Hi CARE friend,

And there it is. Today. Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

Today is my last day at my muggle job… and when you receive this letter on Thursday, I’ll be flying to Italy to start my sabbatical in the only other city I could imagine living in after New York: Beautiful, Everlasting, Majestic, Soulful Rome.

Today, I’m also writing my last CARE check love note to you.

I’m not done writing, and I’ll be back on this page for sure… but under a different name. Because this year, while I seem to be making a lot of very different, somewhat life-altering, decisions, mostly what I’m doing is sunsetting my identity as a caretaker.

As many kids raised by deeply traumatized and/or sick adults, I learned at a very young age that being needed and “good” was my best bet at survival.

Mind you, it didn’t work very well… but we rarely pause long enough to assess whether our survival mechanisms deliver or not.

My mother threatened to kill herself, allegedly because of me, more times than I can count, AND she got close to ending me at least once. My aunt—and closest mother figure I ever held—died of cancer long before I could become an oncologist in her name… and my father betrayed me so regularly that I have trouble now assessing what was even real between us.

I’ve tried EVERYTHING to make them love me, never fully understanding that a lack of love for me was never the problem here. What they were disconnected from was their ability to love themselves. It was not about me. It was not against me.

They didn’t hate what they saw, they just couldn’t see me… But as a kid, it can feel safer to feel hated than to be invisible.

Building the bridge

This week, I also sold my Paris apartment. Things got delayed quite a bit and it feels very fated that I ended up signing the last papers confirming the sale on the day of my going away party from my job. It was not planned, but it makes so much sense.

It magnified the transition.

This apartment, in many ways, is where I became me.

It was my first HOME… and it was the first time that someone else didn’t own the place I was living in.

As someone who’s been told by her mother everyday for 18 years that the house she lived in was not hers (and that my parents could decide to throw me out whenever they wanted to), as someone who then left that house with only a suitcase and no address when the pain got more threatening that the false sense of security it brought, as someone whose first rented apartment was sold by the landlord less than a year later and who had to move out again just when she was finally finding her ground, as someone who had not known what feeling home meant before turning thirty, I poured my heart and soul into that apartment—and I cared for every inch of that little abode the way we yearn to kiss better every inch of the skin of our beloved.

And by landing in that place, I slowly remembered how to land within myself.

I found my way back to my dream, I found my way back to singing... I found my way back to New York! By finally finding a place where I could stay, I regained the faith and energy I needed to leave.

On 9/9/2019, as I was waiting for my ride to the airport, I had this realization that changed my life forever. I was sitting on my blue-green sofa and looking at all the pictures of New York that hugged my every wall...

And as the sun dawned on Paris, my truth dawned on me, illuminating every part of me that I had forfeited.

“I was never going to become a singer in New York by being a physician in Paris”. No matter how many singing lessons I took, no matter how many pictures of New York I surrounded myself with. I was on the wrong ladder, and there was no amount of climbing that would lead me to the view I yearned for.

And so I boarded the plane that was conveniently taking me to New York for a week, and I spent the entire time reconnecting with my greatest loves: New York, Broadway, writing, yoga and my soul energy.

By the end of that week, I had fully cemented a decision I would never have considered a month before: I would leave Medicine, and I would move to New York… and someday, somehow, in New York, I would SING.

Setting the bridge on fire

It took me 6 years. Six years for the bridge to be built and for it to become sturdy enough to be crossed and… burnt to the ground.

And so this week I’m leaving that in-between job and, this week, I can finally fully leave Paris behind.

And this week, I expected peace and awe and joy—and at my core those are the emotions that dance and reclaim me! But on the surface, I am witnessing 40 years of sorrow, terror, and self-hatred demanding to be acknowledged, honored and healed.

Because there’s a reason why we’re all so afraid of leaving—EVEN what jails us, even what hurts, even what kills.

Share

Yes, all we want to talk about is the relief, the sweetness, the glory—but that’s not all that comes up when we leave.

Even when something hard ends, there is a need to grieve. And before we can land where we’re going, we need to unroot ourselves from where we were! And unrooting is painful, and unrooting takes time.

Now, I have done my fair share of leaving in this lifetime, so even if it took me by surprise, yet again, at least I know that NOTHING HAS GONE WRONG HERE.

I know Pain is not just a part of the process, it’s one of the most healing, empowering and vital parts of any journey of self-reclamation.

It’s also how we remember the true meaning of self-RESPECT.

Because those decisions that we need to undo now—be it a career, a move, a partnership, a marriage or anything else that we once chose to commit to and that we’re choosing to let go of now—at one point, they served.

They served a need we might resent now… they served a need we might not feel connected to anymore! But they served a NEED.

And parts of us are still convinced that this need is still a need we must pay attention to. And those parts need to be heard, comforted and revered, because those parts saved our lives.

Breaking the rule

As a kid, I convinced myself that being a caretaker would make me safe. People would need me so they would not send me away! And if I knew how to heal people, I would not have to watch them suffer anymore... And maybe, if I could help them heal, MAYBE, then they would be able to love me.

It was a flawed hypothesis that cost me almost everything, but it was a very valid one.

And so there’s a very young, very scared, very wounded, young girl screaming beneath my skin right now, because I have set on fire all the gatekeepers she had built for her broken heart.

Indeed, she had a plan!

I was supposed to prove to the world that I was not only a good daughter but a good person, BY ANY MEANS AVAILABLE. I was supposed to find a way to cure cancer and to end trauma once and for all for everyone. I was supposed to gain control over the entire world so that I could keep it safe, and happy, and whole. I was supposed to make sure that nothing bad would ever happen again, and to love everybody, and to be loved in return. I was supposed to save my parents and I was supposed to take care of us ALL.

And not only did I “fail”on every account, I am now deciding that I will not even try anymore. I’m aborting the plan—and the little girl within is terrified.

I was supposed to compensate for having left my mother by “staying” everywhere else… and I ended up leaving Medicine, my apartment, my country, and my father too.

I unbuilt my career, I unbuilt my long-awaited home.

I am starting over yet again and I have the audacity to throw away the only one rule that my inner young one has ever believed in: be a caretaker and love will follow, be a caretaker and you will be safe, be a caretaker… or die alone.

Finally

So this week has been hard. I had breakfast, lunch and dinners with my inner demons, and they were all alternating between throwing tantrums and panic attacks.

And that’s okay.

Pain is not a sign that there’s something wrong, pain is a sign that we need to pay attention. There is a crack, there is a leak, there is a surplus of energy, there is a wound.

Pain is the great awakener, the most misunderstood prophet in our most sacred inner land.

Pain is a benevolent messenger and Pain is a FRIEND.

Because the adult within me has built other bridges, other gatekeepers, a new safe haven for me to rest and nurse my dreams into creations. The adult made sure we could leave, and that we were right to do so.

The adult unlearned that it was loyal, holy, or NECESSARY to stay anywhere where love is not being served or revered. The adult has witnessed that there is no safety to be found in inner gaslighting, in tolerating abuse, or in staying where the power of our light is underestimated and where the sacredness of the dark has been disavowed.

The adult has learned that love is created and received from the inside out, and the adult knows that I am making huge leaps forward everyday on my way home. The adult knows that I’m where I’m meant to be—and that I am here to SING… in New York.

The adult knows Life is SOLID, and that the Universe always has our back. The adult knows Grief and Anger are love—and that feeling them is how we become whole again.

The adult is at peace, the adult rejoices, the adult knows.

But the adult didn’t fully know where the kid inside was hiding… and Pain led her back to the child who needed her the most: the child I used to be, the child that has been waiting for her mom to come and pick her up since birth!

Well, this child has found her mother this week… FINALLY. Child and mother have been reunited within my heart.

Pain did not come to break me apart, Pain came to reunify me.

So long, my friend

And so it ends this week… on paper and all around me!

And, yes, so it BEGINS—in my heart of hearts and at the epicenter of my dream.

Thank you for having been a part of my journey back to me!

Thank you for reading these letters, thank you for trusting me enough to subscribe to CARE check. Thank you to those of you who also took the time to write back to me! What a gift.

I struggle to find the words that can embody how much it meant to me.

Sharing our truth is the privilege of a lifetime—and I will never take any of it for granted.

I will be seeing you soon dear CARE friend… and I’m sending you one last time (at least for 2025) kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

This is my second to last post of this CARE check chapter… and I have no idea what comes next. As I mentioned in my last post, I just quit my muggle job (my last day will be October 3rd) and I’ll then be embarking on a three-month sabbatical.

Yes, in this economy. Yes in this political context—I have learned that those kinds of leaps of faith are indeed never rational...

After all, I did leave my parents’ house without any other home awaiting me AND Medicine amidst a pandemic. I also moved to New York a little while later with only two suitcases, still during a pandemic, and again with no home awaiting me. Because I trust my gut and Life a lot more than I trust my fears, and it has always served me well.

I am known to make deeply altering life decisions quite often, and I know that from the outside it looks like they were made in an instant! But that’s not the way our hearts work.

Seeds are often planted in this highly fertile soil beneath the skin of our chest without our conscious awareness, especially since we haven’t been trained to fully understand our inner seasons—if anything we’ve been untrained in remembering that they exist at all. So those inner flowers do tend to bloom at the most unexpected times, according to our brains, and suddenly we just know that it’s time for a change. Or more precisely, we witness that the times have changed.

So I trust that I made the decision I needed to make. I’m even proud of it—to have listened to my heart’s whisper! But I’m still scared.

Why advice so rarely serve

There is always some isolation that comes when you decide to make a significant change in your life, no matter how cherished, supported and understood you feel by your people. It’s a fact we need to accept and not fight.

Because decisions, no matter how good or liberating, come with consequences; and only one person on Earth will truly have to carry them forever: the one who made them.

I’m not saying our choices will only affect us—they can impact many many people, and in the case of those so-called world leaders they tend to reverberate on everyone. But still, the one person that will carry in their bones the decision’s weight, downfalls and rewards is the person who made that decision in the first place.

And this is why advice, no matter how well-meaning, is not often—if ever—what we need from each other.

We might need perspective, guidance or inspiration. We might even at times benefit from words of caution (that is if they come from Love and not from the fears that hold the cautionner). But mostly, we need a kind, loving, reassuring and truthful mirror that can help us grapple with the options we have and hear that soft, fierce, voice that lives within our hearts—the only voice that “knows best” in any circumstance.

It seems so easy to know what others need… but again all we can make are very good guesses, nothing more. Of course, we can see that something is not working for someone else. We can also spot their blind spots. We can often track their wounds, whether they’re conscious of them or not… But if it’s so hard for us to understand what is going on beneath our skin even though we literally live there (!), no one else can truly comprehend it better than us.

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The cost of liberation

It’s something I’m constantly reminded of when leading a coaching session. I can always see when there is misalignment, and I know many tools that can help those who trust me find their way back home to their center; BUT the answer I was so sure they would find there is never exactly the one I had in mind. It’s always more creative and something I would never have thought of! Because those answers never lie in our thoughts, they lie in our essence.

And only YOU have direct access to your own soul energy, to the marrow of your bones, to the fabric of your inner being and to your current understanding of the outer world. That’s one of the most awe-inspiring, sacred, humbling and precious parts of our journey on Earth. Our point of view is unique and no one else can translate it into words or form.

This is also something I’m constantly reminded of as I navigate the highly confusing, more-often-than-not abusive, and at times soulful relationship I have with my Earth father.

If there is one thing I would never wish even on my worst enemy (not that I have any, let alone “a worst one”), it’s to have to divorce one of their parents. It is the one bond we all come on Earth craving and yearning for the most. [I highlight both those words because they touch on two different concepts… Craving relates to what we think we need to survive, including our addictions and anything we turn to to cope with the fears that shackle our cores; yearning relates to what we long for in the name of Love.]

And if there is one thing that I never expect I would have to go through again it’s divorcing another parent. I already lost the woman who felt like a mom to me to cancer, parted with the woman who birthed me in order to survive her, and the woman therapist who became my rock when I shouldered those two indescribable losses died in a terrorist attack. I thought it would be only fair for me to be able to hold on to my father. The fact that the said father has been living with cancer for the last 15 years or so already felt like a cruel joke… so I never expected we would reach the point where our relationship would start feeling, to me and those who love me, as both a health and sanity hazard.

But we don’t choose the curriculum in Earth school, our only power resides in our willingness to surrender to the tide and to let the water take us where the lesson can turn into wisdom and Love.

And every time I do energy work, my body’s answer is clear as crystal: I can’t cope with the dynamics at play any longer without losing parts of me I will not be able to recover.

Which is so hard for me to admit because building a relationship with this man has been one of the most relentless pursuits in my existence, until now. At times, it felt like the single most important thing in my life. But what I have learned along the way is that I can either be in a relationship that looks good with him or be in a relationship with myself PERIOD.

And my saving grace comes from my singing—always my beacon in the storm, always my reason to weather it and find my way home, always my greatest love. Because I cannot sing when I lose my self-connection.

And, of course, none of my other relationships can truly function when I’m disconnected from my heart and core.

So it means that it’s either him or the rest of the world. It’s either this relationship or the rest of my life.

Defeat and surrender

“Defeat and surrender always feel the same to me

But what does it matter? They both bring me to my knees

Oh, break me down and put me back together

I surrender, I surrender now”

Those lyrics from Mumford and Sons’ song SURRENDER feel like a very welcoming hug to me at the moment. Because giving up on fixing things with my father feels like a crushing defeat… but my heart knows better. I know it’s actually a choice to surrender to what is, what heals, what serves, and what feels like love.

I’m being kinsugied by Life, I do trust that! But that doesn’t make it any easier.

And there are a few reasons for that, including those below:

• No matter what happens, we never stop loving our parents. I don’t actually believe we ever stop loving anyone, but the awareness of the bond that links us to our parents is probably the strongest relational awareness we have. It’s just so PRIMAL. And we carry them within our bodies and within our DNAs.

• Relationships are not all good or all bad. Relationships all contain Love, even if it’s only a drop of water in the widest desert. There are things that hurt even in the most blissful partnerships (be they platonic or not) and there are things that warm our hearts even in the most treacherous ones. And when it comes to our parents, it’s a truth that feels both even more instinctual and more culturally ingrained.

• Those specific “titles” never change. We all have parents (even if we never met them). We all are someone’s offspring. Whether we accept and acknowledge it or not, it’s a fact. I can become your wife, friend, boss, employee, colleague, neighbor, savior or nemesis just as I can unbecome it, but I will never be someone else’s biological child.

• Every relationship is unique and everchanging because each person is unique and everchanging. We can never truly know what’s going on, and it leads us to make a lot of assumptions that muddy our perceptions. There is what we don’t know we don’t know and there is what we are not yet willing to know because it hurts too much. There is what we thought we were doing out of love and actually did out of survival mode, and there is what we thought was love and was actually manipulation. There is what we could have done differently and all we will have to live with now. There is what we understand and what we just cannot comprehend. There is what we mean, what we say, what we hear, what we think they mean and what silence prevented both parties from sharing.

From the outside we tend to see very clearly if a relationship serves someone or not, but from the inside there are many hundreds more layers to take into account. Which is why we can never know if it’s truly better for someone to stay or to go, or probably more accurately when is the right time to go.

If that relationship still feels vital either because of material reasons or because there is an energetic bond that we don’t know yet how to live without, then leaving might counter-intuitively not be the answer yet. That’s a hard fact of life and one we can fight all we want but still have to compose with. We’re not truly here to break patterns, we’re heal to heal them. We’re not here to break cycles as much as we’re here to complete them.

What we truly need from each other

So no, someone in an abusive relationship of any kind does not need advice… they need LOVE.

The love that reminds us that we matter, that we’re worthy of freedom, respect and care, that we can and want to leave. The love that reminds us of our power, our agency, our resilience and our ability to heal and hope. The love that will carry us forward when we make the hardest decisions we can be asked to make on Earth… The love that will hold us through the grief from having to say goodbye to someone we truly love unconditionally—which implies beyond the ways they have used, abused or hurt us. The love that we might have forgotten how to embody and how to receive.

And it’s the same when contemplating life-altering changes. We might want to weigh in and share with our loved ones what we think and why we think it’s a great idea or not, but what our loved ones truly need in those moments is our love. They need to know that we have their backs and that whether they fall or fly, whether they end up floating away or finding the most welcoming ground, we’ll be there to see, hear and love them, just like before. That everything might very well change but not our love.

Yes, it seems to me that the only thing we can truly do for each other is remember how to love ourselves and promise to love each other.

Each of our journeys is too unique, arduous, gut-wrenching, complex and miraculous for anyone else to be able to fully grasp why the choices we make make sense… especially in regards to those heart choices that even our own brain can’t fully explain.

Which is why I’ll end this letter with my favorite quote from Andrea Gibson. It seems to me like all my current life experience bring me back to that understanding and that is probably what I’m most grateful for at the moment:

“Everything but I LOVE YOU is small talk——Andrea Gibson”

I LOVE YOU

leo

Hi CARE friend,

When is the last time you took a leap of faith?

Even if it was a long time ago! Even if it was a very tiny one... Can you reconnect for a few seconds with how it FEELS? To listen, to listen deeply to that knowing that speaks in sensations and that words can’t always reach.

I’m asking because a big big change is coming for me, and this will impact CARE check that will go into hibernation while I go on my first (and probably only ever) sabbatical.

This week I made it official that I am leaving my job at the end of September.

And the next day, I’ll embark on a new kind adventure:

I’ll be traveling, emptying out, journeying back to myself and finding out who I am NOW—after shedding decades of unprocessed trauma, after the melanoma, after turning 40, after closing the chapters that kept me tied to Medicine, Oncology and Academia, after putting roots in the city of my heart and dreams, after discovering somatics and coaching, and after finally reconnecting with my essence as a singer first and foremost and also as a writer. After returning to Love.

I’ll be claiming all my remaining days off before that, which is why I’ll also be off line for the next three weeks… and which means that this is the third to last post you’ll receive from me in 2025.

How it all began

I started writing regularly on Substack 2 years ago, after a beautiful workshop at the Omega center led by Liz Gilbert and Rob Bell. I had created CARE check a year prior to that but I had been struggling until then with the inner permission to identify as a writer and to trust that I not only had something to say but that it could matter, be received and resonate in a way that serves and helps.

For the last two years, I’ve sat down almost every Tuesday morning to write those love letters to you in my neighboorhood’s Flower Cafe—and it has changed me beyond words.

At first, I wanted to write about those tiny anchors that we can plant on the way that bridges our center to the external world, and that help us recenter every time we get lost. That’s where the title CARE check came from.

I wanted, I needed, to write, but I only believed I could do it “as a life coach”.

Things shifted along the way…

I remembered more and more of myself. I reclaimed parts of me that I didn’t even know existed. I shifted from my hero’s journey to my heroine’s journey, which means—if you’re not familiar with those terms yet—that my focus shifted from this outward quest that allows us to heal and liberate our inner masculine to this inner pilgrimage that invites us to reclaim and reempower our inner feminine.

So I stopped taking the writing where I wanted it to go, I let the writing take me to who I am meant to be.

While staying committed to the explorations of our individual minds, I dove into the understanding of our hearts, bodies and collective psyche.

I always knew we were more than our ability to think… but I had a lot of unlearning to do in order to reconnect fully with the sacredness of our ability to feel.

And so even though I will be back here sooner rather than later, I don’t know exactly how, when, and whether I’ll change the name of this publication or not.

Where the road is taking me

I feel very privileged to have this opportunity to pause in such a deep way, especially given the state of human affairs at the moment… AND I also know that this is a call I cannot not answer.

Especially when the world needs us FULL like never before—full of courage, full of hope, full of determination, optimism and love.

Right now I am ready and willing, but I have very little left to give and offer.

My body’s exhaustion has reached the marrow of my bone, my heart is stretched so thin it’s begging for a lullaby, and cancer was a powerful wake-up call.

Trauma recovery is healing and beyond rewarding, but it’s also draining. Grief and Anger are the way back into our hearts and into Love, but they do ask a lot of us to be felt into gold. And I entered the world of Medicine and Academia when I was 18, which means I’ve been giving for the most part of the last 22 years most (and oftentimes ALL) of my energy to a vocation that was never mine to begin with.

I spent decades led by a compulsion that didn’t come from Love (compulsions NEVER do) but from wounds…

Wounds I’ve been committed to healing since 2019.

Wounds that are slowly turning into scars and gold, turning into reminders that there is nothing we can’t survive if we surrender to the pain long enough for it to turn into the Love that will kintsugi us back into Love.

I first thought I had to deny and forget everything from my past to overcome it, but that only kept me frozen in a trauma coma for decades. I then learned I had to revisit it all and reclaim my own story to move out of my inner ice age, to awaken those volcanos at my core that turned me into ashes so that I could enter the healing Phoenix process. And I now know that I NEED a time of nothingness to butterfly up.

I’m mixing the metaphors because there is no shortage of inspiration to be found in Nature when we need help surrendering to those needs that only our hearts can name and that society has desavowed.

It is hard to come back to our authentic instincts in a culture that made us wary of them. It is hard to hear the whispers of our inner world when the external world is constantly screaming at us.

And this is why I surrender to the need for those three months to resettle within myself:

To learn to know who I am when there are no expectations—be that real expectations from those who surround me or projected ones by my fears onto others.

I want to witness how I live when unbound from made-up concepts, such as the 9-5 schedule, weekends, 80 hour weeks, or 5-day work ones.

I want to rest, truly REST, remembering how it feels like to not be alive out of obligation.

I want to see when and what I write when it’s not for a specific project bound to a specific form or deadline.

I want to melt even more into my singing practice, but without any thought about a career or a performance. I want to honor how singing is a tool of Love, inner connection, self-healing and liberation.

I want to return to my center and bloom from the inside out.

I want to see what I do and read when it’s truly just for me, and not about what I—consciously or not—believe is needed FROM me.

I want to know which structures actually hold and support me and which ones I use to shield me or tame myself .

I want to see new horizons and let them change me.

I want to witness the fears that come up when there is nowhere to hide, because there is no “shoulds” or “can’t” and only space for insitinct, intention, and response.

I guess this will be my inner Eat Pray Love. My own mini Odyssey back to my truest truth.

Is that something you’ve ever considered? Even if in a much subtle way? Even if just as one solo trip somewhere you’re either been feeling called back to for a while or where you’ve never been?

If so where would you go? Can you trust the answer that might have popped up in front of your eyes?

I know in my bones that I need to go and spend some quality time in Italy… Rome soothes my heart in a way that I don’t understand but easily surrender to. In parallel, every inch of my skin and under is calling me to Montana. There’s an obvious sacredness to this land that I cannot wait to bow to. And I’ve always known that someday, somehow, I would need to visit Bali. I also know that time is now.

Those are the places unequivocally calling me right now and of course, OF COURSE—even more emphatically—I want to spend time being, just being, with my great Love and awe-inspiring friend: New York.

I want to get to experience my forever home when I am stripped back to my heart and core.

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So THIS IS NOT GOODBYE YET, but please wish me luck and inspiration, as I start mapping out the journey that my gut is sending me on… without any consideration whatsoever for what my brain might have to say about it all.

How rude… How terrifying. How exhilirating! How MARVELOUS.

After all, there’s a reason why it’s so easy to turn “scared” into “sacred”.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

How are you today? What needs tending, acknowledgment, celebration, healing, or praise? What’s bubbling at the center of your heart, waiting to be sought out, expressed, found? What is taking fire at the center of your core as you keep on wandering on this beautiful planet?

I’m asking because something big is awakening within me, and those are moments we need to honor and anchor in. Those are moments that ask of us to surrender, trust and lean in. Those are the moments that bring meaning and healing back at the center of our experience. Those are the moments that bring us back into Love and joy.

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Reconnecting

At some point on my journey home to myself, I convinced myself that I had to part with a very big part of me.

I thought I couldn’t be trusted with neither romantic love nor sex anymore, and that those were chapters that had been closed for good. It wasn’t a truly conscious choice, but it was a deeply entrenched one. It reached every corner of my psyche until any thought related to romance was thoroughly obliterated.

It just wasn’t part of my awareness anymore. It just didn’t matter—to the point of forgetting that it had EVER been a part of me. To the point of forgetting how healthy, dreamy, wonder-ful, it feels to lean in towards those feelings. To the point of forgetting what a beautiful and enlivening experience they yield.

One thing that I have learned about me by now is that I’m really good at knowing when something is wrong, when something isn’t working, when something is out of alignment. My childhood left me with a very acute radar for dysfunction and an extremely sensitive body, that will let me know without the shadow of a doubt when something is not unfolding in a way that serves.

So I’m glad I trusted that there was something wrong with the way I engaged with romance! But.

But another thing that I keep on witnessing is that I’m also often mistaken about where the problem comes from.

Because I could feel how much yet-unexplored-and-ungraspable-trauma was being brought up by my romantic arcs, I decided that I was not cut out for it.

Every time I met a man I loved, I sabotaged the relationship and either hurt him in ways that I wonder if I’ll ever be able to truly forgive myself (is there ANYTHING harder to cope with than hurting someone you love?) or ran away before anything could happen (at least this way, I was mostly injuring my own heart).

And each time I met a man who could deepen the wounds I was not aware of, I jumped all in, led by a compulsion to finally figure this pain out, until the moment where I couldn’t function and finally broke things off thanks to my strikingly honed survival instincts (surviving my parents did come with some perks).

So no, I decided. I didn’t have the right DNA and Soul structure to fall in love or have sex in a way that served… anyone.

But after years of trauma recovery, I’m finally starting to see this differently.

