Every act of unforced cooperation is a manifestation of love.
But sometimes we feel compelled to manifest non-cooperative behaviour - to compete with each other, to opt out or to boss others around.
How can we creatively respond to an unwillingness to participate in love?
It is no good to demand love. It cannot be conjured up by an act of will. If one of us has an incapacity for love, either generally or when in specific circumstances, their innate capacity for it has to be unlocked.
One mistake we can make is to read such an incapacity as critical information about ourselves. We may ask ourselves what is wrong with us that the other person does not show us love. But the incapacity lies with them and does not reflect on our worthiness.
But also we should not look on an incapacity for love in ourselves as evidence of our own unworthiness.
What is needed is the key to that lock. The question of worthiness is the lock itself. As long as we are asking why we are not worthy or trying to prove our worthiness our attention is being drawn towards our self and away from taking in and processing the stream of information from others which love requires.
Unconditional acceptance, i.e. unconditional love, is the key to the lock.
We are all worthy of love, so the worthiness question is irrelevant. What matters is not worthiness of love but capacity for love and this means relieving ourselves (or being relieved by others) of the need to prove our worthiness in any way.
Unconditional acceptance of others does not mean we have to do what they tell us to do. And it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t restrain them from hurting others when we can. What it does mean is that we don’t demand that they change and we don’t accuse them of being unworthy. Because they cannot open up their capacity for love through an act of will and to challenge them to prove their worthiness is only to strengthen the lock which holds them bound.