Love without the BS

Why hearing the L word sometimes feels so cringe

'Compassion’, acrylic on canvas, painted by me

My last piece of writing about the longing for the beloved was like a coming out of the closet moment for me. I spoke to that which I feel defines me the most: love.
And my longing for it.

I always felt that this personality, Kasia, is like a costume I wear because apparently that is what we do here.

The real me — the innermost part of my heart, where I feel God is constantly making love to me — was always hidden. Like an unspoken rule: we talk about everything but that.

As a little girl it was so confusing, like I imagine it was for many of us. I felt the love that we are, fully. I was connected to it deeply. It was the most real thing, so tangible, so alive. Why is no one acknowledging it? Speaking about it? Naming it? Enjoying it? Why is everyone pretending it’s not there?

So I learned to hide that part. Then to dismiss it. Sometimes I even ridiculed it.
Along the way I suffered, like we all do when we feel disconnected from love.

So I tried to fix that. I entered the realm of healing and New Age spirituality. Here the word was finally spoken out loud: LOVE. I got excited. With all my innocence and naivety, I believed I had finally found the way back.

Except that soon the words didn’t match what I was experiencing.

Sometimes in big and obvious ways — gurus talking about oneness while being manipulative, narcissistic, and abusive in reality.

But sometimes it came in small, innocuous acts of absence. Absence of small gestures of human kindness. Like my friends who were practicing heart coherence — genuinely beautiful people — who offered to pick me up from the airport and host me for the night, but did not think to offer me breakfast in the morning after a 20 hour journey. Or another friend who hosted me but did not care to offer me a blanket or to inquire if I am comfortable.

All those moments of the heart being so open, like a flower expecting the warmth of the sun, and instead being met with the lack of it…

It leaves a mark. The heart becomes weary. Now when someone spoke about love, especially the ‘high frequency’ version, I didn’t just buy it. More often than not I cringed. I learned, that some people are very good with words but maybe not as good with actions. And it’s not necessarily mal-intentioned. There is simply a gap between the ideal self — which we have access to through words — and the conditioned self.

That’s a very normal human experience. We all have that gap.

It’s in the honesty about it, in accepting and bringing into wholeness those imperfect parts, that the heart softens and exudes an effortless, natural warmth that is a true signal of its health.

I also learned that sometimes the people who don't call themselves spiritual at all are the most heart embodied humans there are.

So after learning my sobering lessons of discernment in the spiritual marketplace — about what love is and what it isn’t — I started exploring my own heart.

It was like entering an overgrown forgotten temple. And once I did enough of the excavation work, the cleaning, the pulling of weeds, the rebuilding — the temple shone again. Delicate, sacred, profoundly precious. When I am in it, I just want to bow. Tread lightly. I feel melted and in deep silence.

The Sufis say: make your heart as soft as wool. And when it’s happening, it’s an experience of speechlessness. Of utter befuddlement. Of disorientation, because the little self can’t grasp onto anything. Because in fact there is no self anymore.

It feels very different than the love that gets sold to us. Loud and pompous. It feels more quiet and unassuming and utterly disarming in its simplicity.

So once we have this experience of the heart truly coming into its depth and softness — beyond the high-vibe ecstatic harshness of pushing it open, which is so much part of our Western spiritual culture — it becomes difficult to find the words to speak about it.

That’s why my last piece felt like a coming out of the closet. Why I have been longing to talk and write just about love for so long. But I was hiding. Hiding behind Trauma Release, Embodiment, and Nervous System Regulation. All those clever and necessary ways in which we prepare ourselves for the heart.

Hiding because I was afraid to be put in the same box as New Age love. Or religious love. Hiding because I was afraid to be ridiculed, dismissed, judged. Told: who are you to talk about it? You are not Rumi. You are not Jesus. You are not a master. You are still full of imperfections.

Yes. I am not a master, not perfect. That gap between my ideal self and my lived self is real. I still doubt, forget, become heedless. I am still learning how to forgive imperfections — in others and in myself. Still learning how to embody this love.
How to soften.

Like a cranio-sacral therapist once told me: become as soft as if you are blowing a soap bubble. And once you feel you’ve got it, become a hundred times softer still.

But when people ask: if there is a God, why does he let all the bad things happen? — my response has always been different.

Isn’t it obvious that the very state of the world, the fucked-upness and imperfection of it, is proof that God exists?

What other than unconditional love could hold such a world in its embrace?

So my imperfections are the very reason love can be in my heart.

And even though this love, I am speaking of, is so hard to speak about — we must try. Because let me share with you this, my friends: giving yourself permission to speak about this part of you is powerful. It’s like being in love with someone and hiding that person from everyone. Excluding this part of you from your daily life, where actually it belongs the most. Not on a meditation cushion, not in church, not in a retreat…but right there in the midst of it all. Plus…

Living in secrecy costs a lot of energy.

Bringing it out of hiding makes the relationship more solid. Real. It gives it permission to evolve, to grow. It honours it.

So to those who ask: who are you to talk about love?

I am a human.

Isn’t that enough?

If you are longing for genuine companionship on the path, you know where to find me.