Dear ones,
In this newsletter, you will find:
Part IV of my musings about the controversial topic of love and in particular, how to discover what love truly is.
An invitation to come back to yourself and nourish your whole being at our Spring Equinox yoga and self-discovery retreat.
A reminder that the 1:1 sessions online are always available for you if you need support that isn’t conventional therapy.
I finished my previous newsletter with the following section. With the risk of boring some of you, I feel the need to repeat it. What follows, comes from it.
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 how to live a life of love?
I decided to start with “how to”, rather than “what”, because I hope to guide you to your own experience.
In a way, the solution is simple and yet so hard - the work of a lifetime:
Tell the truth, to yourself first and then to everyone else.
As part of that, acknowledge the loss of love in our early years (and in the world at large)
Grieve that loss and heal the wound
Act in love.
Step 1: Tell the truth
being a glass house
My mentor Jared Franks once told me to imagine being a glass house and to go through life like that.
I didn’t understand straight away the difficulty or the power of what he was asking me to do. In a glass house, you can see everything from outside. He was inviting me to live as though everyone could see the full content of my mind, the full whirlpool of my emotions, all the parts that I was trying to hide - the good, the bad and the ugly. Not as an endless disclosure - it is not about disclosing anything to anyone at all - but just as an energetic stance. The stance of having nothing to hide.
Being a glass house, which simply means being real, is perhaps the hardest spiritual practice that exists. It confronts you with all the wounded old parts of yourself that you wished you could silence. The vengeful ones, the angry ones, the destructive ones, the manipulative ones, the needy ones, the hurt and vulnerabe ones. All these little inner children are finally brought into light one by one.
While the invitation is to be transparent to the world, what you are actually doing first and foremost is becoming transparent to yourself (for most of us, for the first time ever). See, most of us lost love early in life as we were socialised to abandon certain parts of ourselves in order to preserve connection with our early environments and caregivers. In other words, most of us grew up with parents, teachers, and other kids who had little true capacity to love, because they had not been truly loved either. In other words, we very early on, traded authenticity for connection. But in that process, we lost self-esteem and love, while gaining a life-long facade.
Being a glass house reverses that early injury. It brings up all these wounded aspects of you - to be seen, loved, disciplined, grown and accepted by the only person who CAN do that job - YOU. And that IS self-love.
Integrity
Being a glass house requires you to be honest within and without - in full integrity. No saving face, no internal justifications, no hiding from your own shadow, no pretending, no lies, no games. You are asked to bring the totality of you to the table, including the not so glamorous aspects. It’s incredibly scary. Most of us think that we could never be loved for who we truly are and yet the discovery is the opposite - honesty and humility are faces of love.
Being a glass house removes all your props, your costumes, the roles you play in different settings: the competent one, the people pleaser, the helper, the fixer, the provider, the listener, the emotional shock absorber…If you want to live in love, these survival strategies, as old as the world, all have to go. Very uncomfortable - it faces you with the question of who you would be without your facade. Having the courage to ask this question and live the answer IS love.
Being a glass house slowly erodes the facade and in doing so, exposes you to discomfort, rejection and criticism. Many people around you are invested in your roles more than in your wellbeing and that’s a very painful realisation to go through. Old “friends” are confronted with your authenticity and prefer the co-dependent version of you that hid all the naughty parts to preserve connection. Sadly, this was never true connection. Happily, we are all able to bear the pain of this rejection and still hold ourselves in our totality: messy, flawed, growing. This IS love.
Being a glass house is also wonderful. It removes all the shame, self-judgement, self-loathing and fear. It is an incredibly healing exercise. It releaves you of all the effort of being someone else, all the shoulds and musts that you carry from your conditioning. And while some people go, the ones who stay are far more loving and accepting of your totality than you ever imagined. It brings true intimacy and friendship built on safety and truth. It makes you more accepting of yourself and of another. It inspires people around you to be naturally themselves, which is so freeing. And that IS love.
Being a glass house asks of you to admit “I love you” even when it really hurts, even when people break your heart, even if it feels so unjust and unfair, even if your impulse is to preserve yourself and hide or punish, even when the habit is to withdraw love. “I love you and this hurts”. That’s love.
If you wonder whether I’ve achieved this glass house business, the answer is no. I am still continuously learning the harsh lessons of my (self-)deception and slowly putting glass windows in the thick walls of my house. I also see the beauty of the parts of myself I have already integrated and the joy and authenticity that it brought into my life. That gives me inspiration to keep going, even if it takes forever.
Step 2: Acknowledge what was missing
Love as an internal homebase
To me, love is what remains when all the above movements of the ego stop. Love reveals itself effortlessly and spontaneously when we stop trying to get it, when we stop trying to keep it, when we stop trying to deal in it (“I am loving towards you if you are loving towards me.”), when we stop trying to resist it, when we stop trying to control it, when we stop trying to save a lie, when we stop trying to protect our hearts from heartbreak, when we stop being someone else we think is more lovable.
When we stop the effort, then there is love. Contrary to what we thought, it often first shows up as emptiness, as a collapse of everything we thought we were, as a surrender to the situation as it is, rather than as we wished it to be, as a deep grief and heartbreak for the love we didn’t receive or lost in childhood, finally, as a powerful openness and tenderness. No, it doesn’t fit the Disney images of romantic limerence and “happily ever after” that we’ve all been fed for years. “Baby, don’t hurt me” also doesn’t fly. But that was never love and it is time to let it go.
Once the grief washes our hearts, another face of love shows up - a safe fertile soil that nourishes us, supports us and helps us bloom into our soul’s potential. I call this the Internal Homebase. And as I say these words, I am conscious of just how many of us have never really had this experience. How many of us grew up in volatile unsafe environments that made us survive, rather than thrive. How many of us closed their hearts early to survive chaos, neglect and abuse. How many of us never developed the internal home base of love that allows us to meet the ups and downs of life from a safe place within.
If this is you, know that love is not lost - it is still within you and has always been your birthright. Recognising its early loss, naming what you missed and grieving what you did not receive is the biggest step of your homecoming journey to love.
How to take this step in my next newsletter.
With 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.