A breath, a feeling, a song, and it all begins again
How to awaken from a nightmare... thanks to a dream.
CARE.CHECK*: What makes you lose track of time and feel suddenly able to breathe more deeply again?
What makes it all worth it—the so-called bad emotions, the fears, the pain?
What makes it feel truer, meaningful again, sacred even?
What makes you feel you again? (Whether that means feeling Grief, Love, Anger or Joy—or all of those all at once).
Today I’m sharing how singing brought me back to Life—which makes sense because singing the reason being alive makes sense to my heart.
Hello my caring friend,
How have you been? What was the flavor and texture of that last week?
Something fun to share? Something hard you wish to be witnessed for and through?
It hasn’t been the easiest ride on my end.
Our world is not always the most inviting place, is it? And sometimes the story that’s reflected back to us is not the one we would have chosen for ourselves…
Yet, I truly believe we receive what we need—and that the question should always be “why do I need to go through this right now?” and not “what am I being punished for here?”.
I believe we’re meant to ask ourselves: “what would be a kinder and more compassionate explanation than my current belief about this”?” and “what would it change if I knew for sure that this is coming out of Love, from a Universe that’s unbelievably creative and benevolent—and not from a resentful, vengeful, narcissistic God in the Heavens?”
** ABOUT MY RIGHT NOW
I feel like I’m losing my footing at the moment. Nothing looks the same any more (starting with the woman staring back at me in the mirror).
My responses are different of course, but so are my reactions!—which is always a much greater benchmark to study how much we’ve changed.
My body feels different… and at the very least, I feel my body so much more.
My coach asked me yesterday if it was really true that things were getting more difficult for me right now OR if I was only starting to connect to how difficult they have always been…
It deeply resonated with what Love had written to me in one of her recent letters (to understand what I mean, you can go HERE): “you’re doing so much better than you think! AND it’s also much harder than you think, honey.”
Oh, how clever was Denial when he hired Minimization to back him up…
It is so easy for me to spot the lack of self-compassion in others… Yet, it is still such a tricky task to notice that sticky pattern within my own system.
* What would it change if I knew for sure
that this is coming out of Love,
from a Universe that’s unbelievably creative and benevolent
—and not from a resentful, vengeful, narcissistic God in the Heavens? *
** ABOUT WHY I’M WRITING ABOUT SINGING TODAY
When I can't find my way home within my heart, when I can’t connect with the energy that enlivens me, when I can’t feel… I lead myself gently to my yoga mat while the stars are still shining, then to my meditation cushion while the sun rises and then I write… until it starts making sense again.
I write until that same truth appears over and over again, in front of my bewildered eyes: the answer is to sing honey.
Singing is my spark, my way in, my reason to come back over and over again to what is. Singing is my compass on this sacred journey. Singing is my map, the path and my destination. Singing… the answer is to sing.
* Oh, how clever was Denial when he hired Minimization to back him up… *
In July 2017, I started to feel that I was reaching the end of where Denial and Survivalism could lead me. There was no joy left in me. None… There was no hope, no drive, no meaning left to living my days in a constant blizzard of chaos and worry. Sure, I was an oncologist so it had to be useful for someone to keep going, but I was also more aware of how numb and hollow I was feeling.
That’s when my last spark of available soul energy shook me into making two decisions that saved me: I would start therapy again and, more importantly, I would find my way back to singing.
* Singing is my map, the path and my destination. *
** ABOUT MY WAY BACK TO SINGING
So I started taking lessons on Saturday mornings, and it took all the dedication that my malnourished heart could muster, because the resistance felt UNBELIEVABLY heavy:
I was just too exhausted to wake up on a Saturday to do something that would only benefit me!? That was just too frivolous when others were dying of cancer… How did it make sense to take the time to sing?
And yet, I was to never stop again, because singing is why I breathe.
And singing is also how I relearned how to breathe.
I still remember the text a friend sent me after learning that we couldn’t meet that day because I wanted to go to a yoga class after my singing lesson. She wrote “oh waoh, what a lovely Saturday: singing & yoga!”. She meant it literally, she was supporting my new decision, she was happy for me… but I melted into guilt. Who was I to sing AND do yoga indeed?
