Dear ones,
Here is Part III of my little exploration of what Love is not, but we often believe it to be.
Before I begin, I want to address an important point. Someone replied to last week’s letter, rightfully asking why I am shooting down positivity when there is so much abuse and negativity happening in the world.
Good point.
I didn’t address the obvious, because it is obvious - physical or emotional abuse, conscious lying, strategic manipulation, coercion, oppression or other intentional damage…is not love. I wouldn’t offend, nor surprise anyone if I said so.
Although I don’t condone these behaviours at all, the good part about them is their obviousness. Because they are so clearly unloving, we can call them out in ourselves and others and do something about them.
Here, I am mostly looking at the unintentional damage we cause to ourselves and others, thinking it is loving. My intention is to shine light on centuries-old confusions that create other unloving ripples in the world, with the best of our intentions. I do so because we are often in the dark about them and therefore stand no change to repair, apologise, discover what acting out of love truly is.
Here we go for the last myth debunking stage.
Love is not blind
We’ve all heard this one. It’s so casually thrown around, often referring to the pink glasses we wear in the early stages of getting to know someone.
Love is not blind at all, neither is it dogmatic or judgemental, but it is discerning.
We all know the trap of having overlooked early signals that something didn’t feel right in the hope that there was “happily ever after”. There never was - we projected our internal ideal of beauty and goodness onto someone else, while looking away from the aspects of them (and ourselves) that didn’t fit that ideal. This self-deceipt is not love - it’s limerance, projection, childhood imagination.
Love is simpler than that. It unfolds over time and it grows with it.
We also all know the tendency to try and hold on to the pink glasses, even though they’ve started coming off and the truth has started peeping in. The next stage usually goes in the direction of trying to keep the ideal alive - if only we communicated better, if only we found the right words to make them understand and see us, if only we could work it out, if only we could change them to make them fit our internal ideal, then it would be “happily ever after”. It won’t. Sadly, that’s not love either. That’s control.
Love is simpler than that. “I see that you are not who I imagined you to be and that hurts. I can hold myslef in that pain.”
If the rift between the truth and our ideal is big and painful enough, we start doubting our perceptions and overriding our body’s wisdom in the hope that the other person may still be who we imagined them to be. “Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe I’m inflexible or overthinking. Maybe I can go to therapy and work on myself to become more [fill the gap].” Well, that’s not love at all - it’s self-abandonment to avoid the painful truth of the situation.
Love is simpler than that. It says: “This feels off and unsafe for me and it demands of me to take hard decisions”. No need to understand why, no need to justify, no need to doubt our perceptions or make ourselves wrong for having them.
We also know the other side of the self-doubt coin: the tendency to judge and condemn, proclaim what is right and what is wrong, once the pink glasses come off completely and irreversibly. Again, it feels like we are telling the truth. It surely feels like honouring ourselves, validating our experience, getting our power back. Finally, self-love? No. It’s actually anger, which feels better and more empowering than the grief and helplessness that we would otherwise have to feel.
Love is simpler than that. It says “I love you and this breaks my heart.”
Finally, we rewrite the script. We tell a story where we were good and victimized. Someone else was bad and abusive. Or we spiritualise it all as a wonderful lesson that we feel grateful for, however painful it was. Vulnerability and wisdom? No - another little loop to avoid responsibility for wearing pink glasses in the first place. Another little attempt to shore up our ego in public instead of lovingly holding our broken heart in private.
Love is simpler than that. It says “I surrender”. No silver lining, no understanding, no heroic story to tell. Plenty of grief to feel and wisdom to receive in that surrender.
Love is not staying small, pacifying, being zen, needing nothing.
I know…Woudln’t it be so nice if the ideal of the Buddha amidst a turbulent and exciting world was achievable? I have yet to meet someone who is naturally in that state at all times.
If you have the tendency or hold this ideal, I invite you to examine yourself - does equanimity take tremendous effort to maintain it or is it truly natural? Because only a lie takes effort to maintain. Are you a hermit by nature, or do you actively withdraw from the world to preserve your peace? Because peace that can be disturbed is not peace. Do you truly need nothing, or do you make yourself small because taking space and having needs was once too painful?
Love is love. None of that effort.
Love is not taxing, exhausting, unsafe.
If you find yourself working for love and safety, going through cycles of fear and relief, trying to regulate your nervous system to be able to better handle another, it certainly isn’t love. It is attachment to something old and painful that needs all your love and attention. This one deserves a whole newsletter in its own right, because it is such a big topic. But simply put, if it doesn’t fill your cup and provide the nourishing soil for you to blossom like a flower, it isn’t love. If it makes you survive, rather than thrive, it isn’t love.
Finally, love is not a lie. Not even a white one.
Truth and love are intrinsically related or different sides of the same coin. Even when it really hurts, even when it dismantles your facade (and especially then), even when your only goal is to protect another…
Truth is the (often painful) gateway to love. Deceit and self-deceit are the not-so-willing gate keepers. And that goes far…How often do we spare the truth not to rock the boat? How often do we withhold information to save face? How often do we present the partial truth as a fact to gain sympathy or save an internal positive image of ourselves? How often do we smile, when we actually feel aggression? How often do we stay when our body screams “run”? How often do we defend our subjective version of events as the truth of what happened? How often do we lie…outright?
I left the truth for the end, but it is actually the beginning and the underlying thread to all the points I made before. Love is not a lie and we often choose to live by lies - it feels easier, safer, and protective of our identity. The lies are often so well hidden that we are unaware of them. Century-old blind spots that no one dared to investigate. Convenient definitions passed down generations or promoted by certain parts of society that benefit from the confusion.
We put on a loving mask and go through life like that. Many masks create a masked world. Meanwhile, the disallowed aspects behind our collective mask are running a pretty unloving show that we all observe and feel horrified by. But it starts with us.
Deep down, we know. We know that something is off. We know it takes tremendous effort to maintain the mask. We know the pain of being loved for the mask, and the belief that we won’t be loved for the messy reality behind it.
We also know the mask fails, often with our close ones. And we long for something real.
That longing is the starting point. And in a way, it is the end of the charade.
So what to do if you want to live a more loving life?
For the sweet and simple, yet so hard to swallow recipe for this whole disaster, I’ll see you in the next newsletter.
Much Love,
Iri
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.
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.