A Dharmic View on Women’s Burnout: Love as Presence, not Performance

Vedic wisdom offers a subtler view. In dharma, love is not measured by how much we do, but by the quality of consciousness we bring to what we do.

When a woman’s care becomes performance, she begins to drain her own life-force — not because her love is wrong, but because her orientation is reversed. She is loving outward first instead of inward through.

The texts describe this shift as moving from attachment (rāga) to clarity (viveka). It’s not detachment in the cold sense, but the freedom to love without losing oneself. The dharmic woman’s love nourishes because it flows from alignment, not exhaustion.

Presence, Not Performance

Many of us grew up equating love with proof — with meals cooked, crises managed, messages answered, birthdays remembered. But the soul never asked for performance; it asks for presence.

Presence doesn’t demand constant availability. It asks only that when you are there, you are truly there — no split attention, no resentment.

A dharmic woman gives through stillness as much as through action. Her steadiness teaches those around her what love feels like when it’s not attached to approval or guilt.

This isn’t selfishness; it’s sustainability. When love becomes clean — free of compulsion — the whole household breathes easier. Burnout dissolves not through retreat from life, but through a wiser rhythm within it.

Reflection:

If your care has started to cost you your peace, pause.

Ask, What would love look like if I were not performing it?

Then let your next act of giving arise from that silence.

Authors note: To be clear, my own children may very appropriately argue I have not mastered consistently offering presence, but it is a work in progress and offers me a more sustainable and hopeful way forward than the performative and extractive pathways I felt I had to adopt which ultimately led to collapse. Sustaining new pathways takes time and trusting these cycles teaches bothe patience and self forgiveness.