of unconditional love over and over again. Not because you're doing it perfectly, but because you choose to do it intentionally. Rising above loving someone because of their positive attributes is one of the most liberating and healthy things you can do for your emotional and mental life. And not everyone or everything in your life deserves that level of work. But if you do have someone in your life that you choose to do this work on, it's going to be liberating for you. When you love yourself or someone else unconditionally, you have taken the obligation of performance out of the equation, especially even if it's good performance. People will invariably fall short of your expectations because they're not living their life to comply with your expectations. They're trying to live their own life. And just like any other human being, sometimes they have a hard time, sometimes easy. The most powerful concept I want you to take away from this episode is the unconditionality of love towards yourself. And this is especially important reminder for high functioning Muslim women. Self love sneaks in through achievement, through checklists and the doing and the performance. You will start to respect yourself because you managed your schedule, because you followed your prayer routine, because you kept the house running, or because you are able to remember everyone else's needs before your own. And while all of these are great qualities, something you can strive for, signs of discipline, responsibility, care, affection, empathy, even these positive qualities are conditions. They keep your worth and your ability to love yourself tethered to your performance. Unconditional self love means that you're rising above that. Loving yourself on the days that you forget, where you're falling short or when you're losing control. Loving yourself when you're reactive, when your faith is not the highest, when your house is messy. Loving to love yourself and becoming comfortable by saying I love myself because I exist. All of this is a reminder that you were worthy before you earned your degree, before you learned your emotional intelligence skills. You were worthy on the day you were created simply because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala decided you were worth creating. This is the most sacred form of self-love. It is not a reward for getting it right. You have complete freedom in this. Freedom to choose who and what you want to love at this level. It could be people closest to you, it could be pets that you love, it could be the community that you belong to, it could even be the entire humanity. The choice is yours. Practicing that choice is your basic right as a human being. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala. Ya Allah, teach my heart to love without conditions, let my heart see me through your mercy, not just through my strengths and mistakes. Let my worth rest in the fact that you created me, not in how much I accomplish or how perfectly I perform. Ya Allah, grant me and everyone the peace that comes from loving ourselves. Help me recognize that you have already loved me, and help me extend the same love to others. Not because they earn it, but because you made me capable of it. Amin Ya Rabul Alamin. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.