Seeing things differently

I’m finally starting to grasp the impact of attachment wounding and how all-encompassing it is until we can build the awareness, inner and outer support system one needs to overcome it. To not only piece together the pieces of my story that explain how the wounds appeared, but to also map them out, so that I can finally see the finished puzzle and a clear picture of how and why my armor, avoidance, anxiety and struggle to receive the Love I’m so deeply yearning for, took form.

I’m slowly realizing that it isn’t that clear cut. That it isn’t about ability but capacity—emotional availability is not as much about skills and mindset as it is about embodiment and nervous system connection.

We need to remember that trauma doesn’t lead us to make bad choices, trauma robs us of the ability to choose. We’re not making bad decisions, we’re COMPELLED to reenact; so it is not actually a decision, it’s an embodied sense of obligation.

So I’m slowly letting those frozen parts of me awaken and I found a very safe, healing, titrable, soft, and intuitive way to do that: I’ve started reading romance novels.

The miracle of reading

Reading is so incredibly healing because it is the perfect blend of receiving and creating. We’re receiving the ingredients from the author who bared their heart on the page, and we’re creating the final product from the inside out.

In non fiction, our specific blend of needs, readiness, and consciousness is going to select which part particularly resonates in the marrow of our bones, reprogramming our brain and DNA, while we feel ourselves shift, reset, expand.

In fiction, our imagination is going to artfully mix our past experiences and current perceptions to paint a canvas that only we can see, feel and experience. Indeed we might read the exact same page written by a highly skilled author who painted in letters a deliciously detailed description of the set, the characters, and the vibe and YET… you and I will see completely different images dance in front of our mind’s eyes.

We receive the ingredients, and we might have a very clear recipe to follow, but we are the cooks and no two meals will be prepared, looked or taste the same way. Even if the impact feels similar!

This is the miracle of reading. This is the miracle of art.

And this is a gift I am in awe of.

If I describe a beach with seafoam green water at sunset, lingering on the orange, pink and reddish waves that escaped the sea to dance into the sky, while highlighting the softness of the sand under my toes, and recounting how the wind gently caresses my skin, while my hair softly sway on my shoulders… you’re seeing it. You’re feeling it!

We believe we’re sharing this experience together, and that’s partly true because we’re sharing its essence, but not its features.

What is popping in front of your eyes is different from what is flashing behind mine. And that’s okay. That’s sacred even. That’s how my understanding of a perfect moment can melt into yours without any of us having to make any compromise.

Imagination is one of the healthiest ways for us to enter our psyche, to bridge the gap between what we consciously wish for and unconsciously yearn for. To connect with those parts of us that are ungraspable not only for others but for ourselves. To get close to wounds we’re so deeply afraid of, we would never be able to look at.

And I’m sure it happened to you at least once… This overwhelming wave of grief or angst or awe that arises with no warning nor invitation when connecting deeply with a piece of Art: be it a song, a painting, a sculpture, someone’s soul or their writing (which arguably are often the same thing).

Why Romance novels?

This intuition to dive into Romance as a way back into the corners of my inner self that I didn’t know how to visit or that existed, came after a powerful breathwork session.

On my way back home, my intuition was sparking flames in every inch of my gut urging me to stop at the book store and pick up a novel about Love. It felt like a need. The way water calls your name when you’ve been walking in the sun for an hour. I didn’t feel lonely, I didn’t feel like I needed comfort or escape, I felt like I needed to bring a compass to my heart, so that she could lead me back to the parts of me I had lost along the way.

It was not an option, it was a COMMAND.

The way I usually feel when I want to learn about a new topic or understand something about the world! It felt urgent, necessary, exciting and right.

It just felt odd to turn to fiction to answer such a call… but by now I have stopped trying to make sense of what happens when my gut takes back the control that was never meant to be surrendered to my brain.

It’s been a little bit more of a month of exploration now; and it’s been beautiful, and it’s been brutal.

In this culture we don’t heal our wounds, we mostly survive them. We don’t let them close, we cover them and find ways to live with or around them. We numb, we distract, we achieve, we overcome, we compensate, we “get over it” but never THROUGH—it hurts too much… and we’ve demonized pain.

So, slowly but surely, I’m walking my way back through each hole that was left into the tapestry of my trust in Romance. And I’m letting myself revisit the pain—gently thawing the ice that kept it both numb and at bay, and letting myself feel it as deeply and willingly as I can muster.

Each book picks up where the other left off in the story of my heart.

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Where those books take me

Some lead me back to my first and holiest love… To his green eyes, the sound of his saxophone, his dreams of conquering the sky.

Some lead me back to the men I didn’t let myself love (like John).

Some lead me back to my deepest and most passionate love, the humming of his car while we wandered in Paris at night, the imprint of his voice as I melted in his arms, and his handwriting on the notes he hid for me in the on-call room.

Some lead me to my softest and friendliest love and the mess that came from the world’s least awakening double love triangles.

Some lead me to understanding myself more compassionately and to forgiving some of my choices, as I watch a protagonist I care for make the same ones. I witness my impulse to figuritavely hold their hands while murmuring that “it’s okay sweetheart… I understand”.

Some lead me to understanding more deeply the men I’ve loved, as the character I’m getting to know spills out their guts and shed light on behaviors I could never explain or relate to at the time.

I read about how terrifying, unmooring, extraordinary, confusing, awe-inspiring and Earth-shattering Love can feel to others TOO. I see that I’m not alone… that I’m not the only one who just didn’t understand, didn’t cope, didn’t answer, didn’t ask, didn’t know.

I read about sex in a way that feels healing and allows me to parse out what actualy feels like porn, like a twisted power play, like innocent fun, like meaningful connection, and like sacred love.

I revisit the idea of consent, of reciprocation, of generosity, of the truest and sincerest forms of care.

I rewrite the alphabet of my own Love language, and treasure the vulnerability that those authors have put on the page, through their endearingly imperfect characters, allowing us to understand the way their hearts beat, the way their bodies yearn, and the way their minds dream. Allowing us to understand ourselves through this guiding mirror.

The sacred gift of Fiction

In fiction, we get to touch Humanity in a way that few other media allow. It’s a privilege, an honor, a gift, and such a rare opportunity to enter one’s inner sanctuary. It’s a portal allowing us to remember how to weave the fabrics of our inner being in a way that allows us to remember how to be.

Thinking helps but feeling heals.

So, if like me, you’re wrestling with a part of you that thinks that fiction is futile, complacent, and doesn’t fit in any plans that gets you where you want to be, please take this as a permission slip to NOT only see it as a hobby that you cannot afford to indulge in!

Be very intentional with what you read and what you need, be willing to stop the books that put salts on your wound without bringing along any elixir to them heal once they’ve been revealed, or any books that lock even further the doors you unwillingly put around your heart!

BUT know that the right novels can touch parts of you that nothing else ever will and that there is incredible magic hiding in the pages of the books that are calling your name right now.

Those novels can bring back safety in rooms beneath your skin that were decimated by trauma.

Those novels can make you laugh, vibrate, dream and sing in this scared childlike way we often don’t remember we can still access and embody as adults!

They can make you cry in a way that feels cathartic and almost pleasurable (almost EROTIC) because of how freeing and all-encompassing it is.

They can lead you to this ocean of compassion that flows beneath our skins and to that torrent of love that lies at the marrow of our bones. They can lead you to the fire that enlivens our heart and to the lava patiently awaiting at our core for the day we’re ready to fully come alive again.

They can reconnect you to stories that you hadn’t fully realized that you have already survived, so that you can finally harness the gifts that bloomed in the aftermath of the storm that prompted your exile from your inner lands.

Novels can connect the dots of what happened to us in ways nothing else can because they open both our minds and hearts at the same time… and when imagination meets Love, there is no limit to what can be created in this world.

Please let me know your thoughts on it all!

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

I’m wondering, where do you go for support?

When things don’t go as planned [or when things do go as planned according to your anxiety since your anxiety had WARNED you that things would get messy]

Where are your safe havens? Who are your safe people? Which practices bring you home into yourself, your heart, your body, your inner sanctuary and the embrace of the Earth? AND what are the bridges that get you there?

Because it’s not always easy, right? To reach out to our support system, to get ourselves to where we need to be to recenter, recharge and heal. The pull of fear, of grief, of shame can be overpowering… and the song of our heart can be hard to hear when the thunders of doubt, anger or angst are growling.

Can a song help? Or writing? Or getting closer to Nature, to a park, to a tree, to a mountain, to the sea? Do you need to retreat within yourself or do you need to be surrounded either by a crowd or members of your chosen family? Do you need to sleep in or do you need to exercise? Do you need to create or to receive? Do you need silence or do you need a symphony? Do you need a book or do you need a movie? Do you need a hug or do you need space? Do you need to cry, to think, to rage, to laugh hysterically or to scream as if your life depended on it?

The possibilities are endless—and when we’re feeling overwhelmed, unmoored or triggered beyond our limits, we will not be able to know what helps, what enables, what keeps us stuck or what heals.

This is why WE NEED TO TAKE THE TIME TO ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS FOR OURSELVES IN THE IN-BETWEEN.

The in-between rushes of adrenaline. The in-between amygdala highjacks. The in-betweens heartaches. The in-between mind twisters. The in-between “breakout news” that should really be renamed “here’s why the doves cry”.

And it gets even trickier when we realize that we cannot rely on a one-size-fit-all plan. Because our needs VARY.

We’re made of live tissue, of dancing atoms, of flowing air, water and emotions. We’re a constantly evolving canva that cannot be defined by one color palette, one artistic trend, one type of paint or brush. We’re the work of our lifetimes and we’re the epitomic labor of LOVE.

What will never fail us

I try to come back to those questions often though. To watch the answers that never change and those that only seem to work every other time or for a little while.

And there are things I’m observing both within me and my clients that do not really change.

There really are things in this world that we can hold on to even when it seems like everything around us is disintegrating with the full force of a volcanic eruption.

• There is the power of our spark. That tiny baby fire that brought us into form and that flares every time we get close to what we love most in this world.

• There is the power of our people. Those whose eyes light up when we enter their world and those that warm our hearts just by existing.

• There is the power of the Love that created what we call the world. Unconditional, indestructible , everlasting, softer than the sweetest kiss and yet fiercer than a thunder of dragons.

But as always we can use those powers for or against us… even when grounded in the best intentions.

Because we can start—consciously or not—demanding for our problems (or ourselves) to be FIXED, instead of leaning on our resources as we repair what needs healing.

How often do we unwillingly starve our love—for someone, for something, for ourselves—by relying solely on its embrace to make us feel better, to compensate, to override those feelings that we do not know how to welcome, embody and thereby cope with?

The part of the healing journey we don’t talk about enough

I have been guilty of that more times than I can count—and I can feel myself becoming resentful when singing doesn't feel nourishing, when walking in the park doesn't feel soothing, when my favorite song fails to open my heart and unfreeze my body, when I still feel like a train wreck after sharing my darkest secrets with a friend who could hold both them and me without so much as a blink. When the cure isn’t out there, and when I still have no f*** idea where the cure is within me.

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THAT’S THE PART WE DON’T TALK ABOUT ENOUGH. The time factor that has nothing to do with a measurable timeline that can be controlled or at least expected.

Healing is messy. And the more healing we do, the most sacred it all feels… YES! But.

But that doesn’t mean it gets any less messy, or scary, or hard, or at times heart breaking.

Even when we understand that heart cannot break, even when we know by heart our own resiliency, even when we know that we will get through this and when we FEEL the excitement for the rainbow that’s coming, we still need to just get through it…

That seismic anger, the all encompassing grief. The sticky frustration, the sneaky guilt. That nagging sense of inadequacy that never seems to ever truly be ready to leave us be.

And that’s not a flaw in the system, that’s by design… because pain is part of Life and pain is here to serve.

Pain is here to serve

As long as we fight that last part, we suffer in ways that feel meaningless and harrowing. Because that is the one pain that we are NOT meant to experience. The one pain that can be found nowhere else in Nature but within the human mind. The pain of resisting.

Martha Beck did an episode about this on her podcast The Gathering Room called “When You Can’t Let It Go”. And her answer was one I’m more and more trying to embody… LET IT STAY.

Pain is not a problem to be solved, Pain is a message to receive. Pain is not the enemy, Pain is the way out. Pain is not a detour on our way, Pain is the gateway to our truest destination.

And it’s not easy for us to accept that, right? It’s not easy to trust that. Because it’s the opposite of what we’re being told, modeled, prescribed.

We’re in a culture that runs away from pain, we’re in a culture that numbs—and so Pain has to scream louder and louder all around us to get our attention.

Because we’ve been trained out of our aching hearts. We only want to feel the part that feels good… or to not feel at all.

But that’s not the answer.

Feeling is where our humanity not only lies but is reborn. Feeling is the answer.

My questions for you now

And so I’ll ask you again dear one, what helps you feel whatever it is that your body is holding right now?

In all your depth, in the multitude that you are.

And can you lean towards it everyday a little more and trust that where we meet our pain is where we will also meet our joy?

Because that’s the tragic part that we’re not effectively warned to look out for... When we numb the pain, we numb everything out.

There’s no way to filter out which sensations we’re willing to experience or not.

Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, WE NEED PAIN.

That’s the one truth we cannot escape, because pain is how we know where we begin and where we end. Pain is how we know how much we CARE—whether we feel ready to care or not. Pain is how we know who we are, and who we are not. Pain is on our side… Pain is the guardian of our ability to love.

That’s why we need to build capacity for pain! And that requires creating—and taking care of—the anchors we need to be able to weather those storms that we’re meant to walk through on our way home to our inner heartdom.

So please, dear CARE friend, take a moment to sit with those questions and to hone your answers.

Our ability to feel our pain right now is the most sacred gift we can offer a wailing world. Because pain when felt turns into gold, kintsuging us back into embodied Love. Because anger when felt turns into wisdom. Because grief felt turns into Kindness. Because shame turns into compassion and fear into courage. Because joy turns into peace… and peace is what we’re all YEARNING for.

We can do this. We can go within and feel the invitations of our inner world to grow into who we came here to become, who we’ve been all along... Love.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

I got to travel back to Paris in July… and it was just as brutal as I thought it would be.

It was brutaler actually—if I'm being honest, which is the point.

I could feel it the second the plane landed in Roissy - Charles De Gaulle: The tightening. The constriction. The call for smallness… This familiar urge to shrink, disappear and hide.

I wanted to fight this just as much I wanted to escape and numb—but I have learned that escaping my body is never the answer. So I leaned in. Because pain is here to serve.

I let it wash over me and, when night finally came, I lay sleepless, jetlagged, and disheartened in my AirBnB bed, listening to a baby whaling in the street and thinking: this baby gets it! This baby gets me. This baby is my friend.

In an interesting plot twist, my suitcase refused to board the plane and ended up spending 48 hours at JFK before someone could convince it that I really needed its support in Paris. So all I had was an in-case-of-emergency kit from AirFrance which contained a toothbrush, toothpaste and… a razor. In-case-of-emergency. Hmmm. Looks like the Universe has a dark sense of humor in Paris (or at least I do).

It was not all bad of course. I saw my two best friends. I saw my baby godson. And I didn’t know that it was possible to love New York even more and, yet, my love ability had clearly expanded when I finally landed back home in front of the Manhattan skyline that will forever mirror the way my heart line would write itself on a monitor. As I felt myself slowly come back to life.

I like to remind myself that my body is breathing me, that I’m not in charge, and that I can’t take any credit for remembering to keep myself alive! But for those first two days in Paris, I did have to remind myself NOT to stop breathing. Anytime I checked I was holding my breath—as if bracing for the impact of my past. As if trying to keep everything out, forgetting that it would of course also include Love.

But my past found me all right. I’m not ready to write about it but seeing my father again was like a gunshot designed to unlock that one last box of trauma that I had not been able to open. I’m still weathering the storm of memories that decided to break free from Denial’s shadow. I hadn’t cried like that in more than a decade… I hadn’t cried like that since the day I “broke up” with my birth mother.

That mixture of horror, disgust, grief and longing for safe love. That blend of disbelief, realization, confusion and understanding. That inner Earth quake shattering all at once your carefully crafted foundations, until all that’s left are tears, broken bones, and blood trying to reorganize themselves into a whole.

This is the kind of pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This is the kind of pain I didn’t believe I could survive twice. And yet, here I am.

The gift of the aftermath

It’s such a normal morning in New York City as I write those words. It smells like summer—IFKYK—and the sun is slowly kissing my skin as I write. I feel held. I feel cared for.

The city hums her usual tunes and there is no mistaking that sense of grounding below my stomach: I made it out, I made it back, I made it home, I made it THROUGH.

And I needed to remember all that I got to remember—no matter how much it hurts, I do witness over and over again that, YES, Pain. Is. Here. To. Serve.

I also relish in the realization that there truly is no amount of inner breaking that will not turn into Gold when we remember that we can ask for help to the Love that beats our heart.

And as I’m being kintsugied by Life, I patiently await the product of the rebirth... the gift that never fails to define the aftermath.

The awe-inspiring rainbow that could never have greeted us if we hadn’t been willing to withstand the storm.

And so I’ll quote our cherished and recently departed Andrea Gibson again because those words have felt like a lifeline to me since I came home:

“I said to the sun, ‘Tell me about the big bang.’ The sun said, ‘it hurts to become.”

Why this trip mattered

I shared a while back that:

I don’t believe we HAVE to go back to our origins; and I believe that it can be self-destructive to do so if we’re not ready. That is if we haven’t yet fully reanchored into our hearts and found the support we need in the here and now to ensure that we will find our way back, even if the reawakened pain blinds us for a few weeks.

AND I believe that there is a point in our healing journeys that demands that we circle back to where we started… so that we can rewrite the stories we inherited into the inspiring tales we came down here to embody.

Share

That was my intention when I boarded the plane headed to Trauma Land.

My main goal was to make sure that I would see my father again before he leaves this Earth, but I also wanted to revisit Paris with the eyes of the woman I have become since moving across the Atlantic.

I had started my trauma work before moving, but not my embodiment journey. So I had never been in the same room with my dad or in Paris, the town I grew up in, while being aware of the inner shifts that fawning, freezing or flighting drive within me.

Denial’s pull had lessened but still ruled over a large part of my psyche the last time I had walked those streets, the last time I had faced my father while he was blatantly lying to me.

So even if the nervous system shutdown felt familiar, everything else felt very different this time around.

I didn’t fall into the narratives I was being prescribed—I watched them with open eyes and grounded myself in the disgust that was shaking my core.

It was like watching videotapes of my past, thereby receiving the proof I didn’t know I needed that I have TRULY done the best I can. Growing up around so much confusing perversion, there was no way I could have walked out of there less wounded.

If anything, I see the MIRACLES that allowed me to hold on to my sense of truth and optimism—if not my sense of self—through that shitshow of a childhood more than ever.

If anything, I feel MORE grateful now. Because I know for sure what I went through and I am done punishing myself for what was done to me, in a desperate attempt to catch a wave of parental love that is never going to come.

If anything, I relish in my sudden readiness and willingness to grieve.

How we heal

So why am I sharing all of this today? Because I am seeing more and more that the idea of breaking cycles is helpful when we’re still trying to escape, but needs to be released once we made it far enough to start healing, once we’ve found our way back to our inner well of safety.

Because what heals us is not to break the cycle that kept us prisoner. What heals us is to complete it.

Interestingly enough, once we feel strong enough, we need to take the time to unravel.

And I’m not sure we all talk to each other enough about that part of the journey home.

How, at first, the healing process asks us to rebuild our spine, to heal our inner masculine, to leave the places that keep us small and stuck and RUN towards the joy and the light… but how also, after that, there comes a time to de-armor, to soften, to melt into the tenderness that can actually reach those wounds that are still hiding at our core. And how that’s ALSO part of the spine reinvention.

Because our structure is not only made of bones. It’s also made of water and air. We’re both the container and the ether.

We need fluidity as much as we need strength. Actually, our strength is found just as much in our fluidity—if not more—as it is found in the solidity of our foundations.

Trauma doesn’t so much lead us into so-called bad choices as it robs us from our ability to choose, period.

We’re stuck in that cycle, in that compulsion to reenact, in a desperate attempt to relive and fix what can never be relived and changed.

Because of that one moment of powerlessness deeply rooted in our psyche—most often at an incredibly young age—we’re caught in a loop in which we’re convinced that the same actions or relations dynamics can give way to different results and to embody that Love and/or safety that we experience.

And so, at first, what we need is to let go of those beliefs and dance steps that do not serve. We need to cross bridges that we’re not only often building as we go but that are also simultaneously BURNING in our back.

It’s scary but it’s empowering. It’s thrilling but it’s exhausting. It’s the hero’s journey. It’s about coming out of the wounded self and reconnecting with our potential. It’s about finding the promised land, reaching the shore, and redefining what Home means to our heart.

Nevertheless, at some point, we will need to go back to that wounded self we had to leave behind. And that’s a part we have a very hard time with in this day or age.

We cling to spiritual bypassing as if our lives depended on it, never acknowledging that it’s the actual cause of our demise. We forgot that grief is not the opposite of joy, it’s part of it. Not in a pessimistic or cynical way, those are just two expressions of the same energy: Love.

We convince ourselves that we can only be resilient if we’re never weak, but that’s not how it works! It’s quite the opposite really.

Resiliency comes from stretching and from building the strength that allows us both to overcome and to know that it’s also safe to just *be*. Even if we got hurt before, even if we could lose it all again, we can be with what is because we know that there is no such thing as weakness when your heart is embodied.

It’s NOT “resilient” to live in a bunker, holding a sword, while wearing a twenty-ton iron shield.

And so we can only reconnect with our truest strength when we finally let ourselves go back to those places that scare us most within.

When we can go back and talk to our most wounded selves and tell them: I’ve got you.

When we can revisit the choices that haunt us and look OURSELVES in the eyes while saying:

I’m so sorry you thought that was the only way at the time. I’m here for you now. AND I forgive you. I forgive you because I UNDERSTAND you, and I understand that there’s really nothing to forgive.

You did the best you could, you didn’t know better.

And if you did know better, that means you just couldn’t see any other way out!

And if you did see another way out and didn’t choose it, that’s just because you didn’t understand yet the way our unhealed and unacknowledged wounds rule over us, and how they can take over when we’re in survival mode...

But I’m here for now. I’M HERE FOR YOU. And there’s no fixing what can’t be undone, but there’s no limit either on what can be created now… and that’s what matters.

That’s what we’ll devote our life from now on: to create HOPE! To create LOVE.

But first we must grieve what had to leave, what broke, what didn’t happen… as well as what did of course.

Why I’m writing this letter today

• And so here is the first reason I’m writing this letter today:

To remind us that if our future self is the one we need to devote our energy to serve, our past selves also need us.

To remind us that the way back can sometimes be part of the way forward and that we must not be afraid to revisit the past, because we will NOT stay there.

And that, if we believe that our present can only hold by suppressing parts of our past, our work is not actually done. There’s still a crack in our foundations and, at some point, everything we’re building now can come undone if we don’t go back to examine it.

And we’re not meant to fear that crack either! Because, as Leonard Cohen reminded us, that’s how the light gets in:

When we get near the cracks, it does hurt, but that pain is how the gold is formed. THAT’s true alchemy.

Pain is part of the recipe of joy and peace. Pain is not our enemy, pain is on our side—pain is the messenger, the prophet, the way in

So dearest, do not be afraid to revisit those places, stories, feelings or relationships that terrify you. Do not go there unprepared, do not get there before you’re ready, BUT do trust the impulse if the call arises in your heart to go back (or if Life is leading you there).

It won’t be forever, it won’t keep you stuck—because you’re not who you were before.

And it will show you what you went through. It will show you the depth and wonder of you.

It will show you those wounds that still need tending, kissing and care… and it will show you that you really did do the best you could in a shitty situation no one had prepared you for—especially if we you still find that situation excruciatingly hard to withstand now despite all your new awareness, recovery and support system!

It will allow you to forgive those parts of you that you don’t know how to understand and reparent. It will lead you back to you.

• And so here is the second reason I’m sharing all this:

To testify that WE DO MAKE IT HOME.

That it’s worth it.

And that the worse is also how the better is born.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved me.

He was one of my closest friends and I adored him. I’m still not sure to this day that I loved him in that way, but I loved him—and I can feel while I type how much that younger version of me still does. He was funny, kind, charming, and his smile could turn the whole sky into gold.

We were inseparable for two years… and then I never saw him again.

It took me more than a decade to figure out why.

I just knew when things had changed, and that my presence had gone from indispensable to intolerable to him overnight. It was confusing, it was painful, it was too much for me to press or find the courage to muster asking why. I couldn’t cope with the hurt so I just repressed it and let him drift away. I didn’t get mad at him, if anything I was grateful! In the way that our inner protectors can misguidedly be when someone feeds our deepest fears.

My wounded psyche told my heart again that we were right to be so guarded, because obviously people ALWAYS leave (and the rare ones who want to stay die…) so what’s the point of fighting for a relationship that is doomed anyway?

I wish I could go and hug that heartbroken young woman who distrusted love so very much that she had become blind to it.

How it began

We had met at a party when he was still dating one of my friends. We instantly clicked and laughed our way into a robust friendship in that one night. That’s all it took for our bond to feel unbreakable.

When they split up, I got to keep them both as friends, a gift I never took for granted… even though none of them are in my life anymore.

I have only fond memories of this man that I’ll call John. Memories mostly filled with unbridled joy, heartwarming carelessness, endless dancing and feeling both adoring and cherished—the BEST combo.

