A different kind of soft

A softness that lies at the center of our core

CARE.CHECK*: What is you relationship with softness?

Is it a word you ever use to describe yourself?

If so does it come up as a trauma response (fawning) or from the center of your core?

Do you like your softness? Do you welcome and protect it? Do you celebrate and tend to it?

Do you fear it or dismiss it?

Are you willing to reconnect with it and deepen your awareness, your understanding of it?

Are you willing to surrender to it?

I hope this week’s letter will open the door to the softest chambers of your inner world.

I love you. 

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

IF YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THIS INSTEAD, you can use Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by a Care.robot.friend :)

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 Hi Care.Friend,

How are you today?

Anything yummy happened since last week? Anything sweet, lovely, nourishing?

Anything tender, vulnerable, in need of soothing?

How are you, truly? How are you, DEEPLY?

I feel a different kind of call coming from deep within me.

This recent surge of anger awakened parts of me I didn’t know I could reclaim, and now I find myself yearning for slowness, for softness, for integration.

And it is a strange inner dance, because my dreams also feel more alive than ever—so I want to show up for them, tend to them, embody them into the world of form! But there’s a rhythm to our lives we’ve been trained to dismiss and reject. 

And even when we disavow our nature, our nature doesn’t change or go away. 

I’ve learned so much about myself these past few months.

2024 has shaken me awake like few years had done before. It’s not that it had never gotten bumpy—or far more bumpier—before, but for once I’m witnessing it all with a widely open heart.

And that is not to say that my heart is wide open. There’s still a lot of armoring to melt inside my chest… but my heart is widely open in comparison to the way it’s been for most of my life.

I had never met my own softness before moving to New York. 

Love truly is everywhere

One of my friends likes to tell me that I’m “a sheep in lion’s clothing”.

That lion analogy comes up often given my name (!) and passionate nature… And I love my inner lioness. I met her anew those past two weeks with that surge of glorious joyous anger.

I needed her visit. I need her so that my songs can free themselves and unlock my solar plexus.

I needed her to remind me that I deserve better than what I got used to giving myself or asking from those I interact with. 

And actually, deserve is not the right word. I don’t deserve better, because it’s not about deserving! That’s not the HEART of the matter here.

We don’t deserve to have our needs met. We’re MEANT to honor and meet them.

So the truer truth is that I need different. 

My mind has been dictating what my body needs for as long as I can remember, but only my body can tell me what she needs.

My mind has no clue… My mind has hypotheses! But only my body has the answers.

And the “sheep’s clothing” my friend’s referring to is the invisibility cloak I’ve sown for myself, out of fawning energy. It’s not me. It’s not the embodiment of my authentic kindness, it’s performative niceness.

It’s not disingenuous, but it’s not heart-centered either. It’s not intentional—and it cannot be… Because it happens before I even register what’s going on.

It’s reflexive. It’s survival.

“Let me co-regulate you… so that I don’t get hurt. Let me be who you’re looking for… so that you don’t leave me behind. Let me say what you need to hear… so that you feel safe and cared for—even if I’m not sure I believe it, or if I’m not sure that it serves. Let me be who I am NOT, so that I can be who you’re looking for.”

No more.

I’m a retiring fawner.

Now, habits die hard, especially when those habits saved our lives. But I'm not trying to kill them, I’m trying to love them into change.

I’m so grateful to my nervous system…

The more trauma work I do, the more I remember what had been kept hidden in the loneliest corners of my mind, the more I marvel at what this body—this extraordinary loving and resilient vessel—has been through and protected me from. 

In Med school, I learned to vilify and dummify the body. The mind is so sure that the body can’t survive without it, which is so sweet when we realize that the body is what keeps the mind alive.

The mind is the origin of self-harm. The mind is also what leads us to harm others. The mind is a toddler with a knife, until the mind can be safely guided back in the arms of our inner mother. Our culture believes that the body is the enemy, but our bodies are the embodiment of love. Pure love. UNCONDITIONAL love. 

The body is scripted only in generosity. It lives for us and asks nothing in return. It only asks for what is necessary to keep us alive! Nothing more. Ever.

It forces us to breathe when we believe we must die.

It heals the cuts we misguidedly inflict to our arms, to our hearts.

It will keep on going, even when we starve and exhaust it.

It will keep on serving, even when we disparage it for reaching limits we were supposed to protect it from.

It frees the water through our eyes, when we’re about to drown in our sorrow, so that we can find our way back into the embrace of our lungs.

It sends us pain whenever we need to know that something requires our attention.

It gives us warmth, and joy, and the ability to wander into this beautiful world.

It rocks us to sleep, when we find the courage to let go into the mystery that we come from. 

It allows us to speak, to kiss, to sing, to hug… and more.

It never says no until it can’t humanely say yes for one more day. We shame it when the “No” finally comes, but in truth the body says yes to us until it breaks! And when the body breaks, it doesn’t show its weaknesses… It proves its strength. That it could go THIS far. That it loves us this much.

Our body is our best friend but as with any friendship, when we never invest in it or if we only take, expect, demand, at some point the relationship decays.

How could it not?

Also if I abandon my body, my body will believe me to be in danger. Self-connection is the pillar of our health and the pathway to our inner well of love.

When we live from the neck up, we forfeit our aliveness. In the names of goals that might look good on paper but prevent us from embodying the light we were sent here to bring forth. 

When I abandon my body, trauma responses take over. And that’s another chicken and egg situation, because when traumatic events occur, my body will push me out to protect me.

