Because you know better.
No, there's no doubt about that. Let me show you why!
CARE.CHECK*: How does your intuition speak to you? Is it through words or sensations?
If it’s through words, do they come with a specific sound or tone of voice?
If it’s through sensations, where do you feel them first and how do they then travel into your awareness?
And let’s rewind: What does intuition mean to you?
How often do you take a chance to listen?
Can you recall a time when you did and how magical that felt? Maybe it was yesterday or five years ago or when you were 10. Trust what comes up first.
Can you call on your intuition more often?
Can you rekindle that sacred friendship that was created for you to know you will never be alone to navigate this experience?
As usual, for context and offerings to fuel your journey within, keep reading!
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, Rick discovered Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by AI Gwyneth Paltrow :)
Hi Care.Friend,
How is this week treating you?
We’re very connected to the grandiosity of Nature right now in New York, between a baby earthquake last week and a sassy solar eclipse on Tuesday.
And today I want to share something I realized in my morning pages this morning:
No one knows better. We all just know different.
It came up as I was reflecting on how I’ve spent my twenties and early thirties running away from my intuition and desperately trying to find someone to trust, to believe in, to follow.
Someone had to know.
Because there had to be a way, right?
To do life the right way.
To understand how to stop all this suffering.
To prevent unnecessary deaths or heartbreaks.
To love each other… To love ourselves?
I looked everywhere for answers. Everywhere! Everywhere but within me…
Which is so sad because my intuition is really strong.
My intuition is my best friend and I am hers—so she cares! We grew up co-creating a very strong bond. I listened to my intuition wholeheartedly, until years of daily trauma disconnected me from my inner world.
That’s when my intuition started to try catching my attention by any way possible.
Through songs at first, because they had always been our favorite secret inner chambers… But I stopped singing.
Through writing of course, but I had stopped writing even sooner!
Through my body, but I couldn’t feel it any more...
Through pain. But I self-medicated with overworking, oversmoking, overhelping, by alternating between starvation and binging—or by overdrinking, when nothing else had worked to shield me from my inner ears.
I was running from my center and I was running fast—and my intuition could only watch me leave, while trying to send me messages through the bottles I was drowning her voice into.
My twenties still shine a dark light in the movie of my mind. And my early thirties felt like a slow fall into Hell and like dying a thousand times over…
The last five years though have felt like a rebirth.
And a rebirth means a giant leap of the unknown, while saying goodbye to everything you’ve ever known, AND while entering a whole new world in which you barely know how to breathe—and, for sure, don’t know how to walk, sing, exist or pave the path you’re meant to follow.
But I guess the good news is we don't really need to pave our roads... That was the first lie. The reason why we all get caught up in ten year plans that suffocate us and serve mostly no one.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in using this extraordinary experience called Life to co-create something with Creation. I believe in connecting with our dreams and dedicating our existence to making sure they exist in the outside world. This entire Substack is dedicated to the sacredness of our dreams and our call for self-creation through soul-connection.
But ten year plans are not the way to do that:
Unfaltering dreams and connection to our intuition are how the magic happens.
I learned from Rob Bell and Liz Gilbert at Omega last year, something I had always intimately known, but forgot that I knew because I trusted the world above my inner voice:
What we need is a dream, a feeling, a sense of meaning, purpose and destination, without any attachment to the way it will come into form and NO ATTACHMENT WHATSOEVER to the timeline of it all.
Our dream will take life when it’s ready to walk the Earth. That’s all. That’s not up to us.
We’re the channel, not the director. The highway doesn’t dictate when we decide to jump into our cars.
* Our dream will take life when it’s ready to walk the Earth.*
Mine is to sing and to be connected to New York, to my artistry, and to love. That’s my dream.
Within me, it feels so obvious and so precise, but on paper it’s pretty vague, right? And that’s the way it’s meant to be.
Of course, I have a lot of hypotheses on how it might look like, once it’s alive, but I also notice that it morphs with the seasons, with what I learn and experience.
It always FEELS the same though. And it always looks coherent. But just like a human being, it never looks exactly the same depending on the time of day (or night!) I call on it.
So yes, what we need is a deep connection, an INTIMACY, a devotion, a sacred contract with our dream… and then what we need is a very specific, thought through, next step.
The next right thing.
The next couple of inches to focus on on the path.
That’s it.
And as Rob Bell pointed out—and as I can witness in my own life and in the life of my coaching clients—we always have exactly what we need for that next step to unfold.
Or to make it happen at least.
Life is always here, helping us, supporting us. We’re never alone. We always have exactly what we need now!
The only problem is that we focus on—and therefore terrify ourselves by obsessing over—what we lack and believe that we want to have tomorrow (not realizing that not having it today says nothing about what we will have tomorrow or not).
We need a dream, a seed in the garden of our heart, that can slowly but surely take roots and anchor us where we belong, and that can also humbly and tenderly grow into a sprout, expand, blossom.
AND we need to home in on the next right thing to do.
We need to be in our dream, until our dream can come to be; and we need to do what needs to be done right now.
Focusing on what needs to be done ten years from now feels clever and productive, but it only derails us from achieving what needs to be achieved right NOW, in order for “ten years from now” to look anything like we hoped it could.
