About the SWAN we have, the swans we are and how much I believe in you.

Yes, it will make sense if you keep reading, I promise!

WEEKLY CARE.CHECK:

Who are you becoming this year?

Who do you want to be by the end of the year?

How do you want to feel and think? What is one thing you want to never do again and what is one thing you really want to learn more about or from?

What is a dream that is ready to take root and what is a dream that is ready to blossom?

Can you write yourself a letter from the you you’re going to be on December 31st 2024 and send yourself a little bit of guidance, inspiration, wisdom and love from afar?

Don’t overthink this one. Just start writing and let your intuition do the rest. 

Start by writing “Dear me from last January, here is what I want you to know as you embark on this new ride around the sun:” and then write. Just write. For 5 min at least, or for 50 minutes if December you is a chatty persona!! 

Just have fun with it and write…

And then light a candle and read yourself the letter you just received from that very special someone that you’re becoming right now.

If you feel called to share with us what struck you in the letter, please know that your light will always be welcome AND celebrated in the comments!!

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** First, if you’re new here, 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.

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. 

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.

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Hello my caring friend,

HAPPY NEW YEAR 

Happy new year, my dear friend, I mean it. 

I wish you the courage to lean into joy, wholeheartedly. I wish you the strength to grieve when you’re called to. I wish you an anchor in awe, grounded in the beauty and mystery of it all… I wish you to be guided into a tender, vulnerable and yet so empowering chapter of growth— supported by the grace of love, and inspired by the force that created billions of stars, entire worlds, endless forms of embodied life and our beating hearts.

So who are you becoming today?

Who do you want to keep on becoming this year? 

And how can you make sure that you’re not trying to become even more of someone else’s expectation of you, but only and always more of who you’ve always been? That is under the masks, the shoulds, the maybes, the fears, the conditioning, the abuse and well-meaning misguided advice…

** BEGINNING ANEW

Let’s start this year by letting a deep breath out together… and when I write deep, I mean as deep as you can in the moment—which might be very shallow.

We’re not here to force our bodies into surrender, we’re here to invite our walking temples into a much deserved sense of relief: we’re here, together, in the safety of those words. We’re here, held by each other’s kindness, and we can let it out. If only for a split second, we can let go of all we’re carrying and just let our lungs release, reset, and prepare for what’s to come.

Let’s now take a beautiful inhale together! Once again as full and buoyant as we can muster—which can be an extremely small amount of air if no one ever taught us to receive before…

If we don’t know yet that it’s safe to receive love. If we can’t connect yet to the generosity of the universe that is just there, right here, in every now, shining for us, allowing us to breathe while we walk and sleep on this Earth.

And after this little reset together, let’s put a hand on our heart—if it feels safe, inviting and warm—and whisper a tender “thank you”.

Thank you, dear heart, for keeping me alive. Thank you for allowing me to love. Thank you for knowing more that I could ever understand. Thank you for being my anchor, my compass and my greatest supporter. Thank you for never giving up on me, not even when I deny your right to have a voice! And thank you for being a beacon of kindness and hope for me, for those I love, and for the entire world.

I deeply believe that we all share but one heart—and that this heart is beating in every human, every animal, and in a different way through every plant and every stone.

I believe that when you melt love with stardust, you get the reverie we call Life. 

I believe everything is sacred—and this year, more than ever before, I pledge to remember that.

So this year, I want to become even more of who I truly am and move even further away from the identity I was frozen into and dying for, only five years ago: The identity of an overachieving western doc focused on a future of misery because it felt safer than exploring my traumatic past. 

** ABOUT WHO I THOUGHT I WAS

To be fair, I didn’t remember most of what I was running away from, which is the gift of protective denial: 

When the lion is chasing you, you’re not thinking about how hard it is to be a lonely zebra in the savannah. 

You don’t think about the little corner of grass you called home and that you will never find your way back to. You’re not thinking about how much hope you had as a baby zebra, or about how soon you realized that your zebra parents were not equipped to keep you safe on Earth. You’re not thinking about how hungry you are and how unfair it is that you’re going to be on top of someone else’s meal—that feels too ironically tragic to be felt while you run.

No. You’re not thinking at all actually… You just run, run, run.

You don’t look back, because your mind is already convinced: “There’s a lion, just run. We don’t have time to check if the lion is still there! We’re about to die: RUN.” 

And as you exhaust yourself and let your entire life pass you by—without taking a second to rest, recharge, take care of your body, of your heart, of your dreams, of the world—you wonder why everything feels so hard, so dangerous, so lonely, so numb. 

No. When the lion is chasing you, you don’t THINK, you run. 

And that’s what I was doing. I was running.

Running in circles on the oncology ward. Running to and from the research lab. Running from someone else’s pain to someone else’s anger—and at times to someone else’s arms. Running from my nightmares that I was done acknowledging by that point: why bother? It didn’t make any difference, they just wouldn’t stop. Running from the terror and sorrow that were shaking beneath my skin, trying to wake me up, BEGGING for my help—and only met by my own indifference or shameful remarks in return. Running from my heart that kept on calling me home, reminding me that there are always stars to be witnessed in the darkness, and that the warmth and light of the sun is always available above the clouds. Running from the voice that wondered when we were going to sing again or move to New York? I was running even from my therapist’s questions, and never talking about anything other than my patients’ hardships—making it mean that I was noble and never owning the fact that I was disconnected from my own.

I didn’t remember the violence, the gut wrenching betrayals and humiliation, the shame, the screams for help no one cared about, the unfathomable sadness, the depth of my loneliness or the reasons why there were so many parts of my body I couldn’t really feel anymore.

I didn’t know why some stories, sounds or behaviors would drive me into such states of anguish or why I was so convinced that I was about to die. I didn’t really care to be honest—and in many ways, it felt like it would be nice to finally “sleep” for more than two hours in a row. 

I didn’t remember. I still don’t remember all of it now… but I remember much much more. And even though it’s not a good story, even though it’s not the story I would have chosen for myself, it’s a story that makes sense. A story that explains to me WHY I am how I am right now.

And this is a story that doesn’t define me.

It is my SWAN: the Story of Who I Am Not.

** ABOUT BABY SWANS

This insight came on a plane in April 2022 when I was flying back home to New York, from a grief-ful and deeply triggering trip to France. It also became my first song. 

It awakened my little songwriter—and led me back to the well of wonder that I had buried in the most hidden corner of my heart.

It became my anthem, my promise to myself, my way home:

“This is the story I’m here to tell

This is the story I was born into, at first

This is the story that built my strength!

The story of who I am not.

This is a story of heartache

But also the story of the choice I made

To find my rainbow in the clouds

To let HOPE and love… pen my way out”

I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of the ugly duckling, who was constantly shamed, by their duck parents and baby ducks siblings, for who they were—but who, one day, discovered that they were a baby swan.

So, they were NOT, in fact, a ugly little duckling: they were not ugly at all and they were not even a duck. They were a swan! An animal that we humans associate with the embodiment of strength, resilience and grace. 

More than once I have been told by my beloveds that I remind them of that story.

I was a little girl that was shamed for all that I was—because I couldn’t stop believing in a kind and gorgeous world and because I trusted my dream more than my surrounding’s darkness. A little girl meant to become a loving woman whose core values are kindness and optimism. A little girl meant to LEAVE the haunted house I was born a prisoner of, and to fly over the ocean into the arms of my great love, New York. A little girl that was asked to stay silent but who just couldn't follow that order because there was a song in my heart, and that song was not meant to be denied.

That song demanded to be sung.

That song still demands it now.

** ABOUT SWANS

It was my birthday last week and, Rick, one of my favorite people in the world (a magical friend, a magical songwriter AND a real-life magician!! What are the odds?) offered me a little swan to wear around my neck…

So that I can remember that my singing voice is the gift that God gave me to survive in this world!

Indeed, I believe that God said: “Here little one, it’s going to be a bit of a bumpy ride at first… but you will make it home, because I created you as a singing soul. And through singing, you will be able to survive ANYTHING—and to turn your childhood’s ashes into everlasting gold.”

I might not be quite there yet of course, but singing did wake me up.

And the more I sing, the more I remember—which sometimes feels like a very high price to pay, given what I have to remember, but it’s always worth it:

Because the more I sing, the more I remember AND the more I soften back into love. 

And love is a “why” powerful enough to make it through any required “how”.

So yes, I am a metaphorical swan in many ways! And I believe that to some extent we all are. 

* He who has a why to live can bear almost any how *

—Friedrich Nietzche

None of us could find complete acceptance when we were growing up—if not at home, we might have been rejected at school or by a particular group of acquaintances. All of us experienced a sense of isolation or shame at one point or another—and it often ended up cutting us from one of our gifts, because we tragically mislabeled them, from then on, as a curse. 

** ABOUT OUR SWANS

We all have a story, a past, and we think it defines us—but it does not. It can not!

It is only our swan. Our story of who we are not… It is an illusion.

A mask we wear without realizing that it’s a choice we get to unlearn.

We are not what happened to us. We are not what we do. We are not what we think. We are not even how we act. 

We are the essence that allows us to be aware of all of this—and to choose to begin anew in every now. 

We are stardust and love.

We are LIFE.

We are miracles.

I am a metaphorical swan, and I have a SWAN. 

YOU’re a metaphorical swan AND you have a SWAN. 

Let’s promise each other that this year we’re done confusing the two.

We’re not our stories:

We’re the love that can learn from it, rewrite it into a story of hope, and awaken through it. 

We are extraordinary beings—embodying gifts that might have been misunderstood, overlooked or even labeled (as shortcomings, weaknesses or oddities) BUT who also get to change that. Right here. Right NOW. 

We get to jump off our ladders, no matter how high we had managed to climb on them—and to declare that we’re not interested in living on a pedestal, in a golden tower or even a penthouse: we want to root into the earth, fly into the sky and just BE, be who we truly are.

* We’re not our stories: we’re the love that learns from it *

I believe in you with all my heart, and I have a feeling that this is going to be a year you will never forget. A year where you will become again who you’ve always been—and we will all be so incredibly inspired and grateful by and for YOU, and your one-of-a-kind gifts.

Thank you for showing up, for allowing us to witness you, and above all else: THANK YOU for existing.

Happy. New. YEAR, dear one.

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

Always,

leo