Written by Noel Coakley

When most of us think of love, we think of the human kind: messy, warm, particular, and full of history. We learn early on that love can be conditional, that it shows up sometimes and disappears at others, that it depends on mood, circumstance, behavior, and belonging.

Buddhism calls this relative love, and it’s not something to transcend or dismiss. It’s the terrain where our nervous systems are shaped and our trust is built or bruised. And it’s also the doorway to something deeper.

When we practice metta, guru yoga, or refuge — or when we recall someone who made us feel safe or seen — what we’re actually touching is not a love that comes from them, but a quality that gets evoked in us. That warm, spacious, unguarded feeling is already ours.

This is what gets called ultimate love — love not as an emotion we direct at people, but as the natural openness of awareness itself. Ultimate love isn’t personal, but it’s not abstract either. It’s what’s left when we stop aiming love like a flashlight and start recognizing it as the daylight we’ve been standing in the whole time.

It is an indiscriminate, limitless love beyond the relative self.

Relative love softens us enough to notice the deeper ground; ultimate love helps us hold relative love with more freedom, less fear, and fewer contracts. The practice isn’t to leap from one to the other, but to notice how the two speak to each other.

Start with whomever it’s easy to love. Let the feeling arise. Then, gently, drop the image and stay with the warmth. In that shift, there’s often a quiet recognition: this love doesn’t actually belong to anyone. It is without borders. It’s just what the heart is like when it’s not defended.