On Learning to Love Like Santa Teresa de Jesús
“This is love indeed, not like a miserable earthly affection.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Teresa of Ávila lately.
In her patience, her clarity, her discipline.
Her balance feels rare. I admire her devotion, but also her humanity.
This October, I’ve been rebuilding myself in ways I hadn’t before.
I’ve been quieter, more intentional. I’ve started to put myself first. I’ve been opening myself to new things, new people, and new ways of being.
And still, there’s one thing I keep coming back to: how to love effectively.
She loved God with the same intensity that most people only dream of feeling once in their lifetime. Yet she never let that love consume her; she shaped it, refined it, made it serve peace.
That’s what moves me most about her: her discipline of love.
Her capacity to burn without losing form.
Her belief that love, to be divine, must first be ordered — not repressed, but directed toward something higher than desire itself.
“Water is a strange thing! We die for want of it, yet too much of it kills.”
Teresa compares love to water: it sustains, purifies, revives — but too much of it, and we drown.
She knew the ache of longing, the kind that keeps you awake, trembling with the desire to be closer to what you love. But she also knew that uncontrolled passion, even when pure, can destroy the container meant to hold it.
So she learned restraint.
The holy kind.
“If He gives a deep draught, He makes the soul capable of drinking it.”
She believed God enlarges the soul before filling it.
That love isn’t meant to kill you, it’s meant to strengthen you.
And that endurance, is the truest form of devotion.
Love and Discipline
Teresa saw discipline not as punishment but as a way to keep love sacred.
She called it mortification, the act of subduing the body so the soul could be free.
To her, this meant not giving every feeling a stage, not feeding every ache with attention, not letting comfort or sorrow rule the spirit.
“Believe me, daughters, when once we begin to subdue our wretched bodies, they do not trouble us so much.”
She reminds us that peace begins where indulgence ends.
The more we give in to the body the louder it grows.
But once we learn silence, the noise softens.
Once we learn patience, love deepens.
Love That Doesn’t Fear Endings
Teresa’s greatest lesson might be that love doesn’t die when it loses its form.
She wrote that the soul which truly loves “does not cling to what a breath can deprive us of.”
To love like her is to stop fearing loss.
It’s to understand that the essence of love isn’t possession — it’s continuation.
That what was real between two souls doesn’t vanish when time, death, or distance intervene; it becomes invisible, but not gone.
“This is love indeed, not like a miserable earthly affection.”
She contrasts divine love with human attachment but maybe they aren’t opposites. Maybe divine love is what human love becomes once we learn to let go.
To love someone or something enough to release it, to bless it, to wish it peace beyond your reach… that’s the beginning of sacred love.
In Our Day to Day
We don’t live in convents, but we live with noise.
We live in constant thirst for validation, affection, meaning.
And still, her voice feels relevant to me and to many others.
We can practice her wisdom every day:
by not letting desire become obsession,
by choosing gentleness over dramatization,
by loving others without the expectation of return.
Restraint, in our world, might look like not texting when you’re lonely.
Or not turning pain into performance.
Or not letting your longing make you small.
Is to love fully, but calmly.
To keep your tenderness intact.
To see love not as something that conquers, but as something that disciplines, humbles, and endures.
She reminds us that love can be both passionate and peaceful.
That devotion can exist without noise.
That longing can purify instead of destroy.
There is something so sacred in loving that divinely, in finding a balance between fire and silence, between presence and surrender.
And maybe that’s what we’re all learning,
to let love refine us without consuming us.
To love with restraint not out of fear, but out of reverence.
Can I get a amen?