Infinite Bliss Ep. 3 – Unconditional Love

Probably the most selfish thing you can do

In this episode of the Infinite Bliss Podcast, Mat teaches the benefits of practicing Unconditional Love. It has tremendous health benefits but also has the power to silence your mind. And, unlike meditation, you can learn this simple practice easily and see meaningful change in your everyday life quite quickly.

Unconditional Love is the easiest way to transform your life. If you’re struggling with drama, then you definitely don’t want to miss this episode.

Thanks for listening my friends.

Mat Robinson ~ The Gregarious Hermit

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Transcript

You’re listening to the Infinite Bliss Podcast. I’m your host, Mat Robinson, “The Gregarious Hermit”. Join me each week as I take you on a journey of inner exploration to uncover the subtle connections between mind, body and spirit. I want to teach you how to regain control of your mind so you can let go of the drama in your life and experience deep inner peace and infinite bliss.

Hi everybody. Welcome. And thank you so much for joining me. This week, we’re going to be talking about my favorite subject, and that is, unconditional love. When I wrote my book a few years ago, Understanding Happiness, I didn’t really realize and appreciate how significant this chapter was going to be. I think this is the most powerful message in the book, but at the time that I wrote it, I really didn’t appreciate that.

So I want to go over the subject of unconditional love with you today, and show you how simple this practice is to learn and how easy it is to incorporate it into your daily life and how quickly it can transform your experience of the world and silence your mind. And it’s so obvious. The answer [to silencing your mind] has been right under our noses the whole time.

You’ll probably slap yourself on the forehead and go, Duh. But hopefully it connects a few dots for you and brings it to the forefront.

First, let me do a quick experiment with you to show you how your mind and body are connected. I don’t think people realize just how strong that connection is. But this is a really good example that I use all the time to emphasize this point.

If you’re driving or not in a safe place to close your eyes, then don’t do this. But you’ll still be able to follow along and understand what I’m doing.

If you close your eyes for a moment and relax, I want you to visualize eating a lemon. I want you to imagine that you just popped a lemon slice in your mouth and are biting down on it, getting all of that flavor and the juices squirting into your mouth.

You all know what happens. Your mouth starts to produce saliva.

So just visualizing something with your mind caused your body to respond physically.

Now, if you visualize an angry confrontation with somebody, maybe a coworker or some guy that cut you off on the highway, you’ll actually release a little shot of adrenaline into your system.

Again, visualizing something with your mind produced a response in the body.

And then the last thing I want to show you is if you sat there and imagined a situation that was just so wonderful, so amazing, maybe a happy memory with a friend or a nice vacation you had. You’ll actually feel endorphins and other feel good hormones flowing around your body.

And in all of those examples I just gave you, the more detail you can put into your vision, the stronger the physical response in your body.

Now, that should give you a little bit of a clue into where we’re going with this. Just by changing the thoughts in your head, you can control how your body responds to the world.

So now you know my secret to happiness, and that is to just make every single moment a happy moment.

There’s a popular meditation called Loving Kindness. And what you do is you sit down and you visualize a line of people starting with somebody that you really love unconditionally. Maybe it’s a family member or a very close friend, somebody that you would trust your life with. And whenever you’re with that person, it just seems like you’re always having fun, always having a good time. And whenever you think of that person, you just seem to smile and feel warm and fuzzy inside.

So for the loving kindness meditation, what you do is you start with that person. You close your eyes and you visualize them in as much detail as you possibly can. You’ll start to feel all those wonderful, loving hormones flowing through your body. Then you visualize yourself smiling at them and you say, “I wish you nothing but peace, love and happiness”.

So that’s the easy one out of the way. Now, the next person in your list is somebody that you know very well, but maybe you don’t necessarily get that unconditional loving feeling towards them. Maybe it’s a work colleague or a familiar face from the grocery store. You like them, but you don’t love them.

But the same thing. You just spend some time visualizing them and then picture yourself saying that you love them and that you wish them nothing but peace, love and happiness.

And then you work your way through a whole cast of characters, right the way through to the last person, which is somebody that you really don’t like. Somebody that you would never dream of inviting them out to dinner and definitely not to your birthday party. Maybe you wouldn’t even help them into your life raft if you were somehow both on the same sinking ship.

But with loving kindness, you still do the same anyway. You visualize them, you smile at them and you say, “I wish you nothing but peace, love and happiness.”

And if you do that meditation often enough, over a long enough period of time, eventually your mind does get used to the fact that you actually want to project love towards everybody, even people that you don’t necessarily like.

But it’s a little subtle, and so it does take quite a long time. You’re quietly retraining your mind by repetition, but you’re not directly teaching your mind how you’d like it to behave.

So I’m going to teach you what I think is a much easier and more direct way. This method lets you learn the skill using small baby steps, and then once you get the skill dialed in, you can start to apply it to your life in a very deliberate, and controlled way.

