How do you cultivate unconditional love?

[Sacred Fool]

I'm working on my heart chakra via meditation. I've always been able to feel my lower chakras, even before I was aware of what they are, so this approach works for me. Otherwise, perhaps just plain meditation without a focus on any particular chakra. As someone else said, even 1 minute is something.

Sometimes the work leads us layer by layer, and sometimes we find we are holding in some layers of our heart that which is not at all what we expect to find there.

A couple of years ago I was working off and on, clearing stuff before I got out of bed in the morning, and I felt a fiercely directed bolt of hatred and anger shoot out from my heart.  Needless to say, I was surprised and just a bit concerned.  Some time later I asked someone about it who can read such things and was told that it was concentrated energy I used in past lives when in battle.  I asked, what was it doing in my heart?  I was told, "That's where you put it."  I found that slightly amusing in its simplicity.

I later thought about how the heart focuses energy in some ways more potently than the chakras below, and I thought of the necessity of having your heart plowed into your work if you're regularly exposed to, and responsible for, repulsive acts of horror.

This is all to say, you're difficulty in accessing your heart may, in some sense, be a self-protective measure.  Ergo, some degree of gratitude might be in order, surprisingly...perhaps. 

To any who feels this might apply to them, I might suggest that focusing for some time on cultivating transcendent, overarching forgiveness could be a useful way to approach the general matter.  Forgiveness is surely a form of love, and if you encounter your own potent shadow along the way, it's a blessed, grace-filled vibration to be able to call upon as a way to help balance one's energetic structure...if you're into that sort of thing.