I felt safe with him. Like I had rarely done with men... He was one of my best friends and I never even considered that we could ever be more. (In my defense, even in retrospect, it’s hard to start considering that something could happen with someone who was practically engaged when we met—I just had never let myself see him in that way.)

We grew closer and closer and I started meeting his inner circle. I can see now how that could have looked as a sign that something was shifting in our dynamic, but I was genuinely clueless.

And then one evening, I was at a party with some of our mutual friends who were drunk and fooling around, and one of them jokingly pushed me onto a bed pretending he was about to force himself on me. I don’t know why anyone would think it’s funny, but I do know that no harm was intended. It lasted less than a minute and I was surrounded by people I knew well and trusted. Still—and unfortunately—it hit close to home, and since I had no recollection of the reasons nor any understanding of my own PTSD at the time, I couldn't give myself the support I needed… and so I called John.

He said he was on his way, and he meant it. Thirty minutes later, I nestled myself in his arms while safety slowly poured back into my pores and until I could breathe normally again. And yes, I can see now how that could have been received as a confirmation that I was on board with a new kind of relationship, but at that moment romance was the last thing on my mind—I was only wired towards survival.

Snapping out of the emotional flashback I felt like myself again but exhausted, and it was pretty late so we decided to go back to my place and have some after party snacks and drinks. Now, yes, we drank a lot, and no that didn’t help, and YES I know how that sounds: that I was not only on board but leading our relationship’s metamorphosis, but you’ve got to understand—or actually no, you don’t have to, but I’m hoping that you will—I was a deeply traumatized young person with a wrecked sense of self-worth, convinced that my birth has had the impact on Earth of Hilter (yes, strangely specific if you’re just meeting me here, but that will make more sense if you read THIS) and even though I had many many great friends, I had no one older than me to guide me.

That makes a very big difference for someone in their early twenties… Especially when the first two decades of your life have been challenging beyond average.

We were heading towards his moped when he found a little piece of paper in his helmet. Someone had written their phone number on it. I’m not sure if the note mentioned anything else but I remember finding this hilarious, and we were still talking about it an hour later while snacking and laughing on my very small studio’s bed. I believe I texted the number pretending to be him and then everything got extremely blurry.

In my next memory—that might have been ten minutes or 3 hours later—he’s lying beside me on the right end side of my futon, finishing the ball of rice I had convinced myself that I couldn’t live moments prior, only to realize after one bite that I was way too drunk to stomach anything solid.

I have no recollection of what we were discussing, I just remember staring at his very handsome face and equally endearing grin while he explained to me emphatically that “Yes but that’s just because you’re in love with me”.

In case you’re wondering, no that’s not the moment when everything shifted between us! But something definitely shifted within me. I can still feel it now.

The ping of anger, the feeling of humiliation, the outrage as his audacity.

HOW DARED HE? How dared he confuse me with all those girls (I was not mature enough and way too indoctrinated by the ambient patriarchy to realize back then that “girls” is not the right word to describe women in their twenties) begging for his attention to the point of hiding their numbers in his helmet for a chance to go a on a date (or in bed) with him?

I was NOT one of his groupies. I was NOT a pathetic loser waiting on his unreciprocated love while tending to my broken heart through overwork (Med school will do that to you) and binge drinking (Med school will do that to you too).

I was NOT in love with him. And I was enraged that he thought I was.

Now why did my brain decide in that moment that his comment could only betray a Don Juan’s attempt to belittle me and forget that I was facing my caring and trustworthy friend who had not only rushed to rescue me a few hours later but also drove me home and stayed with me when he could have spent the entire night either at the aforementioned party or chasing Helmet Cutie? I don’t know… Or at least I didn’t know at the time!

I didn’t know trauma was even a thing… So how could I have known that trauma was my lived experience?

You need to have had self-worth in order to know that you’ve lost any sense of it.

How it ended

In any case, my entire body tensed up while I rolled my eyes and answered with a drunken mixture of unkind sassiness and exasperated sarcasm: “Oh yeeeeees John, I am sooooo in love with you.”

My heart aches as I recall the look on his face. I was too drunk to connect the dots at that moment, but there was no amount of dissociation that could prevent me from seeing the pain in his eyes, the color shift in his skin, and how his body went from cotton to steel in an instant.

Before I could even finish my sentence, he was on his feet and told me he had to go. We had just talked about starting a movie so I felt confused but I was too numb to ask questions. I tried to hug him goodbye but he stiffened and less than five minutes later he was gone.

The next day, without a care in the world, I texted him to see if he wanted to hang out once our hangovers cleared out—because when you’re in your twenties, they actually do. He just replied curtly that he was busy... and of course there was no way for me to know then that he would be “busy” anytime I would ask to see him from now on.

You’re probably thinking that I realized my mistake a few days later, but no.

Denial is a powerful spell and the curse would remain unbroken for many years after that. I wondered what was going on, sure, but I just decided to not take it personally. He probably was busy dating! It was no big deal. And it was for the best anyway, right? If the guy had the nerve to believe that I was in love with him (“when I was NOT!”), I was not going to run after him and give him even more reasons to see me as a pitiful and weak damsel in distress.

Because yes, in my deeply wounded nervous system, “Love” had been encrypted as a power play. So if I was in love with him when he was not, I was losing! And the idea that he could have been in love with me would only cross my mind a DECADE later—thus much too late to fix any of the mess I had so deeply unconsciously made.

The aftermath

I wish we talked more about how often we end up breaking our own hearts.

I wish we talked more about how much happiness we get robbed from by our own trauma.

I wish I knew how to forgive myself for the Love I sent away when I didn’t know Love was an option for me too.

I wish I could go back in time and spare those two young people the heartache that was about to darken their days and haunt their nights…

But I can’t.

I obviously cannot change anything in my past—apart from the way I look at it. I can only hope that John never thinks about any of this anymore, and that it didn’t become those kind of before/after moments that wound you for a lifetime.

I hope he’s happy. I hope he thinks about me fondly, if he ever does. I hope he doesn’t waste any precious second feeling resentful or diminished by what transpired between us. I hope he knows how lovable he was and that my reaction betrayed my cracks, not his.

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I tried to apologize once. Approximately 5 years after it all unraveled. Approximately 5 years ago. He said yes to meeting me! I couldn’t believe my luck… And then he stood me up. Not sure that’s a very good sign that he was past all that—but time has passed since then.

And I’m glad that meeting didn’t happen because at the time I still hadn’t pieced it all together. I hadn’t started my trauma recovery. I knew I had screwed up but I didn’t know how. I’m pretty sure that would have infuriated him even more.

A friend once told me that it had been common knowledge that there was a lot more than friendship binding us at the time, and I couldn't believe that she didn’t think of telling me about that—wasn’t I the one who needed to know the most? But as she pointed out, I was actually supposed to be the one who KNEW, better and before anyone else.

Why the sudden nostalgia?

So why am I writing about all this today? Why the sudden nostalgia?

Because I read a book that broke me open. I thought it would be a cute summer romance and I needed a break from some really heavy stuff I’m dealing with right now. Also I had just had a breath work session and came out of it with a yearning that I couldn’t point into words: all I knew was that I needed some romance in my life and that it was time for me to read some fiction again.

I had convinced myself that romantic love was not for me years ago but suddenly none of the reasons why made sense anymore.

I always let the Universe choose my reading for me, and this has been one of the foundations of my healing adventure, but I believed that you can only heal through non fiction. I couldn’t see that last thread of conditioning that has us convinced that thinking is the only way forward and that feeling is a curse or a means, but never the end.

But there she was on the page: a gut wrenching reflection of my younger self. An infuriatingly insecure young woman unconsciously hurting the man she adored with the blade she kept in front of her heart, and thereby losing her chance at the love she was so desperately looking for.

Of course in the book, she gets the support she needs to open her eyes and her heart… and her beloved doesn’t only wait for her, he understands. Of course in the book, Love overcomes and every wound turns into a portal. Of course in the book, years turn into just a few pages that explain why no one has time to move on and forget about one another. Of course in the book, it all works out and of course in real life, there is such a thing as too little too late.

John and I are strangers now, and there’s no reason to try and reconnect.

I do hope he’s happy and married and a father or anyone he wanted to be and become. I do wish I could hug him goodbye and tell him how much he has meant to me and still means to my heart. But I also know that there’s no point.

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Still I need to forgive myself, if I’m ever to unroot the story that I cannot be trusted with Love. And writing about him today is my attempt to do just that. To make sense of what happened and understand that one cannot be more “healed” or “awake” or “centered” or “ready” than they are at any given time.

About what it taught me about Love

One cannot easily believe in what they’ve never been shown and one just cannot love when dealing with an unattended bleeding hurt. One cannot easily trust intimacy when one’s intimacy has been weaponized and violated as a child. It is hard to believe that we can be lovable when we haven’t experienced feeling loved by those who brought us on Earth.

I was not ready for him—and I trust Life too much to believe that we were meant to be together since it didn’t work out.

I guess we were here to miss each other and to both learn invaluable lessons thanks to that.

Because I treasure Love now. I treasure those moments when I know for sure that someone loves me… I will never take this feeling for granted—and I believe this is one of my greatest rewards for surviving what I wasn’t sure I wanted to overcome.

I will never stop finding new ways to show those I love how much I DO love them, because I know it’s not always as obvious as it seems for others and that Love is not always easy to receive.

I will sit with your shame and I will sit with your grief for as long as it takes for you to know that NOTHING will ever make me look away.

Like Love wrote through Megan Falley (check out ’s Gilbert’s substack, Letters from Love):

“It seems, in this second, i might have your ear. that i might be just barely perceptible under the noise of your not-yet-ness, not enoughness. let me seize this moment of almost-quiet to tell you now: there is nothing you could do to ever disappoint me. exactly where you are, that is where i want you. exactly how you are is just as intended. what you call flaws are my absolute favorites. show me your wounds. that’s the first place i’ll kiss.”

It also makes me think of this quote from another gorgeous, miraculous, poet who just left this Earth for a better world, Andrea Gibson:

“I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.”

If I could turn back time and lie with John again in that bed, I would tell him that I’m not sure of my feelings and that it feels very scary to me, but that I do know that I love him and I want to figure out what that means. I would tell him that he’s one of my favorite people and that there is nothing more enchanting to me than laughing with him or dancing in his arms. I would ask him how he feels about me and what he needs me to know and do.

If I could see him now, I would want to tell him about the childhood that I had kept a secret not only from him but from myself at the time and tell him that losing him was one of the biggest prices I had to pay for my own struggles. I would want to know if there is any remaining pain I can soothe and ask how I can apologize in a way that would heal the younger part of him I hurt, for GOOD.

And if I only get to see him in the great beyond, I will thank him for having loved me in such a way that I could receive decades later, even if I couldn’t receive it at that moment. Because ain’t that one of the most breathtaking kind of miracles? I would tell him that our memories were worth the pain and the longing I felt when I finally realized what I had forfeited and that having known him was a gift I still cherished a decade after our last exchange.

If I could go back in time, I would hug that young leo until she knows that it is finally safe to start crying out the ocean of grief that was suffocating her heart. I would look into her eyes and tell her that her parents’ inability to love her meant everything about them, and NOTHING about her. I would show how brightly the Love within her shines and the holes that she was allowed to fill with Awe instead of Shame.

And today what I pledge to remember is that there is still time and still so much Love to receive, feel, embody and offer.

We are not defined by our past mistakes, we are defined by our current choices, and I choose to never let someone I love believe that I am rejecting them.

I pledge my truth to those who care to hear it, and I pledge to bow to my fierce and soft heart’s guidance the next time I wish to define any bond linking me to another human soul.

And so what now?

I know better now. So I’ll do better... And I’ll “forgive myself for not knowing what I didn’t know before I learned it”. I’ll try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud and keep on following the wisdom of Maya Angelou and all those other Earth Angels who reminded us that Love is not about perfection…

Love’s about the willingness to grow, to try again, to trust and to KNOW that this is what matters: Showing up.

Finally, as an homage and because no one knew how to write Love into existence better than them, I’ll finish this letter with some of my favorite quotes from Magical Andrea Gibson. They shown on the world from their sunrise to sunset in a way that will warm our hearts until we can meet them in this land that poems come from and where poets go to rest when their holy job as heart awakeners is done.

Onward and towards Love,

Always,

leo

Hi CARE friend,

How are you? I’m asking, I’m really asking.

The world is in so much pain right now, and we’re all so much more sensitive than we know.

There’s no escaping our nature, they’re no closing our hearts so tightly that the cries of the collective cannot enter.

Because we’re connected from the inside out just as much as we’re connected from the outside in. And what we can try to escape from, by shutting our eyes and covering our ears, will still reach us through the Love that beats our hearts.

Because Love wants to know, because Love cares, and Love is who we are. No matter how disconnected from our core we are.

And so I really want to know: How are you? What do you need right now?

And whatever that is, can you give it to yourself with the same devotion and tenderness that you would if facing a wounded child? Even if only in the smallest way?

We are all deeply wounded children right now and we can only offer others what we have. So let us give ourselves the support, hope and nurturance that we’re all both yearning to receive and longing to offer.

Time to tend to our hearts

Tending to our hearts is not superficial, frivolous or selfish… and it cannot be an afterthought. Tending to our hearts is how we connect with our depth, our wisdom, our strength, our courage and not only our ability but our willingness to Love fiercely, unapologetically, unconditionally, every inch of and being in this world.

Tending to our hearts is the most responsible, generous, empowering, life-sustaining, life affirming and life-serving choice we can make. Tending to our hearts is our most pressing and our most sacred assignment.

Because we cannot change others—we’ve all tried, it doesn’t work—and that’s because WE’RE NOT MEANT TO.

We don’t know better than others, we know different. (I wrote about it HERE).

What we can do however is heal and liberate ourselves! And when we do, it benefits everyone.

That’s how we change the world.

By tending to each and every part of the whole…

So the only way to make sure that everyone is deeply cared for is to promise each other that we’ll all start by taking care of ourselves. And ONCE we’re full (of hope, of love, of strength… of Life), we can make sure to share all our resources with each other.

That’s how we undo the effect of the terror of lack.

If we’re all self-responsible and self-sourced, we know that we can give wholeheartedly without questioning what will be left for us. If everyone is self-responsible and self-sourced, we know that they will neither take more than they need nor more than what we can offer.

And here’s another thing that I’ve been meaning to write about:

The stories that hurt women

There are a lot of messages in our culture that harm women on a daily basis. We’re becoming more and more aware of them, and women are liberating themselves from those self torturous narratives and reclaiming their inner fire, inner enchantment and inner power. It’s the most beautiful thing to witness and experience.

We’re remembering that we were never fragile little beings who needed a man to protect them. And we are not brainless little creatures drowning into useless feelings either.

We’re reanchoring into our hearts and bodies, thereby healing our psyches and realizing that there’s more to a human being than their left brain.

Actually, the left brain is the one part of us that has as much power to achieve as it has to destroy. That’s the one part of us that should be kept in check and that’s also the only part of us that wants to render everything else futile and meaningless.

So yes, things are changing at the deepest level for all people who identify as women as well as for all folks who are connected with their inner feminine and committed to harnessing its strength, magic, wisdom and well of care.

But there is also a need to look at the stories that drive men’s state of affairs.

And I believe that there’s one foundational message ingrained in our collective psyche that is deeply hurting men and potentially both fueling and explaining many men’s unconscious hate towards women and their will to control them.

There’s another story that does not serve

It’s this idea that in case of emergency we should save children and women, first and foremost.

I agree for children obviously. They’re either defenseless tiny humans or vulnerable young people in our care, and they’re our most precious offering to this world. They’re embodied love who haven’t yet forgotten that Love is the only answer to what ails our world… and they rely on us to find their way safely into adulthood.

They’re the most enchanting part of us in the now and they’re the promise of a future that we might not get to be a part of. They’re pure, innocent, and it is our responsibility and privilege to keep them safe.

Nelson Mandela reminded us that “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children”, and I will add to that that the way we treat children on the personal level is a direct reflection of our connection to our inner humanity and of where we are on our healing and self-reclaiming journey.

So YES. Let’s always make sure the children are safe first and foremost.

And that does imply that one or a few adults need to be designated to guide them to the shelter… but that does NOT imply that some “kinds” of adults matter more than others.

The priority is to get the children to safety with SOME adults to tend to them, regardless of gender—except maybe if there are some very small babies who need their breastfeeding mother, but again it’s not so much about the adult, it’s about the child’s most pressing need.

And once the kiddos are safe, the priority is to make sure that as MANY of us can be spared. There is no requirement for gender segregation at any step of this process.

We all matter. We’re all important. We’ll all be missed! (And if we’re not, it will be because of our behavioral patterns and life choices, not because of the gender we identify with or of the sexe we were assigned at birth).

Interestingly, when you really think about it, saying that women come first is as insulting to women as it is to men.

It’s insulting to women since it implies that we’re either weak beings who need to be saved by men (we are not) or heartless people ready to step on someone else’s head to survive (we are not).

It’s is insulting to men, since it implies that they do not matter as much as everybody else (they do).

Men and women have all been indoctrinated to believe that what this world needs is martyrs! But that’s not true. The solution is not for us all to die at the altar of someone’s else’s needs. What this world needs is LOVE. The invitation is to live at the altar of our treasured humanity—ours and everybody else’s.

The reason we say that hurt people hurt people is mostly because when a wounded part of us has felt utterly powerless in the past, they registered that the solution was to become the one that holds power. They do unto others what was done to them in a desperate effort to not feel as a victim anymore, realizing too late that becoming a perpetrator solves nothing and that it is a far greater burden to bear.

It’s the most tragic vicious cycle and it takes tremendous integrity and courage to step out of it and find one’s way back into one’s heart! But that’s the only chance at redemption we have, because only our hearts can show us the wound and pain that blinded us out of alignment.

And I believe that if you’re not aware of how painful it can be to be told your entire life that you are worth less than children and women (aka everyone’s who is not a man), you’re going to unconsciously want to compensate by creating systems that make you look—at least in some areas—more valuable than them. And you’re for sure going to double down on your rejection of anyone who doesn’t stick to the rules of gender.

Fear and hate always can only take form into this world through the root of our unattended wounds.

I read somewhere that when women get trapped in the idea of taking over men and to simply reverse the current order of societal organization, they’re actually keeping the patriarchy alive—they’re just dressing it as a woman.

I deeply agree with that.

To me, feminism is not about hierarchy, it’s about bringing us all back where we belong: on Earth, in each other’s arms, and focused on meeting our own needs, so that we can serve our communities, Nature, and this mesmerizing world by embodying the Love we are.

It’s not about finding the “better sex”, it’s about restoring the harmony, inside each and every one of us, between our inner feminine and inner masculine. That’s how we can then connect with each other as human beings, instead of gendered concepts.

We need to stop putting women in cages that they’re only allowed to escape to step occasionally on a pedestal. Women are not victims, goddesses, whores, angels, the problem or the solution. They’re human souls in a female body who identify as women. Nothing less, nothing more.

We need women back where they belong: grounded into the dirt, blooming towards the heavens.

And we need to stop putting men in boxes that they spend their entire lives trying to fight and destroy. Men are not protectors, predators, leaders, warriors, the problem or the solution. They’re human souls in a male body who identify as men. Nothing less, nothing more.

We need to bring men back where they belong: grounded into the dirt, blooming towards the heavens.

[I did not include trans folks and gender fluid people in the last two paragraphs because it seems to me that they had to transcend those gender constructs already to be able to exist in a culture that hadn’t made any place for them… and that while they’re facing even harder projections to weather and overcome, they are at least somewhat spared from those I just listed above.]

What we need right now

What we need more than ever is to uncover the narratives that trick us into believing that we could ever be so different from another that it justifies throwing our own hearts into an unforgiving acid lake of Hate.

What we need more than ever is to remember how worthy, precious, special, valuable and LOVING each and every one is as our core.

What we need more than ever is to stop ranking, weighing, controlling, attacking, despising or idealizing everything.

Our differences are what make our oneness WHOLE. Our differences are pavements on the road of unconditional love. Our differences are how we remember who we truly are and can embody again our one collective heart.

Our differences are not there to separate us, they’re here to show us how much Love we’re able to feel and bring into this world.

Men are not better than women and women are not better than men. No human being is better or worse than another because of the way their body is shaped, the gender they identify with (if any) or the way they’ve been conditioned to think, behave or pray. No human being is better or worse than another one no matter how many mistakes they’ve made or how many achievements they brought forth.

We so desperately need to remember that, in our innermost heart, we all know that.

We need and we love each other. We’re meant to be each other’s keepers, not each other’s judges.

Yes, our entire world will change overnight if we can just find the courage to remember that…

Our entire world will change overnight if we can just find the courage to remember Love.

The path of remembrance

The path of remembrance starts with being more mindful of the stories we tell ourselves, no matter how cemented in our psyches they are and no matter how good on paper they look.

If the story doesn’t lead to connection, if the story disempowers even one character in order to empower the other, if the story doesn’t serve EVERYONE, this story does not serve. PERIOD.

If the story doesn’t come from AND lead to Love, that story does not serve and needs to be erased and rewritten.

Now let us all choose to remember that we’re the one holding the pen, and that we can choose who will enliven our finger: our wounded brain or our enlightened heart.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

How have you been? How did you celebrate the Summer solstice? What is one thing that your heart asked you on that day to devote even more attention to for this second part of the year?

And did your heart whisper—so much so that you might have missed it—or roar—so much so that something major immediately shifted if your outer world?

My heart definitely roared… and the manifestations definitely followed.

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I’m watching my father descend through hell, as he refuses vehemently to accept that his time on Earth is coming to a close and grows more hectic, desperate, and angry with every week that arises.

It’s harrowing to witness.

It’s mostly heartbreaking, often gut wrenching, and at times infuriating as his not-so-repressed-anymore rage can turn at any given time and land on those who are the most dedicated and loyal to him.

He comes in and out of the hospital, he comes in and out of denial, and I see his personality get more fractured every day, as a completely different man can pick up the phone depending on the trauma wound that has been activated in the moment right before that.

He also has moments of confusion that are particularly complex to navigate over the phone… and there are fewer and fewer moments in which our hearts can meet and reconnect us as souls who deeply love each other.

One could argue that makes those moments even more precious and I don’t know if I agree or not because the price to pay feels too high, but there is one undeniable gift that comes from all this: my father is not able to wear any of his masks anymore adequately, and it’s like all the veils that were still blurring my understanding of my past are being lifted one after the other.

I see him so clearly now… and everything—I do mean EVERYTHING—that happened to me as a kid, as a teenager, as a young woman and for the last ten years finally makes sense.

I feel like I am living in a nightmare and yet this nightmare is giving me back the grounding I have been looking for since I first entered this world… This nightmare is giving me back my anchor into reality.

I grow everyday more conscious of what the little girl inside had to go through and I am in AWE of her, everyday more. So I’m living a nightmare that has the impact of growing my life even more into the loving dream I have been creating. What an interesting paradox.

An unexpected plot twist

Now, there has been another plot twist this week, on the day before the solstice: I also had my first exchange with my mother in TEN years.

That morning, my father had gotten so agitated while on the phone with me that she rushed into his room to see what was going on, and there was no way for me to hang up at that moment obviously. To be honest, I was even glad she was there so that there could be physical touch involved as we tried to help him find his way back to a modicum of inner safety. He was whaling and shivering, and I needed all the help I could get to catch his heart’s attention so that the panic could subside.

Still, that was one of those before/after moments that we never feel prepared for.

The little girl inside is still so scared of that woman who not only tried to take her voice and her life, but also used to repeatedly stamp over her young heart until all that was left were tears, blood and bruises.

Yet, that little girl didn’t panic… and neither did I.

In fact, I felt stronger than I have ever been. I felt held by my spine and empowered by my inner fire—and that’s why that little girl knew she was safe! Because she knew she had me.

And the good news is that my mother, just like me, was focused on helping my dad, so we didn’t have space or time to go beyond the here and now, which allowed us to stay clear from our wounds and grounded into our humanity.

Or at least, I could! And the wounds that did seem activated within her were mostly ones that concerned my father and not me.

It was harder to watch that I could describe here… but it was also fascinating and, in a way, healing. Because another thing that I could grasp was the level of dysfunction between these two deeply traumatized beings.

Both in agony over the horror stories they seemed to have been telling themselves internally, they just projected their shame and fears on each other while I was trying to gently coax everyone back into sanity.

And I felt deep empathy for those two struggling adults for sure, but there was another reason why it burst my heart open:

I got to see as an adult what I had had to witness and navigate as a child… and my hard-won compassion for younger myself grew by a thousand fold.

A paradigm shift

I now see that little girl as a HEROINE!

I never liked the idea of being a victim of my parents—it just never helped me to look at it this way—but I did fear that I had been a failure as a daughter… However reliving this in the body of a 40 yo woman, I could hug my inner baby leo and not only swear to her that NONE of this was ever her responsibility—let alone her fault (!)—but that she did an absolute BRILLIANT job supporting them at the time and surviving them on top of that.

I have had many flashes since then of scenes between those two and I’m now realizing that I have been trying to calm them down since the day I learned how to talk.

My mother mentioned that it was the first time she was hearing my father cry... I wondered HOW?? I’ve seen him cry more often than I have heard myself cry in the last decade.

An older memory has also been very present since that call: in that one, I can’t be more than 4 years old (so just like in the above picture). My mother was sobbing in her bedroom and explaining to me that my dad hated her and that she had nowhere to go now… She was saying that her life was over, that there was no hope left on Earth. I can still feel the sense of determination that awakened my entire little body while I dragged her downstairs, sat her down on the sofa and went to get my father who was brooding in his office. I forced him into the living room and explained to them why and how they had to make up.

