Ain't it worth it?

About spark, capacity and desires

CARE check*: What lights you up?

What warms you up from the inside out?

What makes time irrelevant?

What makes the ache go away?

What feels like joy, like relief, like oxygen? Even if just for a few glorious minutes

What reconnects you to the Love that breath us all and to the essence that we all share?

Do you know?

And if not… are you ready to remember?

I hope this week’s letter will guide you back towards the spark that started your heart.

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

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Hi CARE friend,

How have you been?

What feels needed, heartwarming, supportive and caring right now?

What feels heavy, tender and in need of love?

I’ve been asking those questions to myself a lot lately. Because we need awareness of both. It’s not all good but it’s not all bad. It’s not all bad and it’s not all good. It’s both, it’s ALWAYS both—and when we lose sight of one, we lose our heart connection.

How counter-cultural to realize that, right? That the way to our hearts is not only found through joy? And that grief, anger or even those unholy emotions such as disappointment, frustration, envy or boredom also are gateways to our center, to our TRUTH, to the forgotten powers of our shadows and the underestimated potential of our light.

I’ve been accepted into a Musical Theater workshop, and for someone who has barely sung in front of anyone but her voice teachers (and almost always a capella), it is no small stretch to not only sing in front of an entire class, but to do it while acting and singing with an accompanist.

It’s tenderizing to say the least and my inner critic is having a panic attack.

I feel my body freezing when I enter the class, and of course it limits not only my range but my song embodiment.

I want so hard for it to be the proof that I belong that it makes it impossible for me to feel like I do (the irony) and to show up in the way I yearn to: vulnerable, SOFT, open, embodied… free.

It’s still going well, I’m not complaining. The teacher is a kind man who’s committed to creating a safe environment and my classmates are lovely, lively, inspired and inspiring Musical Theater actresses and actors. I love those Monday nights. I want those Monday nights to turn into my daily experience! But I cannot find the joy I am so desperately looking for there… YET.

I am committed to helping myself change that.

I have learned that we can both tend to and honor our current capacity, while building bigger capacity for what’s next. It’s not an either/or; it’s a yes/and. I acknowledge and own my current limits and I don’t let them define who I’m growing into next.

Our desires do not match our nervous system’s capacity because they’re not meant to.

Our desires are here to awaken us, to call us home, to grow us, to turn us into who we always were at our core and therefore always meant to become in this world.

Our desires stretch us until the chains that bind our hearts become irrefutable. They won’t let us rest because they know that we cannot be safe until those chains—made of years (decades!) of unprocessed trauma and repressed emotions—are melted back into love.

Our desires reveal to us all the ways in which we are still trapped! Our desires will also, if we let them, force us to remember all the ways in which we are free.

Everything changed for me when I started singing again… Of course, it didn’t feel like it at the time. It even felt like everything was getting worse!

Not because I was singing again—I would never have linked the two back then—but because everything that was out of alignment started to FEEL out of alignment! Because I started to feel again.

That’s what happens when we reconnect with our spark. It rekindles that tiny fire in our hearts that will inevitably thaw the ice that had taken over our inner world.

That ice kept us afloat; it gave us a ground to stand on. That ice kept us alive. That ice deserves nothing but gratitude and praise… AND that ice is meant to flow back into Love when our need for ice subsides.

It’s up to us to know how much we want to breathe into our spark. How much we want to tend to and grow that inner fire. It’s up to us to gauge how fast we can let our inner Spring take over.

Maybe it NEEDS to be winter for a little longer!

Because winter is when we can grieve, reflect, refocus and reassess.

Our Great Mother, in all her blue glory, slows down every aspect of Nature to prove to us that it is not only safe, but on brand to winter.

Our culture may have forgotten the wisdom of Life but our bodies and hearts haven’t. They can’t! Only a human brain can impose such hardship upon itself—that’s why we’re the only species that can decide that our needs do not matter.

Sometimes all we can do to survive the most dire circumstances is to shrink our spark to its last fiber and keep it safely locked into our heart, where no one can see it, where no one can touch it, where no one can damage it any further—not even ourselves.

I had to do that with my singing voice. I could learn English in order to write in a language that barely anyone around me understood, but I couldn’t sing in a way that wouldn't be heard! So I stopped.

I stopped and it nearly killed me.

I stopped and my body paid the price. I stopped and I aged two decades in five years.

I stopped and I lost my memory of joy! But I also lost most of my ability to feel my pain… and since I didn’t know how to process it, since I didn’t have the time or space to learn the skills I needed to cope with feeling all what I was both forbidden to and way too clever to feel at the time, any pain relief felt like SURVIVAL.

Because it was.

And so I survived. But there’s something so tragic about dying alive.

Have you ever heard Diana’s plea in NEXT TO NORMAL? When she tries to explain to her husband what true embodied suffering feels like?

“The sensation that you're screaming, but you never make a sound

Or the feeling that you’re falling, but you never hit the ground

It just keeps on rushing at you, day by day by day by day

You don't know, you don't know, what it's like to live that way

Like a refugee, a fugitive, forever on the run

If it gets me, it will kill me… but I don’t know what I’ve done.”

In hindsight, this perfectly describes my twenties! It also captures the essence of my early thirties…

But until I started singing again, I didn’t call it pain or trauma or suffering or anything else for that matter. I just called it NORMAL.

And spending most of my time on the oncology ward, surrounded by burnout physicians and exhausted patients, no one reflected that Life could feel any different.

But then I started singing again. And so everything changed.

Our spark rekindles that tiny fire in our hearts

that will inevitably thaw the ice that had taken over our inner world.

Because even if I still felt mostly numb when I sang—even if I still feel numb today to a large extent—I started feeling the numbness. That was my entry point in the life-changing realization that numbness is ANYTHING but neutral.

Unbeknownst to my trauma brain, singing was fueling my spark, and my spark was restarting the fire of this sacred dream that we all hold inside our hearts.

And this time my dream was ADAMANT: No one—and least of all me—would be allowed to get in her way.

She bulldozered any attempt of the sunk cost fallacy to keep me stuck on a ladder I had no business climbing. She made New york’s call so deafening I just couldn’t breathe anymore when I was in France. She made everything painful but the idea of moving here and finding my way back into heart song.

To this day, that’s my only true solace. This knowing. This memory of a reclaiming that hasn’t fully happened yet! This remembrance of what singing as a child felt like and this unshakeable commitment to embodying once again this gift that I was born to bring forth.

But the road to Rome was not paved in one day, and neither is the road of freedom from a jail that has been built at the deepest layer of one’s psyche.

And. That’s. OKAY.

I recently did an extensive review of my thirties and my biggest and most beautiful takeaway was that there is a reason why the timeline unfolds this way.

Indeed, there is a specific timing that is needed for an acorn to turn into an oak tree. The sprouting will not start in any season or under any condition!

Nature manifests through alchemy, not magic thinking.

We don’t go from caterpillar into butterfly in one day, because we just can’t.

We don’t have it within us yet!! I mean, we have the potential for that transformation yes, but a caterpillar has no wings, no colors. Those take time to build and claim. Its body is made to morph into a butterfly but it takes a lot of UNDOING, first and foremost.

The caterpillar must first turn to goo… and then stay tucked in in a cocoon for what I’m sure feels like the LONGEST time. In many species the cocoon phase is as long as the caterpillar phase… In my case that would have meant I need 35 more years to butterfly up! So realizing that my first singing class was only 7 years ago is very reassuring.

And that wasn’t the day when I realized that my heart was still set on getting me to New York and on a singing stage…

No! It took me two years (and meeting Sylvie) before I could allow myself to commit to my singing practice consistently! Deciding to move to New York took another four months, and owning my decision to leave Medicine took another ten (and even then I wasn’t sure, that was not a small decision to leave by)…

Only then could I truly give myself permission to go all in on my singing journey.

There are steps on our journey of reclaiming. Necessary foundations to rebuild. Necessary pauses to grieve… and dream.

So CARE friend, I’m wondering what your spark is?

Do you know?

That nagging little cry that just won't let you rest until you listen. That longing, yearning, wanting, NEEDING, to show up for something that feels sacred to you, even if sacred is not a word you’re used to using or feel entitled to. That activity that makes you forget everything else, even if only for a few seconds. That gateway into timelessness—a timelessness born from Love and not dissociation.

And if you don’t know yet for sure, please trust that your heart knows.

If any image or idea or film or book or song or anything came up while reading this, trust that this is a clue. Your heart knows what your spark is because your heart is its guardian—and I believe that our spark is our heart’s true motor.

And if you know what it is—and whether you feel ready to admit it or not, even in the confines of your inner world—what is one thing that you could do this week to honor your spark?

Think of the smallest offering of time, care, love or energy.

Trust what just came up.

And just do it.

At least once.

Our spark might not be directly related to that sacred dream that I believe we came alive for, but it will always lead you there. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO to harness the magic of your own inner spell is to SHOW UP.

It’s that simple.

And I know it’s that hard sometimes…

But ain’t it worth it?

Ain’t it worth dedicating at least a few minutes of our lives to the purpose of fully coming alive? Ain’t it worth so much more than that? Ain’t it worth everything we have?

AIN’T IT WORTH IT?

Your heart just answered.

With kindness, love and light—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not need to fear anymore.

leo