But what about Receiving?

A part of the healing journey we don't often talk about

May 20, 2025

CARE check*: What does Love mean to you?

What does RECEIVING Love mean to you?

I’m not asking about your Love Language here—even though it’s part of it— I’m asking about the felt sensations, the felt experience?

And does it feel yummy, expansive, resourcing and SAFE?

Or has your nervous system—like mine and many others—been taught to resist, brace, retrieve or numb when Love is knocking at your inner world’s door?

There’s nothing right or wrong about any response coming up for you right now. Only powerful, healing, awareness that can change the way you relate to the entire world.

I hope this week’s letter will feel like soft invitation to reclaim the most important relationship one could nourish and nurture: your relationship to LOVE.

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

Hi CARE friend,

What does receiving Love mean to you?

As you may know already, I have this habit of choosing a word for the year. Actually, choosing is not the best way to describe this… as it mostly feels like a download from Life, a word sent by the Universe for me to know where to put my heart and focus on that year.

In 2024, it was RECEIVING. In 2025, it’s REWRITING. And both have delivered plenty.

Now, interestingly, after doing this for 5 years (Intention, Humility, Integrity, Receiving, Rewriting), I’m noticing how one theme does take precedence for a year in a quite striking way—so that I can acquire the basic curriculum—but I also then get some refresher and some “time to dig deeper” complementary courses in the years that follow.

And so RECEIVING is not done with me… (I have a feeling that this wise teacher will stick with me until my last breath on this planet.)

But let’s go back to REWRITING for a moment.

I have this habit of choosing a word for the year.

Rewriting

Turning 40 and a melanoma diagnosis are two very elegant ways to get one started on their REWRITING journey. It created within me a beautiful urgency to live fully that has reawakened my every cell…

Life is now.

I have an embodied sense of that like never before. And it doesn’t feel scary! It feels sacred.

It’s fascinating to me to watch my very elderly father still trying to negate that life ends at some point, while being myself so acutely aware that every day is a most precious and extraordinary gift. He still seems stuck in that idea that all can be done “tomorrow”—you know, that exciting time when everything will somehow be easier or more convenient according to our mind—and that makes me so sad for him.

It seems like he’s been waiting since birth to start a life that he’s now about to leave… unstarted. It’s harrowing to witness.

AND I also see this counterexample as a very powerful gift.

My father couldn’t show me how to live a fulfilling life but he did demonstrate what happens when you don’t let yourself commit to this gut wrenching, heart expanding, brutiful, mind blowing, awe-inspiring journey on Earth. When you let others dictate the rules and outsource your moral compass. When you forfeit your power on the altar of conformity and forget to love yourself, in a hopeless quest to be admired by people you don’t even like or respect. When you collapse your own spine because you’re afraid of the perspective that you will get once it’s straightened.

It seems like he’s been waiting since birth

to start a life that he’s now about to leave… unstarted.

The beginning of this year has forced me to let go of all the frames I was hiding into. Salt was put relentlessly on all my wounds until I couldn’t pretend anymore not to be aware of them. It unearthed all the narratives I had needed to survive the chaotic environment I grew up in while highlighting how stuck, small, and broken those narratives were making me feel now. It took away the fake sense of security they had once offered me to force me to understand the true meaning of safety. Safety that can only be born from the inside out.

It threw me in the dark forest of our unconscious, and I descended into the underworld to retrieve the parts of me I once thought I couldn’t survive with and now know I cannot live without.

The result is that I’m finally ready to define myself according to my heart’s perspective—and to no longer abide by my mother’s projected wounds’ narrative. Funny how coming back to one’s true self feels like a complete reinvention, right?

And amidst this rewriting process, I’ve realized that my ability to receive is still deeply hindered in one of the ways that matters most… which brings us to RECEIVING again.

Funny how coming back to one’s true self feels like a complete reinvention.

Receiving

Last year I relearned how to receive myself.

To receive my own sensations. To receive my feelings and the wisdom they bring forth. To receive my limits as invitations for growth instead of either fighting against them or denying their existence.

I learned to receive my experience through a deep commitment to embodiment.

I learned to receive my pain, my vulnerability, and I learned how to receive the unknown as a necessary and fundamental part of a human life.

I unlearn that overgiving is a requirement to be allowed to breathe on Earth and I unlearned that overgiving is even Love.

However I forgot one absolutely pivotal step in all of this… I forgot to relearn (learn?) how to receive LOVE. How to rewire my nervous system so that it can feel safe to not only receive signals of chaos, but also signals of being cared for, supported, invited, wanted and received.

I learned how to receive the unknown

as a necessary and fundamental part of a human life.

I had relearned how to not constantly keep my lungs empty by exhaling at full capacity… but not how to also INHALE passively, softly, tenderly even.

I had never realized that my entire body braced whenever air tried to enter to replenish me OR whenever someone showed me affection and reciprocity.

Because here’s another thing I’ve realized:

Our exhale is a reflection of our ability to give; our inhale is a reflection of our ability to receive.

And of course all of this greatly impacted my ability to sing! Especially when in front of others… which is how I finally came to identify this missing link.

I will never stop marveling at how reclaiming my singing informs my trauma healing journey.

Singing is not only my reason to live, it is the "how" I’m coming back to life.

What a gift…

THAT’S WHAT OUR SPARKS DO FOR US:

This is why it’s so paramount for you to reclaim yours. To reconnect and rekindle that inner fire that brought each and everyone of us into form and that allows our hearts to drum us into existence.

I will never stop marveling at how

reclaiming my singing informs my trauma healing journey.

Singing

Based on past trauma that I won’t revisit here, the belief that “People will hate/hurt me if I sing” is deeply ingrained in my psyche. It’s a tough one to shake… and I have tried everything I could to erase this program from my brain. Including during Byron Katie’s Work on this.

In case you never heard of it, I wrote about this potentially life altering practice HERE, and here’s a summary:

Choose a thought that feels painful and yet very true to you about yourself or somebody else (ie: They lied to me). Then let yourself wholeheartedly question it…

Ground into your body and let yourself contemplate those four powerful questions, in a semi-meditative state :

Is it true?
Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
What happens/how do I react/how do I treat myself and others when I believe this thought?
Who/What would I be without this thought?

Usually by the end of that inquiry, you have a much clearer understanding of what that thought is creating in your life and how it impacts your experience, emotions and behaviors.

A SPACE has been created between you and that thought, which allows you to see it for what it is: a perspective with very heavy consequences on your self-esteem, well-being, and/or relationships with yourself and others.

That’s when you can start the most transformative and final step: turn the thought around (ie They told me the truth, They didn’t lie to me, I lied to me, I lied to them), and ponder how that statement might be at least as true or even maybe truer than the original one.

Again, the mind tends to resist the idea, so I invite you to read a full example HERE or to witness Byron Katie guiding someone doing this. Because it cannot work if just taken as a thought exercise, it needs to be an experiential understanding of the power of beliefs.

And trust me, when we get there, it’s humbling, heart opening, and can be intensely liberating.

But when I did it a while back on the belief “People will hate me if I sing”, I wondered why the turnaround “People will love me if I sing” felt, yes, truer but not better.

A SPACE has been created between you and that thought,

which allows you to see it for what it is.

And that question was brought back to the forefront of my awareness last week when my Acting Song teacher asked me why I always looked so crossed with myself after singing. In the moment, I replied that it was because I was never satisfied with the way I sounded but I knew there was something deeper to unearth.

And as I wrote about HERE, the next day led me to revisit this relationship between love and singing.

Interestingly both my voice teachers also focused that week on something off with the way I inhaled when singing, urging me to let myself receive more air and expand in between notes.

It took a moment for all of those ingredients to blend together and turn into wisdom, but when it did everything clicked in the most freeing way.

Yes, I was so afraid that people would hate me for my singing, but what if on the contrary they loved me for it? What would happen then?

It’s not that receiving love feels threatening per se, logically I know it’s the most wonderful experience—and one we’re all wired to be deeply yearning for—but it’s just that it feels so foreign to me.

This is not something that I learned by osmosis as a child, and this is not something that I knew I had to learn as an adult.

Isn’t it the most extraordinary moment on one’s healing adventure though? When you realize that learning how to feel your pain is in the past and that the assignment is now to learn how to receive LOVE?

It took a moment for all of those ingredients to blend together…

and turn into wisdom.

Trauma and Love

And it makes so much sense that Trauma would impact our ability to receive Love. It makes so much sense, somatically.

Because Trauma tightens, while Love melts. Trauma constricts, while Love expands. Trauma urges us to close everything up (and keep everything out), while Love advocates for us to open ourselves to all of this wondrous experience (and to receive ABUNDANTLY).

It doesn’t mean that Trauma is incompatible with Love, absolutely NOT—Love is not only the antidote, it is the reward.

Because NO ONE is more loving and connected to Love than someone who endured the worst and healed themselves into the best that Life has to offer.

It does mean however that, after Trauma, we need to relearn how to receive Love—and if like me your trauma started when you were the size of a pug, it’s not so much about relearning than unlearning what Love is not, so that you can reopen your heart to it.

Trauma impacts our ability to receive Love.

Indeed, what I was taught was Love as a kid is anything but. It is founded on power plays and emotional immaturity. It is fueled by self-destructive dynamics projected on others and by a complete refusal to look beneath one’s own skin. It is a losing game that hurts everyone and leaves our hearts drained and weary... So no, it’s not Love, it’s its very opposite.

In some ways, I feel lucky to be able to revisit this so frequently with my father, as an ADULT. To witness what’s going on and how it feels. To learn how to fully trust my eyes, my perceptions, my body sanctuary. To compare my interactions with my family of origin to the interactions with my chosen friendmily—thereby unlearning organically that Love can hurt, confuse, exhaust or kill.

That also allows me to spot and connect with the moments when the love does come through the cracks of those iron walls of trauma that hold them prisoners still.

And so what I had learned to call Love is something that my body is so wise to brace against! But what I now have learned is Love is something my entire body yearns to receive.

So there might be a few more unconscious narratives to untangle, but I am READY.

What I was taught was Love as a kid is anything but.

And of course now I want to know what is coming up for YOU, with this idea of Receiving, of Love, and with this invention to define those words for ourselves and not through our minds but through our bodies?

Is receiving Love easy for you or do you notice how much safer it feels to either wall up or… to give?

Because that’s another subtle—and mostly unconscious—way we keep ourselves from RECEVING.

By sending Love back on her way the second She knocks at our door. By automatically saying Thank you when someone is thanking us (even if it makes very little sense). By discarding a compliment or by “paying it back” immediately, as if this tiny loving spotlight was burning our skin. By evaluating our inner value based on what we have to offer and how much we can contribute only. By feeling guilty anytime our cup fills up, because what about all those whose cup is emptying out.