It is one of the very rare extra clear memories I have from those days… and I'm only now grasping how utterly crazy that scene would have looked to anyone watching.

But why am I telling you all of this today?

Because it brought to the forefront a question I’ve been pondering for many many years: What makes our parents different from everybody else?

How much more slacks are we meant to cut them in comparison to anybody else we love? And why do they get away with behaviors we would never tolerate even from our closest friends?

Having been estranged from my birth mother since I was 19—or at least having tried to, because choosing to stay in touch with my dad entailed that she was still a huge part of my life, which meant facing all the consequences of my choices with only half of the “reward”—I often wonder why estrangement had been the absolute right choice for me in my relationship with my mother and why I was making a different choice in the case of my father.

After all, I knew I was not staying in touch with my dad because I believed you HAVE to be in contact with your parents! I don’t.

I believe relationships can only work when founded on love, not on obligations…

I also believe that parenthood is a choice and a commitment that one makes, and that it has very little to do with your DNA being part of your child’s genetic bank or not. To me, one is not a parent by default—it’s both a privilege they have to earn and a vocation they get to be willing to embrace (or not).

Finally, I observe that there are people that feel like family to my heart and that none of those are people I am related to by blood.

So no, it has nothing to do with dogma.

Also, as anyone who comes to terms with the dysfunctional patterns in her relationship with one of her outbringers later in life, I’ve unconsciously entered many relationships because they mirrored to me what was off with my dad. And I did cut those people off!

Plus, my dad is giving me very regular refreshers of his ability to put salts on wounds I’m struggling to heal. Unfortunately, our interactions are rarely a pleasant experience anymore (even if I will never give up the hope that we can change that) and they tend to throw my body into survival mode which in turn hinders my ability to sing. They throw me back into the past and cut me from the present and my manifesting energy.

So why is it so obvious to me that cutting ties with my mother was the right choice then, and that staying in contact with my dad is the right now?

It has nothing to do with them

Simple. It has nothing to do with them…

It’s because I am so much stronger now. I’m not a kid anymore! And more importantly, I am now on my own side.

I’m staying in touch with my dad for the same reason that I stayed on the phone when my mother entered and why I didn’t only talked to her but offered her support, care and compassion even though nothing has changed on her end: she still denies having ever done anything to me, she still claims to be a victim of her selfish and Hitlery daughter and she obviously never apologized.

I’m staying BECAUSE I CAN.

I finally know that what I see and feel is what matters—not what they say.

I listen to their words and even give grace and gratitude for the well-meaning intentions that, at times, cut through the armor of trauma that they wear! But I look at their actions, I take in the impact, and I let my heart tell me if Love wants me to move closer or further away.

I am able now to let my inner knowing drive me and to keep myself free from any narrow-minded ideas of right and wrong, of good or bad, of being “the good daughter”, of needing to defend myself or to forgive unconditionally.

I have learned how to let myself be. I have learned how to let my Self lead…

If I had been 19 when I realized how wounded, manipulative and fragmented my father’s psyche is, I would have cut ties with him. If I had been in my thirties when I realized how wounded, violent and fragmented my mother psyche is, I would have reshaped our relationship’s framework instead of exiting it.

And that is why I can let her enter back into the periphery of my life now, because I don’t live there anymore, desperately trying to blend in with anyone who could love, save or absolve me!

I now live at the center of me, in my inner sanctuary in which only few can enter and even fewer are allowed to stay.

I don’t subscribe to transactional love anymore, I only follow unconditional Love—and unconditional Love taught us through Prentis Hemphill that we have boundaries to rely on, so that our wholeness can be protected and so that our heart can stay open organically.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” — Prentis Hemphill

And side note: Isn’t it funny how those who judge us for leaving—and thus for making the hardest decision a child could ever make in regards to their parents—are usually those who could have helped us make it safe enough to stay? But I digress…

It’s not about blood

Finally here’s one last thing I have realized about our parents that differentiate them from anyone else. And it’s not blood…

…it’s the ancestral trauma we all inherited.

I know the pain that lives in the marrow of my father’s bones because any generational wound that one doesn’t know how to feel and heal, one unconsciously transmits to the children they’re raising.

So I couldn’t care less about the fact that my parents and I “share the same blood”—which is not even literally true. But there is one thing that I know intimately about them that no one can know as intuitively. I know their pain.

I know the pain that drives them, because I carry it within me.

And when I was too young to carry this pain effectively, I needed to move away from my mother so that I could learn how to swim and how to find the shore before considering whether or not I could go back to share what I have learned with her. Staying in the deep water with her would just have meant drowning with her. It would have made things even more tragic and not even a little bit better.

But I have been on this healing journey for many many months now and I might not have enlightened every corner of my inner dark forest, but I have found the source of my light and I have made peace with the darkness. I have learned that there is nothing to fear because even Fear is ultimately only and always looking for Love.

I have learned that I am safe even when trapped in the most violent storm—I have learned that there is a shelter to be found even if only by finding the eye of the storm.

And so I am willing to stay and let them put salts on the wounds that they bestowed upon me… first of all because it allows me to spot them and tend to them and grieve! But also because I remember what it means to live with so much unexamined pain ruling over my life.

I see their innocence and helplessness AND I see their untapped agency. I see the confusion in their eyes and the complete lack of grounding accessible into their own beings. I see the power they don’t know how to embody.

I see their struggle and that allows me to not take any of it personally! I see their unvoiced yearning for a savior, for absolution, for peace. And that allows me to remember that none of this can come from me.

I have been where they are… and I understand that, just like me, they were born with wounds that they inherited and so this pain doesn’t belong to them more than it belongs to me.

I love the idea to stop trying to break cycles and choosing instead to complete them into healing.

I don’t believe we HAVE to go back to our origins; and I believe that it can be self-destructive to do so if we’re not ready. That is if we haven’t yet fully reanchored into our hearts and found the support we need in the here and now to ensure that we will find our way back, even if the reawakened pain blinds us for a few weeks.

AND I believe that there is a point in our healing journeys that demands that we circle back to where we started… so that we can rewrite the stories we inherited into the inspiring tales we came down here to embody.

This is not about proving anything to ourselves or to anyone else. This is about healing, which means that this is about Love. And Love doesn’t force or judge. Love inquires, witnesses and reveals.

It's different with our parents than with anybody else because, no matter who they were or if they were even here, they are parts of our origin story. Because there is no us without them, and I’m not saying that as in “we owe them everything” (They had sex! They got the reward. Nature did the rest.) What I mean is that we carry them in our DNA and there is no escaping their impact in the fabric of our beings, so we might as well look into the mirror they provide so that we can understand ourselves and heal.

It’s not different with our parents because of our parents. There comes a time when we realize that they are no more or less special than any other beings. They might be human beings we adore or they might be human beings we wish we didn’t have to interact with (or anything in between) but that doesn’t change the fact that they are just that: fellow human beings.

It’s not different because it is about our parents, it’s different because it’s about what we need to truly know ourselves and heal. It’s not about blaming them, it’s not about celebrating them, it’s not for or against them. It’s about a reclamation of OUR truth and authenticity, a process that can be supported and hastened by learning about them.

So I’m learning that our parents bless us with their healing for sure, but they can also unconsciously help us heal what they couldn’t… by allowing us to witness their pain.

And I also now believe that the way we honor our parents is not by surrendering to their will, meeting their expectations or tending to their needs…

We honor our parents through our own healing.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

There is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

Because writing is how I figure out what I do (and do not) know, and because there’s a dynamic I keep witnessing that makes me pause.

My current understanding of this pattern is that we’re stuck in a patriarchal framework in which everything is seen through the lens of hierarchy. And so instead of seeing things as interconnected—which they are, as Nature keeps on generously demonstrating to us, hoping we will finally remember this essential truth—we tend to try to rank everything.

What’s impacting what? Who is the strongest? Who’s in charge? Who’s wrong, who’s right, who’s winning, who’s to blame?

And this leads us to very strange and—in my opinion—sterile debates that keep us stuck and serve no one.

The two examples of this that caught my mind are the debate about whether thoughts or emotions come first… and the debate on what matters most when training a singer: the holistic healing of our breath patterns or the intricacies of the tongue, larynx and mouth relationships.

And what troubles me is that instead of looking at all of those as connected, mutually beneficial (or detrimental) and of paramount importance, we end up fighting as if only one of them COULD matter, and as if those who do not see that have to be wrong.

Before and after the vocal cords

I see a lot of voice teachers for instance get enraged at the idea that focusing on breathing in a singing lesson matters. This is mesmerizing to me.

A particular teacher that I will not name once wrote that if you care about your student’s breathing patterns you’re confusing human beings with systems. I was speechless.

Because what are human beings if not… systems??

Here is an excerpt from the Merriam Webster definition of a SYSTEM:

A regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole, such as (...) :
- an assemblage of substances that is in or tends to equilibrium, 
- a group of body organs that together perform one or more vital functions, 
- the body considered as a functional unit (...).

Check. Check. And check.

And here’s what I have personally observed as it relates to singing:

When I am breathing in the way my body is yearning to, my larynx thrives and most of my problems with root tongue tension and phrasing take care of themselves

AND

… when my tongue and neck feel free and relaxed and when my phrasing supports the song I’m singing, it gets much easier to breathe with my full body.

Those are interconnected, not competitive—and they could NEVER be mutually exclusive!

Thoughts, emotions… and thoughts

In parallel, I see a lot of articles or posts explaining that a. *thoughts are the ones creating emotions* OR b. *emotions are the ones creating thoughts*, and that not only does realizing *a* or *b* change everything, but if we got that sequence in the wrong order we’re screwed… but are we?

Here’s what I have personally observed after five years of soul searching and hundreds of hours of coaching both as a coach and as a coachee:

Thoughts create emotions, and when we get curious about the story behind our feelings, we always witness that we make sense at the deepest soul level.

I cannot feel optimistic if I’m telling myself that there’s always a catch to unearth and I cannot feel hopeless when I think about all the love that surrounds us even on the darkest days.

AND emotions, especially when unprocessed, create thoughts! When we get curious about our emotional state first, we always get a new perspective and understanding towards the thoughts inhabiting our brain at that very moment. As polyvagal theory specialist Deb Dana teaches: “Our state determines our story”.

If I’m feeling scared, my thoughts will naturally focus on reasons for this fear to exist and if I’m feeling awe, it’s much easier for me to think about the gloriousness of Life.

Those do not need to be either/or!

Truth is where there is Love there is connection, and where there is connection there is interdependence. We impact each other, whether we want to or not. We impact each other whether we’re aware of it or not!

We are emotional beings who think and thinking beings who feel. We’re both. So of course our thoughts and our emotions will influence each other!

Life is a dance, not a computer program. Those debates do not free us, they keep us stuck on what doesn’t matter. Who’s on top of the pyramid is not the relevant question when looking at parts aligned in a circle.

What matters is to be met where we are now so that we can know what needs tending for our inner sense of harmony to be restored.

• Some of us are more connected to our bodies and some of us are more connected to our minds. That’s what will lead us to either enter our healing journey through thought analysis or through feeling our way back to center.

• Some of us already breathe freely and will benefit mainly from guidance focused more on what happens after the air starts vibrating the vocal cords! Some of us (and I would argue most of us) have highly restrictive breathing patterns and will go nowhere until the part of the equation that gets the air to the vocal cords is taken care of.

About the thoughts & emotions LOOP

What I have noticed is that at some point talk therapy has served its purpose… and that if not paired with embodiment, we become stuck.

Understanding the story only goes so far after all, there is also a need to RELEASE all that the body has had to carry when we didn’t have capacity for release. Indeed, understanding why I couldn’t feel my grief as a kid is a great step to reclaim the inner permission to grieve I’m yearning for! But then I still have to do the grieving for the healing to happen.

AND embodiment alone can also keep us imprisoned of unconscious narratives that we need to become aware of so that they can lose the hold they have on our psyches.

Because if we only release the feeling, the thoughts might be less frequent and powerful, but at some point that part of us who never received the touch of our own love is going to speak again: through projections or through our dreams. So we might end up stuck in an endless cycle of releasing our anger, our fear, or grief, without realizing that it is fueled daily by an inner voice we do not know how to acknowledge or reparent.

Which means again that we need BOTH.

We need to understand ourselves and we need to EMBODY ourselves.

And yes some people can restore themselves into a thriving human soul through thought work alone, but I believe this is because they were never deeply severed from their bodies through trauma. They know how to feel organically, and this is why thought work alone can enable the release.

And some people can restore themselves into a thriving human soul through embodiment alone, but I believe this mostly happens when their specific trauma were mainly physical and/or happened later in life, when a healthy and loving ego was there to help them process the thoughts in real time. In this case, the embodied nervous system is the only part of us that needs healing and embodiment is how we heal our body… because embodiment is Love.

But for most of us, there’s a need to tend to the story and its effect. We need to connect with the story, relate to it and understand the impact it has on us. And when tending to any unexplained “effect”, we need to also get curious towards the story that either created them or that is keeping them alive. So that we don’t fall prey to new stories that do not serve.

And more importantly, we actually do not NEED to attack those who choose to take care of themselves in a different way! Because we do not need them to give us permission to heal in the way we need to by choosing the same path; we need to reclaim our own medicine for ourselves and share it with those who need that specific brand too.

What benefits you will most probably benefit me… BUT that might still not be what I need right now:

If you’re in desperate need of water, that doesn’t mean that shelter has become irrelevant but—and especially if you already have a shelter—me giving you my house will not cure your thirst.

I need sunlight as much as everyone else but if I spend all my days roaming outside while starving, food is what I need—not another sun bath.

We need to trust each other and trust that everyone knows best what is beneficial to them at that moment—for that particular part of their journey, in that body no one else has ever inhabited nor will ever experience, and with the mindset and emotional realm that is leading them at that time.

Affirmations

We do not need EITHER to shame practices that do not work for us!

We get to either be curious on why this is not serving us and what we need to tweak to make them our own, or to let fly what doesn’t apply (as I heard the wonderful Kara Young say yesterday in a fascinating conversation with Leslie Odom Jr at the 92 NY about failing up, Broadway, and Life).

And one example that comes to mind here are AFFIRMATIONS.

Some are adamant that they will save your life and some need the world to understand that they are useless. Some despise those who do not know how to use them and some ridicule those who rely on them.

But again, why??

Truth is affirmations can be incredibly powerful and life-altering. They can also be useless and at times harmful.

They do not “work” or “not work”—they can work and they can not work depending on how you craft and use them.

If you only repeat a sentence you do not believe whatsoever, it won’t help—and especially not if you’re doing it defiantly to prove that it is a ludicrous approach…

If you’re not connected to your body, you might not realize that an affirmation can actually trigger you—thereby enhancing ALL your trauma responses, while you tense up a little bit more with every word.

The truth is affirmations only work if we believe them OR at least deeply wish to give them a chance. They only work if they create an emotion within you that serves your dreams, goals, purpose and/or sense of self and Love.

This is why we need to choose our words with intention and devotion so that they resonate at the soul level and through the marrow of our bones. We also need to connect with how the affirmation FEELS, not with how it sounds.

And it can be helpful to phrase them as a question when it’s a tough paradigm shift to integrate, adding a WHAT IF at the beginning of the thought we want to practice (eg: what if I was deeply loved and supported beyond my current understanding and ability to witness? What if things were going to work out?).

Beliefs are just practiced thoughts. Nothing more. And most of our thoughts fly underneath the threshold of our awareness, especially when we’ve been thinking them on repeat for decades and since we were very young.

This is why we can end up believing things that are self-harming, adversarial, or even in contradictions with our values—because most of those beliefs have been ingrained within us when we were too young for discernment.

And this is also why it can be so incredibly exhilarating and humbling to review what we think about money, genders, ethnicities and those traitorous notions of right and wrong!

Having been raised in a misogynistic family system for instance, it took me years to unlearn that boarding a plane piloted by a woman was not suicidal! I also noticed a belief that men were better doctors than women even though I was a physician myself AND even though the physicians I admired most were mostly women... so the first time one of my best friends told me I was a feminist, I thought she had gone mad!

Because I was loyal to my beliefs, and I didn’t realize yet that my values were showing a very different story: the one written not by my trauma but through my heart. The one in which women, men and gender-fluid folks are partners, equals, and beautifully interdependent.

And so back to my point, thoughts do create emotions. An affirmation is going to create an emotion whether you trust that or not. But this might be creating the opposite emotion if there’s a second voice commenting in the background:

While you tell yourself “I trust in my ability to figure things out” hoping to generate the confidence and gumption that are your birthrights, the inner critic might be arguing “yeah right, like the way you handled the situation at dinner last week… and the way you screwed things up at work 8 years, ten months, 17 days and 3 hours ago”.

In that case you will not be building confidence by repeating your affirmations, you will unwittingly give the reins to the critic to further injure your psyche and body.

Thoughts do create emotions AND emotions create thoughts!

Because the emotions that are stored in our bodies will either allow the heart to receive what we’re thinking so that it can be alchemized into healing or… trigger the inner critic's scrutiny, counter arguments and petty commenting.

Interconnectedness

Hens create chicks. Chicks create hens.

Thoughts create emotions. Emotions create thoughts.

Again, it’s a cycle, not a pyramid. No matter who came first at the beginning of time, we’re past that point now and that question is thereby profoundly irrelevant!

It’s not about figuring out the hierarchical pattern at play, there is no hierarchy. It’s about interconnectedness.

Share

And in my two examples it’s about the sacred marriage between spirit and form.

Because we always need to come back to this truth: it’s not about the ether only or the form only. It’s always BOTH. It NEEDS to be both.

Embodied spirit. Spirit AND form.

The thoughts are the ethereal component and the emotions are the embodied manifestation. Spirit influences form and form influences spirit.

Life doesn't reflect that one matters more than the others, because both matter. Sometimes one takes precedence on the other but then it realigns.

It’s not about balance, it’s about harmony. It’s not a dynamic set in stone because by definition dynamics are not fixed.

The hierarchy between spirit and form is not a fact of life, it is a debate that was born in the human mind and that has been wreaking havoc all around us ever since.

Life is both spirit and form, and therefore so are we. We are human (aka embodied) beings (aka souls).

When the breath leaves the body, we transition out this existence… and without a body, the breath cannot take form in this realm.

Again, we can see the thoughts as the ether and the emotions as the embodied. Both matter. Both drive us. Both can make or break us. Both work in tandem. Both are interdependent, beautiful, valid, needed and sources of both healing and suffering.

They can expand and transform us or they can keep us small and stuck.

We do not need to decide to focus on one or the other—we need to connect both of them and integrate them to allow the dance to transport us through Life.

And so it goes with our singing. Our entire body is the instrument! And our entire body is interconnected.

The breath is how we marry the ether to the form that our body represents. It’s how our souls turn into songs.

Just as it is absurd to believe that singing is unrelated to what happens at the level of and above the vocal cords and above—this is literally where our songs take form—it’s also absurd to resume our entire instrument to those tiny bands dancing in our larynx since they are completely dependent on every other part of us to function, and since they will not and CAN not vibrate if air is not passing through them.

All that’s within us needs all that’s within us. All that’s within us is valid, useful, and a vital and brilliant part of the circle. It’s not an either/or.

It’s not about what matters or not for everyone ALWAYS, it’s about what needs tending and love within me, within you and within them, at any given time.

Maybe you need more surrender, maybe you need to be more intentional. Maybe you need to focus more on those around you AND maybe you need to focus a whole lot more on yourself. Maybe you need to lower your shoulders OR maybe you actually need to let them go back up. Maybe you need more strength building, maybe you need more flexibility. Maybe you need more boundaries… maybe you need les walls. Maybe you need to reempower your inner masculine, maybe you need to let your inner feminine awaken and guide you. Maybe you need more time in community, maybe you need more time alone! Maybe you need a lot more structure, maybe you need a lot more flow.

I could go on for hours…

The point is that it all depends on where you are now! And only YOU can know this answer. Nobody else. Because the answer is fluide, nuance, ever evolving and can only come from you. We don’t know what’s best for others—all we can do is share what works for us and invite others to test what works for THEM.

There’s no right way to heal, there’s no right way to come back into alignment, there’s no right way to live.

There’s no wrong way to heal, there’s no wrong way to come back into alignment, there’s no wrong way to live.

There’s what works and what does NOT.

There’s an impact that matches and embodies our intentions or not.

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There’s no right or wrong way to enter the circles of Life—and the only way to know what will help YOU is to TRY, and to let your heart tell you if it feels helpful or not.

If it does, who cares whether everyone else agrees it was the best course of action or not? And if it doesn’t, who cares whether everyone else believed it would be the wisest approach?

What matters is not to put the pattern into a box it was never meant to fit into…

What matters is Love.

Let me know your thoughts!!

I’m so curious to know how many of us are getting tired of the tyranny of the EITHER/OR…

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Hi CARE friend,

How are you?

Has something big happened in the last few days? In the world for sure, but what about *your* world specifically? And what about your inner world? Is there something that needs to be celebrated, acknowledged, released, raged out, mourned or processed more deeply?

Sometimes what can seem like the littlest thing can have an enormous impact on our psyche. Because it shifts a paradigm we were relying on. Because it puts salt (or a balm!) on a wound that we were not aware of... Because it impacts our everyday life in a small but meaningful way.

Sometimes of course the very big things happen too, and even though we intuitively know that they’ve changed the course of our journey, we can’t really know exactly how or how much just yet.

I’ll share a few examples based on the smaller and bigger shifts that marked my week: from the most random to the most pivotal one.

A decision

I have decided to stay in my apartment for one more year. Even if I feel Brooklyn’s call vibrate in the marrow of my bones, I just didn’t have it in me to move at the moment (and to be fair, I didn’t find any apartment calling my name either).

It has only been a year since I last switched homes, and with all my remaining ties to France slowly dissolving as my father withers away, I feel a need for grounding that I had never experienced before... I was telling myself that I needed to wait to have found a place I truly wanted to call home for the long term before letting my roots expand, but the fact is I need deeper roots to stand on right now, in order to rise ever higher.

We need to let ourselves descend to ascend: that’s a truth our culture forgot at its own expense.

And I have been running my entire life, I know how to run! But what my body is begging for right now is for some anchoring. [Especially after the unexpected melanoma plot twist.]

And so I stayed.

And that felt right! But that didn’t feel good. So I am committed to changing that.

Which brings me to my first incredibly mundane example!

My most recent apartment is much smaller than the one I had before and that applies to the kitchen too. And so the dish drying rack I had was too big for my current sink. I made it work. I told myself it was fine. But everyday I would notice, and have to work around it. So I finally decided that even though “I already had one!”, it made no sense to keep struggling with something that I could change for less than $30.

Funny how the smallest purchases can be the hardest ones to justify to ourselves, right?

And so I now have a perfectly fitted dish rack in my kitchen, and nothing has changed in the world, BUT even I didn’t expect the sense of relief it would bring in my everyday routines. Because it created space and practicality: two things we undervalue easily. Now, instead of feeling slightly annoyed every time I do the dishes, I feel at peace with what I see.

It’s trivial, AND it counts. Just like we can dismiss the pain of a paper cut by comparing it to the pain that would have been inflicted by a sword, BUT getting five paper cuts everyday would still… suck.

Which brings me to a related but somewhat bigger example:

I donated my sofa bed last Tuesday. It was a very hard choice to make because not only did I think it made my living room more welcoming for my New York friends but, to me, it was mostly a bed available for any non-NYC friend who would want to visit. Especially since one of my best friends still hasn’t been able to visit four years and a month later (she has five kids!) and I was still hoping that the stars would align and that this sweet convertible could welcome her soon.

But in the meantime, there was little room to move in my smallish living room (in which I spend a lot of time since I work remotely) and I bumped into the sofa every morning when I did my yoga. It took careful improbably daily calculations to adjust my mat in a way that would allow me to flow without injuring my body, the wall or the couch... And I know how ridiculously superficial of a problem that sounds, but when something happens everyday its impact adds up even when the impact itself is a tiny one to begin with.

Moreover, there are many things we cannot control in our existence, but when there is something we can easily change, it’s interesting to ponder why we’re choosing to remain inconvenienced by our surroundings.

Of course I took solace in the idea that it was very New York to be struggling in a tight space! But there’s something even more powerful than romancing an idea of justified struggle: freedom of movement.

And while recently discussing this with my best friend (who did use that sofa bed more than once), she reminded me that my place is meant to be a safe haven for me… and not only for those who might visit someday.

On top of that, there was another fact heavily weighing on my psyche, no matter how much I was trying to tell myself that it didn’t matter: as you may have recall, I’ve been raised by a hoarder, so living in a room that felt full to capacity (even if clean, decorated, and tidy) was extremely triggering for my nervous system.

I knew I would feel relief once it was gone… I didn’t expect to feel this level of restoration, ease and calm.

Those two examples illustrate how much our habitat impacts us whether we’re aware of it or not! They also highlight how much our direct environment can impact not only our days and moods but our nervous systems.

We have decided as a society that those matters are trivial, but I don’t believe they are.

There is a constant conversation happening between our surroundings and our inner realm—and this is the reason why cleaning, tidying up, decluttering and intentionally setting up our place make such a difference.

And so after those two outside-in examples of transformational shifts, below’s a third and inside-out one.

The curse is broken

I’ve written a lot about the curse that my mother cast on my younger self...

When she got enraged, she would chastise me and yell that my “birth had the same impact on Earth as Hitler”.

I know it sounds irrational and incredibly random, but it cut to my core because, as random as it was, it was extremely SPECIFIC. And we all know it’s easier to disclaim a vague claim than a specific one, because specificity implies proof.

