The Institute for Love and Time (TILT) launched a web app to help people practice unconditional love for their whole selves—past, present, and future. “It’s a self-guided tour through your own process of becoming more unconditionally loving and loving yourself unconditionally,” says project director Dr. Julia Mossbridge. She defines unconditional love as “feeling loved and loving without the need for anything to change.”
The website is timemachine.love and here’s how it works:
- Rate your well-being and hopefulness. Every time you visit it, you’ll be prompted to use sliders to report on your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, as well as how hopeful you’re feeling. The idea is that you visit every day and the program creates a “hope map,” showing how your level of hope evolves over time and as you use the website.
- Record a voice message for your future self to listen to later. You can respond to a prompt about your past, present, or future, or do your own thing.
- Return to the site the following day to hear from your “past self.” You’ll be notified that you have a message and encouraged to listen to it with love.
- After three days, you gain access to the Meditation Tent: a digital space to listen to self-compassion focused mantras from the The Institute for Love and Time team or record your own.
- After another three days, you gain access to the Hope Garden. Here you can plant digital seeds of hope and nurture them with whatever they need to thrive. You can also plant seeds in the community garden where you can see and water others’ seeds of hope, or record messages of support and congratulations to their future selves.
- Build a supportive online community. With support from the app developers, you can also create a closed community garden for a specific group, like a support group for a particular mental health concern, or a group for people who live in the same location. In a closed group, you can nurture and interact with the hopes and messages from people you know and can relate to.
