Is this love? (Part II)
Hello dear ones,
In this letter, you will find
Part II of my reflections on common myths about love and (in this particular newsletter), myths about self-love
Last 10 days of Early Bird discount for our yoga and self-discovery retreat in March
A gentle reminder that I continue to offer 1:1 sessions online and in person
IS THIS LOVE (Part II)
Here is part II of my exploration of what is love, or rather, what isn’t love, but we often believe it to be.
In part I, I rattled a bit the common confusions between love and sacrifice, love and absolving of responsibility, love and self-erasure or tolerance of unloving behaviour, love as a reward/punishment system. These are confusions we often learnt at home through our parents. They are centuries-old errors in love, passed down, solidified and even rewarded by our social structures.
We can group them in team
“codependence masquerading as love”
To see them and become conscious of them in our close ones (especially our parents) is already a big thing.
To see them infused in the fabric of our society and even our ideals of what a good man/woman is, is another thing.
To see them ingrained in our own DNA and our own behaviour, with the best of intentions, is a huge blow.
To stop furthering them is, of course, a totally different ball game. It exposes the pain and fear that they’ve been carefully protecting for generations.
The task seems small, but it is oh so big. We all feel the urge to console a friend immediately and remove their pain, instead of letting them feel it in our presence and take responsibility for their own situation. We all want to protect our children from the pain and disappointment of the world or their own mistakes, instead of letting them face the bitter truth and consequences. We all prefer to take care of another and feel valuable, than face our feelings of helplessness and worthlessness. We often prefer to justify away harmful behaviour and find excuses - facing the truth and grief of the situation, then walking away, requires great courage and capacity to weather guilt.
Yes…it is indeed all rooted in fear, not love. And if we stop ourselves in our tracks, we would have to feel this fear. Weirdly, that is the medicine. Weirdly, lovingly holding ourselves in that fear and pain IS what changes everything.
In this newsletter, I’m exploring the next selection of the love show.
Positivity masquerading as (self)-love
Here we go.
Love is not going with the flow, swimming in bliss, cruising through life, staying positive
I know - I am going to upset the ‘new age’ crowd, as well as the eternal optimists with this letter.
Life is dual - there is good and bad, hardship and ease, flow and blockage, beauty and ugliness, pain and pleasure. One cannot exist without the other.
To ignore the hardship and focus on the bliss is one sure way of causing tremendous suffering (to those around you to begin with, but ultimately to yourself too).
Having a positive inclination may be healthier and more pleasant to be around than having a negative one. But if it takes effort, adventure planning and cultivating a mindset, if it carefully edits the contents of life to suit your positive filter on it, it’s not real. In most cases, positivity is a cover-up operation for avoidance.
The drive for positivity is future-oriented and a full-on escape of what is right here, in this moment - often good and bad, messy and beautiful, boring and enlivening. This causes tremendous disconnection - from life, from the intimacy of this moment and from others too.
If you are that positive guy or girl, I encourage you to ask your close ones for feedback - do they feel safe and seen with you? Do they feel they can be themselves in front of you, or do they edit the hard bits in a painful psychological surgery to fit you? Do they call you when they need a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on? Ultimately, do they feel intimately connected with you?
More importantly, if you are really honest, do you feel intimately connected with anything at all? Or is your life a passing movie and a huge effort to engineer the next episode of fun, abundance and passing joy?
If that touches a note in you (and I’m sorry for that), you may discover that for you, the deepest love and connection is through facing the pain, boredom, discomfort and tragedy that is ALSO here, in this moment, part of life.
Love is not “embodying your Inner queen or king”, pampering yourself, offering yourself a self-care treat
Self-care, self-empowerment, self-nurturing can be so crucial for those of us who have a self-punishing and self-abusive tendency. I don’t completely want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
After the pendulum swung for so long in the opposite direction, it is only natural that it also swings in this one. Still, I can’t help but see that this is so often misunderstood as the final (and only) destination. It isn’t - it is a temporary nurturing and healing stage. The trouble is, it has created a whole wellness industry that no longer serves as medicine, but rather as an addiction to painkillers.
With the risk of disappointing many, when the pendulum finally gets back to the middle (if you allow it), there are moments of self-care and self-empowerment as punctual healing balm for old wounds. There are moments of self-doubt and self-disempowerment as echos of old pain that needs our love. And this is where the main difference lies - there is not so much preoccupation with self altogether. We react spontaneously to what we or others need, we respond naturally to what is in front of us - difficult or easy. There is no special archetype to embody, nor any preoccupation with such images - neither queen, nor king. Love, and true self-love, is quiet and effortless. It is rather what remains, when all images, archetypes and efforts fall away.
Love is not a self-improvement project, nor is it complacent about the state of our soul
Again, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
At some point in our lives, we become aware of certain patterns that keep repeating and we soften our tendancy to call them “accidents” or the fault of others. We understand it is our responsibility to attend to them, heal and change our behaviour. We seek help, we embark on a journey of self-discovery, maturation and emotional healing. Yes, you guessed it right - here, I am referring to those of us who have the tendency to self-reflect, want to improve and go to different therapeutic and healing modalities.
However, I also see something else that comes with that beautiful capacity to self-reflect. A lot of the people I’ve seen in sessions have a subtle belief that how they are right now, with all their flaws and quirks of character, isn’t lovable. Worse even, it isn’t loved. And therefore, they need to fix those flaws to earn the love that is just behind the corner…if only they were better.
As I spell it out like that, you may begin to feel how unloving, in fact self-loathing, this whole predisposition is. Again, it is often centuries-old, rooted in religious beliefs of sin and virtue or family education of reward and punishment. It seems so honourable to want to be better, noble, humble. On the surface, it looks like love.
It really isn’t. See, love doesn’t care where we are on our journey - beginning, middle or a hypothetical end - it loves us anyway. Love doesn’t hold the notion of sin of to be punished - it speaks of unawareness and innoncent mistakes to be corrected.
Of course, the opposite tendency - “I am perfect as I am “, “There is nothing to be worked on”, “Other’s reactions are their problem and they need to seek help” is very far from (self-)love. It’s more in the direction of lack of care, accountability, self-reflection and…frankly narcissism. But that’s for another newsletter.
I’ll pause here. As always, I’d 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.