And it was not about my personality or my actions, it was centered on my birth. It was not a comparison to any vicious man, it was a link to one of the cruelest men to have ever lived. And it was not any of those cruel men, it was Hitler, who rarely appeared in any conversations in my non-jewish French family in the 90s. Finally, it was not “only” about enabling abuse, hate or terror, it was about causing a genocide. That was the impact that was implied.

So it was the absolute worst kind of legacy any human heart would ever want to carry... and yet she was adamant, the verdict was irrefutable—and I had no hope for salvation since we were talking about my birth: aka an event that had already happened.

I have been working on this belief for years. I’ve tried everything to release it—but as Byron Katie often teaches: we cannot let go of a belief, we can only provide what is needed for the belief to let go of us.

Because we don’t choose our thoughts, we don’t even create the vast majority of them! Mostly we inherit them from our family, our peers, our culture and then our job is to get very curious and let our heart investigate which thoughts serve us (and the world) and which only makes us suffer..

It was quite obvious from the start that this prophecy was not serving me so curious about it I got for sure.

I looked at it rationally. I went as far as comparing the number of people we each had injured or killed (!). But again, it was about my birth, not about what had happened after that…

Of course I also did Byron Katie’s work on it, but the belief stayed on.

I worked on it somatically! And since then the pull had lessened, but the spell was just too strong. Up until now nothing had “worked”.

Anytime anything goes wrong, anytime I feel the tiniest hint of frustration, I wonder… is that how it begins?

No matter how many times anyone would tell me that I am kind, loving, nurturing, compassionate or that my presence, my work or my art are healing, there would be this voice inside of me thinking: “True or not, that will never be enough to compensate with the impact that my birth had down here. You don’t understand! There’s just no hope for redemption here.”

I was invited by many friends, guides and healers to give back that story to my mother, to realize that it was not mine to carry, but I just couldn’t because… what if she was right? What if she had seen something that no one else apart from her could have seen?

I needed to keep myself in check at all times—to a level of inner tyranny as my trauma coach likes to reflect back to me.

But this week, in one fateful conversation with one of the most gifted healers I have ever had the chance to meet, it all clicked.

We don’t get to know what allows us to suddenly solve a puzzle we have been working on for years, but my gratitude is boundless. And they do say that miracles are not events but changes in perspective… and there are moments when we can indeed witness that Life doesn’t only have our backs, Life has our hearts.

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And so here is what suddenly dawned on me: My mother was born in 1944.

So here’s our first cue to why it finally makes sense for Hitler to be part of the story.

On top of that she was born to a 16 yo or so mother who was shunned and outcast by her entire family (that is her parents AND her 13 brothers and sisters) for becoming pregnant out of wedlock.

The grandmother I remember was a cruel, vicious, highly abusive, emotionally manipulative, and cold-hearted woman who destroyed her daughter’s self-esteem and injured mine in ways that I am still recovering from. She rejected the path of forgiveness and she never found her way into any kind of healing—she didn’t know she had that choice. And I will make no excuse for the woman she became, BUT I can easily find compassion for that teenager whose entire world collapsed that year, amidst a brutal war.

And that’s when it hit me.

How suddenly that absurd torturous claim could make sense to a mind twisted by grief and a deeply wounded psyche! How it could even make sense to compare the impact of someone's birth to Hitler. Because that year, my mother’s birth had the same effect on my grandmother’s life as Hitler’s indeed: her pregnancy cost her her sense of belonging, love and safety.

The fact that she would make my mother pay for this is appalling but again, as someone who understands trauma so intimately, I can understand what happened to this very young woman and understandably troubled mother who suddenly felt like she had lost everything.

Which means that this story was never about me. My mother was not talking to ME! She was just reenacting. And that also explains why I had this nagging feeling that the story didn’t belong to her either… That I couldn’t give it back to her because it wasn’t hers.

I thought it meant it was mine to carry, but I now see how it is neither hers nor mine. This story belongs to the karma of my late grandmother. This story is… dead.

I cannot fully put into words yet the impact that this realization had on me. I dropped into my body and into the floor like never before. I felt so anchored, so present, so supported, so sturdy.

The light in the apartment changed… Everything looked brighter, crispier, kinder.

And as I wrote this morning in my morning pages, not only a new chapter but a new BOOK of me can start now—because now that I don’t have to make sure that I am not “Hitler”, I can be me at last.

About CARE check and us

I will stop sharing soul-searching prompts for the time being because I am not sure that this is what any of you is looking for when coming to this page. Please do let me know if you miss them though!

My hope here is to create a space where we can know that all within us matters, that all within us is good, that all within us has a purpose. That even the most gut wrenching story deserves our attention because there is healing, forgiveness, compassion and peace to be found at its root. That our voices matter more than we know because they are the vessels Love needs to sing Herself into form and into the world.

My hope is to be a beacon on your path of self-reclamation by sharing mine as vulnerably and as unapologetically as I can.

My hope is to find the words that allow our heartsong to awaken our spark, so that our sacred dream can take precedence over the noise of the world, and so that we can become who we truly are.

My hope is that we can co-create this space as a safe haven where we can fully connect with that reclaimed beautiful self, thereby creating ourselves into the gift we’re here to receive and offer.

Please do let me know what feels most helpful and needed, and please know how appreciative I am of your energy and of your choice to be here.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Do you know?

Is it Nature, is it Art, is it Love?

Could you cultivate this relationship with awe, seek it out, romance it and bow to it this week?

Can you make it a priority?

Can you treat it as the most precious resource and as if your life depended on it?

Because it DOES.

I hope this week’s letter can highlight those parts of the healing journey that we do not talk about enough yet—and that we’re called to bring back to the forefront of our existence as our world so urgently needs healing and repair.

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

How are you?

One of my favorite shows ever closed on Broadway last week. I did get to see it three times and there’s a cast recording to hold on to, so I won’t complain too much… but I had hoped it would run for much longer than it did. It actually closed after only three months after receiving no Tony nominations. It was led by Idina Menzel and centered on the most majestic californian creatures: REDWOODS. It was raw, deep, enchanting and cathartic. It was the medicine we needed in a culture that struggles to remember where true healing comes from.

And I believe it was profoundly misunderstood…

… because it was showing the true colors of unprocessed grief.

Our heroine was at the end of her rope and that made her desperate, brash, demanding, and incapable of dealing with anyone else’s emotions or struggles but her own. She was not pleasing, she was not self-sacrificing, she was not nice nor nurturing. She was no longer willing (or able) to pretend that you can still function in a world hollowed by loss, as if nothing had ever happened…

So in a nutshell, she was breaking a lot of the rules that get you accepted as a woman in our society—especially a woman who has had the audacity to outgrow her twenties.

… and because it was not about some grand heroic quest won thanks to the boldness of one’s courage and sword, it was about the journey within.

It was about meeting your edge and surrendering to it, instead of ruthlessly fighting to overcome it—as our culture instructs us to do even at times within the most well-intended healing spaces. It was about bowing to that inner collapse until it can turn us into the ashes needed for our inner phoenix’s rebirth.

It was about the death of what no longer serves and soul reembodiment.

It was about coming back home to the sacredness of Nature to be nursed back into wholeness, instead of numbing out the pain as if caring was a character flaw.

As the one-year anniversary of her son’s death approaches, Jesse, our main character, snaps and leaves New York—and her wife— on a whim, without a note or any explanation. She gets into her car and starts driving, running away from any cues that would remind her of her son’s deadly overdose and from any feeling trying to finally be acknowledged and felt through. She drives on and on until she arrives to the Redwood National Forest… and that’s when something suddenly shifts within her.

A beautiful moment follows in which she’s just walking among the trees and starts humming as if remembering how to breathe for the first time in a decade... And she doesn’t know it yet, but she’s fallen in love. Or should I say, she’s fallen back into love.

Because that’s what Awe will do to you. It restarts your entire life by awakening your heart, thereby reminding YOU where the source of it all comes from..

Now this moment resonated through the marrow of my bones because I know this feeling by heart. Yes, I know it by experience.

Rock bottom

I first reached rock bottom on my own journey in 2015, the year I turned 30. I was frantically climbing the ladder of Medicine and Academia, convinced that the absolution I had been dreaming of since birth was waiting for me at the top, and therefore fully committed to the path I was on. I was completely oblivious to how far away from my center I had strayed, severed from my love for singing and for New York, and resigned to live as a martyr since it was the most noble way to justify a life of constant suffering and self-denial.

I remember thinking that other people seemed to have figured out how to do joy and that it made sense to spare them from the duty of the oncology ward. After all, cancer had been part of my life since I was a little kid, so it made sense to keep my curse all to myself and dedicate my life to it so that other people would be able to spend their entire existence shielded from the reality of that disease.

I had no notion of my own PTSD and thought I was being practical and disciplined. I thought God had a message for me and that the message was that I had done something terribly wrong at one point and that it was my job to make up for it now.

I wish I could hug 30 yo me… and I hope that through this page, I am somehow sending her some of the energy that allowed her to keep going.

And so I turned 30 on January 4th, trusting that my redemption act was working and that this decade would be lighter than the last! I fully trusted this until January 7th… the day when the therapist who had allowed me to pull through my teenage years was killed in a terrorist attack.

I hadn’t seen her in the past two years, because residency had felt too demanding to sit on a chair and talk about everything I was so deeply committed to avoiding… but she still felt like my safety net and like my lighthouse in the storm. I had no home to come back to, so she was the closest representation of a safe haven that my heart could hold on to.

She also felt like the only one who truly knew me. At that time, most people around me thought that my mother was dead and that I just had a slightly troubled relationship with my stepmom. Not that I ever outwardly lied, but people assumed... I only referred to my mother as my father’s wife and they knew I had lost a parental figure in my youth and that it was the reason I was training as an oncologist. So it made sense! And it made it all so much funnier and acceptable for everyone.

For many, not talking to your mother is a crime, while not talking to your step parent is self-respect, even if the reasons for not talking to them are the same. We tend to worship blood relations to the point of forgetting that our true essence is not blood but Love.

And so here I was, “alone again… naturally”.

A choice to make

Now there’s another feature of this unfortunate plot twist that was going to change my life forever. Because as you probably have experienced when someone you deeply care about dies, every conversation you ever had with them tends to start playing on repeat in your head, whether you’re on board with the program or not. And when those conversations were between an abused teenager and her therapist, those conversations are not warm, fuzzy and fun...

Which can be even more disturbing when you’re trying to live knee deep in denial that any parts of your story that didn’t fit the narrative of the happy childhood you yearned for ever existed.

My bubble burst in the most violent way and that’s when the flashbacks started to become daily occurrences. All the inner voices of my younger wounded parts started to scream at me and that year felt like the longest descent through hell.

And you know what the saddest part was? I couldn't call my therapist to help me go through any of it.

In any case, that tragedy—as tragedies often do—started my healing journey.

Maya Angelou did teach this to us all through Oprah:

“Whatever happens say thank you, Darling. Because you know God has put a rainbow in this cloud.”

This promise has been my lifeline more than once [and it has yet to let me down]!

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So that summer I had a choice. Ending my journey on Earth or finding another way to relate to myself and to the world.

One particularly hot and steamy summer night, I chose the former option… and right after making that decision, something rose up from the deepest part of my being and I started singing “AFTER THE STORM” from Mumford and Sons.

I had just discovered this gem of a group the week before and I didn’t know I knew that song by heart! But my heart was not going to let me give up, so she sent me the anthem that I needed to hear and sing to hold on to this precious existence. And it worked.

I was never the same after that night. I had been rocked back to life by Rock bottom and gratitude slowly replaced hopelessness as my daily companion.

I started meditating and started to build a new relationship with Life. I reconnected with my story and started remembering not only the horrors of my past but what had brought me joy through it all: I remembered that I loved singing and that I loved New York. I had reasons to live for beyond the Oncology ward.

I wasn’t ready to start walking to my dream again yet… but I stopped running in the opposite direction.

I stilled myself where I was… and I can now see how it all ultimately led me back to my heartsong in New York!

The Grand Canyon

Unfortunately, in November 2016, I started what would be the equivalent of a fellowship in the US and that slowly brought me back into all my old patterns. There was no time to meditate, dream or breathe (or so I told myself).

Martyrdom claimed me to its cause again, and it was a brutal year of self-denial, inner boundaries trumpling, exhausting hours at the hospital and gut wrenching baths into my patients’—and my own—desperation.

For a year I lived in apnea and was slowly withering away, but the good news (I guess?) is that I hadn’t started any kind of treatment for my PTSD, so even if the bone-deep exhaustion helped numb it out somewhat, I couldn’t completely forget again neither what had happened to me… NOR how I had survived as a kid: By singing and by dreaming of becoming a New Yorker.

I also remembered a very healing trip in California, where I had been hosted by the most loving family for three weeks in San Luis Obispo. I remembered the embrace of the desert and the awe that imbued the desert nights, even if I had no words for Nature’s embrace yet—I was way too disconnected from my body at the time to be able to feel the body of the Earth.

So that summer I started singing lessons again… and I also planned a beautiful road trip on route 66 with a friend.

The first few days felt more like punishment than relief as my back gave out when we arrived. I was in unbelievable pain that was only made worse by the constant driving from one motel to the next. But then we arrived at the Grand Canyon… and something changed me forever.

I stepped out of the car right after the park entrance and took in the ocean of beauty that was standing majestically, and unapologetically, in front of my eyes. At first it took my breath away, but then it gave me back the breath of life. I felt tears in my eyes, coming from the innermost corner of my heart and my body suddenly came back to life.

I remained intensely emotional for our three days there—which was probably even more annoying to my avoidant friend than my back pain had been prior to that! But honestly… I didn’t care. That man was the epitome of selfishness and the first cracks to my addiction to codependency had been made by the healing Beauty of the Canyon.

That was a before/after moment in my life that I had no words for or context at the time. I had no idea what was happening to me, I just knew that there was no point in resisting it… and that it was good.

I knew that even if tears and emotions felt like a death sentence at the time, in this special context, I was safe.

The curse has been broken

I believe that’s what we see unfolding within Jesse when she first sees the Redwoods… and I believe this is why she then harasses the couple of foresters she meets, as she begs them to first let her climb one of the trees and then to let her live for a few days on a platform built in one of them (a Mother tree called Stella).

I remember trying to convince my travel companion to stay just for one more day in the Canyon (and obviously I would have begged for us to stay just one more day after that too) but there was no keeping him away from Las Vegas.

The contrast between what I had just experienced in the world’s greatest open sky cathedral and the way I felt when entering Sin city (which was just recovering from a terrorist attack a month earlier, to add to the traume reenactment) is hard to put into words now. My nervous system went into complete shock, and I ended up hiding in the hotel spa’s zen room until it was finally time to leave.

Again, I couldn't understand any of this at the time, but of course, it makes perfect sense to me now.

Healing is not “achieved” in just one moment of course, it’s a lifelong journey.

But every journey is made of steps, and some of those steps will irremediable change the course of your life.

Those moments can be hard to identify right away because, even though everything changed in that second—for and within you—at the level that matters most, nothing seems to have changed in your external world for weeks or maybe months or even years after that! But the spell has been cast. The curse has been broken.

The seed has been planted in your heart and your inner Redwood is getting ready to sprout and support you forever more…

As the story unfolds, Jesse finds herself again thanks to the shelter and sanctuary provided by Tree Stella. She meets her anguish, her deepest fears, her crippling guilt AND she rekindles with her sense of playfulness and joy. She meets herself and remembers that she’s so much more than the stories that torture her weary mind, as she finally lets her grief wash over her.

And a few beautiful songs later, she ends up alone on a platform near Stella’s top, while a fire journeys through the forest. That’s when she reconnects with this resiliency that beats our hearts and inhabits every fiber of Nature in the same way that it enlivens each cell of our bodies. She then dies to her old self and awakens reborn, after finally letting herself dream of her son and receiving his song from the ether.

She now has a long road back to New York, a marriage to rebuild and a whole new existence to birth into form… but she has remembered what feeling whole means—and she will never be the same after that.

We can’t repair in fixing mode

So, no, nothing is “solved” by the end of the show because it’s not a show about fixing, it’s about repair.

It’s about understanding that even when we’re convinced that we’re broken beyond any hope of relief (as she angrily explains when one of the foresters shares her belief that we, as part of Nature, have the ability to overcome everything), repair will happen through us when we stop running away from a loss that has already happened. When we stop trying to outrun a feeling that lives under our very skin. When we stop rejecting what is and pause long enough to let it transform us back into Love.

This show is a treasure that I will forever be grateful for. I hope we’ll get a revival, and that by then we’ll all have moved back into our hearts so steadily that we can understand the lesson and promise that the musical represents.

In the meantime, the fact that this story made it to Broadway at all already feels like such a beautiful sign of how much our consciousness has evolved.

We’re going through extremely challenging times as hate and terror parade daily on the forefront of our awareness and news channels… But let’s remember again the words of the Earth angels and wise women that paved the way for us so that we would know what to hold on to in times of struggle:

Let’s remember Maya Angelou’s promise because there is a rainbow in every cloud… and thus clouds are by nature rainbow incubators.

It is the paradox of Life on Earth: good spurs not only from good but also from bad.

Earth school delivers us a very hard curriculum but we are not fragile egoic creatures, we are embodied love. We have what it takes to alchemize lovelessness into love because the cure is the name of what ails us!

Lovelessness is the only challenge we ever truly come across—be it in a million different forms—and so Love is only ALWAYS the answer, the solution, the antidote.

And because Love is born from the inside out, finding Love means and requires finding OURSELVES.

But the good news is that, as Jesse demonstrated, even if you run away to the furthest distance you can muster, you can only ever run towards yourself—and Love is always going to be there, with open arms, to welcome us into the most healing, warm and powerful embrace.

So let us trust our joy, and let us trust our pain, my dear CARE friend.

Our emotions are not obstacles to overcome, they are the portals to enter. They’re not the executioners, they’re our guardian angels. They are not there to end us, they’re here to show us that whatever happens, we can—and we will—begin again.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Have you ever defined it for yourself? Have you ever experimented with how it FEELS like?

Do you even know what feels caring to YOU? Or what feeling caring feels within you?

What if it had nothing to do with what we’ve been taught to associate with that word?

I hope this week’s letter will feel like a potent invitation towards self-reclamation. Because we need you. We need all of us.

We’re at a crossroad… and Love is counting on us.

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

How have you been lately?

What feels exciting? What feels heavy? What might be ending? What is beginning?

It’s so important to learn how to truly answer these questions—even if only to in the confine of our own hearts.

To connect with the core of our being and check not only with the mind but with the emotional marrow of our bodies. To ground into our very being, and to anchor within our hearts with reverence. To give words to our inner experience and take the time to not only think about what’s happening but to feel ourselves through existence.

We’re so much more than the boxes we’ve been trained to check. We’re so much more than we could ever imagine… We’re Love embodied and vessels of creativity. And our sacred calling is to remember that now.

We NEED each and every single one of us to remember this right now.

Before we self-destruct as a species... Before the Earth needs to edit us out. Before we stray so far away from our center that we end up lost to the world—and to ourselves—in every way that matters.

Redefining Self-Care

As a reminder, this platform is not about the common definition of self-care. It’s not about being calm at all costs, taking more vitamins than we can count, having neatly organized to-do lists that please our left brain or eating chocolate while taking a bath.

It’s a HEART commitment.

It’s a promise that we make to ourselves and to the world to reconnect with and reembody who we truly are—which includes our sense of aliveness, and our ability to bring Love into form.

It’s a surrender to the spark and sacred dream that beat our hearts and a new understanding of what it means to give, receive, serve and LIVE.

It’s about redefining self-care as a devotional practice, as a radical act of self-reclamation.

This is why I renamed the platform CARE check: Reclaiming us.

CARE check: Reclaiming us

Because in order to understand self-care we need to redefine what CARING means, first and foremost! We need to reconnect with the depths of our love and the limits that a life on Earth entails. We need to reclaim ourselves: body and soul.

Because we are the energy we bring in every room, in every project, in every creation, in every relationship. We have so much power than we realize. And awakening to that is not just our birth right, it’s our most sacred assignment.

Because when we truly care for ourselves, we feel not only cared for but also CARING. So it is the ultimate win-win:

The more we care for ourselves, the more care we receive, and the more care we have to give. And, as everything in this world of form that comes from Love, it radiates from the inside out.

Because when we take care of ourselves, we also free everyone else from having to tend to our own beautiful needs that we’ve all been shamed into denying and thereby struggle to honor for ourselves. We still need each other but we don’t depend on everyone but our own hearts’ guidance. We’ve got our own back! And that’s how we become someone who truly has everyone else’s back to.

Because taking care of ourselves is how we UNDERSTAND how to truly care for others.

Because when we take care of ourselves, we not only reclaim ourselves but we also remind everyone else how it’s done… and why it matters.

Wholeness

We were talking last weekend with a dear friend of mine about how we believe we are looking for perfection, but what we actually not only need but yearn for is wholeness.

And wholeness means, by definition, that no part of us is left out.

So we can only reach wholeness by releasing any ideas of so-called perfection.

We can only reach wholeness by romancing our inner darkness as much as we welcome our inner light. By reimagining the darkness into the loving, fertile, life giving soil that it is (and by no longer fearing the fake monsters that only exist in our own projections).

We can only reach wholeness by letting ourselves come undone when we need to, and by allowing Life—instead of our mind—to dictate the agenda and flavor of the day.

We can only reach wholeness by letting ourselves come fully ALIVE—which requires us to embrace the unknown, the messy, the unplanned, the heartaches and the rage. Which requires us to embrace the mundane, the magic, our need for joy and our need for rest. Which requires us to bow to our unadulterated, precious, fallible, awe-inspiring mostly and gut wrenching at times humanness.

We can only experience wholeness by reclaming each and every part of us.

We can only experience wholeness by coming back to the truth of who we are.

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This platform is dedicated to helping us do just that.

Coming back to the truth

The truth that we are what we came here to offer—which is why, again, reclaiming ourselves is the most important choice we will ever make (it bears repeating because the inner programing we’re all dealing with runs deep).

The truth that there is nothing to fear beneath our skins, apart from the consequences of refusing to look at what is going on.

The truth that all is born in the darkness, including our brightest light.

The truth that the darkness is a nursery of stars and that it is not only our responsibility but our salvation to visit the dark forest of our unconscious as often as our heart advises.

The truth that both too much darkness and too much light renders us blind! AND that what we need is harmony, never extremism (even when extremism is hiding behind a pretty name such as perfection). We do not even need balance: we need flow. We need both darkness and light, and we need to let them dance together the way they were always meant to.

The light is necessary for Life but the darkness is where Life takes form (be it the universe, the bottom of the ocean, the center of our hearts or the inside of a womb). The fact that one is celebrated and the other one demonized in our culture is only an invitation for us to come back to the only source of knowing that can be trusted no matter what: our embodied hearts.

And so let me tell you about an unexpected tool of self-reclamation that I have been bathing into for the last three months…

Projecting

Sanford Meisner is considered as one of the greatest pioneers in terms of teaching acting, and I’m learning his technique at the moment. It’s freeing, it works, it’s beautiful, AND it can be extremely confronting for anyone who grew up in a highly dysfunctional environment.

It is for me for sure. Why? Because the entire idea is to project everything you feel on the external world. To “blame” your acting partner and/or immediate environment for everything that happens within you. It’s their fault. They made you upset. They made you feel triggered. They made you feel uncomfortable, elated, scared, angry, optimistic, sad or inspired. They. They. They.

So basically it demands for me to become who I have sworn myself I would never become.

The intention is healing of course in that setting!

As performers, we get to get so stuck within our heads… so the goal is to focus outside of ourselves, in order to finally leave ourselves alone. In order to let ourselves BE.

Because letting ourselves be is the only way to lose yourself fully into your song or character. The only way to tame the voice of this perfectionistic inner critic that means so well and yet wounds us so deeply on a daily basis. To let the art and magic happen through you, to forget that there is a you to begin with.

It’s powerful and highly transformative.

And in this setting you’re not hurting anyone anyway since you’re facing someone lost in the same fictional world... It’s the ideal place to experiment.

And even more importantly, as I’ll describe a bit later, it’s “projection with a twist”: because it’s not coming from an unconscious attempt to avoid ourselves! It actually demands that we inhabit ourselves FULLY.

The way back to center

Still it’s widely confronting for a human being who has dedicated her entire life to unlearning patterns of projection...

I know so intimately the pain of having been projected on, I swore to my heart that I would understand how to not do that to others. So it feels threatening to my nervous system to experiment with such a shift of paradigm!

And at the same time, we are only free to behave in a soulful way when we know we can find our way back from any patterns that don't serve and when we can receive each and every part of this experience without losing our center.

Well, I have learned that our center is never found in the “middle” of all that we can be.

And so we can only find our centers if we allow ourselves to explore both ends of every spectrum until we find the point that feels like an anchor, that feels like home, that feels like us, that feels like LOVE.

We cannot think our way back to center or follow someone else’s map, we can only experience what our center feels like.

Finding where our center lies is not an accomplishment we can force, it is an answer we get to receive.

Receiving

When you think about it, our connection with both ourselves and with the world around us is entirely dependent on our ability to Receive. And just like with feelings, there is no room for negotiation with Life as far as Receiving is concerned.

We either feel it all or we go numb. We cannot decide to only feel the emotions we like and discard those we find uncomfortable. And in the same way, we cannot decide to only receive what feels good and not what does not. We’re either in receiving mode or not.

