About the origin of courage
And how courage is the opposite of what we think.
CARE.CHECK*: What does courage mean to you?
What is your lived definition?
What is YOUR understanding of it?
What feels courageous through your heart, independently of what you’ve been taught?
Today’s an invitation to revisit this word, and parse out what is culture and what is inner experience.
I hope this week’s letter will also feel like a call to redefine what is bravery, courage, and… self-abuse, as well as an opportunity to reconnect with where our strength truly comes from.
I love you.
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 robot friend :)
Hi Care.Friend,
How have you been?
What’s new? What’s sweet?
What’s going very well?
I’m not asking this specifically out of toxic positivity nor because I’m afraid of the depth of our days (you know me, I’m NOT).
I’m asking because if you’re like me, an eternal seeker of a truer truth, of a more open heart, of a more sturdy alignment, devoted to uncovering each and every layer of this human existence, you might be wired towards looking for what needs improvement and under notice what needs celebration.
I’m learning this with the help of my great friend and miraculous vocal coach, Sylvie (I introduced you all to her here).
Recently she’s been asking me to report NOT on what felt wrong, imperfect, stuck or limiting within my singing practice, but to notice what is going GREAT. What feels easeful, expansive, soulful and JOYOUS.
What a shift… Someone who cares about the tenderness I experience and not only about what she can solve or fix. What a gift.
This is also something we anchor in when doing somatic work:
Which part of your body feel the safety of right NOW? Which parts of your body know that you’re lovable and loved and that you’re okay—no matter what? Which part of you is connecting to the room you’re in and to the beauty that surrounds us at all time? Which part of you feel alive, soft, warm, open?
I hope you checked while reading. I hope you feel how grounding it is to know that parts of us (no matter how small they feel at the moment) always know that we’re whole and complete just as we are—right here, right now, always.
And for some reason all of this reminds me of a conversation I had with another wonderful friend, Alli (she’s also a fantastic life coach and you can find her here if you want to meet her! You won’t regret it.)
Last Thursday, as we were preparing to support each other through The Work of Byron Katie, we started talking about courage—what it looks like, what it means, and most importantly what it FEELS like.
“You’re very brave”.
“You’re so courageous.”
Those are words I have heard a lot… and I guess they’re true?
Well they are, for all of us, because let’s face it: it takes so much courage to be alive!
What a strange world we human beings have molded… What a scary place we’ve created, in the middle of the gorgeous garden that Earth provides for us wherever we’re not interfering… What a terrifying jail we tend to unconsciously design for ourselves within our minds!
What an extraordinary adventure we’re called to live from the day we are born and until it is time to give back our last breath to the heavens… What a sacred adventure when we decide that surviving is not enough and that we’re also committed to coming alive—to dive deep beneath our skins, until we can arrive into our hearts and create a whole new world from the inside out…
So yes, we’re ALL very brave and very courageous.
We are because we choose kindness when our awareness is being flooded by Cynicism’s propaganda. We are because we choose to listen to our inner world instead of imposing our worldviews onto others. We are because we choose to love, each and every day, even though we’re constantly being tempted to buy into the narrative that love is a weakness, a fallacy, or that it doesn’t even exist (my goodness how disconnected we have gotten from ourselves to be able to believe that our very essence is a myth).
* It takes so much courage to be alive.*
And on paper, I can see why I appear brave or courageous.
I did leave the house I was born in without any concrete plans for my survival beyond that doorstep. I did jump down a ladder I had been climbing for 15 years to move to New York and start over—in devotion to my sacred dream. I had indeed chosen, before that, to become an oncologist. I did travel alone to many countries and, yes, I moved to New York with only two suitcases and no address amidst a pandemic.
I see how it looks. Yet, I can also testify about how it felt!
I left that house without any concrete plans for my survival, because I just knew that my chances were better at surviving anywhere else.
I jumped down that ladder, because I was suffocating up there (and I wouldn’t have survived one more day without the support of the Earth).
I started over and followed my dream across the ocean, but it’s my dream that has been carrying me ever since.
I chose to become an oncologist because I thought it would save ME.
I traveled alone to many countries and I moved to New York with two suitcases and no address amidst a pandemic, because I knew, I just KNEW, that the life I had couldn’t be what we’re meant to find down here, it couldn’t be “All There Is”—and I’m so glad I listened.
It didn’t feel like bravery, it felt like breathing again. Like freedom. Like the promise of a joy I had forgotten how to feel.
What I left might have looked like security, but my inner experience of it all felt like torture. I left TOWARDS safety.
I was not scared… I was inspired—and I was ready.
* It didn’t feel like bravery, it felt like breathing again.*
So I want to write about courage today because I don’t think it is what we’ve been trained to think. A lot of us believe that courage means doing dangerous things without feeling fear. And I don’t believe that’s courage, personally.
I believe we can be led to do fearlessly something labeled as dangerous, by two opposite ways:
The first one requires dissociation, a complete disconnection from our center.
It’s when our mind goes rogue and forgets it’s part of a system that is far more intelligent that our brains alone can fathom.
It’s when we fall into the modern trap of living against ourselves, of pushing through everything, of muscling through pain, of demonizing pain and rendering this incredible potent and LOVING messenger irrelevant.
It’s when we bypass our own truth to match our culture’s pace and delusional narratives.
It’s when we either want to prove to everyone else how great we are or when we’ve convinced ourselves we matter so little that we have to overcompensate at every turn (those beliefs are actually two sides of the same coin).
It’s pure survivalism.