But what’s meant to happen is for the body to take over only until we make it through the storm, and then we’re meant to come back home and say thank you. The body is here to make sure we survive NOW, and we’re supposed to make sure it comes back alive afterwards.

It’s meant to be a back and forth between the body taking over so that the mind doesn’t panic, and the mind then showing up in service of the body to nurse it back into wholeness.

Unfortunately our modern ways led us to unlearn how to ever come back in.

Which is how we spend our entire lives disconnected from who we truly are, getting more and more lost into the world of forms, everybody else’s expectations and our most horrid fears. We hide it under the armor of success and productivity.

We push through, we numb, we should ourselves into oblivion—and we call it a life.

We swim into fight and flight energy until the body starts pulling the brakes, because we’ve got no fighting or fleeing left within us. Or because attacking or running away would put us in even more danger than staying in front of our so-called problem. So we freeze or we fawn! We become robots or we believe ourselves to be sheeps.

We do what it takes to survive and everybody marvels that we’re machine at work or a model of selflessness. (You can read about the tragedy of worshiping selflessness HERE).

And when we’ve got nothing left to give to the world, we fall into collapse. Cut from our inner and outer wells of compassion, we call it laziness, depression, unworthiness or self-sabotage—because shame is our preferred drink in that state of complete dysregulation (you can read more about the ladder of dysregulation HERE and HERE!).

And to think that there was such a simple way to end that gruesome story decades earlier and to spin the story into the fairy-est of tales!

By coming home, to our center.

By breathing our numbness back into feelings that we can then alchemize into healing love. By anchoring back into our heart. By letting our armor slowly thaw, thanks to the warm embrace of our own essence. By choosing to pause and stay with what is, long enough so that what is can change. 

And that’s the journey I’ve been on for a few years now.

Reclaiming my sensations, until I could reclaim my emotions. Reclaiming my emotions until I could feel them back with or into love (read HERE about how that works). Letting the memories come back, so that I could rewrite what they mean and how the story ends. And letting that story end… so that my dreams can take over. 

Coming home in my body over and over again, no matter how much it hurts—because I know that this pain is not saying that there’s something wrong with me! It’s reminding me that I’m alive, and that I get to slow down and heal now.

Witnessing how the pain turns into joy when I hug it, instead of running away. Noticing that the pain doesn’t kill me, it helps me grow, expand, deepen.

Understanding that my limits are not here to entrap me but on the contrary to show me where (and with whom) I do not belong. 

We can let our armor slowly thaw,

thanks to the warm embrace of our own essence.

And so I forfeited my niceness. My good girl badge of honor. My will to be seen as a savior, a useful martyr or a princess. I put the sheep’s clothing back on the shelf, with so much gratitude for the storms it allowed me to weather and withstand.

And so I reconnected with my inner lioness and my inner swan. I realized I had never been an ugly duckling, and I relearned how to roar—if only in the safety of my own heart. I started singing again and as my spark could enliven me again, everything changed. I moved to the city of my dreams and back into the temple I was given at birth. 

I am learning to feel my grief and to dance my anger. I am learning to cuddle my fear and to soothe my shame with the sweetest lullabies. I’m learning to tell the truth of who I am. On the page, in my songs, to those I love.

And underneath it all, I am meeting a new kind of softness. The holy vulnerability that lives within all of us. I am meeting a tenderness I had forgotten could exist—and I’m committed to embody it.

I’m yearning for a slower pace, for contemplation, integration and an even deeper surrender to grace.

I am learning that my needs are not a nuisance, inconvenient, shameful or wrong. I am learning that they are an invitation to love. They don’t make me hard to be with, they make me precious and rare and human. They’re valid. They’re GOOD.

They’re the signature of my humanity and a call to become. 

I need me AND I need you. 

What’s so terrible about that? 

How did we grow into a society that believes we must be so independent that we must cut ourselves even from our own hearts? Why do we insist on living exhausted, bone thirsty and starved? Why do we tend to believe that if others have needs it will render them incapable to love us?

Why don’t we worship our needs for love, tenderness, dreaming and connection? What are we so afraid of? What could be born from that but hope and kindness?

Because we don’t explore our fears, we can’t disempower them. But that’s a choice we can change in a second. 

So I’m choosing to lean in into the arms of my own softness. I’m choosing to relinquish my need to defend or fight. I’m choosing to let go of my armor, one heartbeat at a time. I’m choosing to surrender to the love that created the Earth and the sky. That created all that I love and all that I am.

I do not know how that works. I don’t know how a lionness and a swan can turn into a singing bird, without losing her fire and her stance… But I’m willing to find out.

Needs are an invitation to love.

To love ourselves, to love others, to be loved.

I’ll let the story go and I’ll let my needs be, because they ARE.

I’ll try to meet them so that you don’t have to. I’ll also be honest when they cannot be met by me only, because what I need is you in that moment. 

I won’t judge you if you tell me that my needs are not aligned with yours, but I won’t judge me either. I’ll celebrate that we’re not a good match and commit to my needs, EVEN MORE.

I’ll become who I am, because that’s how I’ll be able to offer who I am to you. A soft and passionate singing swan-lioness in New York. 

And I hope you will meet there.

At the center of our center.

Where love and light meet in that sacred darkness that I call a nursery of stars.

That’s where you’ll rediscover your spark. That’s where your dream can anchor and grow and bloom through your heart and into the world.

That’s where I wish to live from, from now on. That’s where we come from.

That’s where we relearn how to meet our needs with grace, and where our needs can show us what we’re made of:

Water.

Stardust…

Fire!

AND tenderness.

With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.

Always,

leo