I hopped off the yoga train immediately… and it took me two years to come back to my mat—it took understanding that yoga would support my singing.
If it’s for my singing, I can overcome any pain, face any traumatic memory, and give myself any relevant permission slip—no matter how much shame or anguish it brings up. Singing is WHY I heal.
Because singing is the only rope robust enough to pull me back, everytime Denial, Saviorism or Self-Abuse call me back into the penitentiary I thought I belonged in.
For reasons that I couldn’t understand back then, singing is stronger than my trauma, stronger than the chains that were strangling me, and holding me prisoner of a past I had already escaped.
Singing was a reason to start breathing again and, the more I sang, the more my body woke up and started supporting me again, on my way back into being.
* Singing is WHY I heal. *
My first lesson was in July 2017 and six months later, I found the strength to move to a new place where I would be able to nest and recreate myself in.
I was still knee deep in denial—and making very little progress in therapy since I only talked about what my patients were facing (and how unfair it was for them), instead of facing up that maybe, just maybe, my childhood had not been the smoothest or most classical one (and that I too needed some care, attention and healing).
But I was still singing… and that meant that for one hour a week, it all mattered again.
For one hour a week, I could remember that joy is a part of life—and that maybe, just maybe, I too was allowed to feel it once in a while.
The next milestone was in early 2018, when Marie, my voice teacher, left the music school she was teaching at and offered to give me at-home lessons instead. That brought singing into my home! That reunited joy with my life’s experience, in an even more intimate way… it was a discrete magic spell I did not see coming but did feel opening every inch of my skin. It was like I could suddenly hear my own heart waking and dancing in my chest.
Soon after that, I was able to leave the abusive workplace I had convinced myself I was doomed to stay at until I died. The next one would not be much better—because healthcare is healthcare and self-negation and emotional exhaustion are not only tolerated, they are mandatory—but that’s also when I started writing song lyrics again.
I also started mentioning my upbringing once or twice to my very patient therapist (!)
* For one hour a week, it all mattered again. *
In February 2019 came the urge to also learn how to play the guitar! And for the first time ever I refused to cancel my musical plans to replace at the very last minute someone at the hospital that weekend. A small step for mankind, but it felt like jumping to the moon for my nervous system!
Something had shifted forever. I could feel it—even if I couldn’t put it into words.
And in March 2019, less than two years after that first song had vibrated through my frozen body, the tiniest—and yet loudest—voice came from my heart to inform me, that I wanted to commit to make singing a much more central part of my life again.
YES! It was time to embody my music again and to start sharing my singing voice with those I loved. I cannot describe the sensations that rushed through my entire body when I admitted this to myself, around midnight, while staring through my living room’s window.. A wave of aliveness I had forgotten could exist... I couldn’t wait to tell Marie the next day! I hardly slept!
I counted every minute until she finally knocked on my door 18 hours later or so.
And that’s when she walked into my apartment with a somber face, to tell me that she was leaving Paris the following week… and would not be able to teach me ever again.
That was the coldest shower my spine ever experienced. The floor disappeared. The nausea was overwhelming… God was telling me to stay silent, according to Bully Brain. That was the only explanation. God was saying: “Absolutely not, you will not sing. You will stop looking for joy immediately, you’re meant for pain only.”
My mind was adamant it was a sign, BUT something within me refused to believe it.
Something within me begged me to wait, to just WAIT—and to see what would happen next.
* It was time to embody my music again. *
And what happened next is that my therapist told me she knew an incredibly skilled opera singer who was giving singing lessons in Paris. Maybe she could recommend someone who knew my repertoire of folk and Broadway musicals? Maybe, just maybe, there was another voice teacher in Paris that could help me? Maybe it was a bit too early to panic and renounce any hope that something good was coming?
And thank God I didn’t because… that’s how I met Sylvie!
** ABOUT THE MEANING WE ASSIGN TO THINGS
This story is how I know now not to label any apparent setback as a tragedy. I know those are redirections, divine guidance and that, more often than not, when you commit to move forward, God will gently walk you back a few steps back—so that you can make a different choice at a crossroad you crossed a bit too fast on your way over wherever you’re agonizing right now.
