Real Love Asks Something of You

Look here, my love, and see what you need to see

There is a line I keep returning to -

Look here, my love, and see what you need to see.

It has such tenderness and yet it is unflinching - two qualities that we find so rarely hand in hand. It lands in the heart so differently from either the softness that asks nothing, or the dismantling that forgets to be kind.

I think it is because it is a different kind of love than the one we have been sold.

——

Most of us, at some point on this path of self-discovery, have put on the dress.

You know the one. The floaty one, the one that makes you feel like a goddess. We’ve bought the crystals, convinced ourselves that they can heal us. Gone to the cacao ceremony. Admired the carefully curated altar. Done the digital courses with their soothing music and promises of miraculous, effort-free change.

And I want to say clearly: there is nothing wrong with putting on the dress. I did, and felt very pretty. I once ran a half-day yoga workshop on finding your inner goddess. I meant every word of it at the time.

The hunger within us that reaches for the dress is real. The reaching itself is the beginning of something - the first intimation that there is more, that the ordinary surface of things is not the whole story, that something in you is awake and looking. Without that hunger, nothing starts. The dress is how many of us first learn we are looking for something.

The problem is not the dress. The problem is when the dress gets mistaken for the destination. When the symbol gets sold as the substance. When the industry steps in and says - here, this is it, this is what you were looking for, £15 please - and the woman, hungry and relieved, believes it. Because nobody told her that the real thing would eventually require her to stand in front of a mirror with nothing on.

When I read old novels, like Jane Eyre and Persuasion, what is clear is that people then examined themselves far more ruthlessly; their motives, their actions. They questioned how they might grow by looking at the darker places. Today we have a much narrower view of self-love that doesn’t allow for the uncomfortable.

And at the same time, what gets sold as unconditional love in the wellness-spirituality space is, if you look closely, love with one very large condition: that it never asks anything of you that hurts. That it holds you, validates you, keeps you comfortable.

Which is not nothing. Being held matters. Being seen matters. But it is not unconditional love. It is love with the darkness edited out. Love that has been made safe and warm and digestible - and in becoming those things, has quietly lost its power to transform.

A cup of tea with a spoonful of sugar is a generous, soothing offering. Warm, sweet, requiring nothing but the ability to sit and sip it. There is nothing wrong with a cup of tea. But you cannot be transformed by it. Real transformation doesn’t cost you money. It costs who you thought you were.

There is a goddess in the tradition of India who does not offer the cup of tea.

She is not cruel - cruelty would be easier to refuse. She is loving, in the way that the truth is loving: completely unwilling to let you stay comfortable in what is false. She is Kali, Goddess of time, death, destruction and transformation. She is fierce, protective, and liberating power.

She whispers, leaning close so that her lips brush your ear: look here, my love, and see what you need to see.

And what she strips away is not you. It is everything you have been carrying that was never you - the roles, the performances, the spiritual identities, the carefully constructed self that looks like awakening but is still managed, still curated, still safe. The version of you that has learned all the right language, does all the right practices, and still, somehow, remains fundamentally unchanged.

The dismantling is the love.

The love that asks something of you has been quietly removed from what gets sold. And what remains - comfortable, validating, costless - gets presented as the whole thing. Which is why people can spend years doing the work and come out the other side essentially the same person in different clothes. The love they were offered never asked enough of them.

Growth cannot happen inside the pretty dress. It is too tight for what is trying to emerge.

——

I am not writing this to make you feel foolish for the rituals, the courses, the workshops.

I am writing it because I trust you to know the difference. Because you have felt something real - and it all leads to the place where the dress has to come off.

Where the love stops being comfortable and starts being true.

That cost is enormous. Nobody warned you. And the reason most people will choose the £15 indefinitely is not because they are foolish - it is because nobody made the real cost feel survivable.

So let me say it clearly: it is survivable.

On the other side of the stripping is not emptiness. It is not punishment. It is just you. Undecorated. Which is both more terrifying and more real than anything the dress could offer.

——

The kindness is inside the asking.

The love that asks something of you is still love.

The Beloved who shows you what you need to see is not your enemy. She is the one who loves you enough to refuse to offer you less than you are. She is showing you what you need to see, and gently pushing you into the darkness to face it.

The love that strips is the love that knows what you are made of. It’s not the dress. It is what is underneath it - you, raw, naked, fully what you were meant to be.

And surely it is worth every uncomfortable moment of the uncovering.

Look here, my love. And see what you need to see.

———

You can begin with my free guided audio practices for returning to the body, nervous system, and the quiet wisdom beneath the noise.