That doesn’t mean we let everything enter beyond the sanctuary of our skin! Of course not. We are meant to recruit the fiercest bodyguard of all: discernment.

Discernment is here to inspect every request to enter thoroughly, before sending that person or energy into our heart or on their merry way.

But still, we either keep ourselves in receiving mode (the doors are not locked but there’s an admission fee called INTEGRITY!) or we keep everything out.

Projecting (with a twist)

Which brings me back to why Meisner technique is so healing on top of being such a great tool for aspiring actors.

And that’s because it does not only lead us to project our inner world onto the room; it drives us to focus intently outside of ourselves—so that we can receive all the cues coming our way—WHILE demanding that we receive our every body sensation and response to what is happening around us.

It brings us back to the level of instinct and reconnects us to all the richness and presence of the present moment, inviting us to not only notice but juice every little shift and detail happening to our bodies, our partner and in the room we inhabit.

It DEMANDS presence, embodiment, surrender and receivorship.

And it’s intensely relational, which is deeply healing because we are relational beings. Or at least we were before we were taught to hide ourselves behind energetic masks and figurative walls.

Celebrating our humanness

I stand by this commitment to bring as much awareness to my projections as I can harness at any given time, but there is supposed to be a difference between the way we live and the way we perform!

(It’s not always obvious because so many of us have been trained to perform the role of “us” in our daily lives, but the difference is meant to exist nonetheless.)

Of course, in “real life”, we want our humanity to lead our humanness… but through Art, we want and NEED to see our humanness celebrated too!

So that we can know that we belong, that we’re not alone, that we’re all going through the same inner tides and that it’s not only normal but SACRED.

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Our humanness is not a character flaw. It’s not a glitch in the system, it’s not something to eradicate or be ashamed of. It’s precious, colorful, valid and it’s a portal.

In my current understanding of our evolutionary journey, we went from realizing that we were not only humans but human beings, aka souls in human form. We connected with our ability to elevate, to morph, to overcome our limitations, to become… But the next phase is not asking us to keep on climbing—we were created for Earth, not the ether!

The next step is for us to reclaim our ability to ground, to integrate, to welcome our limits as the wise teachers they are, and to be all that we are.

I don’t believe we were sent here to transcend the human experience, I believe we were sent here to experience it fully—until awe and heartache, enchantment and crushed expectations, hope and acceptance, as well as accountability and grace can all coexist within us and show us what it truly means to exist.

Which leads us back to the call we’re all asked to answer now:

SELF-RECLAMATION.

Reclaiming you

When we reclaim ourselves, we become who we’ve needed since birth and we become who we’ve always yearned to offer to the world. We become the answer to the questions that drive our restlessness and sense of disconnection.

When we reclaim ourselves, we liberate ourselves and that’s how we collectively heal. From within each heart, and then FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

When we reclaim ourselves, we heal our part of the whole and when we all do that, the whole thrives.

When we reclaim ourselves, we answer not only Humanity’s but Nature’s plea.

Only by reclaiming ourselves can we ever truly find our way to each other. Because when we’re full of ourselves, we’re full of Life and thereby full of Love! So there’s nothing left to need or take… Only overflow to wholeheartedly offer and surrender.

When we reclaim ourselves, we reclaim all of us… and LOVE RECLAIMS US.

That’s why self-care is the opposite of selfish... It’s an act of service.

It’s the most radical act of Love.

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So please please please CARE friend, reclaim yourself for your own sake—because you’re an extraordinary work of Art and you DESERVE to become fully aware of that—AND know that when you reclaim you, more than one ripple effects shake the world back into place:

Because you give us permission to do the same. Because you reenchant the darkness thereby allowing it to create the light and Love it longs to bring forth. AND because we get to see you, the real you—and that is a gift that none of us can afford to pass on.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

What does RECEIVING Love mean to you?

I’m not asking about your Love Language here—even though it’s part of it— I’m asking about the felt sensations, the felt experience?

And does it feel yummy, expansive, resourcing and SAFE?

Or has your nervous system—like mine and many others—been taught to resist, brace, retrieve or numb when Love is knocking at your inner world’s door?

There’s nothing right or wrong about any response coming up for you right now. Only powerful, healing, awareness that can change the way you relate to the entire world.

I hope this week’s letter will feel like soft invitation to reclaim the most important relationship one could nourish and nurture: your relationship to LOVE.

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

What does receiving Love mean to you?

As you may know already, I have this habit of choosing a word for the year. Actually, choosing is not the best way to describe this… as it mostly feels like a download from Life, a word sent by the Universe for me to know where to put my heart and focus on that year.

In 2024, it was RECEIVING. In 2025, it’s REWRITING. And both have delivered plenty.

Now, interestingly, after doing this for 5 years (Intention, Humility, Integrity, Receiving, Rewriting), I’m noticing how one theme does take precedence for a year in a quite striking way—so that I can acquire the basic curriculum—but I also then get some refresher and some “time to dig deeper” complementary courses in the years that follow.

And so RECEIVING is not done with me… (I have a feeling that this wise teacher will stick with me until my last breath on this planet.)

But let’s go back to REWRITING for a moment.

Rewriting

Turning 40 and a melanoma diagnosis are two very elegant ways to get one started on their REWRITING journey. It created within me a beautiful urgency to live fully that has reawakened my every cell…

Life is now.

I have an embodied sense of that like never before. And it doesn’t feel scary! It feels sacred.

It’s fascinating to me to watch my very elderly father still trying to negate that life ends at some point, while being myself so acutely aware that every day is a most precious and extraordinary gift. He still seems stuck in that idea that all can be done “tomorrow”—you know, that exciting time when everything will somehow be easier or more convenient according to our mind—and that makes me so sad for him.

It seems like he’s been waiting since birth to start a life that he’s now about to leave… unstarted. It’s harrowing to witness.

AND I also see this counterexample as a very powerful gift.

My father couldn’t show me how to live a fulfilling life but he did demonstrate what happens when you don’t let yourself commit to this gut wrenching, heart expanding, brutiful, mind blowing, awe-inspiring journey on Earth. When you let others dictate the rules and outsource your moral compass. When you forfeit your power on the altar of conformity and forget to love yourself, in a hopeless quest to be admired by people you don’t even like or respect. When you collapse your own spine because you’re afraid of the perspective that you will get once it’s straightened.

The beginning of this year has forced me to let go of all the frames I was hiding into. Salt was put relentlessly on all my wounds until I couldn’t pretend anymore not to be aware of them. It unearthed all the narratives I had needed to survive the chaotic environment I grew up in while highlighting how stuck, small, and broken those narratives were making me feel now. It took away the fake sense of security they had once offered me to force me to understand the true meaning of safety. Safety that can only be born from the inside out.

It threw me in the dark forest of our unconscious, and I descended into the underworld to retrieve the parts of me I once thought I couldn’t survive with and now know I cannot live without.

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The result is that I’m finally ready to define myself according to my heart’s perspective—and to no longer abide by my mother’s projected wounds’ narrative. Funny how coming back to one’s true self feels like a complete reinvention, right?

And amidst this rewriting process, I’ve realized that my ability to receive is still deeply hindered in one of the ways that matters most… which brings us to RECEIVING again.

Receiving

Last year I relearned how to receive myself.

To receive my own sensations. To receive my feelings and the wisdom they bring forth. To receive my limits as invitations for growth instead of either fighting against them or denying their existence.

I learned to receive my experience through a deep commitment to embodiment.

I learned to receive my pain, my vulnerability, and I learned how to receive the unknown as a necessary and fundamental part of a human life.

I unlearn that overgiving is a requirement to be allowed to breathe on Earth and I unlearned that overgiving is even Love.

However I forgot one absolutely pivotal step in all of this… I forgot to relearn (learn?) how to receive LOVE. How to rewire my nervous system so that it can feel safe to not only receive signals of chaos, but also signals of being cared for, supported, invited, wanted and received.

I had relearned how to not constantly keep my lungs empty by exhaling at full capacity… but not how to also INHALE passively, softly, tenderly even.

I had never realized that my entire body braced whenever air tried to enter to replenish me OR whenever someone showed me affection and reciprocity.

Because here’s another thing I’ve realized:

Our exhale is a reflection of our ability to give; our inhale is a reflection of our ability to receive.

And of course all of this greatly impacted my ability to sing! Especially when in front of others… which is how I finally came to identify this missing link.

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I will never stop marveling at how reclaiming my singing informs my trauma healing journey.

Singing is not only my reason to live, it is the "how" I’m coming back to life.

What a gift…

THAT’S WHAT OUR SPARKS DO FOR US:

This is why it’s so paramount for you to reclaim yours. To reconnect and rekindle that inner fire that brought each and everyone of us into form and that allows our hearts to drum us into existence.

Singing

Based on past trauma that I won’t revisit here, the belief that “People will hate/hurt me if I sing” is deeply ingrained in my psyche. It’s a tough one to shake… and I have tried everything I could to erase this program from my brain. Including during Byron Katie’s Work on this.

In case you never heard of it, I wrote about this potentially life altering practice HERE, and here’s a summary:

Choose a thought that feels painful and yet very true to you about yourself or somebody else (ie: They lied to me). Then let yourself wholeheartedly question it…

Ground into your body and let yourself contemplate those four powerful questions, in a semi-meditative state :

• Is it true?

• Can I absolutely know that it’s true?

• What happens/how do I react/how do I treat myself and others when I believe this thought?

• Who/What would I be without this thought?

Usually by the end of that inquiry, you have a much clearer understanding of what that thought is creating in your life and how it impacts your experience, emotions and behaviors.

A SPACE has been created between you and that thought, which allows you to see it for what it is: a perspective with very heavy consequences on your self-esteem, well-being, and/or relationships with yourself and others.

That’s when you can start the most transformative and final step: turn the thought around (ie They told me the truth, They didn’t lie to me, I lied to me, I lied to them), and ponder how that statement might be at least as true or even maybe truer than the original one.

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Again, the mind tends to resist the idea, so I invite you to read a full example HERE or to witness Byron Katie guiding someone doing this. Because it cannot work if just taken as a thought exercise, it needs to be an experiential understanding of the power of beliefs.

And trust me, when we get there, it’s humbling, heart opening, and can be intensely liberating.

But when I did it a while back on the belief “People will hate me if I sing”, I wondered why the turnaround “People will love me if I sing” felt, yes, truer but not better.

And that question was brought back to the forefront of my awareness last week when my Acting Song teacher asked me why I always looked so crossed with myself after singing. In the moment, I replied that it was because I was never satisfied with the way I sounded but I knew there was something deeper to unearth.

And as I wrote about HERE, the next day led me to revisit this relationship between love and singing.

Interestingly both my voice teachers also focused that week on something off with the way I inhaled when singing, urging me to let myself receive more air and expand in between notes.

It took a moment for all of those ingredients to blend together and turn into wisdom, but when it did everything clicked in the most freeing way.

Yes, I was so afraid that people would hate me for my singing, but what if on the contrary they loved me for it? What would happen then?

It’s not that receiving love feels threatening per se, logically I know it’s the most wonderful experience—and one we’re all wired to be deeply yearning for—but it’s just that it feels so foreign to me.

This is not something that I learned by osmosis as a child, and this is not something that I knew I had to learn as an adult.

Isn’t it the most extraordinary moment on one’s healing adventure though? When you realize that learning how to feel your pain is in the past and that the assignment is now to learn how to receive LOVE?

Trauma and Love

And it makes so much sense that Trauma would impact our ability to receive Love. It makes so much sense, somatically.

Because Trauma tightens, while Love melts. Trauma constricts, while Love expands. Trauma urges us to close everything up (and keep everything out), while Love advocates for us to open ourselves to all of this wondrous experience (and to receive ABUNDANTLY).

It doesn’t mean that Trauma is incompatible with Love, absolutely NOT—Love is not only the antidote, it is the reward.

Because NO ONE is more loving and connected to Love than someone who endured the worst and healed themselves into the best that Life has to offer.

It does mean however that, after Trauma, we need to relearn how to receive Love—and if like me your trauma started when you were the size of a pug, it’s not so much about relearning than unlearning what Love is not, so that you can reopen your heart to it.

Indeed, what I was taught was Love as a kid is anything but. It is founded on power plays and emotional immaturity. It is fueled by self-destructive dynamics projected on others and by a complete refusal to look beneath one’s own skin. It is a losing game that hurts everyone and leaves our hearts drained and weary... So no, it’s not Love, it’s its very opposite.

In some ways, I feel lucky to be able to revisit this so frequently with my father, as an ADULT. To witness what’s going on and how it feels. To learn how to fully trust my eyes, my perceptions, my body sanctuary. To compare my interactions with my family of origin to the interactions with my chosen friendmily—thereby unlearning organically that Love can hurt, confuse, exhaust or kill.

That also allows me to spot and connect with the moments when the love does come through the cracks of those iron walls of trauma that hold them prisoners still.

And so what I had learned to call Love is something that my body is so wise to brace against! But what I now have learned is Love is something my entire body yearns to receive.

So there might be a few more unconscious narratives to untangle, but I am READY.

And of course now I want to know what is coming up for YOU, with this idea of Receiving, of Love, and with this invention to define those words for ourselves and not through our minds but through our bodies?

Is receiving Love easy for you or do you notice how much safer it feels to either wall up or… to give?

Because that’s another subtle—and mostly unconscious—way we keep ourselves from RECEVING.

By sending Love back on her way the second She knocks at our door. By automatically saying Thank you when someone is thanking us (even if it makes very little sense). By discarding a compliment or by “paying it back” immediately, as if this tiny loving spotlight was burning our skin. By evaluating our inner value based on what we have to offer and how much we can contribute only. By feeling guilty anytime our cup fills up, because what about all those whose cup is emptying out.

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I’ll be sharing more and more about this new phase on my healing journey, about this new sacred adventure of learning to Receive.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me!

And I believe we need to normalize how arduous it is to Receive, in a culture that only rewards what we put out... and not only ignores but also very often shames all that is within.

Finally, I hope you’ll receive ALL the Love today.

In every inhale you let in... In every smile you inspire! In every interaction you share with a fellow Earthian. AND—most importantly—in every heartbeat that lovingly drums you into Life, so that your heartsong can remind you that you belong here.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

How are YOU today?

Did something big unfold for you this week—around or within you?

Did something small shift, softened, left or came back?

Can we take a minute to really tune in, to lean into what’s going on beneath our skin, to deeply listen to our bodies, to amplify the voice of our own fiery heart?

And can you let (I did write let) yourself INHALE, and RECEIVE the abundant support that we became so disconnected from when we misguidedly disenchanted the world?

It looks like moving this love letter delivery to Fridays was not working for most of you, so the next full CARE check will be delivered to your inbox this Tuesday and then on Tuesdays going forward.

Still, today, I wanted to share some caring energy with you: so here are the lyrics of my latest song: DON’T CALL IT LOVE.

Hope they will feel like a hug to your heart…

Don’t Call It Love

Don't call it love

If it's not grounded in your bones

Don't call it awe

If you can't see Life in these stones

Don't call it love

If you won't surrender to your art

Don't call it awe

If that's not the song of your heart

.

Don't call it love

If your fear is casting the spell

Don't call it awe

If it's not filling up your well

That well of love

Because that's what the world needs

The awe of love

True love that awakens and heals

.

Don't call it love

If you can call it any other name

Don't call it awe

If it's not extraordinary magic or magically mundane

Don't call it love

Because that word is a sacred place

A place of awe

To surrender the urges to race

After fake love

That only gives or only takes

Like manufactured awe

That can't fortify what it breaks

.

Don't call it love

If it's not born from the essence

The essence we call awe

When we fall back into presence

Back into love

With that is and more

Back into awe

For what we get to live for

.

Don't call it love

But do call on Love for answers

And please follow Awe

Until she turns all soldiers back into dancers

And here’s my invitation for you today and in preparation for next week’s CARE check:

• What does love mean to YOU?

• And even more importantly what does RECEIVING Love mean to you?

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Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

What do you make it mean? About you, about your body, about what you’re doing.

How do you handle it? Do you force, do you push, do you back away, do you disappear?

Has it worked for you?

I hope this week letter can open a new door and offer you even the tiniest shift in that relationship that has the power to change our entire lives… for the better.

I love you

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

I want to start with a heartfelt thank you to all of you for being here:

This budding platform is one of my greatest loves and, since Monday evening, we are 100+ here! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your trust, your time, your presence… and I am more committed than ever to show up here unapologetically honest and fully surrendered to this extraordinary journey we call Life.

Extraordinary…

Because it is extraordinary.

Even when it’s gray, even when it hurts, even when it’s BEIGE, even when.

We are balls of stardust and love walking on a spinning planet lost in a boundless universe. Our bodies are doing more to keep us alive at any given second that we could ever achieve in our entire lifetime—and we don’t need to pay any attention to any of it for the magic to happen. There are babies being born right now at every corner of the world… AND baby stars shining their first rays as I write, in parts of space we can only dream of and never see! Trees can communicate and hold each other through their roots, and flowers are modeling to us how to bloom, no matter what, wherever we look. There are creatures at the bottom of the ocean that have never seen the sky… and there are birds who could never imagine what it means to be earthbound. A stranger can hurt on the other side of the globe and my eyes can cry the tears that they are forbidden to express. A singer can write a song on a rainy day that will bring the sunshine somebody else needs to hold on to Hope years, if not decades (or even centuries) later. My heart can turn my feelings into words and those words can seed into yours and turn into love.

We live in a culture that has unconsciously disenchanted the world, thereby disconnecting us from what we need most, the sanctuary of Nature and the temples that our bodies are… but we get to remember that Awe is our birthright.

Our culture has cut us from our emotional world and taught us that there is only danger in the darkness and only goodness in the light, thereby blinding us to our ability to feel, create, heal and alchemize… but, as I always say, the darkness is a nursery of stars that we get to recover and surrender to now.

A fire’s wisdom

On Saturday evening I was supposed to go see Gabor Mate way uptown for a talk I had been looking forward to for months. Unfortunately I never made it there.

There was a fire on the subway tracks ahead of us and, after spending what felt like an hour trapped in between two sessions with dozens of other worried New Yorkers trying to ignore the smell in the wagon and to pretend that it was completely normal to be at a standstill, our subway backtracked to 96th street and everyone was asked to evacuate the station.

At that point the smoke was undeniable and the fear so thick it had become palpable, but I marveled at how we all had each other’s back. There was no pushing or pulling. We were all aiming for the door but we were not willing to leave anyone behind.

It was a quintessential New York moment. A moment where you can witness that New Yorkers might not have time for nonsense, which includes performative niceness, but they are incredibly KIND.

I don’t believe we ever were in real danger, but greeting an underground fire is not what you look forward to on a Saturday night… and there was no making it to Gabor Mate’s talk in time.

Still I walked home feeling so thankful for how much we all care about each other, whether we always remember that we do or not.

I thought about the firemen who came to take care of us... I thought about the MTA people who mobilized to find a way to get us to safely rewind our tracks. I thought about the coordination that those kinds of moments demand! and my heart felt warm.

Yes, we have lost our way as a species and time is running out for us to awaken, course correct and deal with the consequences. Yes, most of us feel raw, tender, under-resourced and unmoored at the moment, and rightfully so. Yes, we’re at a SOBERING tipping point in Earth school, and since we refused to learn our lesson about uncertainty in 2020, we’re getting an even harsher reminder that no matter how much we want to think that we can now control the universe, we are not in charge, we will NEVER be in charge, and we were never supposed to be.

Yes, all of that is true… AND.

And there is a beautiful invitation to return to Love, somehow made even more potent now thanks to the contrast that chaos offers us.

Sitting in that subway train without service or a friend to talk to, I decided to practice a meditation taught by Martha Beck. I looked at my neighbor one after the other while thinking “I love you, and you love me”. And I remember all of their faces as I type… I felt so moved by the light that I could see in their eyes while their bodies tried to mask up the fear and unrest that we were all experiencing. Some folks had gone into Flight mode trying to make jokes (that mostly didn’t land) and/or to analyze what was happening, and some folks had gone into Freeze, their agitation only betrayed by the bouncing in their legs. But when our gazes crossed, we smiled at each other and for a few seconds, there was nothing to be afraid of. We had each other! We were each other.

It was not an easy moment for anyone but everyone was respectful of the tiny space that we shared and coping in the best way we could. Coping again not with danger, but with uncertainty. In that in-between moment where we know that something challenging is happening, and we don’t know yet how hard it’s going to get nor how quickly we’ll find ourselves on the other side of it.

Fearing uncertainty

Now we always associate uncertainty with bad outcomes because we have a negativity bias. That’s a feature of our brain that is very useful for survival but not so helpful in regards with our ability to live.

We’re all very skilled at designing terrifying “WHAT IFs” but it’s harder to come up with more empowering and uplifting ones:

What if it worked out better than I could ever have imagined? What if I am closer to my dream than I think? What if they loved me as much as I love them? What if people actually loved it when I sing? What if I got what I want? What if something good is going to come out of this? What if it is going to be so much easier than I fear? What if it was going to be the sweetest day ever?

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** How did those FEEL?

** Can you meet them with that same open-mindedness that we’ve been trained to offer our fear mongering WHAT IFs?

** AND can we talk for a second about how we call the latter “REALISM” and the former ones “delusions”?

Because let’s be very clear: BOTH are fantasies. There is just no way to know how the wind will turn in the meteo of our lives.

It’s time for us to rewrite the narratives that cripple us!

Cynicism is NOT wisdom and optimism is not deadly.

Uncertainty is front and center on the world’s stage. Uncertainty is front and center in my personal life as well.

As I’ve been writing about in the past weeks, I’m being molded into the next version of me and it’s not a comfortable process. I’m tightly contained in the in-between, with very little room to move forward as the bridges that tied me to my past have all caught fire.

I guess that subway adventure was a pretty accurate representation of the overall arch of my current storyline... In both cases, I’m being asked to find my way home, while being immobilized where it hurts.

And that’s okay. Because pain is not a sign of danger: pain is here to say that intentional attention is required for us to feel safe again.

Pain is not here to hurt us, pain is here to show us that we need LOVE.

It hurts when I sing…

It hurts when I sing.

That’s a truth I do not want to accept but Truth doesn’t really care if we agree with its existence or not. Truth is FIERCE! Truth is here to save our lives, not to keep us comfortable. Truth is here to show us the way home, not to make us feel at home where we don’t belong.

Once seeded inside of us, Truth has a mission and Truth will not be tamed or silenced: if we don’t want to hear or see it, we are the ones who need to close ourselves off… to ourselves.

We only ever have two choices: To embody our truth, or to leave our bodies.

It hurts when I sing, physically.

My lungs and rib cage are frozen in time, still bracing against the constant attacks of my childhood environment.

My neck has been mostly numb since the day my mother tightened her fingers around it… but when you sing, your larynx moves, and when a traumatized larynx moves, it hurts. This is not “bad” hurt. This is Nature finding a way back into movement, knowing that movement is LIFE! But it is painful nonetheless.

My back is trying to escape the wall she had pushed me against by pushing my sternum forward, which doesn’t allow the breath to flow from my lungs into the world in a way that fully supports my heartsong.

My left shoulder took the most of the impact as she was trying to push my mother back… and whenever my larynx moves or whenever I’m startled and inhale a bit too sharply, my shoulder tightens right back into an armor that is neither needed nor beneficial anymore: it got me through the worst once! It’s misguidedly keeping me from the best now...

My belly hardens and my right hip turns to stone when I need them most to melt into sound.

It hurts when I sing, emotionally too.

Because when you breathe, you feel. This is why it is so healing! This is why singing is not only life saving, it is life giving. Because singing is breathing EMBODIED. It’s breathing turned to form thanks to our hearts partnering with our vocal chords. It’s the purest form of alchemy.

AND it’s widely confronting.

If you have any kind of trauma (and if you’re alive, you do), singing will bring them forward so that they can be showered in Love.

And if like me you have singing related trauma, this phenomenon will be increased ten folds.

Singing is like a warm breeze thawing the ice that formed around those emotions that we didn’t know how to feel. The Grief that we couldn’t cry. The Fear that we couldn’t shake. The Anger that we couldn’t SCREAM. The Shame that we couldn’t comfort… This sense of too-muchness that so many of us carry on our weary shoulders. This sense of not-enoughness that we somehow all wrestle with while thinking that no one can understand what we feel.

Singing is Love and Love cares.

Love will not see wounds and just walk away. Love will ALWAYS come closer. Love knows we matter.

So, in that way, singing is the ultimate act of self-reclamation!

If we can let ourselves sing from the rawness of our inner being, and not only sing under the dogma of our internalized bullies.

If singing can be beautiful just because it is, and not only when it’s perfectly on pitch, perfectly balanced, perfectly accurate rhythmically.

And this is the promise I’m finally ready to make to myself:

To sing for the love of singing. To sing without an agenda, without asking my singing to be perfect or palatable—or even received. To sing because I NEED to. To sing because this is who I am and because my heartsong belongs in this world, whether I can trust that or not. To let myself know that I know that, because I know that it is true for you and absolutely everyone else! And I’m a part of everyone. To sing FOR my pain and not against it. To sing to come alive without asking my singing to support me in a way that I am not willing to support it.

The gift of Resistance

I was reminded of Newton’s third law this weekend and how RESISTANCE CREATES RESISTANCE. How this is the only way it can be.

We so often forget that the rules of Nature apply to us too, because we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that there’s Nature on one side and us on the other side. We think we own Nature. We think we are Her “guardians”. We forget that we ARE Nature—no more and no less than a bug, a lion, or a tree.

And so if resistance creates resistance, there’s something we need to relearn urgently in our culture!