So when the timing seems downright cruel, my friend, take a deep breath and remind yourself that it can’t be a coincidence indeed AND that it can’t mean what you fear either! No. It’s NOT proof that you were cursed as a newborn baby. No, it’s not because you were mean to a stranger last week or because you forgot to reply to that email yesterday. It’s not a punishment, it’s a rewrite that needed to happen for the story to end centered on your dream.
Because Life is Love, and Love always gives us what we need the second we open ourselves to receiving what we want.
Marie was sweet, fun and bubbly and the perfect voice teacher for me in 2017. But only Sylvie would be able to guide me back to my voice, to walk me safely back into my heart, to hold me while everything unraveled, and to ground us in our shared passion of music, as a way to navigate every inner storm I was about to weather on my way to the singing shore.
Because, yes, it turned out that there’s nothing Sylvie cannot teach you how to sing! and while she offered me the inimitable wealth of a classical singing training, she also allowed me to learn how to belt, mix, riff and how to navigate any Broadway composer’s mood or whim on the music sheet! She has been my guardian angel and my guiding star on this journey, ever since our first lesson in Paris on May 13, 2019.
* It’s a rewrite that needed to happen
for the story to end centered on your dream. *
I went to Rome, between Marie’s departure and my first lesson with Sylvie, on a trip that changed me forever:
I received my first shiatsu back there and the weirdest memories came back while the masseur was working its way along my spine…
The beginning of a long journey of reclaiming decades of my life I had forgotten.
I didn’t make the connection with the fact that I started writing again—for the first time in ten years—a few hours afterwards.
And, of course, I couldn’t have known back then that there would be no true singing without reembodiment. That singing would ask me to come back home inside myself and to slowly unfreeze my chronically exhausted, dissociated body. That singing would ask me to reconnect with the truth of what happened and of who I really am. That singing would require me to wake up because no one can sing in a coma.
Denial’s days were counted… but of course I had no way of foreseeing that those were the first days of my trauma healing journey.
* Love always gives us what we need
the second we open ourselves
to receiving what we want.*
** ABOUT HOW SINGING SAVED MY HEART
Nothing could have prepared me for what true singing—embodied singing—would do for me, for my heart, for my swan (the story of who I am not, as explained HERE), and for the little wounded baby swan within me that was ready to come back to Life and fly.
No one around me could have predicted that 4 months later I would remember that my life was always meant to take place in New York—and decide to quit a career in Medicine I had sacrificed the last two decades of my life experience for.
I was not prepared either for the sudden recollection that would come that my body had been brutalized, violated and more, for years on end, that my heart had withstood the most dangerous storms and that there was an ocean of sorrow and a volcano of anger hiding beneath my skin.
I had no idea of what I would discover about my upbringers, my origins, my trauma, my body.
I couldn’t have guessed that, in the name of my singing, I was soon to start kinesiology, coaching, somatic work, IFS or breathwork. Anything—and everything—that would allow my body to release the notes I was so deeply craving to share with the world. I didn’t know that reclaiming my body meant reclaiming my stories and feeling ALL the emotions I had repressed for very good reasons—they hurt so badly.
* There would be no true singing without reembodiment. *
I didn’t know that I still had songs in my heart whose words and melodies were begging to come out through my lips and fingers. Oh what a miracle it has been to welcome all those musical friends into my experience over the last two years…
I would never have predicted that, in 2023, I would go to a workshop on Creativity at the Omega center with the magical Liz Gilbert, and that it would change me again in ways I did not know one can be changed. That I would go to the School for the Work… That I would dedicate myself to my healing for one and one reason only: to free my diaphragm. To… SING.
** ABOUT SYLVIE
Meeting Sylvie has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. It has changed my entire identity, because I went from feeling cursed by a karma I could not escape, to feeling cared for and guided by this most gracious and loving creative energy—an energy I call God or Love or Life or the Universe interchangeably.
Meeting Sylvie meant learning that I had a body and that my body needed me to let her breathe freely and fully. To not just allow 10% of the air in and out—the bare minimal required to survive— but to allow oxygen to come within every corner of my being and heal me or to allow air to go out fully, so that I could finally release all of this terror, anguish, corrosive shame, all this holy grief.
Meeting Sylvie meant understanding that to sing we need to breathe.