We saw before how your mind has the ability to control your body. How visualizing something causes a physical reaction in the body. That’s great when we’re actively using our mind to do something like that, but when our mind runs unchecked, it reacts to the world around us on our behalf. It controls our emotions for us and tells us how we should feel.

So if you want to have a peaceful experience of the world free from drama, you have to have a peaceful mind. And I will say that again for emphasis.

If you want to have a peaceful experience of the world free from drama, you need to have a peaceful mind.

And the easiest way to do that is to make a peaceful response to the world your default response to everything, and no surprises. We’re going to make unconditional love our default response to everything.

So I want you to just sit somewhere nice and quiet away from as many distractions as you can. And I want you to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.

Now, this isn’t a meditation, but I do want you to just relax and start to get your body into a peaceful state, because it just makes this so much easier.

But take a few deep breaths and just relax each time that you breathe out.

And I want you to start to visualize something that you love unconditionally, something that brings you great joy. It can be a person, place or thing or even an experience from your past. Something that just made you feel really wonderful inside. And I want you to visualize that person or experience in as much detail as you possibly can. Try to bring in all of your senses. So not just vision, but also sound, touch, taste and even smell.

The stronger you can make that vision, the stronger the emotional reaction in your body will be.

So just spend a moment visualizing that whatever you chose as your happy place, your place of unconditional love. Just spend a few moments visualizing that until it almost becomes real and you can feel that wonderful sense of excitement and joy and bliss radiating throughout your whole body.

It should feel slightly euphoric, and I want you to just smile at that thing that’s making you happy right now. Fall in love with that thing.

Now, once you’ve got that feeling going, I want you to actually turn your attention inwards and just look at that feeling inside. And it’s that feeling we’re looking for here. How wonderful your body feels. It should be tingling and you should have this sense of joy just rising through your whole body.

And I want you to just get used to that feeling. Study it and try to analyze it so it becomes familiar.

And then when you’re ready, I want you to slowly open your eyes and the first thing that you see in the room, I want you to feel that same pure love towards it.

So it could be your television set or a clock on the wall, a plant, something like that. But just feel that sensation of pure love towards that thing that you’re looking at. And if the sensation starts to fade, then just close your eyes again and rebuild your original vision of unconditional love. Generate those feelings inside your body and then open your eyes again.

Just keep doing that for a while. Then when you can do that and maintain that feeling each time, and you can maintain that feeling for a long time, then I want you to start slowly looking around the room at every object that’s there. And again, just feel this pure love towards it. Project your love at that item. You don’t have a conversation in your head saying, I love that plant or I love that TV, I love that couch cushion, but just feel love towards it.

And once you’ve fallen in love with everything in your living room and you can maintain that feeling, now you want to slowly stand up and actually start to move around your home, falling in love with everything that you see.

Doing this for 10 minutes or so every night in your own home is pretty easy because you naturally love everything that’s in your house. You bought all of those things, you put them there so there’s a connection to them. So it’s just very easy and very natural to be able to generate that feeling towards them.

But you now have to take this show on the road and you’ve got to go outside and into an environment where you don’t have that same level of control, and still try to feel pure love towards everything.

So even a piece of trash on the sidewalk or graffiti on the wall, things that you may not necessarily like, but just try to feel pure love towards them.

And the one thing that you might notice straight away is that when you encounter other people, your mind shifts and it actually gets quite defensive. We’re naturally wary of strangers and other people. And so as soon as your mind perceives a person walking towards you, then your mind starts to go on the defensive. And when you practice unconditional love for a while, you become more in tune with how your body feels and you’ll be able to see that shift more easily. Now, your job at this point is to try to shift that back and just try to feel pure love towards them.

And you can actually play a little game with that and you can notice your mind switching back and forth as you walk down a busy street. Just keep switching it back to unconditional love. That’s the only thing you have to do.

And you can even do this with people that you don’t like. Let’s say you always get into a bit of a conflict with your boss. You just don’t like them, and every time you have an interaction with them, there’s always some awkwardness there and it just doesn’t feel great. You’ve already labeled them as I don’t like them. We’re going to try to project pure love towards them.

Now you have to do this ahead of time. Let’s say you’ve got to go and see your boss in 5 minutes time. You don’t know what the meeting’s about, but you have to go and see them. Just mentally prepare yourself. I’m going to feel pure love towards my boss. And as you’re walking towards the meeting, feeling pure love towards the wallpaper and the coffee stains on the carpet, keep reminding yourself that you’re going to feel pure love towards them.

And once you walk into that room again, you might notice your mind switch very quickly. But just really try very, very hard to switch it back to unconditional love.

And hopefully one of the things you may notice straight away is that your interaction with that person changes. Once you’re feeling pure love towards them, then you’re no longer defensive. You’re not always looking for what’s the catch, you know, what’s the conflict going to be?