Because we’ve been taught to FIGHT resistance (sigh: we’ve been taught to fight everything…) We’ve been told to push through the pain, to overcome it, to be at war with it, to kill it, to admonish it. And here is Resistance, that deeply loving part of us, just trying to tell us that we have a wound in need of tending BEFORE we can proceed.

Do we listen and say thank you? Of course not, we meet it with a sword. Digging the knife even deeper into our own cores, and losing the wisdom that was trying to help us not only grow, but heal…

So here’s my invitation this week dear CARE friend:

** What if instead of vilifying our resistance, we met it with reverence and humility?

Because our options are NOT limited to either attacking it or tuning away completely.

Because our options are NOT limited to breaking ourselves apart until all that’s left of our bodies are ashes OR just leaving our bodies completely to live from the neck up, thereby forfeiting our strongest connection to our own magic…

Because our best option when meeting Resistance is to STAY. To just stay with it, and to listen to what our deep soulful knowing is trying to reveal to our confused psyche.

Pain is not meant to make us move away, pain is here to ask us to lean in. Pain doesn’t call for speed or force, it requires slowness and LOVE.

** Can you identify one area in your life—maybe a small one, like a tiny resistance that you feel towards a hobby, or maybe the most vital one for your heart, as singing is to me— and can you invite Resistance into a conversation?

And notice that I wrote CONVERSATION: not a rant, not a debate, not a hostile interrogation, not an accusatory plea.

** Can you ask that part of you what it is trying to say to you? What is it trying to protect you from?

Because it IS trying to protect you: contrary to common beliefs, Resistance is not showing up to ruin your life! It is showing up because deep down it is convinced that it is the only way to save it.

** What is the unmet NEED driving all this?

Is it PERMISSION? If so, can you take the time to review the stories you inherited around doing what you loved or on how it is “selfish” to follow your dreams?

Is it SAFETY? If so, instead of badgering yourself for not having the capacity yet to show up in the way you want to be, can you move back on your own side? Can you start by acknowledging that you’re TRYING and that that is already SO beautiful and worthy? And then can you find a way to support yourself while you figure out how to overcome what feels so unsafe and arduous?

Is it REST? Are you just too tired, too overextended, are you just stretched so thin than even what you love requires too much energy? and, if so, how can you lower the stakes so that you can still show up for the love you deserve to feel TODAY, while adjusting your habits so that Rest can be reprioritized in the name of tomorrow?

Is it HELP? We have romanticized the idea of independence to the level of insanity in the west… but we do need each other! And it’s not only okay, it’s precious. And if you’ve ever been asked to help anyone for anything, you’ll know how invaluable, meaningful, energizing and heartwarming it is… and therefore what a GIFT it is to let someone else help us when we need it.

** Whatever it is, can you give it to yourself in the smallest way this week and let me know what happened, what changed, what shifted?

Answers need questions to be born

I tried this approach earlier this week and asked my weary body what she needed, as I woke up achy, tender and feeling incapable of singing…

And my body replied: “I lose Love when I sing”!

When I sang as a kid, I was breaking the golden rule of staying silent, small and invisible until I was summoned and needed. At some point on my trauma journey, the only way I could survive was to numb everything out and for that I had to stop singing for 15 years. And since I’ve started singing again, I’ve been harassing my wounded body so that she would sing again the way I sang before being so deeply and repeatedly violated.

So I project on others the fear that they will hate me if I sing, that they will not like what they hear, that they will not listen and receive what I have to give… but I am the one doing this to me.

Indeed, I realized how unforgiving I had been to myself the night before when my larynx didn’t tilt the way I wanted in class, when my shoulder couldn’t unbrace fast enough for me to sing freely, when joy couldn’t find a way around the dam I have put around my emotions to survive.

I realized I had just been feeling unsafe! And ironically had become unsafe to myself in return.

I realized what my body wanted me to become aware of, and how much I needed that recognition: I am withholding love from myself for not singing in a way that allows me to love myself again (!)

I am so glad I listened to what Resistance had to say to me... I am so glad I am even more deeply understanding what’s happening to me.

I’m so glad to have realized that I’ve been singing as a prayer for self-reclamation, while shattering my own sense of self-allyship the second I start to sing.

What a hopeless pursuit that was! And so OF COURSE my body braced. Not because she didn’t want to comply… because she was trying to help me realize what was not working, what will never work.

Message received Body… I will do better. I will lean in.

Your voice matters

Let’s all promise to each other now to operate with the underlying assumption that WE MAKE SENSE, and that there is a reason—a good, valid, IMPORTANT reason—for us to feel the way we feel.

Let’s move back on our own side with the gumption of a Mama Bear and the fierceness of a lioness.

And please please please consider tattooing on your heart that YOUR VOICE MATTERS: that is your voice, your heartsong, AND the voice of your pain.

What if it was the missing link we’ve all been searching for for so damn long?

WHAT. IF.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Any tightening anywhere? Does your breath quickens or shallows?

Does Guilt feel like an emotion that you know intimately or are you so emmeshed with it that you don’t even notice it anymore?

REMEMBER: if your body immediately goes into fight or flight when hearing about guilt, that is not a sign that you did something wrong, that is a sign that there is a wound there in need of CARE.

So please put a gentle hand on your heart and remind yourself that you are okay and that you ARE a good person.

Guilt is a feeling, not a verdict.

I hope this week’s letter will provide a supportive bridge for you and Guilt to get reacquainted within the embrace of Love and to understand each other better. I hope also that the steps offered at the end of the letter will feel helpful and invinting!

Let me know ++

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

What are you exploring right now? Is there an emotion you’re learning about? Is there a new idea that just won’t let you sleep at night? Are you just trying to keep your head out of water and need a moment to celebrate how good you’re doing—even if, especially if, it doesn’t feel like it?

I see you. And I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m exploring Guilt at the moment…

I’m exploring Guilt at the moment—what a fun subject, right?

I have studied shame before and I understand why so many say that guilt is helpful while shame is not… but I’m not sure I agree.

Binaries are so rarely useful when applied to the human experience.

Because it depends on the context!

And even more importantly it depends on our capacity to first identify our emotions and then to tend to it.

Differentiating Shame and Guilt

Many say that the main difference is that Shame says “I am bad” and Guilt says “I did something wrong”.

That makes sense to me. I can feel that nuance. I agree that feeling that we did something bad is better than feeling that we are something wrong. Obviously. But I’m not sure they are that clear cut… and, in any case, they fuel each other.

Sure, okay, feeling guilt only feels a bit less gut wrenching than feeling shame only, but can we pause and ponder how frequent it is to feel them together?

When stuck in shame, we feel guilty about everything. And when we feel guilty, it’s easy to spiral into shame.

Personally I believe that, as always, if we can meet each of those emotions anchored into soul energy, they serve.

Shame showered with Love turns into the fiercest Compassion. Guilt, alchemized through an open heart, shows us where we’ve stepped out of integrity—thereby giving us a great opportunity to fix it!

But there are two caveats I want to highlight.

First of all, most of us struggle with a partly conscious underlying sense of Shame… it is a frightening feature of a culture in which perfectionism, self-sacrifice and the worship of productivity have been elevated to the level of religion—and that is before touching on how shaming our educational systems can be or on any kind of childhood trauma.

Personally, when I feel guilty, and if I am not acutely aware of how much presence and self-love I need at that moment, I will most probably spiral into shame in the hour that follows… and if the hours of coaching I’ve led are any indication, I’m even less alone in the Shame department than I once thought.

Even more importantly, there are many factors that can not only widely impact your idea of what constitutes a forgivable misstep and what is an irreparable offense, and that can ALSO make you think that everything you do or say is an inconvenience

(Quick CARE check: how many times did you say “I’m sorry” reflexively in the last… hour? I thought so.)

Guilty until proven innocent…

Motherhood is a striking example of how pervasive guilt can become in a culture that doesn’t value or understand your needs and role.

The same can be said for anyone belonging to an oppressed so-called minority for whom the world was not designed by default (which is, ironically enough, most of us).

And of course trauma is another major driver of the Guilty-Until-Proven-Innocent Program embodiment.

In the case of childhood trauma especially, that is compounded by the fact that in abusive families the punishment rarely fits “the crime”, and the body remembers the impact, not the circumstances. So learning that you made ANY kind of mistake (which includes email types of course) can send your entire body into the most intense emotional flashback—a fact made even worse if you criticize yourself for your so-called irrational reaction.

Why is Guilt such a trigger?

It took me a while to understand why guilt is such a trigger for me and why I can’t do guilt “casually”: I’m either guilt free or deserving of the death penalty.

But even though I still judge myself for it harshly when I’m triggered, I can see why it makes sense… why I make sense. Why my reactions, if not always rational indeed and at times unwise, are VALID. And why I need to give myself the Love I didn’t receive in those moments and not the belittling I have learned to expect and justify.

It always comes back to the blueprint of our minds… To what I call our SWAN: the Story of Who we Are Not. Only by reconnecting with it can we rewrite it into a tale of empowerment.

Only through undoing our SWAN can we show our inner ugly duckling that she (or he, they!) was a beautiful swan all along.

Becoming Guilt: story 1

My mother once slapped me so forcefully it left a mark on my face for an hour because the bottle of coke in the fridge had not been put back the right way in the fridge. I had just walked in the kitchen to have dinner and was not at all prepared for the burgeoning storm. I have never cared for coke and had not touched that bottle, but at that moment that was apparently irrelevant. I was guilty… if only for not having checked before my mother came home that absolutely everything in the house was in perfect order!

And my inner ugly duckling registered that if anything goes wrong in the fridge… it’s my fault. To this day, my entire body tenses up if something complains that a container was not sealed the right way, whether I came within a mile of that container or not. I’ll even wonder if it’s my fault if you’re telling me about that unsealed container from another country over the phone.

Becoming Guilt: story 2

I also never got any explanation of why my mother shut the car door on my left hand one evening, when we were coming home from dinner. Everything seemed fine until I felt that indescribable pressure on my left hand.

A second later, everything within me went numb… I looked up silently and watched my mother’s face, noticing that she looked very shocked herself. And after a few moments of silence, she slowly reopened the door, quickly checked my thankfully unsevered fingers, and just said that she was in a bad mood and “she didn’t mean to”.

She also told me not to tell my father—which was a waste of time not only because I of course told my father over the phone an hour later (he was on a business trip in Cameroun that week) but ALSO because he didn’t make any comment.

I understood that night if my mother was in a bad mood I was GUILTY and deserved any punishment coming my way.

And that made mornings extra scary going forward because everyday without exception she would take one look at me when I came out of my bedroom and complained “oh of course there you are again in such a bad mood and already ruining everybody’s day”.

It took me thirty years to question the fact that I was not a morning person even though I adore mornings and have never had any bad comment from anyone else on my waking vibes.

Becoming Guilt: story 3

Finally, when I was 8 or so, we went to the grocery store together and my mother asked me to push the shopping cart, which was no small feat since the cart and I were basically the same height, it was heavy and the wheels were rusty.

At one point she stopped abruptly in front of me and I just couldn’t brake fast enough. It hit her in the ankle and she started screaming at me, telling me how stupid, cruel and dangerous I was.

I think about that moment daily. I could draw every inch of that floor after staring at it so intensely. I felt the blood leaving every vein I owned and wondered if that was what disappearing felt like. Oh how I hoped it did… I hoped I would die and finally be free. I remember the background noise, including the humming of the nearby escalator, I remember how the store smelled, I remember in front of each alley I was standing.

My bones are trembling while I write this and my throat is dry. That’s the power of an emotional flashback.

At the time, I couldn’t muster the strength to look around me and it felt like everyone was watching in horror the sadistic little girl that I was… A girl so evil she had just viciously assaulted her own mother.

It might have been a maximum of ten people but of course it felt like a raging crowd of a thousand. A very good example of how quickly Guilt invites Shame to join it on stage.

Many have told me since that people were probably staring at my mother and not me… Many have mirrored how obvious it was that I didn’t mean to do that and that no guilt was warranted! But I still feel guilty.

And, as my mother replied when I sobbed that I didn’t mean to hurt her: “you should have meant NOT to hurt me, and words do not matter, only actions do”. What can you reply to that?

How we heal

Interestingly this is the first time that I spot the double standard between story 2 and 3! I will never stop marveling at the healing effect of writing our stories…

And obviously I’m not sharing that to weigh down everybody’s mood (little 10 yo me DEEPLY needs you to believe that) but to show that when dealing with emotions, it makes little sense to label them as good or bad.

What matters is to use them as potent gateways for us to understand the shape of our inner world and learn how to morph it into a sanctuary of Peace and an inner temple of Love.

For many of us, Guilt is nothing more than a learned behavior. It’s not a message anymore, it’s our default. And the most beautiful news is that we get to change that now. Together. One rewritten SWAN at a time.

The gift in the Guilt

I like the saying that “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical”—meaning that our intense reactions show us the way to our deepest wounds.

Guilt, just like Shame and Fear, is a call for attention and LOVE.

And feeling guilty doesn’t mean that we ARE guilty.

Just like Fear doesn’t mean danger!

Just like shame doesn’t mean that we’re shameful.

Those emotions are just here to tell us that there is a leak beneath our skin and a place within us that the warmth of Love cannot reach… yet.

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Now of course sometimes we feel Fear because there is danger and Guilt because we did something that is outside the embrace of our values, and to this I will answer: GOOD. TO. KNOW. Thank you, Fear! Thank you, Guilt! Now we can adapt, respond and move on.

But, more often than not, those emotions are invitations for us to redefine what danger means, and to realize that right or wrong are fluid and constantly evolving concepts that need to be reassessed every day, depending on our current circumstances—and not according to dogmas that so often wound and, in the end, quite rarely serve.

An invitation for you

And so, practically, here is my invitation dear CARE friend: learn to know intimately what guilt feels in your body, and create for yourself a CARE check plan to follow in case of doubt.

Here’s the one I tattooed on my heart:

When I feel guilty, I will follow the G.U.I.L.T path back into Love.

I will:

GROUND: first and foremost and before trying to fix, compensate, apologize to the world, fustigate myself, I will GROUND. I will do what it takes for me to come back into my body and to anchor back into my ability to love.

Understand: second I will review what happened today and what happened to me in the past. I will separate the facts from the story I am being told and from the story I am telling myself. I will give myself the time and space to UNDERSTAND. I will make sure that there is a reason to feel guilty and, if so, that this guilt belongs to me.

INQUIRE: third, I will review all that can be done in response—not reaction—to what happened.

LOVE: fourth, I will check with LOVE what I need to do. That can be done thanks to prayer, journaling, discussing it with a trusted soulmate (which can be your partner, best friend, a family member, a pet, a tree, the moon, the ocean or any soulmate of YOURS) or through ’s liberating practice of the Letters from Love. I will not blindly trust my bully brain’s guilty plea—I will recruit an inner and outer jury to help me see clearly what is happening within and around me.

TRUST: fifth, if there is guilt to be felt, I will TRUST that nothing has gone wrong here because in the grand scheme of things what needed to happen needed to happen. I will trust in my ability to repair, apologize, show up and figure things out if I did do something that I wish I could undo. I will trust other people to find it in their hearts to forgive me if I did do something that hurt them, and I will apologize and do what I can to make amends. I will trust the Universe to show me the way to make this “right” and to rebuild an even better world thanks to the crack that I might have caused. And I will also trust that if it was not mine to fix, it will get better on its own—because Life is creativity and creation and we are not alone, we are loved and we are held. Life knows best.

Guilt’s usefulness

And one last thing I will add is that Guilt, even when “warranted”, is only useful for as long as it is.

What I mean by that is that feeling guilty can help us grow our value, strengthen our spine and open our heart! BUT there comes a time where we can apologize before even feeling guilty. (Just like we can learn to face some everyday hazards, without needing fear anymore, to both remember to keep ourselves safe and tend to the fire that needs to be watered.)

Let me know what came for you reading this and what are your own healing ways to cuddle guilt back into wholeness.

I do hope this felt helpful, and that it will help you remember that:

There is ALWAYS a deeper story, a deeper need, and a more loving answer to uncover when we feel triggered, unsure, unloved, unlovable… GUILTY or unmoored.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—all three born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Before I start, let’s check in:

How has this week landed for you?

• Any win you want to be witnessed for? Any downfall you want to be witnessed through?

• If so: how can you be that compassionate witness to the parts of you that need your applause, your embrace… those parts of you that need Extraordinary You?

• AND what or who always helps you be who you need to be and deserve to become?

• Can you make sure to spend some time doing just that and/or with that person (or pet or tree!) TODAY?

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I’m off this week so this won’t be a long letter (nor will it truly be a letter at all).

Today, I decided to create and share an outline that links all that I write about on this platform—so that you can see where I am coming from and where I am going to.

A reintroduction of some sort.

Hopefully, that will feel like a helpful foundation for our ongoing journey together!

I’m just so grateful and excited you’re here…

Where am I coming from…

I believe that collective healing can only be accessed through personal liberation, and that personal liberation can only happen through self-CARE.

I also believe that there are three pillars of self-CARE that build upon each other and that we need to intentionally re-prioritize as a way of being:

Self connection that allows self-reclamation and fosters self-creation (which really means becoming who we were always meant to be—before “the world” told us otherwise)

How I understand the 3 pillars of Self-CARE…

PILLAR 1:

Self-CONNECTION is how we build and tend to our roots. It’s how we enter our own inner cocoon.

It’s how we move back home in our body sanctuary and recenter into our hearts, thereby reconnecting with our greatest source of Love and wisdom.

It’s how we unwound our psyche: by rekindling the gut-heart-mind axis that allows us to hear and follow our intuition, lead from Soul, and use our mind in a way that serves everyone (instead of letting our mind follow unexamined conditioning that—mostly unconsciously—hurts us all.)

It’s how we create the inner safety that we then get to project all around us.

That’s how much it matters! Because, yes, at any given moment, we’re either offering Fear or Love…

PILLAR 2:

Self-RECLAMATION is how we sprout. It’s how we rub our wings against the cocoon until they become strong enough to break it from the inside out… thereby freeing us to start anew.

It’s the journey of reclaiming our voice—spoken, written & sung—so that it matches the Love we are and manifests our most sacred intentions.

It’s how we can relearn how to embody that spark—that little fire that keeps your heart alive—and that is meant to light up the way for you to reclaim your sacred dream:

That dream that only YOU can have and put into form—for your sake and for the betterment of our world.

It’s how we heal our inner Feminine & Masculine, thereby reclaiming the magic, power and wisdom of those sacred energies. It’s how we ENGOLDEN them to heal our relationship with ourselves, others and Nature.

And it’s how we understand the power of Emotional Alchemy. It’s how we remember that ALL emotions serve and lead us back into Love.

• Because Fear and Shame, when showered with Love, turn into Courage and Compassion!

• And because Grief and Anger, when felt into Love, turn into Loving Kindness and Wisdom.

PILLAR 3:

Self-CREATION is how we bloom. It’s how we butterfly and rise.

It’s how we diamond up and turn both our wounds into Medicine and our gifts into a treasure that we get to receive… and share with the entire world.

It’s how we Swan:

Releasing the projections of those who labeled us “ugly” because they couldn’t see our strength, grace and beauty… because they didn't see that us being different didn’t mean we didn’t belong! Because they defaulted to harshly judging an odd-looking “duckling” instead of welcoming that adorable cygnet into their heart.

It’s how we disempower the internalized voices of those who couldn’t hear our heartsong… thereby unleashing ourselves as an ANTHEM that heals, awakens, nurtures and awes.

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What do I call Personal Liberation?

It is the organic byproduct of Self-CARE as I understand it.

Sovereign in our inner world, we can show up rooted in Love and with a widely (wildly too) open heart in the outer one.

We’ve turned our wounds into gold and now wear our scars as true badges of honor:

Not in the name of survivalism—we don’t believe in that anymore—but as proof of our extraordinary resilience.

We reclaimed our gifts and we KNOW that we are enough, worthy, precious, and part of the sacredness of Nature.

We have our own back and we’re anchored into our center, so we can ease-fully be what the world needs—be it fire or water.

We made it home, and we’re not afraid to get lost again… because we know the way back BY HEART.

I believe that personal liberation is an ongoing journey and the invitation of a lifetime:

We never arrive because this is not a place, it’s SOUL embodiment.

It’s about turning our lives into WORKS of Art.

Freed from our projections and self-harassment. Freed from those stories that don’t protect us anymore and yet still keep us small. Freed from expectations that come from scarcity and not Love. Freed from our past and into the present moment.

Free to love ourselves and share that Love with the entire world. Free to show up unapologetically for the future we dream of.

It’s about letting creativity, joy, and grace reclaim, support and nourish us, so that we can feel our pain safely and ALCHEMIZE our personal experiences into a manifesto of collective healing.

And how does it foster Collective Healing?

Well, when we free ourselves, we free others.

Because we do not only model how it’s done, we give everyone PERMISSION to wake up, fall, rise, fly, FEEL and become…

We give each other permission to just be.

• When we understand our own humanness, we can relate to the humanness of others.

• When we bow to our own humanity, we can revere the humanity of others.

When we take full responsibility for our needs and dreams, we release everyone else from having to meet them for us. Which means that we can finally, truly, love them unconditionally.

And when we find our way back into Love—true Love for the human we are, true Love for every other being, true Love for the world we live in—we remember at the cell level that Love is all that truly exists.

So we become the Love that we and the world so vibrantly needs.

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And this is my promise to you…

To keep showing up here—raw, tender, soft, fierce, vulnerable and open.

To share all that I’m experiencing on this journey as a former Paris wound-led physician who’s becoming the New York soul-led singer and artist she always yearned to be and offer.

To not only expand on all that I’m learning about our bodies, voices, hearts and essence! but also about all that I’m UNLEARNING about who we are not.

I promise to keep modeling reverence to that deep knowing that we call intuition, reverence to our body temples and sacred emotions.

I promise to keep writing about the messy middle, about the gut wrenching in-between, about the price we have to pay for our own trauma healing and about why it is ALWAYS worth it.

I promise to enter the dark forest first so that I can faithfully attest that there is nothing to fear beneath our skins…

I promise to believe in my dream and YOURS—even when you can’t, and even when I don’t know yet how.

I promise that I’ll keep showing up, even when I wonder if anyone cares, and especially when the story doesn’t make sense anymore—because that’s when we’ve been taught to give up… and I am committed to proving our cynicism wrong.

In a world plagued by lovelessness, the answer is not to further understand how to fight… the answer is to relearn the true meaning of LOVE.

And that’s why Self-CARE is how we heal not only ourselves but others…

Because Self-CARE is how we embody the Love we’re made of and for.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

What is your current understanding of gender?

Do you relate to your body as your home or as your identity?

Do the words Masculine and Feminine feel activating to you—and if so can you journal on how and why? Can you also let it be? And can you let it move through you now?

Those might be hard questions to ponder AND those are such foundational answers for you to not only receive from yourself but embody.

I hope this week’s letter will bring you clarity, perspective and support, and that it will feel like a loving invitation to reclaim for yourself and according to YOUR heart what it all means to YOU—as if no one else ever had a thought about any of this before and as if nobody else ever will.

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

Are you also feeling both lost and strangely determined at the same time right now? Like it all got so murky and unclear, and yet so vital and pure?

After all, diamonds are found in the caves of the underworld and the call to diamond up is not for the faint of heart—which is why we’re equipped with hearts that are fierce, loving and powerful beyond measures.

I’m in a strange portal at the moment.

I’m in a strange portal at the moment. SO. Many. Mixed. Signals. So many urges to go, so much inspiration! And also… so many nos, so many obstacles.

It feels sluggish and foggy. It feels tenderizing and raw. There’s no clarity… I’m meant to keep walking through the dark.

Now, I trust the darkness. I know it’s the nursery of stars. I know it’s the fertile ground where everything takes form. I know it’s the caring night that holds us all.

I know it’s our origin and I’m guessing it’s our final destination.

I don’t believe there’s a difference between the darkness and the light.

I believe there’s light we can see—and therefore love—and light we cannot grasp—and therefore fear. And I read last year that physicists are starting to go towards this conclusion too, studying how what appears dark to the human eye and mind is actually exhausted light.

I also don’t believe in right and wrong anymore, I believe in inner integrity.

I don’t believe in dogmas, I believe in inner clarity.

I heard Martha Beck remind us recently that if we’ve found someone we agree 100% of the time with, it’s amazing: we’ve entered a cult! (Was she quoting Ram Dass? I’m not sure now). She then added that if two humans agree on absolutely everything, one human is superfluous! How beautiful of a reframe… To understand that our differences are not what separate us but what make us precious and in service of Life (and one another).

When clarity leaves us…

When clarity leaves us, we’re called to surrender. Which does not mean yielding to the one person who pretends to have all the answers… No, we’re called to bow to the unknown and let it reclaim us.

And by letting it reclaim us, we reclaim ourselves.

In many ways, I’ve stopped making sense to myself again. I yearn to journal and yet it has become increasingly difficult for me to find my way to my writing desk. I’m not quite sure I understand anymore when my body is begging for movement and when it’s imploring for stillness. Music can at times feel invasive to me after being my most loyal life partner for as long as I can remember. I never sought silence before, and now there are moments when silence feels like the most trusted friend.

I’m feeling called to slow down when all I’ve ever known how to do is run.

In a nutshell, what used to work for me before is not always working for me now and what felt foreign, odd and inaccessible is starting to feel like a way of life I could adopt. I’m being reinvented but I’m not entirely sure who I’m being reinvented into.

