Is this love? (Part 1)
“Is this love that I'm feeling?
Is this the love that I've been searching for?
Is this love, or am I dreaming?
This must be love 'cause it's really got a hold on me
A hold on me”
Hello dear ones,
Do you know this old song by Whitesnake? I’ve embarked on quite a big exploration, as you can tell. In the coming newsletters, I will dive deep into the subject of myths we unknowingly hold about love, in the hope that we will discover together what remains when they are gone.
It wouldn’t be controversial to start with the following statement:
We live in a world that, on balance, does not operate out of love.
If you disagree with me on this one, you need not read further and I would love to hear from you.
If you have the same impression and wonder why that is, I invite you to investigate with me. I have no answers yet, but I’ve embarked on this inquiry wholeheartedly and would love to share the journey with you.
If you share the same feeling, yet you feel there is no point looking at this - “what can we change anyway” kinda thinking - stay with me. These newsletters are for you. The answer is so much. It takes a tiny candle to dispel the darkness in a place that has never seen light before.
I’ve taken nothing for granted in this inquiry and am open to being challenged on every statement that I will make. Please challenge me. I also feel personally very confronted by it, so if that’s your feeling, you are not alone. As always. I’ve used my own experience and self-discovery as the basis to understand the world or others.
I will start by looking into what love is NOT, but I (we) have been conditioned to believe it is.
And before I get into philosophical discussions with some of you, I am not speaking of the absolute unconditional love that the scriptures and sages point to as our true nature. I know nothing about that.
I’m speaking about the raw and messy love that is the fabric of our relationship with ourselves and others.
At the root, we operate from a mistake about what is loving
I’m going to fail at the task of defining what love is for now and start backwards. Over the last 2-3 years, I was repeatedly confronted with what love was not, yet I believed it to be.
I personally (and sadly) caused a lot of suffering, unknowingly operating from a mistake. The more I looked around, the more I saw that the mistake was not only mine - it is conditioned, passed down generations, embodied deeply in our cells, centuries-old and widely spread. It’s a collective filter, through which we view the world.
In other words, we operate from a lie that goes unquestioned. And, with the best of our intentions, we cause suffering to ourselves and others in the name of this lie.
Love is not sacrifice.
We’ve heard this one before, but have we really heard it? In the Eastern European culture I come from, doing everything for the children, swallowing emotions not to rock the boat, doing the emotional labour for a whole house, accommodating beyond physical needs, working hard to exhaustion to earn rest, sacrificing your own family life to look after elderly parents and on and on…is simply part of what is expected.
And it’s not confined to that region. In the West, we carry that same sacrificial lamb energy wherever we go. We burn out at work, we overfunction in relationships, we overstay, we overextend. It is woven into the fabric of the religious myths we carry (even if we ourselves are not religious).
It looks like love. Maybe it even feels like love.
It isn’t. It is fear. Fear of guilt, fear of being ostracized and seen as a bad person, fear of being selfish, too much, unkind, unlovable, fear of not knowing who we are if we stopped working tirelessly.
It often lives in the system as a quiet resentment or an autoimmune disease, a chronic exhaustion, a mysterious migraine, a stubborn anaemia. The body is helplessly trying to say: “Love doesn’t require sacrifice. It never did.”
And while it is somewhat easy to eventually see the damaging effect it has on the one who is sacrificing, it is a little more difficult to swallow the fact that it causes damage to everyone else involved.
You wonder how? In our sacrifice and overfunctioning, we are maintaining systems - family, work, relationships - that are dysfunctional to begin with. We kick the can down the road, but the can is broken and barely rolling. We protect others from difficult truths that they will, one way or another, eventually have to face and that delay has never helped anyone. We carry emotional, physical, mental burdens for another, robbing them from the opportunity to mature and grow throug the experience. We stay in control by doing so. In other words, we help sustain a lie. And love is not a lie.
Love is not sweetly accommodating of what is unloving.
Seems obvious? Not to me. Many of us have the tendency to explain away unkind behaviour and stay for it. “It is so-and-so’s trauma”, “it’s because of their childhood wounds”, “they are going through a rough time”, “it wasn’t intentional”.
Feels and looks like love? It isn’t. While all of it may be true, staying for the behaviour is rooted in fear, often serving a different agenda and ultimately an unloving thing to do. First, towards ourselves, but also, and this is hard to see, towards the person causing the pain.
Having clean and clear boundaries with what doesn’t feel right (without even calling it harm) and removing ourselves if needed 1) is self-care and self-love 2) protects other people involved, including children, other family members, co-workers, friends 3) holds a loving but harsh mirror to the person causing it and gives them a chance to reflect, adjust and repair.
Leaving isn’t easy. Saying no isn’t easy. It brings up a host of uncomfortable feelings, championed by fear and guilt. Yet it is so loving.
Love is not helping people out of the consequences of their own actions, nor is it absolving people of responsibility.
This one really looks like love, but it isn’t. Responsibility and self-responsibility are aspects of love. They are aspects of us growing up and learning the Law of Cause and Effect of this universe.
Helping someone out of a mess they created on their own may look beautiful on the surface and there might be a place for it too, but not before they’ve learned their lesson. Not before they’ve sincerely taken responsibility. Otherwise, we rob them from a precious opportunity to grow.
If we examine why we have the impulse to extend a helping hand, we would discover strange motivations - “I don’t want to watch them suffer”, “That makes me a good [mother, father, brother, friend, person]”, “It keeps the ball rolling without too much chaos” etc.
Well…none of it is FOR the other person, is it? In the long run, what supports the other person is the ability to admit mistakes, the sensitivity to feel their effect on others and the environment and the responsibility to correct them.
Love is not a commodity.
Oh, this one…we all seem to do it. We withdraw love when we are deeply hurt or disappointed. Often, it takes a long time and repeated hurt before we get there, but eventually the shoe drops and the heart closes.
Love is simpler here too: “I love you and this hurts”. It doesn’t mean staying, it doesn’t mean shutting down either, it certainly doesn’t mean punishing or withholding love. It means meeting the grief, impossibility and helplessness of the situation with a wide open heart.
Easy to say, oh so difficult to do. Perhaps a silly and impossible ideal of mine, but I dream of a better world - first for myself and then for all of us.
So dream on.
To be continued.
What do you think?
If the subject touches or confronts you, I would love to hear from you.
Begin Again| Spring Yoga and Self-Discovery Retreat
Monchique, Portugal, Mar 20 - 27, 2027
Come back to the essential. Clean the slate. Refill your cup. Begin Again.
Prices starting from €1,440. Enjoy a 10% Early Bird discount by Oct 1.
It’s been a while since I last offered a retreat at beautiful Bodhi Bhavan and I’m very happy to return to our retreat home next year. My last 2-3 years have been an intense and it seems I am not the only one. Something is going on at the collective level. It has been a beautiful, but also tiring transition.
I have planned this retreat as a space to truly rest, refill our cup and nourish our whole being. I’ve dreamt it as a new beginning - a chapter yet to be written. A journey of simplicity, of self-care, of sweet landing after the storm. A kind embrace that so many of us need right now, including me.
If you feel like taking a break of your busy life for a week, taking good loving care of your body, cleaning your diet, rooting into movement and meditation, following a rhythm where you don’t have to think about anything and simply and deeply coming back to yourself, this retreat is for you. Welcome on the mat.
1:1 Sessions With Iri
These sessions are for you if you…
Are reflecting deeply and doing the “work”, yet something within you remains unresolved. You are weighted down by an unnamable load
Feel stuck in your circumstances, trapped in an old version of yourself, but the new you hasn’t yet emerged
Notice relational patterns of tirelessly working for love and hopelessly failing at receiving it
Have some intuition that you are not the victim, nor is anyone else to blame and life is mirroring back something important to you. You want the truth, even if uncomfortable.