A lot of people talk about unconditional love as the gold standard for loving someone. You choose or decide to love someone and then you adhere to that personal choice no matter how the other person looks, responds to you, or treats you.
It's a spiritual practice at its core and a beautiful practice - and yes, it can be a real practice - especially when the other person doesn't behave how your ego wants them to.
The same can be extended to giving. Or what I'm dubbing "unconditional giving" - the art of giving to someone that which you love, without requiring them to be or do anything in particular in return.
This is in stark contrast to transactional relating - or relating someone under a thinly diguised form of control and the anticipation that you will get something back at a future time as a result of your giving.
Over the past few years I've practiced "unconditional giving" by giving away, again and again, ALL of my possessions. I would acquire the things I loved - clothes, essential oils, technology - items of the best quality I could find. And then if someone said "I love your jacket" I made it a contract with myself to give them that thing - right there on the spot, no questions asked, nothing asked in return.
It allowed me to honor others as I do myself (see the Golden Rule) as well as observe my attachments and any pockets of scarcity that my ego was projecting into my world.
There are as of yet few manifestations of unconditional giving that I've seen in the wild, but I just ran across one called Helium Grant, which seems to be a great example of this new type of consciousness that's starting to spread into the modern world.
Unconditional love, unconditional sex, unconditional giving - I consider them all the highest forms spiritual practices. Has anyone tried something like this before?