And the funny thing is that I’m making less and less sense to my mind, but I also feel more and more myself! I guess I just don’t know who that is yet. I guess we’re always evolving, always starting over. I guess the “me” I reclaimed in 2020 was just the next inner layer under my protective shell… and I’ve deepened one or two layers more since them, so a new truth needs to emerge. And, with that, a new identity and a new understanding of my self-care.

I wonder how many times a woman is meant to reinvent herself…

I wonder how many times a woman is meant to reinvent herself and yet I suppose that’s one more thing that those of us who identify as women need to reclaim!

Because constant reinventions are not celebrated in our culture… AND we’ve exiled everything that we need at the soul level, in a patriarchal world that only reveres and acknowledges the mind and only celebrates having a body when it relates to the brain.

I’ve started reading yet another of those books that change everything for you, inside and out. Maureen Murdock’s THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY had this effect on me last September and I’m now reading another of her more recent books in awe, FATHER’S DAUGHTERS: Breaking The Ties That Bind.

It is not an easy read. It’s confronting, it’s raw, it’s deep, it’s brutiful. And I needed it so deeply to understand myself and my inner setting even more! It feels like such a timely read while I’m slowly saying goodbye to the complicated and multi-layered man who was once my hero and will always be my father.

I believe every woman (and human!) needs this book given the patriarchal conditioning we fell into and independently of her relationship with her father.

It’s a powerful reminder of the dangers of internalized patriarchy, while further highlighting that the patriarchy is not so much about men than a result of a core wound that we hold as a collective regarding our inner Masculine and Feminine.

It’s ALSO a beautiful ode to the Masculine we need to restore in the world—that Man of Heart energy that is the elevated embodiment of the Masculine Archetype.

We think oversimplifying things will make it easier…

We think oversimplifying things will make it easier for us to understand the world and thereby feel safe in it. I believe that is the foundational lie that weakens our psyche and empowers our collective tendencies to blame and/or deny, instead of relying on compassion and curiosity when we need them the most.

It’s dangerous for us to simplify what happens within and without. And nothing has been more damaging to us all (“us” not only including humans but the whole of Nature) than the overcoupling of the Feminine with the female gender and of the Masculine with the male gender.

The way I understand it now—and obviously that is constantly changing as I continue my exploration of the humaning journey—there are four levels on which Feminine and Masculine can be looked at (and as a reminder those are just words! Words that are here to serve and POINT towards the truth… Words that can be edited by your heart if they’re not doing their job).

And the problem is that we use the same definers to describe those widely different concepts and parts of Life, so we logically get very confused with their meaning and overcouple a lot of them. We get lost in translation, in a way.

So here’s my current understanding of the Feminine and of the Masculine at play:

• On the level of form or matter

• On the level of the mind

• On the level of the collective psyche

• On Soul level

On the level of form, those bodies we live in have a sex defined by our genitals and hormones. Some bodies are female, some bodies are male, and some bodies are intersex. That’s just a biological and genetic fact that needs to be separated from our meaning-making abilities and needs. Our body’s sex has physical implications that we have to contend with, including who can birth children, which hormones rule our biology, how we have sex and who menstruates or not, and even though we are NOT our bodies, we do spend our entire lives within them… so they will influence our everyday lives. That’s all our sex truly means, but on top of that we’ve added gender constructs! And that’s why our bodies’ sex tend to influence how we show up and how we are perceived in the world:

Because who we think we are, we become.

On the level of the mind—and on the level of the mind only!—exists this idea of Gender. Gender is a mental construct created by humans and in constant evolution as we grow, deepen and evolve as individuals and as a collective. This is an identity that we consciously or not endorse, abide by, or rebel against. This is an idea that we GET to shape, edit, nuance and make our own.

Genders are not a “fact” of Life, they are a DECISION the majority of us haven’t fully realized we’re—willingly or not—making. Some of us identify more with our Feminine energy, some identify with our Masculine, some identify with both equally, and some identify with none particularly. That’s the foundation of gender fluidity. In our culture, we tend to believe that our gender must align with our body and that there is a particular way to act depending on the gender assigned to you. But again, many think it’s an unquestionable fact without realizing that it is an implicit rule created by our minds, not Nature.

As we can see in Nature, biology impacts our rhythms and behaviors—at the raw level of instincts at least—whether we want it or not. However our gender will only impact us if we don’t question the internalized diktat we associate with them.

That’s when the level of the collective psyche enters the game. That’s where we meet the archetypal understanding of the Feminine and of the Masculine.

As a reminder Jung defined an archetype as universal, inherited ideas, patterns of thoughts, or images, that dance in our collective unconscious and drive our lives in a way that we can only comprehend when we make them conscious. They’re neither good or bad but they are part of our experience, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.

And as with every archetype, we can look at the engoldened translation of that energy or at its toxic expression.

Of note, I’m trying really hard to not use words such as light vs dark or elevated vs low, because those are consequences of our default pattern towards the engoldened qualities of the Masculine in comparison to the now deeply misunderstood engoldened Feminine.

Indeed, the engoldened Feminine (that some call divine or sacred or healthy!) reminds us of the fertile, enchanting, mystical and healing powers of the deep Earth and of the dark. It is dark beneath the ground, it is dark at the bottom of the ocean, it is dark within our wombs, it is dark within our hearts. And the Universe is a web of darkness too. The dark is where all Life is born, again and again and again. The dark is where Life (and light!) goes to take form.

In a world that has been taught to worship the Masculine only, we constantly seek elevation and light. We bow to the spirit only. But the grace of Life is never found in the extremes. Enlightened elevation will only create Love if deeply rooted in the center of the Earth. Love is spirit embodied.

The “LOW” is just as sacred as the “HIGH” is divine. And the darkness is just as enchanting as the light is magical. Too much light has the same effect as too much darkness, they both render us blind! AND we must descend to truly ascend. So in both cases, we need both. We need harmony... We need BALANCE.

• The distorted Masculine falls into patterns of domination, of righteousness, of separation. It attacks, placates, drains, pushes, destroys, rushes, and plays mind games. It only bows to our thoughts and never lets our emotions show us which thoughts are true or not. It sacrifices empathy at the altar of a logic that can become ruthless to the point of dehumanization and killing. It puts the individual on a throne built on the shoulders and health of the collective.

• The repressed Feminine falls into patterns of fragility, of emotional fogginess, of enmeshment. It disempowers itself, claims victimhood, shrinks, hides, denies, freezes, and uses emotional blackmails. It drowns itself into emotions without letting us study the stories creating them to check whether they serve or not. It confuses kindness and niceness and mistakes self-denial with service and compassion. It puts the collective above all, throwing the individual in a cave without water, nurturance or oxygen to breathe.

When we talk of the patriarchy, we’re not talking about human beings in a male body, we’re talking about a world where distorted Masculine and repressed Feminine are the norms—and for some the ideal. We all need to unlearn this by rooting within ourselves to reclaim and heal those potent and inescapable energies.

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Because what we need now are the engoldened qualities of each.

• The engoldened Feminine nurtures, flows, creates, inspires, alchemizes all our feelings into Love and allows us to deeply root within our bodies, senses, intuition and on Earth. It connects us to all that is and to each other. It cares.

• The engoldened Masculine protects, maps out, builds, empowers, edits our thoughts in the service of Love and allows us to grow beyond our limitations and the physical limits of this world. It connects us to ourselves. It serves.

And when they merge, they LEAD. From and into Love.

Finally, on the level of Soul, those energies that we call Feminine and Masculine that fueled the archetypes, impact our understanding of our biology, and somewhat inform our gender constructs, exist in a gorgeous continuum—not as separate or opposed energies but in extensions of one another and mutual service.

Only on the level of form can separation exist. On the level of Soul, oneness is the underlying principle.

It’s those sacred Yin and Yang principles that allow the world to be. Two polarities of the same energetic source that are beautiful, potent, and life affirming on their own and that ALSO balance, empower and serve each other. Together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

They’re both born in each other as spirit and matter merge to come to Life. An idea only exists in the world after taking form and the form is only born because the idea arose. The embodied and the ethereal, concrete hand in a figurative one (and vice versa) allowing the endless cycles of creativity and creation to morph, inform and evolve each other.

The beauty of the night is revealed by the beauty of the light. The beauty of the light is revealed by the beauty of the night. The Feminine is the inspiration and the Masculine is the idea... The Masculine is the creation and the Feminine is the Art. One cannot be without the other and the other cannot be without the one. ALL in Nature (including us) is imbued by those two sacred forces and that is why we live in this awe-inspiring world.

The Soul Feminine and the Soul Masculine are on one end of the spectrum, in the purely ethereal and the male body and the female body are on the other end, in the fully manifested. Those are the foundations that Nature gave us and that pertains to all that is, all that ever was and all that is to come.

And then, in the middle, there is the “human drama”: this beautiful, gut wrenching, at times, heart opening always, story that we tell each other about who we are and who we are not.

The good news is that this story is just a story and one that we get to discover, edit, deepen, expand, transform and surrender back to Love over and over and over again.

And if we want peace among humans, we need to create peace within ourselves first and foremost… Understanding where we come from, the energies we’re made of, and the deeper call from our inner wisdom that knows that there is another way to see and therefore exist in the world. The way of Love.

I hope you know…

I hope you know how precious, needed and cared for you are. I hope you know it from the inside out. I hope that you will let both your inner Feminine and your inner Masculine diamond you up into the gift you’re here to receive and share with all of us.

I hope we call all remember soon that we are not who we are urged to fear we are… and that we can reclaim the essence of Nature and the sacredness of our bodies to redefine what it is to be human.

A redefinition summarized in the world LOVE.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo

Do you know?

If so, do you know why?

Is it different depending on the area of life (home, relationships, career)?

And what comes up for you with the idea of doing things the other way around for once?

I hope this week’s letter will feel like a helpful example of how we can retrace our history to understand ourselves and what shaped our decision making patterns… so that we can know which patterns we can trust and which patterns might need editing.

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

Hi CARE friend,

How are you?

Are you feeling mostly supported or slapped in the face by Earth school at the moment?

I’m definitely closer to the second one right now.

I’m feeling unearthed and unmoored. Like I’m at a crossroad, but a crossroad unlike any one I’ve encountered before, because I just can’t see clearly what is right, left, front or back.

It’s confusing, it’s scary, and… I have to admit it’s also interesting.

The Universe definitely got my intention, and while my mind is stuck in a never ending tantrum, my gut feels very alive and my heart very calm.

So I know I’m okay. I know it means I’m learning something pivotal.

I don’t feel alone, I feel supported: I know it’s an invitation, not a punishment. It’s an initiation, not a crumbling down. It’s a journey in the underworld meant to help me build what I dream of. It doesn't feel like falling apart. It feels foundational.

Now it doesn't feel great, but my inner sanctuary and compass are on board, so I’m mothering my weary brain into acceptance.

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To be honest, at first I was trying to force my brain into acceptance.

I wrote myself a Letter From Love this morning (check out this life changing practice on magical ’s Substack) and Love urged me to stop harassing my poor brain into accepting what it is just not ready to fully accept at the moment… To trust that wanting to accept it is enough! And Love also added that I didn’t even “have” to do that.

Feeling disappointed, restless and unsure is allowed apparently… I just never had read that memo until now.

One of my most pressing soul yearning at the moment is to take roots. To find my home and feel at home. To ground.

Home is a tricky subject for my psyche. There’s a lot of wounding there, and it’s a place where I’m realizing more and more that my young inner Maiden needs remothering.

I grew up in a beautiful house in Paris that was shared between my aunt and uncle’s family and my parents and me. It was picture perfect on the outside and it was full of grief and unprocessed rage (mostly my mother’s) on the inside. I was too little to remember a time before my aunt got cancer and she died when I was thirteen, shattering any sense of safety I had been able to foster in our challenged family dynamics. On top of that, my mother reminded me daily that that house was not mine (I didn’t know at the time that it was actually not hers… because my father had not added her name on the deed when she moved in) and required me to call before coming home from school if it was earlier than expected for whatever reason. Failure to do so attracted painful reminders on my cheeks.

I never truly moved out of there, I fled.

My parents went away for a week when I had just started Med school (in France that happens right after high school) and a phone call from my mother finally broke me into awakening. I met the limits of my capacity for cruelty. We were studying in one of Paris’ gorgeous public libraries with my best friend, Lou, and after hanging up, I joined her on the bench she was taking a break on, at the top of a beautiful stony staircase. She took one look at me and without waiting for any update on the conversation, she told me very matter-of-factly: “this is it leo, it’s time to leave that house and break free from her hold on you. You can sleep for three weeks on my couch and that will give us time to figure this out.”

And so I went home, packed what I could pack, and asked another friend who had a car to come pick me up the next morning.

That was it.

In less than 24 hours I had decided to leave and left the only address I ever had… with a plan only for the first 21 nights—until Lou’s partner came home.

For the next six months I found shelter after shelter thanks to the generosity and love of my amazing friends… I was scared, but I lived in the present moment—which is somewhat easier to do at 19 and when buried into your studies. There was no time to grieve obviously and I took it one week at a time. However, I didn’t have to get a job as my father slowly understood my decision and started supporting me financially more and more. One beautiful thing about my dad is how he always put my education first: he wanted me to remain fully dedicated to my medical training, and he ended up renting me a small studio at the beginning of the next academic year.

It was only 130 sq ft, a 6-floor walk up and there was only 6.5 min of hot water available per shower, but to me it was heaven. It was my first true home and a charming little cocoon—“under the roofs” as we call those little Parisian nests that used to house the wealthy’s house staff. My friends would come every night to drink rose wine and eat pesto pasta once we were done studying, and I just loved it there. I felt safe for the first time ever and I thought I would live there forever (yes, I was young and very romantic: forever home was a concept I still thought existed and living in a shoe box felt very stylish to me).

Unfortunately, a year later, the landlord decided to sell it to a neighbour who wanted to expand his own condo... My lease would not be renewed. I had to move out and unconsciously made it confirm that I would never deserve a steady home. It split my unworthiness wound open—and to make matters worse, the boy I adored had just broken up with me, a week before I learned that my dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

In a nutshell, my new world was shattered right when I was starting to trust that things were getting better—and my most wounded parts are still unlearning that this is proof that happiness is not an option for me.

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Again, Life came to my rescue before I even found the courage to ask for it, and I ended up finding another apartment in the same hallway, quite miraculously. Moving would still feel excruciating but at least it would be easy—that was no small silver lining—and so I moved into this new studio that everyone loved but me.

It was bigger, it was charming in a more modern way, it had a bathtub and unlimited hot water—but it didn’t feel like home. While everyone (including me) marveled at how lucky I was, there was again no room to grieve. I was bleeding from a wound I had no awareness of—I knew nothing of trauma at the time—and I wish I could go and hold that terrorized young leo who made it mean that she would never belong anywhere.

After that, I buried myself in Med school first and then residency, never trying to anchor anywhere anymore and thereby feeling more and more disconnected from all that makes me me. I had stopped singing, I had stopped writing creatively, I had stopped dreaming. I had exiled my New York dreams and let saviorism become the fuel (at first) and (then) the death of me.

Oncology was my day job and supporting my dad through cancer was my side hustle.

I withered away slowly… until out of despair, I finally listened to the screams of my inner world long enough to understand that if I was to survive in Earth school, I would need to start singing again.

My mind had no idea that it would (or even could!) change everything, but of course it did.

As my inner spark found fuel again, my heart slowly awakened. As my heart awakened, I remembered.

I couldn’t remember what it meant to feel safe and anchored—you can’t remember what you’ve never experienced—but I remembered the hope I had had as a child that, someday, SOMEHOW, I would know for sure what having a home feels like.

By then, I had become a physician so I could apply for a mortgage to buy an apartment and I also inherited some money, which felt like a sign. I decided to go look for the perfect apartment… and it found me before I even started looking!

It is a pattern that I am now recognizing: I have always felt like I didn’t deserve a home and YET this is the one area in which the Universe has always provided for me in the most magical ways.

I mentioned my will to find a new place that I would truly cherish and love to my best friend (yes, same guardian angel more than a decade later) and she emailed me an offer that same day with a note saying “that place made me think of you!”

As I looked at the pictures of the living room’s white hardwood floor, stylish kitchen, and elegant bedroom, I felt a full body YES and immediately made an appointment to visit it—at that time, apartments in Paris were sold in a day. It was in the most inviting neighborhood, right at the bottom of Rue des Martyrs, and I fell in love with it instantly, which is why the owner chose me. She was moving out to follow another dream and buy a bigger place with her partner, but she wanted another woman in her early thirties to take over that place that had meant the world to her when she was looking for who she was. And I will be eternally grateful for that because finding myself there I did… and it led me to New York.

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I spent months turning this little abode into the most welcoming nest. I made sure that every tiny touch meant something to me and my nervous system started to heal for the first time. Filled with heartwarming lights, pastel colors, artful pictures of New York and golden decorative objects, it was a delight for the senses. I had the comfiest bed and I pruned everything that no longer served—including my career in Medicine.

While awaiting my because-of-the-pandemic-delayed VISA, I started waking earlier and earlier and doing yoga every morning (thank you magical Adriene & Benji). I took long walks in my lovely neighborhood and I got my coaching certification while taking as many singing lessons as I could. I started my trauma healing journey and learned that I had a body and how to move back in. The world was on pause and so was I, as I was letting go of everything I had held as true before… Everything but my undying love for New York and my singing passion.

Leaving this treasured home felt hard but, of course, I knew that no matter how many pics of New York I put on my walls, Paris would never be New York and it was time for me to cross the Atlantic and never look back.

Which is more easily said than done of course.

Last week I found a buyer for this sweet Parisian sanctuary and she’s a woman in her thirties looking to find herself there! It’s perfect, it feels fated, I’m truly happy with how things unfolded AND it’s a tough goodbye.

I knew I wanted to release this condo: I have not enjoyed renting it and I have no plans of coming back to France whatsoever! This place deserves to be united with an owner that can cherish it and be nurtured by it in return. It is time to sell AND this is the only place I truly ever could call mine! So again… reparenting is in order: my young inner Maiden is wondering if she’s losing her only chance at having a steady home.

She’s not! I’m a New Yorker now and, four years and 11 months in, I have no doubt whatsoever that this is where I want to finally take root. I made it home. This is where I belong: in this concrete jungle full of dreams, awe and paradoxes. In this gorgeous energy bath that will test you and nurture you to your core like no other place on Earth—if your heart and mind are opened.

I know I can let my Paris apartment go, because the apartment of my dream can only be on the side of the Atlantic I’m writing from right now.

I know it’s the right decision. It’s a simple decision too AND that doesn’t mean it’s an easy one to live by. Grief is Love… and I loved this tiny safe heaven with my whole heart.

Also, while I’m releasing the last anchor I had in France, I’m contemplating where to ground in New York in a very practical way, because my lease is up.

When I arrived in New York, I found the most gorgeous apartment in the Upper West Side. Pandemic prices made it possible for me to live in a gorgeous and spacious one bedroom by Riverside drive. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was: I had found an apartment I loved even more than the one I had in Paris… It was perfect, I didn’t take a second there for granted! and once decorated, it turned into a home that I will forever remember and hold dear.

It was hard to move out of it last year… but the rent had gone up again and I couldn’t afford it any longer.

I was at peace with that. Somehow, I felt ready. It had been my landing place but I had changed so much in those first three years in the US, that it made sense to have a change of scenery. I had shed a lot of limiting beliefs and I was yearning for a place that I could move into as a singer, and not only as a woman who loved to sing.

I had also fallen in love with Brooklyn and thought it was time to cross literally and figuratively the bridge between who I had thought I had to be and who I was always meant to become.

But money was scarce, and moving is very costly. I wasn’t sure how to make it work and if Brooklyn was even an option. That’s when Magic knocked on my door again.

My landlord, with whom I have a great relationship, called me after receiving my letter explaining why I couldn’t renew and made me a beautiful offer. There was another smaller but very cute one bedroom available two floors down and I could either move into that one without any rent increase OR, if I truly didn’t like it, he would let me stay one more year in the same apartment at the same price.

I knew I would feel very uncomfortable staying where I was, knowing that he would easily re-rent it for $600 more each month than what I was paying (which he did in less than a day) and even if I didn’t love the new apartment quite as much, it is a very lovely place. ALSO the person who lived there before me was a singer! Which meant that my limiting belief of “if I sing in here my neighbor will kill me” would be lifted since she was clearly alive three years in (!)

That was my sign and I moved in.

I told myself it was temporary. I knew that my money situation would improve over the coming months and I also have this lifelong dream of having a dog, which was not possible at the time in my building.

I told myself that I was entering my chrysalis and that it would be a cocoon year, allowing me to embody my singing fully and then move to Brooklyn with a four legged friend as a roommate.

I was not wrong about the butterfly metaphor! This year has been deeply transformative… and it has been a bit brutal. I received the invitation for a new descent in the underworld and I did turn into goo.

If you’ve been reading these letters for a while you’ll know that I got surgery for melanoma, rethought a lot of my most important relationships, started taking my Musical Theater training seriously, met the dark feminine, turned 40, and that I’ve been exploring every aspect of the healing journey to repair my relationship with my father who’s slowly dying.

I have changed at the deepest level—which mostly means of course that I’m more “me” now than I’ve ever been before. (That “me” that I knew so well when I was 4yo and that I had completely forgotten about by the time I turned 30...)

All in all it makes sense to close that experiment and move on, right?

But honestly, I feel bone tired. Those first 40 years on Earth have been quite harrowing and I did change country in 2021 and moved again less than a year ago.

My leg is still somewhat recovering from the melanoma excision and I am grieving in more ways than one. Freeing my singing voice can only be done through extensive daily practice out of my comfort zone and with the support of a lot of trauma healing and exploration. I’m committed to this CARE check adventure, to my songwriting journey, and I’m also writing a book as a foundation for a musical. On top of that I have a job and am still acclimating to a whole new country and culture at a time of acute collective wound inflammation.

Looking for an apartment in New York is no small feat and my first experiences have not been as smooth as I hoped they would be. There are many boxes to check on your application when there is so much more demand than offer on the house market, and that one apartment I fell deeply in love with is now someone else’s home.

That is fine, I truly believe that rejection is redirection, but that also felt like an invitation to ponder whether staying where I am wanted could be a better answer than my usual: “let’s leap in the unknown”!

And I am wanted where I live… When I told my landlord that I had to move because of my dream of having a dog, he first said that there was nothing he could do, which I totally understood! But then a week later, he called me and said he had decided to let me have a dog.

Which means that I’m getting a furry life partner whether I cross the bridge or not!! Which means I could have a dog even sooner if I stay… Which means that it might be even more certain that I will have a dog if I STAY than if I go!

And as Love wrote to me last year when I was wondering if it was okay to postpone my Brooklyn dream since my landlord was offering me such a great deal: “Contrary to your ingrained beliefs, not everything in your experience needs to be bold and hard! Yes, you are called to move to Brooklyn but no one ever said it was supposed to happen in 2024 or even 2025... What matters most is for you to learn that you can be welcome somewhere and that you do truly deserve a home.”

I do want to move to Brooklyn, I feel that deep soul stirring every time I arrive at Borough Hall. Something has shifted in my energy and I feel more aligned with that neighborhood than the UWS now… BUT I love the UWS and it is such a lovely place to have a dog. I’m close to magical Central ParlRiverside and 2 minutes away from enchanting Riverside park. I can sing here, I can write and I can love. I am in New York and even if it’s a long commute, I can go to Brooklyn at my heart’s desire. So the truth is that there is no real rush to cross that bridge.

Yet it feels urgent. Urgent in a way that makes me wonder if it’s a trauma response.

Indeed, how do you convince a nervous system that has only found safety in leaving, in big leaps of faith, in extraordinary transformations and in letting my heart and intuition take precedence over any limitation… that it can be safe to now “stay”?

That it might be the answer? That it might be the invitation? That it might even be how the healing happens this time?

That no one will be disappointed in me because I don’t have to prove to everyone (or me!) how brave I am every single morning to be allowed to exist?

How do you reframe staying as an act of self-reclamation when you’re so terrified that it means that you’re giving up and selling out on your dream?

How do you do “doing things differently” differently—because yes, ironically, keeping things the same is what would be novel to me?

As I write that, I think about how I always coach my clients on learning how to stay before they act on their decision to leave, so that they can be sure that they’re leaving out of love and not fear…

Of course, following that same reasoning, I coach them on creating an exit plan that works for them before deciding to stay also! So that they know for sure that they’re staying for love and not because it’s comfortable or familiar.

Also, I will be getting a dog and keep pouring into my artistic journey in both cases, so things WILL be changing anyway!

And it’s funny how similar it looks to my Paris journey, right? I’ve been in this position before of being somewhere that is great, just not the best fit for me. That “miracle” apartment in the same building that appeared to save me when I had to leave the one I truly loved!

So if I trust the pattern… it means that I’m meant to stay in this one until I’m truly ready to leave and that my dream abode will then appear.

My truth is that I’m just not ready to decide today. I don’t know how to stay and I don’t know if I have it in me to leave. This apartment is not a place where I see myself staying for many years, but I’m very cognizant of how lucky I am to live there still.

So I’ll choose kindness and let myself be for a few days. I’ll let the mud settle and trust that the way will appear. I’ll let Life show me what I need to see so that I can know what is loving guidance and what is trauma reenacting.

I’ll stay in the unknown for a little while longer, because this is where the magic always finds us: when we find the courage not to leave or not to stay but to ground in the in-between.

Learning how to love ourselves through uncertainty is how we create the inner safety we yearn for and I guess the answer to my most burning question is that I know where my home is!

It’s right here, WITHIN.

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo