*Communicating with Love | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | April 10, 2026*
Last week, I received so many birthday wishes and gifts from you. Gifts, in my language, are new ideas, works of art, books, songs you sent me to listen to. Among them, one reader gifted me a podcast episode. I pressed play. It was an interview with the American writer Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for her massive bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. And that’s how I learned that Gilbert has a beautiful page on Substack called Letters from Love, where she and a vast community of readers write exactly that - letters from love, to themselves.
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What does that mean? Letters that are nothing less than a form of communication with love. With the energy of love, if you will. Or “the entity of love.” Something she herself has been doing for 15 years, and that today thousands of people, inspired by her, do as well - taking a pen and paper, or maybe an iPhone and Notes app, and writing a question at the top of the page in the second person: “Dear Love, what do you want me to know today?” or “Love, what is important for me to understand about myself?” And then surrendering to a free-flowing letter that love writes through them, to themselves.
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At first, I listened with a half-smile. I love channeling (if you haven’t yet listened to my episodes about it, I’ll link them at the end of this column), but I had never thought about channeling love. I also believe that everyone, truly everyone, can channel. And still, I was surprised by how similar the letters were across completely different people - some of whom had never read anyone else’s letters.
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For example, in many of them, love speaks in the plural. It says: “We are with you,” “We are by your side,” “We love you.” Or, again and again, the same idea appears in different wordings: “What is unseen is everything that truly exists,” or in another letter: “The unseen is greater and more vast than anything that can be seen.”
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But what captured my heart most was the way love addresses the people writing to it: with terms of endearment. Not just “my dear,” “angel,” but also “sweet as honey,” “little bunny,” “you sweet, sweet being,” and more and more.
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Gilbert explained in the interview that this is also a way to begin, if it doesn’t come easily. To imagine how love would address you. And if even that doesn’t come easily, she reminds us how effortlessly we come up with endless affectionate nicknames for our dogs and cats, and of course for our children. And how we almost never, ever give ourselves such names. Why is that, really? Here’s a chance to begin.
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So how do we start? Especially if we’ve never practiced channeling before? First of all, Gilbert suggests, don’t think of yourself as someone summoning a spirit. It’s better to think of yourself as someone imagining the voice of love. Even inventing it. She says not to worry - at first, you’re making it up, and at some point, you actually begin to hear a voice from within that you did not invent at all.
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And if you need a kind of gateway into that state, Gilbert suggests reading or listening to something that feels like love to you. It could be music that is love for you, or an articlethat is love. Gilbert herself, for example, reads poems by Mary Oliver to enter that state. Then you write a question at the top of the page: “Love, what do you want me to know?” And then, you write whatever comes, without judgment. Even if it feels like imagination. Even if it feels silly.
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After 15 years and thousands of letters, what can you tell us about this muse of love, the interviewer asks her in the podcast. Is it similar to the muse of creativity, for example?
Oh no, Gilbert says. The muse of creativity demands that you produce, create, realize. It is very demanding. But love is calm. It doesn’t care what you do, and you don’t have to prove yourself. It is simply there. It answers questions like: Am I worth anything at all? Am I wasted? Am I good enough? Is there meaning to life, or am I living a meaningless life?
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At this point I thought about my grandmother, who must have been deeply connected to this entity of love, because she believed that we shouldn’t demand anything from our children. We should love them. And she lived that way. With her, there was space without judgment and without demands - and it was vast. Much larger than her one-and-a-half-room apartment. And at the same time, I thought about all those who grew up without that kind of love. Gilbert herself says she never received this kind of love and that is why, every day when she writes for a few minutes, she feels the love she longed for as a child.
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To close, I want to share a story she mentions about the Dalai Lama and his first visit to the West. It was in the United States, in a room full of people, when a woman asked him a question he could not answer: she asked, what is your response to self-hatred? For long minutes he tried to understand, through his translator, what she meant - whom do you hate? Why? That makes no sense. Why would you hate yourself? Then he turned to the people in the room: do you know what she’s talking about? Of course, they all answered.
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At the end of that visit, he said that two things astonished him during his time in the West: self-hatred and obsessive consumerism.
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Both, Gilbert says, are two sides of the same thing.
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In short, I’m placing links below - to the Letters from Love page, to the podcast I received as a gift, to my previous episodes about channeling. This feels to me like the exact movement I need right now, and maybe you do too - to speak with love instead of with war, to call ourselves by tender names instead of shrinking in the face of what is happening, to speak the opposite language, a quiet inner resistance, and with love.
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Wishing all of us a Shabbat Shalom,
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*