Your mind is just at peace because you’re projecting pure love towards that person.

Feeling love towards somebody you don’t love. I consider that to be black belt level of unconditional love, but you can do it. It just takes time and practice.

And I just want to emphasize that it’s the feeling of love that you’re looking for. You’re not walking around saying, “I love you man”, to everybody that you meet on the street. But as you walk past them, you’re just generating that wonderful feeling inside.

It’s blissful, it’s joyful, it’s euphoric, and it really should be our natural state.

I mentioned in my last episode that I would be giving away one of these little wooden bead bracelets to anybody that asks me a question. Now, I’m only on episode three, so of course, nobody’s had time to ask a question yet. But one question that comes up quite often in my workshops is along the lines of “I’ve been meditating for a long time, but I can’t seem to silence my mind. It’s always talking to me. No matter how hard I try.” And this is a really common question.

Meditation can be quite frustrating because it seems to take a long time to notice any significant results. And well, what I just taught you is the answer to that. If you practice unconditional love, your mind will actually go silent because how can it criticize or complain about something if you’re just feeling pure love towards it?

Things that it might normally get upset about and you start to get that little rant going in your head, criticizing and complaining or needing to feel superior. Again, it’s kind of like that fear of someone else judging you, so needing to feel superior going around criticizing everybody or defending your actions when you are literally feeling pure love towards everything, your mind doesn’t even have a chance to jump in there with a comment.

So it’s one of those things that it does take a little bit of time and a little bit of practice, but it seems to give you the reward of a silent mind much faster than meditation alone. And it’s something that you can practice all day long, every day, and nobody even knows that you’re doing it.

Unconditional love is probably the most selfish thing you can do from that respect, because you’re the one that reaps all of the health benefits of filling your body with love while everyone around you is getting upset at the world and contaminating their bodies with toxic chemicals, you’re just smiling inside.

So the next time you spill your Starbucks, feel pure love towards it and just notice that the complaint stops. Oh, I’m such an idiot. Oh, my God. I can’t believe I just did that. That will literally stop because you’ll be feeling pure love towards what happened. When somebody cuts you off on the highway. Feel pure love. When your kids do something dumb, chuckle and feel pure love towards them and see how your mind no longer needs to criticize them.

But once you calm down your mind and you no longer get that negative internal reaction, your external reaction will also become more peaceful or nonexistent. You won’t complain or criticize as vocally because you won’t even get that conversation in your head to begin with. And that’s how you being peaceful inside starts to bring peace to the world outside.

When somebody confronts you and says something mean, feel pure love towards them, and you won’t feel the need to get defensive or upset.

But understand this, feeling joy on the inside and feeling pure love doesn’t change anything out there. Those things will still happen to you. You’ll still spill your Starbucks. People will still cut you off on the highway. Your boss will still be mean to you.

But you become immune to all the stories and the drama that the mind creates. You are projecting pure love onto the world and everywhere you look, all you will see is, you guessed it, love. Because once you look for love, love is what you see. If you project love onto everything, love is what you see everywhere you look.

But again, it doesn’t change the physical world around you. It changes how your mind interprets and reacts to everything.

So learning this skill will radically change your life. And it only takes 10 minutes a night to practice. And then you can start doing it all day long, every day fairly quickly. Nobody knows that you’re doing it, but you’ll selfishly reap all of the health benefits and transform the world from within.

Filling your body with all those wonderful hormones and chemicals that make you feel good really does do wondrous things to your body and your health.

And again, when I wrote my book, I didn’t appreciate just how powerful this practice is, but now it’s literally the only thing that I want to teach people.

You know, if you really want a quick fix for everything that you feel is going wrong in your life, practicing unconditional love allows you to see beyond what the mind is telling you.

And don’t forget to love yourself. It’s very easy to overlook this. We’re often, or should I say, our mind is often pretty hard on us and likes to point out our own failings and the things that we’re doing wrong. By practicing unconditional love towards yourself, you will diminish and stop this negativity.

Imagine how nice that would be to not have that inner critic whispering in your ear and holding you back all the time.

If you practice unconditional love, you will experience deep in a peace and infinite bliss.

Okay. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you found this useful. And as a reminder, if you’d like to submit a question to get your own little bead bracelet, then visit my website. TheGregariousHermit.com/podcast And there’s a little form on there that you can submit a question. And if I use one of the questions for a lesson or as part of an episode, I will send you one of these cool little bracelets.

And again, you can use these things to set an intention for the day. My intention today is to practice unconditional love. So every time I bump this thing, knock it on something, every time the little tassel catches the corner of my eye and grabs my attention, that’s my reminder to project love towards everything.

So when I end my videos telling you to love everything and love everybody, now you know exactly what I mean and why I say that.

Don’t forget to, like and subscribe and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Thanks for listening. Bye.

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