Anxiety is not activism

The traps to be mindful of on our way to the Love that heals

CARE check*: What gives YOU hope?

What brings you joy?

What nourishes you?

What energizes you?

What soothes you?

What FEELS like rest?

What FEELS like Love?

What recenters you into your inner home?

I hope this week’s letter will motivate you to deeply consider those questions and make finding the answers your heart’s priority right now.

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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 are you?

Take a few seconds before answering. Take a whole minute if you need to.

Take a slow breath in and let it nourish, soften, and gently open you.

Take a slow breath out and let it feel like a release, a cleansing and a healing choice.

As Liz Gilbert and Byron Katie remind us, Earth school is a tough school with a very challenging curriculum and we’ve been handed out a very ambitious group assignment.

Overwhelm is frantically knocking at all our doors and our nervous systems are widely overstimulated… and that is without taking into account any of the preexisting trauma that we all carry in our fascia, muscles and bones.

So again, let’s take a deep breath together (and a deep breath only means as deep as you can right now… no forcing necessary).

Because whatever happens—and I mean it, WHATEVER happens—we’ll keep on breathing the same air and we’ll still be made of the same Love.

And that matters.

I promise this to the parts of us that are disconnected from hope right now.

• Those parts have valid reasons to be scared, enraged and full of sorrow and angst.

• Those parts have valid reasons to keep us up at night and urge us to check the news.

• Those parts are valid, welcome, and they’re vital for us to stay connected to what’s happening in the world!

BUT those parts need OUR help first and foremost.

Because Anxiety is not Activism.

I thank the pixar gods for the timeliness of Inside Out 2, reminding us that Anxiety is incredibly well-intended BUT that Anxiety is not meant nor fit to be in charge.

There are insidious traps we can fall into in time like ours.

I’ll name a few below:

• The first one is thinking that it has never happened before…

How much we love the phrase unprecedented times.

And those are unprecedented times of course in the sense that everything is always new, the very foundation of Life being impermanence.

Those are also unprecedented times in the sense that never before had we had access to information on such a large scale. We truly are able to carry the weight of the entire world on our shoulders now.

Those are also unprecedented times because the flavor of the moment is dictated by the current state of progress including AI which had not been a player in History until now.

BUT those are not unprecedented events at their core:

Human beings losing their connection to their hearts, thereby falling prey to their wounds and projecting them onto others, has been a common thread in the history of the human race.

Human beings losing connection with Life, thereby convincing themselves that they are supposed to control the world and everyone that lives in it, while dehumanizing those that they don’t know or do not understand has been at the core of our collective unconsciousness for as long as we recall.

That’s actually how we EVOLVED!

And many people have shown us the way through. Even if they’re not with us anymore, we have mentors to come back to: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, the suffragettes, Jesus, to name only a very few.

Were they prepared from birth to rise to the occasion? Most of them weren’t. Were they perfect? Mostly not. And that’s very news because that means we do not need to be either.

Life on Earth is made of expansion and contraction, and us being in a contraction right now doesn’t mean that everything has fallen apart.

Am I downplaying what’s going on right now? Absolutely not.

The mud is definitely being stirred up and it’s hard to see clearly through the fog... We have very serious reasons to be concerned and we know that hardships and heartaches await.

So please, stay with me as I keep on listing the traps we need to be watching out for.

• Because another trap is thinking that nothing can be done.

Alice Walker reminded us that “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

We are NOT powerless.

We are not alone.

We are not actual children stuck in an abusive home.

We are the offspring of Life, able to withstand the most unconscious forces and to bring Love back to the forefront of our awareness—because, again, Love is who we are.

If we convince ourselves that nothing can be done, we will be proven right. Because we will not do anything.

Our thoughts create our emotions and our emotions drive our behaviors. So whether we believe in manifestation or not, what we believe about ourselves will always come true, because it cannot NOT happen.

Our brains are computers, and WE are writing—consciously or not—the program that leads them.

If we’re convinced that we’re powerless and that it is out of our hands, we’re going to fuel emotions such as terror, denial or cynicism—none of which fostering actions that allow us to look at what is, at what CAN be done, and at each other with an open heart.

“The most common way people give up their power is

by thinking they don't have any.”

—Alice Walker

• Now, on the other end, there’s the trap of reactivity through which we convince ourselves that the only solution is to dive head first into the pain.

The trap of not putting our oxygen mask first, forgetting that if we stop breathing, we literally die—and refusing to acknowledge that it might look good on paper to die for a cause but that it hardly ever serves (most deaths leave us feel lost and do not awaken everybody else’s urge to show up), and that it exceptionally (if ever) matches the impact that our satying alive could have had.

That trap leads us to consume the news so constantly that overwhelm takes over, cutting us from our best inner leaders—our guts and hearts—which, in turn, either:

• freezes us on our coaches

• OR jails us into conversations that feel productive but only create more worry and distrust that no one can digest

• OR drowns us in anger that separates us even more from each other.

The truth of this moment is that we need each other more than ever before AND we cannot give to each other what we do not have, which is ourselves.

So self-care, self-nourishment, self-love and self-empowerment are what matters MOST right now.

I wrote HERE about how we need to be hopeful—and that it can only happen if we are hope FULL. I believe that with my whole heart.

We also need to be LOVE full.

We need to embody what we yearn to receive and offer.

We need to “be the change we want to see in the world”, as Ghandi reminded us.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”, as MLK highlighted.

“It is not what we do but how much LOVE we put into it”, taught us Mother Teresa.

We need to embody the Love and Hope that we NEED to explore our collective shadow and enlighten it into gold.

It might look good on paper to die for a cause but it hardly ever serves.

We first discovered the importance of inner exploration. It changed the world for the better.

We’re now well advanced on the path of regulation. It’s changing us at the deepest level.

Exploration and regulation are the pillars of self-reconnection but they’re not the end game! They’re the FOUNDATION.

• When we only explore our inner worlds, we tend to get lost in the stories carried by our inner ghosts. We can get even more disembodied and end up feeling trapped into our wounds.

• When we only focus on regulation, we can end up bypassing our emotions or silencing those very stories that we deeply need to revisit, release and rewrite. We can end up feeling even more disconnected from our wounds.

This is what led us to uncover the paramount importance of Integration.

Integration allows us to bring our thoughts, emotions, and behavioral patterns to the altar of our hearts, so that they can be alchemized and turned into wisdom, determination, compassion, and dreams that both recreate us and illuminate the world.

So yes,

• EXPLORATION and REGULATION are the foundation.

• INTEGRATION is the core then allowing us to rise from our roots…

• And then—and only then—can we aim at LIBERATION!

But here again there’s a process to follow. Something that most of us have never been taught. Something that is usually taught the other way around!

PERSONAL liberation must precede COLLECTIVE liberation, for Liberation to be rooted in Love—and not in projection.

We all know the difference between someone who tells and someone who shows. We all know the difference between someone that leads from a textbook and someone that leads by example. We all know the feeling of being told by someone to do as they say while knowing that they don’t. We all know that person trying to fix or save you because they have no idea how to help and love THEMSELVES.

We’ve all been that someone at least once too! So no judgment here—just an invitation to reflect on what heals, works and serves… and what does NOT.

“It is not what we do but how much LOVE we put into it”

—Mother Teresa.

Exploration and regulation lead to integration that leads to personal liberation which enables collective liberation.

And NONE of those can be achieved in a way that truly heals and serves if it’s not rooted to our connection to all that is, to each other, to our essence.

Exploration without love is self-judgment. Regulation without love is self-enslavement. Integration without love cannot happen. And liberation without love is not liberation, it’s a power play.

AND none of those will be achieved if we’ve lost hope in the first place…

Which is why it all comes back to Love and Hope, dear CARE friend.

Which is why this is what we must prioritize even MORE than ever before right now.

We need to keep ourselves informed, obviously, and to do so with devotion and determination… AND we need to do it in a way that is manageable.

While tending to our nervous system capacity as if our life depended on it—because it does.

While choosing a way to receive the news that is TITRATABLE and leaves us feeling determined, aware and clear-minded—NOT ravaged, confused and paralyzed.

While remembering that if a picture tells a thousand words, it means that we cannot look at more than one or two pictures of suffering and hate at once—and probably not even per day, week or month.

While defaulting to the written form if possible as it only involves one of our senses, allowing us to use the other ones to ground in the now.

While choosing writers that want to educate—and not addict—us.

And making damn sure that we are receiving the support we need right before and right after those little immersions in what doesn’t work.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”

—Martin Luther King Jr

We need to promise ourselves and each other that we will tend to our need (yes, NEED) for joy, rest, connection and Love.

We need to remember why Life is so precious if we want to be able to show up and care for Life the way that we’re meant to.

The answer is not to tune out…

No!

AND the answer is not to go all in either.

The answer is to tune in and root ourselves in the Love that beats our hearts.

Because Love knows the way.

Because all we truly have to do is to listen! But we can only listen to what we can HEAR.

So we need to receive Fear’s call, write it all down on paper and remember that we’re not in charge here, we’re only the messenger created to bring Fear’s plea to Love.

OUR job is to let Love lead.

To let Love lead us to the next right thing.

To let Love lead us to the next right action.

To let Love lead us to to the answer we’re seeking…

And to let Love lead us to back into Peace.

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

leo