About the magic that hides in plain sight
The magic that beats your heart, enlivens your core and the magic that is yours to rely on.
CARE.CHECK*: What does intuition mean to you?
Is is a strange concept you’re not sure you could define? Or is it a daily lived experience that allows you to know you’re never alone?
Is is a forgotten acquaintance you didn’t know how to welcome and understand or is it your best friend, your guardian angel, your beacon of kindness and hope?
How does your intuition speak to you? Through which sensations? Do you know them intimately? How could you lean towards them even more? How could you receive them body and soul and let your heart do the translation your mind is not equipped for?
I hope this week’s letter will help you rekindle this relationship with the magic that lives at out core.
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 AI Gwyneth Paltrow :)
Hi Care.Friend,
How have you been? Have you checked today?
If not, when was the last time you checked?
Could you do it right now?
Softly, tenderly, compassionately—with a WIDELY open mind and heart?
What’s here right now for you?
What’s dancing within you… what’s looking for support, for light, for connection?
My last month in my beloved apartment has started. I’m moving on May 31st, and as it is custom in New York, I have no idea whereto! I just know that my lease is up and that I can’t match the rent increase. And I find solace in knowing that my heart and my body are calling me to cross the Brooklyn bridge.
Indeed, they’ve been begging me to spend all my free time in Brooklyn for six months now. I’ve fallen so deeply in love with Cobble Hill… and something I can’t quite name or understand happens within me every time I step on the Borough Hall platform.
Now, even I don’t fully understand that feeling yet, I know it very well.
The first time it happened to me was in 2016. It was my last day in New York; I was flying to Paris a few hours later… and this trip had felt bittersweet and I was trying to understand why.
In France, Med school starts right after high school and lasts between 9 and 12 years, depending on your specialization and on whether you also take a year off to associate a Master’s degree to your Doctorate—which I did. And so in 2016, after twelve years of sacrificing everything for what I thought was my dream at the time, I flew to New York to reunite with this city that has always felt like the greatest love of my life.
I wanted it to be a solo trip. I didn’t have the words to describe it yet but I was looking for a way back into soul connection.
I flew out of France the day after getting my long awaited MD and board certification (we get both at the same time over there), found the cutest AirBnb in the Lower East Village and took what felt like the deepest breath in a decade…
Now anyone who ever held their breath for too long knows that the expansion that comes with relaxation feels like anything but bliss in that moment. Because when we breathe, we feel… and when we’ve been storing emotions on top of emotions on top of emotions, within bodies we exhaust, disparage and starve for love, breathing can only bring relief within us, AFTER having freed all the horror first.
* Because when we breathe… we feel.*
And I didn’t have a very well furnished Care.check toolbox at that time.
I had started meditating a year before when the first flashbacks started to reoccur, awakened by the death of my beloved therapist in a terrorist attack. I didn’t understand PTSD back then, because trauma is not something that western Medicine understands well. I knew my mother had been unkind to me (!) but I also knew that thinking about it sucked—so I just pretended she didn’t exist and that everything was fine, just fine, always so FINE, and *perfectly* fine.
I talked non-stop about the state of the world and about my dear patients’ trauma and struggles, so I thought I was very connected to my emotions. After all, I was very aware of everyone else’s! That had to mean something, right?
And numbness doesn’t really feel like numbness anymore when all of you is numb.
Meditation helped with navigating the recurring nightmares, and it had brought me my first glimpse of the peace that lies at all times underneath the chaos.
Unbeknownst to my own mind, I had also started a gratitude practice, as I had decided that I would write the Acknowledgments part of my thesis dissertation as an ongoing love letter, over the course of the year it took me to write it. So after each encounter or phone call with a loved one or acquaintance, I would write, edit or refine the paragraph in which they would be thanked for the goodness they brought into my life… [the Acknowledgements section turned out to be 19 pages long!]
Thus I had started creating the tiniest anchor into my heart, which was something… But it was the baby version of a tiny anchor.
I was still mostly dissociated though, and deeply imprisoned in a traumatized body trying to protect me from memories I had no capacity for.
* Numbness doesn’t really feel like numbness anymore
when all of you is numb.*
And so I arrived in New York, innocently thinking that I would only feel joy and love, without realizing how apparent it would then feel that I was living someone else’s life!
My only dream has always been to live and sing in New York, you see… So climbing the Academic ladder of a dehumanized (and dehumanizing) healthcare system across the ocean, was never going to help me to embody my songs—and even less so to sing them in the city I loved…
I had become an oncologist out of deep trauma and after losing to cancer one of the persons I loved most at a very young age… And that younger part of me, frozen in time, still believed that by becoming an oncologist I could save her! That younger part of me just couldn’t face the fact that she was already gone.
And don’t get me wrong I loved that job.
The privilege to meet the most beautiful souls while they face one of the most profound human experiences and touch both the fragility of our existence and the awe inspiring power of our love was a daily experience I will cherish forever.
I met (and lost) some of my dearest friends on the oncology ward. My patients were my greatest teachers and I wish I had known all I know now, when I was their doctor. I could have supported them so much more in the way that matters most… With the softness of my heart and not through the rigid knowledge I had acquired.
And more importantly, I could have loved them FREELY. I could have loved them openly and overridden the lies we’re all told as physicians—such as “your emotions will kill your patients”. [And yes that’s a quote from many professors I was trained by…]
But I was never meant to be an oncologist. That was never my sacred dream, and that was NEVER what my spark was whispering in my heart (please read last week’s letter if you need help reconnecting with your spark!!).
What I was dreaming of was to sing, to write, to heal myself and others through Art…
What I was dreaming of was to answer the call of New York, a call I had been hearing since the day I was born.
What I wanted was to find my way back home: home into my heart, home in New York.
So instead of the joy of being in New York, what I mostly felt but wouldn’t name was the grief of walking on a path that was taking me further and further away from my core. I was losing myself and I felt old, broken and lost. I felt and looked so much older back then, it still strikes me every day when I look in the mirror. Slowly but surely, my body was dying of lovelessness—and lacked every form of nourishment we rely on: food, sleep, hope, creativity, connection.
But something shifted on that last afternoon!
I was wandering in the Upper West Side, the last neighborhood on my program of those long daily aimless walks that I take as a way to date New York—one of my favorite things to do still now.
And something started stirring within me. I know now it’s called intuition! At the time it felt more like a panic attack.
Something was asking me to take my walk a bit higher and a little further West. It made very little sense to me and it was starting to get quite late. I had to go back and pick up my luggage before I could make my way to JFK.
But thankfully, I listened.
* My body was dying of lovelessness
—and lacked every form of nourishment we rely on:
food, sleep, hope, creativity, connection.*
That’s how I ended up at the corner of Riverside Drive & 85th.
That’s where I experienced my first ever understanding of the word home.
The safety. The softness. The warmth. The quiet joy. For a few seconds there, I felt like I belonged. I felt like singing again (it would take me two years to follow that impulse) and I remembered how it felt like to… HOPE.
I felt dizzy but so grateful. Those five last minutes would be my beacon for the dark two years that were to come.
From then on, I thought lovingly about that moment without asking it to explain to me why it meant so much, why it was so important.
I just knew that there was a corner of New York, one place in what felt back then like a terrifying world that felt like home.
And as fate would have it… that corner is where I live now.
That corner is where I’ve lived for the last three years.
I was in awe when I realized where I was, in 2021, a few minutes after stepping out of the subway to visit what would then become my beloved apartment. I hadn’t connected the dots when making the appointment with the broker, since I didn't remember where the corner was—only how it looked and felt.
So it took my breath away when I stepped on 85th and recognized not only that familiar view, but that embodied experience.
And the Upper West Side was the only place I’ve ever felt this way…
… UNTIL I stepped on the Borough Hall platform and spent a day wandering in Cobble Hill!
I bathed in that sense of peace, that sense of trust, that sense of being held and cared for that Borough Hall and its surroundings awaken at my core, for an entire afternoon… and when a few hours later, I stepped out the subway two blocks from my apartment, I instantly knew the Upper West Side was not my forever home anymore.
And this time I also knew what it meant: sooner or later (and it appears that “sooner” will win here), I’ll be moving to Brooklyn!
And in June, hopefully, I’ll be living near Borough Hall, near magical Cobble Hill.
I’m sharing this story because I have since witnessed that it is how our dreams communicate with us… Through intuition.
Our dreams do not care about words, about timing, about practicality or for how long we have silenced or forgotten about them. They don’t hold grudges, they’re pure love. They’re infinitely patient and compassionate. They know we’re just trying our best… They know how good we are and they know that SOMEDAY, somehow, we will come back. If only for apologizing for never honoring them. If only on our deathbed to finally acknowledge how much they mattered.
And just like our bodies and just like the Earth, they just keep on sending us signs to say that we’re welcome here, that we’re welcome to come back into the sacredness of our own hearts, and that there is another way to “do” life. A way that has nothing to do with doing, nothing to do with external validation, with fitting in, with following the steps of someone else’s so-called ladder to success.
Our spark burns the fire that gives us life and enlivens our heart, allowing us to survive through ANYTHING… thanks to the only true source of strength that exists on Earth: The SOFTNESS of our heart!
The only source of power that heals and creates, instead of attacking in the name of defense.
The only TRUE strength one might have… and one we all share:
The power of Love.
* Our dreams do not care about words, about timing, about practicality
or for how long we have silenced or forgotten about them.
They don’t hold grudges, they’re pure love. *
Your spark is within you and your spark knows your sacred dream by heart. Your spark is ready to reveal itself to you, no matter who you believe yourself to be at the moment.
Your spark will guide you through sensations…
Your spark will tell you YOUR truth—and that is not a truth told through words. That’s a truth that softens you, expands you, opens you and allows you to remember who you are.
Your spark will do all of this in the kindest way and will not reveal to you the thousand steps that are necessary to realign all at once! Your spark knows that you’re an overachiever who wants to be a good person and take care of everyone else while trying to alleviate all the sufferings of the world all at once. Your spark knows you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders! So your spark will never overwhelm you and will only always share with you the next direction: a sweet subtle invitation to follow her guidance into feeling alive again.
It can be, like me, on a specific corner in the city you’re meant to move to five years later or it can be with someone else or through a book or through a song.
Just follow the compass you live in! Your body is a beacon guiding you back home.
* Your spark is within you and your spark knows your sacred dream by heart.*
And as I keep on learning, home is never just a place and home can never be another person. Home is the moment you reenter your heart and can finally awaken to the love that made you, the love that is all around you and the love that beats your heart. To the love you are, the love you’re made of and meant for.
Your dream is here for a reason.
And as you become your dream, your dream will become you—and you’ll receive the gift you came on Earth to be… and that’s how we’ll get to receive the gift you are, in awe.
Thank you for being you…
What. A. Gift. You. ARE.
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo
So good to meet you here, Jodi! 💌 Your letter was so so beautiful...
I hope that connecting with your own definition and felt sense of home will feel as healing and inspiring as it was to me... and I love that we get to help each other remember that intuition is here to guide us on this incredible journey 🌷
Dear Leo,
Thank you for your comment to my LOVE letter on Elizabeth Gilbert's Substack. I jumped over to read your postings and I am resonating all over with your words on this post. Yes, I feel intuition in my body and I love your reminder of that and connecting me with a call to reflect on what home what home means to me.
With loving kindness,
Jodi Jones