And if the pandemic or the way our world reinvents ourselves (for better and for worse) every year can teach us anything, it’s that our glorious plan would have worked if “ten years down the line” was now, but that we have no way of knowing what will make sense for us or anyone else in the near future—let alone ten years from now.
So yes, we need a direction to commit to each morning. We need to remember what we love and our values. We need to bow to our heart’s wisdom and I believe we’re meant to dedicate our lives to receiving the gifts that were made and meant for us… because that’s the light we’re meant to embody and thereby share with everyone else.
Once again, we need self-connection and the intention and devotion to self-creation! And we need to do what needs to be done now.
That’s it.
That’s how it all comes true!
And that’s how we serve: By being in our center and letting love flow through and around us.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this letter:
Only YOU can know.
You know better.
You don’t know better than everyone about everything, of course not, but you know better what you feel, where you’re meant to go and who you truly are than anyone could ever know—anyone on this Earth, no matter how deeply they know you, no matter how much they love you.
That doesn’t mean you know for sure or that you know it all (if only)—but you do know better than anyone else what the story of you needs from you.
* Only YOU can know.*
I can testify to this because I’ve proven it to myself a hundred times over, within myself and by watching my coaching clients.
We can all think (“we” including them, their friends, their mentors, their family and me) that the next right step is to go north; but by going inside, by connecting to their essence and to what is, they suddenly realize (and so do I as a bewildered and over excited mirror) that they were meant to travel west all along!
You know better.
But to prove it to yourself, you need first to reconnect to the part of you that actually knows.
That part that doesn’t know through words, through concepts, through reason or thanks to worldly proofs or a ten year plan. That part that speaks to you by opening you up, softening you, shifting your energy and the way the light looks as it dances on your surroundings.
That part that we call intuition, deep knowing, highest self, center or [insert the word that works for you there].
* You know better.*
And as it relates to the world, to right and wrong, to true or false?
No one knows better than anyone else here either. We all know “different”.
We all know something that no one else can know, something that transcends our human comprehension. Something that comes from the drop of Life that we are, something unique and yet so universal. We all have a unique perspective shaped and tainted by our past, our level of awareness, our sacred dream, our human fears, our conditioning, our wounds, our unique talents, our unique gifts.
And sometimes what we know serves the whole a little more than what someone else knows… but that still doesn’t mean we know better.
Because what serves the whole at any given time is not always what serves the whole as a whole.
We don’t know better, we know different. And it’s all valid and valuable and what we know matters for each and everyone of us.
But whatever happens, what someone else knows about you or Life should never matter more to you than what YOU know about you or Life.
Life created us and life is our creation. No one knows best but Life.
We’re all here trying our best to figure it out—with the level of humility, safety, regulation and devotion that we can muster.
We’re all doing the best we can based on what we’ve been taught, what we experienced, what we learned and what we successfully unlearned.
We’re all dealing with immensible pains we don’t quite know how to handle, with thoughts we don’t know how to tame, with feelings we don’t know how to welcome and love, with wounds we don’t know how to heal or alchemize into wisdom, with fears we don’t know how to tuck in with a lullaby.
No one knows best but Life. We’re only here to contribute, to bow to the mystery—and to channel what can help us all understand what we’re meant to turn into words, and navigate what we’re not meant to understand.
And again, no one (apart from Life) knows better what is meant for you than you.
So choose yourself today.
Not over someone else’s well-being, but ALWAYS over someone else’s advice.
And when we really understand what well-being means, we realize that nothing that truly serves our heart and dream could ever hurt someone else’s heart and dream anyway.
[Codependency is neither a wise nor a fair judge.]
* Life created us and life is our creation.*
Listen to your deep knowing, your intuition, to what is true for you, no matter what anyone else say.
Notice what those who truly love you have to say, notice what those who are where you want to be reflect back to you, notice, yes NOTICE! But don’t listen to them over what that voice that only you can hear or feel is telling you to do.
NO ONE KNOWS BETTER THAN YOU.
They know something different that can enrich and inspire you! Or they know something different that doesn’t apply to you right now…
But I promise you that no one knows better than you.
The only truth in the thought “I know you better than you know yourself” is “I can spot that you have blind spots you’re not aware of”.
True humility comes when we realize that that’s ALL we can ever know though. That blind spots exist. But we actually never truly know what it is that others can’t see in them.
No one knows better than anyone else. Not in the deep sense of the word.
Care.friend, please know that you know better than anyone what you’re meant to do, to feel, to grow from and into. Because that’s how the world can change.
Not by following someone else’s personal legend, but only by learning how to truly listen to what only you can know and create.
And if what I'm writing here doesn’t resonate, leave it all on the page because I DO NOT KNOW BETTER. I only know different.
And so I trust that’s what I’m meant to share, which does not mean it’s meant to always resonate.
But I take my job seriously and I believe that my job down here is to receive my intuition wholeheartedly and then to write what she tells me, humbly and trustingly. So I listen.
I hope you choose to listen too today. To your intuition. To what only can you can bring to life and to our world.
I particularly hope you can remember that you know better anytime someone tells you that what you believe your dream needs from you right now, is not what the world needs from you today.
I know that you know better.
So please trust this… Please trust yourself!
And please, please, PLEASE: Trust. Your. Dream.
Then watch everything change.
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo