Fear is an invitation

One we might prefer to ignore and yet one that can heal us in a way little else can.

CARE.CHECK*: What do you do when you’re scared?

When the answer is not clear? When the question terrifies you?

When your heart is closing, when your body is shaking, when your mind runs in circles?

What do you do when you just don’t know what to do? Who do you become when you’re not quite sure of who you are anymore?

Fear is so scary when we let our mind handle it…

Thankfully, our mind was never supposed to get us into safety: only our body can do that.

And we can feel like we’re losing our mind ten thousand times a day, but our body is always there waiting for us to remember that our body… is always here.

If and when you’re feeling your fear, I hope that this week’s letter will help you find some grounding, solace, connection and support.

I also hope it will help you know how deeply you are loved. 

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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, you can use Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by AI Gwyneth Paltrow :)

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 Hi Care.Friend,

How are you today?

How were you yesterday?

And how were you last week? Now what about last month?

Any patterns you notice? Any knots?

Any constant source of gratitude and joy? Any insight or pressing question?

I’m feeling it all again this week. I can’t share everything yet because I’m committed to only sharing from places of embodied vulnerability and healing here—from my center, from an open heart… which means there are wounds too raw to be exposed at the moment, and corners of my life that still feel too mysterious and shadowy for me to put them into words (and that includes my relationship with joy). 

However, I can share that my heart—and my nervous system’s capacity—are being stretched like never before.

It’s not that I’m facing the most dire circumstances, I’ve been through much worse. But I’m experiencing a lot of uncertainty, complete groundlessness and also A LOT OF CONTRAST.

A lot of terror, and a lot of joy. A lot of grief, and a lot of miracles. The most sacred connections I could ever have dreamed of, and a striking mirroring of my deepest attachment wounds. More baseline regulation than ever, and so many PTSD triggers on a daily basis. 

So, in a nutshell, some of them “good” and some of them “bad” (even if I don’t believe in those labels anymore)—but mostly a lot of things are scary right now… 

AND all those scary things are pretty much out of my control, which of course, my brain absolutely hates. 

My brain deals very well with crises, my brain is used to chaos—chaos makes sense to my nervous system: I was raised in it.

But my brain is also an overachiever and has a problem solving addiction. Chaos that we can’t control (which is, yes, the true definition of chaos, but PLEASE bear with my denial) is not supposed to happen. Chaos that we can’t control is not okay. Chaos that we can’t control means death… or so believes my nervous system.

Thankfully, I’ve learned five years ago that my life doesn't actually depend on my brain. I’ve been on a journey back into my body ever since and I live, as often as I can, surrendered to my heart and intuition. So when my brain panics, I listen. I try to catch the thoughts running in circles in my mind, so that I can hug them back into love. I try to offer *What Ifs* that invite my dear friend Hope inside—and not my inner Hitler. I soften into my pain, I breathe through the turmoil. I let the Earth support me and I invite the light to come closer. 

That doesn’t mean the door is always open for light to enter… but I keep offering new deals to my inner jailer, hoping that at some point something will make him want to unlock my chains. After all, NO ONE is immune to love.

Just like Shame, Fear is trapped in a loveless land.

So the only solution is to bring Fear so much love that she feels motivated to find her way back into our hearts. And once Fear is safely tucked in in that sacred inner temple, we can start the journey again, fueled by the courage that fear and Love co-create in the background.

Now, how can we help Fear meet us halfway? How can we lure Fear out of the darkest corners of our unconscious and invite her to step into more accessible shadow edges?

Well first, we have to be willing to feel our fear—and that’s a part that most of us are not very excited about…

I don’t blame us! It takes so much courage to feel afraid. 

To own it. To accept it. To embrace it. 

To not numb.

To not force our way out of a scary situation.

To not attack (which is exactly the same as to defend—more on that in another letter).

To not run away, while not overexposing ourselves either. 

To STAY. 

To anchor and ground, while feeling fear rushing through our veins, shaking our limbs and lips, temporarily freezing our bones and our ability to hope. 

To witness our humanness, our depth, our shallowness. To feel our limitations vibrate through us wanting to be honored, celebrated even.

It takes tremendous courage to be afraid in a culture that confuses courage with fear-avoidance and denial, thriving with survivalism, kindness with weakness—and mistakes niceness for kindness.

It takes tremendous courage… and especially because it requires authenticity. 

There’s a rainbow in every storm.

And authenticity is scary because it threatens our connections…

Not the soulful and embodied sacred connections we can create from a sturdy core and an open heart, but the connections we’ve been taught to make through people-pleasing, people-fixing, people-shaming and the glorification of codependent patterns. 

Brene Brown highlights the difference between fitting in and belonging in her beautiful book ‘BRAVING The Wilderness’.

Fitting in is when we want to be liked by those we think we like. Belonging is when we want to be loved by those we know we love. Fitting in requires us to become who everyone else expects. Belonging requires us to find ourselves, first and foremost. 

Authenticity and connection are our two most primal needs, as Dr Gabor Mate explains.

And as a young person, connection has to come first. We are literally dependent on others for survival. We cannot decide that we’re just going to be ourselves if that means no one will protect, feed, or accept it. For almost two years we cannot walk or talk. We’re not equipped for a revolution.

However, as we grow up, authenticity becomes more and more important! Because without authenticity, there can be no true connection.

Authenticity is the foundation and connection is the expansion. So if we don’t find our way back to our center, we’ll always have to anchor within others! Which means we’ll remain as dependent as a child to another person—even though we can now do everything on our own, we just don’t know that we know how. 

And, of course, deep nurturing loving connections are incredibly helpful for us to embody our authenticity more and more. They make everything taste, look, sound and feel better! They are the goal. They fill us with meaning and joy... We need each other. We need each other SO MUCH. But once again, those connections can only blossom if we’re able to stand on our own.

Authenticity comes first.

Why?

Because authenticity can exist without connection, while connection cannot survive where authenticity is not being lived out. 

Authenticity is our center. When we connect with our authenticity, we reconnect with ourselves… and from that place of deep self-connection, we can truly connect with others.

We must understand that we need to receive ourselves deeply first and BEFORE we can truly offer anything to the world. 

If we don’t, we’ll just project our unmet needs on everyone else.

Because needs are needs. Not choices. We can’t survive when they’re not met. So even if we choose to ignore them, our system will not let us die. Our system can’t. We’re wired for survival. 

So we’ll find others to take care of us… and we’ll call it love.

We’ll cover this unconsciously manipulative arrangement under a mountain of kindness and affection. We’ll ready ourselves to pay back for that attention with all of our time and energy. We’ll sacrifice our dreams (robbing the world of what we came here to be) in the name of everyone else’s needs—lamenting that we carry the world on our shoulders, and wishing we could only start living if others could start doing a better job at surviving.

We do not see that we’re helping everyone else because we neither know how to help ourselves, nor how to receive help from others. We do not know that we’re looking for our own answers by suffocating others with advice that we’re the first ones to ignore.

We do not know that they’re doing the exact same thing to us.

We think it’s normal to drown into each other. We think it’s romantic or spiritual even—or we convince ourselves that we’re compensating for our sins or earning I right to live on Earth.

We don’t know that we’re good inside, miraculous even. We don’t know that we’re only made of love, and that the only thing to fear is not even fear itself, but only our fear of feeling it.

We don’t know that we’re whole and complete and that we hold the entire universe beneath our skin.

We don’t know that others are just as strong, loving, magical and resilient as us—under the masks we’re all wearing.

We confuse the wounds we carry with our identities—and we call ourselves broken, lost, helpless and bad. We might even repeat it to everyone who will listen or we might try to hide it under decades of accomplishments (and so-called worldly success).

We might then project our self-abuse on others, while trying to convince ourselves that we know better, that we would have created a far better world than God, that we know how everything works and what is right and what is wrong. Indeed, we might believe we are the problem or we might believe we are the solution, but those are two sides of the same coin. 

In both cases, we believe ourselves separate from the whole, and we torture ourselves through constant comparisons.

We might make them look good on paper but comparisons can only destroy us in the end—because they rob us from creating our world from the inside out, anchored in our authenticity and open to sacred connections.

Comparisons trick us into believing that love is conditional and that authenticity depends on approval. So once again, we might decide to defend our authenticity against all odds, but that only shows that we’re not aware that our authenticity doesn’t need to be defended or protected. Our authenticity already is and is only waiting to be harnessed and connected with.

What stands between us and our authenticity is only our fears, those protective mechanisms, this armor, that puts a shield around our vibrant heart. And as mentioned at the beginning of this letter, the key to reopen our heart is love.

So we can disempower ourselves by relying solely on other people’s love or we can decide to jump head first into our own well of love. 

We can breathe our own love, embody it, melt into it and let ourselves feel it.

Until all of our fears and shame know they can also count on it.

Until we can feel our grief and anger and recognize immediately that they’re love too.

Until joy and awe and excitement and gratitude feel safe again, because when we remember that love is who we are, Love doesn’t feel scary anymore! 

And that’s my invitation to you this week.

To choose you. To love you.

To feel YOUR love. No matter what it means to you.

To shower yourself with it, unapologetically.

To use all the courage that breaths your lungs and choose love, radically.

To love yourself enough to feel your fear—and let fear show you the depth that your own love can reach. 

You’ve got this. You’ve got you! And Fear is not dangerous, fear is an invitation to love EVEN MORE—and that’s why they say that our biggest fear is always our next step into enlightenment.

I’ll keep on sending those invitations to feel my dear Care.friend, because the more I allow myself to feel, the more I witness, in awe, that all feelings either ARE love or lead to love.

That’s why we can’t heal what we can’t feel.

Because what heals us is love…

Which also means that you cannot NOT heal what you feel!

Because feeling MEANS Love.

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

Always,

leo