It’s reckless, and celebrated by those who either benefit from it or fell into the same trap of self-ABUSE. A kind of self-abuse that was cleverly rebranded as self-love by the ego, as if love did not have to be loving.
It’s the tragedy most of us have been taught to play out at birth.
It’s how our so-called reality started reflecting only the wounds we’re so unwilling to care for that we project them on others—and not the love that breathes us, beats our hearts, connects us and defines us, beneath the masks we believe we must wear.
THAT IS NOT COURAGE; that is self-denial—and a misguided attempt at rekindling our self-worth.
* It’s when we fall into the modern trap of living against ourselves.*
The second one, on the opposite end, happens organically when we follow our inner compass.
It doesn’t feel like courage, because it feels obvious.
It’s the next right thing.
It’s what our intuition is singing into our hearts.
It doesn’t necessarily make sense to anyone else but, to us, it seems like the only choice.
It can feel vertiginous or exhilarating, depending on the size of the leap, but it also ALWAYS feels warm, soft, expansive and inevitable.
There might be fear attached to the choice we’re making, because the mind likes to go ballistic while reviewing the worst case scenarios of potential consequences—but our core feels sturdy, yummy and so so alive.
It’s what’s meant to be, it’s as simple as that!
And if you’re connected to what is, you receive an abundant downstream of signs that comfort you in your choice at every turn.
It’s DELICIOUS.
It connects you to your center like never before and allows you to discover new extraordinary corners of your inner world.
It feels like self-trust, and like the embodiment of love.
It feels like the sweetest promise and the most reassuring lullaby. It feels like a rebirth.
IT MIGHT BE COURAGE, but mostly it feels like guidance.
And when you have a big decision to make, I invite you to wait until it feels like such evidence. To not push through to make your dream happen, because when we’re pushing through, it NEVER comes from love. It comes from FEAR avoidance.
From wanting out of the discomfort of the in-between, that gray zone we all fear… forgetting that it’s where the magic happens. This dark patch of the road that doesn’t feel neither comfy (aka familiar) nor like the reward… but that we don’t actually need to run away from because, as I like to remind myself, there’s nothing to fear in the darkness, the darkness is only a nursery of stars.
Our dreams are never in a hurry to see us arrive. They know they’re meant to come true, they don’t follow a ten year plan.
Our dreams are made of Love and Love trusts. Love NURTURES. Love is patient.
Love frees us. Love expands and softens us. Love doesn’t push through the mountain, Love embraces all that she touches until it melts into Love.
There’s no courage needed when you’re on your own path.
I mean, I realize that last part is not exactly true now that I see it in writing. It does take courage!
But not the courage to do what’s in front of us.
It takes the courage to FEEL.
To look into our own eyes and stay right here, right now.
To jump into OUR shadow and trust that there’s nothing we can’t heal from, if we’re willing to feel our wounds back into love.
* Our dreams are never in a hurry to see us arrive.*
And in my experience, courage is not something we have. It’s not even something we are.
Courage is what happens when we sit with our fear and say “I see you, I love you, we’re going to get through this whether I know how to or not.”
Courage happens when we refuse to abandon ourselves or to leave our own side.
Courage happens when we choose to embody our values, no matter how much we’ve been told that our values don’t matter or how much they clash with the current status quo.
Courage happens when we decide to let our anger show us our limits, and when we choose to honor them no matter how INCONVENIENT they appear to be to the world.
Courage happens when we surrender to our grief, and let it dance and shake us until it turns into kindness.
Courage happens when we hug our shame so fiercely and so tenderly that shame turns into compassion.
Courage is the natural evolution of Fear, when Fear is felt by our entire being and held into light, by the healing MAGIC and STRENGTH of our love.
Courage is a feature of INTEGRATION.
Courage is not something that can be taught or mustered, because courage is born—as anything and everything that heals and serves—from the inside out.
Courage is a byproduct of integrity and the offspring of a loving heart.
My dear friend, I invite you to reflect deeply on what courage feels like.
Because, once again, it is not what we think. It’s not a CONCEPT. It’s not even a choice.
It’s a process of allowing, of self-connection, and it is NOT the answer to a call; it is the realization of who we have been all along.
* There’s nothing we can’t heal from,
if we’re willing to feel our wounds back into love.*
So yes, I am courageous, because I HAVE realized who we are.
I have because one day I decided to take a deep dive into what made me feel so inadequate, unworthy and broken—and all I discovered were thoughts that could be nursed back into the liveliness of the love that we are.
I haven’t tucked them all in yet, and there is still so much despair and loneliness in that inner orphanage, hiding deep down in my unconscious… But I’ve explored enough corners of my psyche and connected with enough human hearts (including mine) to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR WITHIN US.
Only darkness awaiting the touch of light…
… to turn into AWE.
* Courage is a feature of integration.*
So here it is, dear Care.friend.
Here’s an invitation to redefine what courage means to us, and to recognize the lived experience of courage as a PROOF that we’re on the right path, instead of using the concept of courage to break our own backs and endanger our connection with our hearts…
Our hearts are the truest source of our strength—and the only strength we need for our world to heal and change.
Courage is not what we think and will never require us to leap into danger, head first and anchor-less.
Courage is our natural offering when we anchor back into our hearts and let our hearts take the leaps for us.
* Courage is a byproduct of integrity
and the offspring of a loving heart.*
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo
I'm so glad they found you!! Synchronistic readings are my favorite kind of magic... 🤲🏻💌
Your beautiful words are magical and entered my being in a way I so cherish. The timing of your message is impeccable. Thank you.