A simple concept… and yet the most transformative adventure one can take.
Because breathwork is not for the faint of heart!
* I would dedicate myself to my healing
for one and one reason only:
to free my diaphragm.
To… SING. *
** ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BREATH
Why? Because we restrict our breathing when we don’t want to feel.
Indeed, when we stop breathing, we stop feeling. So restricting our breathing is the most effective brake we have on our emotions. Again, if we don’t breathe we don’t feel. And the best way to not feel is therefore to not breathe.
And why don’t we want to feel? Because when we feel, we remember… Because what the mind could not register or can invalidate, the body cannot lie about.
The body can stay quiet and keep the score or the body can Self-express. There’s no middle ground there…
* When we stop breathing, we stop feeling. *
So to sing, I would have to remember.
I would have to face what happened, to acknowledge it and to feel it from the inside out. I would have to dive into my trauma work as if my life depended on it… which was of course the case, but I couldn't care less about living! By that point living had only felt like a cruel and hopeless experience I was ready to let go of… BUT I was not ready to stop singing. I was not willing to stop singing ever again.
And I am not willing to ever let anything come between me and my singing again, because I remember that singing is who I am now….
Singing is why I’m relearning how to breathe slowly, painfully, trustingly, daily.
Singing is why I’m learning how to receive all the horrid feelings that are still trapped beneath my skin.
So yes, singing is literally WHY I breathe!! That’s how sacred singing is to me.
* What the mind could not register or can invalidate,
the body cannot lie about. *
** ABOUT YOU
I’m sharing all of this because as I mentioned last week, my mission here is to lead you back to YOUR singing—to what singing is within and for you.
To your spark…
To your reason to believe that there is indeed a reason, a purpose, for us being there—and that it is goes beyond any fight for survival, and beyond any pain, any loss, any hardship, any trauma. A remembrance of some sort that before we landed on Earth, we knew we were following a divine invitation to experience the scared from the inside out, in a realm where the sacred would be hidden from view, but could we reclaimed and reincarnated by those willing to believe that awe and joy and grief and anger, and above all LOVE, are reasons enough to be there.
* When we feel, we remember. *
We don’t heal for the sake of healing. We heal to come alive again!
And we need a reason to go on this so-called hero journey, because this is NOT an adventure lived on a golden road, surrounded by care bears, rainbows and daisies.
No. It’s a lonelier-than-lonely trip taken on desertic skin-burning roads, through frozen skin-biting lands and through the darkest woods one could ever fathom.
And yet, it is a journey through which we get to witness that the darkness is a nursery of stars… and that within the scariest storms we will be met by the most radiant awe-inspiring rainbows.
This is how we learn that, within our hearts, beats a compass that is drumming our way home and that within each and everyone of us is a beacon of kindness and hope that only awaits to be reignited, trusted and made sacred again.
* We don’t heal for the sake of healing.
We heal to come alive again! *
So find your singing, my dear friend—and let your singing reconnect you to a song that cannot be forgotten or tamed.
The song of a Life that is not easy or void of pain—because contrast is how we learn that the goal is not happiness! the goal of life is aliveness—but that makes it all worth it, because it makes you want to… sing, in the perfect virtuous cycle of fate.
And my final wish for you today is that your Sylvie will appear right after you muster the courage to remember what singing is to you… and that your new beginning is only one breath—one song—away.
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo
* One last love note if you’re new here and wondering what is a Care.Check:
Self-care is the gateway to self-love, and self-love is the womb of self-creation.
Self-creation is how we become all that we were meant to be. How we turn our sacred dream into reality! How we embody our gifts so that we can share them with our beautiful hearts… and this extraordinary world.
THIS is why self-care matters so much. Because, ultimately, this is how we serve the world.
And to truly take care of ourselves, we need to understand ourselves—which means both our inner system and our vision of the world—deeply. We need self-connection.
Which is why we need to understand our body (our home and temple), our heart (our compass and anchor in love), our mind (our formidable assistant) and our parts (this inner family that has always lived beneath our skin and that IFS is revealing to us now).
So those weekly (newsletter) and daily (in Notes) Care.Checks are here to guide us back to our truth and intuition—while we travel this fascinating and soulful journey on Earth, together.