I believe in you

I believe in us

CARE.CHECK*: Does control feel safe to you?

Do you hold a belief that without control, there can only be chaos?

And do you believe that chaos is inherently wrong?

Are you willing to rethink some of those beliefs and to surrender them to your heart’s wisdom?

What comes up in your body when you think about control?

I hope that this week’s letter will feel like an inspiring baulm and a loving call to action.

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 Hi Care.Friend,

So what was in store for you this week?

Something good? Something activating? Something confusing?

All of the above?

If so, I’m with you.

This journey on Earth is a fascinating one, but it is not always the most ease-ful and peaceful one. And we have a huge role to play in that, for sure, but I think it is dangerous to cultivate the belief that everything depends on us. 

Because that’s just another clever way for our egos to try to feel in control of it all. And because that’s just not true. 

We have tremendous influence on our external reality, yes, but we do not have power over everything that happens to us—and we’re certainly not meant to control what happens to and for others.

And it’s also never about control anyway… Not even in regards to ourselves. 

Control yields rigidity. Control is stiff and still—and that’s just not the way life is supposed to be. That’s counter-natural in every way.

Life is supple and Life is movement. Life is a dance in which no two steps are the same ever.

Life is creativity and creativity suffocates in rigid containers.

That does not mean there’s no room for structure, but they’re meant to be foundations, not ceilings or walls.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room for will, but will must be the servant of Love and we tend to see it the other way around.

I’ve been studying all summer what we mean when we talk about the Feminine and Masculine.

Reading about how our myths and tales guide us into understanding our true nature, when we unearth the ancestral wisdom they carry and when we do not stop at the surface level of the narrative. I’ve immersed myself into the power of mysticism to help us drop us back into our bodies and soul energy. I’ve opened myself to new ways of being and new ways of seeing—and I devoted myself to understanding what the Feminine way is about, why the patriarchy arose and to which depth it has impacted all of our lives, independently from the gender we identify with or if we identify with a gender at all. 

It changed me… It changed how I view and understand the world. So I’ll start writing about all of those illuminating concepts a lot more in my upcoming letters.

But in the meantime, I wanted to invite you to read two books that have particularly impacted me on this quest for a deeper understanding of why things are the way things are and why those of us who identify as women feel the way we do in this patriarchal culture:

• Meditations Secrets for Women by Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche,

• The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. 

I wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone on a healing journey (which is everyone, whether we’re aware of what our heart is doing for us daily or not).

One thing that those past five years have proven to me is that there is nothing I will not let myself explore if it means that I can embody and serve Love in the way I know I was—that we were ALL—meant to.

There’s nothing I will not consider if it can free my heart voice. 

It cured me from any resistance I could have to dive deeper in the darkness that we all dread so much, because every time I enter the darkness, all I find is Love. Every door I let my heart unlock has led me deeper into Life’s embrace and shown me that there is nothing we cannot heal, if we can find the courage and softness to let it be, let it move us and let it leave.

The darkness is a nursery of stars and I believe that our love is the spark that the baby star needs to come alive.

Fear has been a loyal companion on this often lonely exploration of those dark forests that we were shamed out of at birth, by a culture that has rejected the sacred (and through which many tried to imprison “God” in cold monuments that one can only visit after accepting rules that cannot be questioned or updated). But Fear is just like us! Fear is only looking for Love.

And so I can relate to Fear. I have compassion for that confused and well-meaning emotion that is just afraid that I will die whenever I utter a word or take a step forward. Fear is not trying to get me, Fear is trying to keep me alive. Fear is not my enemy, Fear is an overwhelmed tiny creature convinced that the world is ours to carry on two fragile, weary shoulders. Fear is not equipped to know what is dangerous or not, Fear’s job is only to let me know about everything that requires my attention.

And it’s MY job then to decipher what is needed and what can be let go of.

And thank goodness this path feels less and less isolating by the day. First of all, because many have walked it before us and the way is actually well paved—and only waiting for us to enter. 

Also things are changing... It can be hard to trust at times, but they are. Because the awareness of the horrors of the world and the subsequent hypnotizing spell of denial are not the only things that have been amplified by the internet, in this era of constant communication and unlimited access to information. The call of Love has been magnified too. 

I do not only believe that, I witness it EVERYDAY.

When we let ourselves hear those questions that are buried at our core, we realize that there’s a choir of human hearts chanting them too, alongside the humming of our Mother Earth and the cries of our animal brothers and sisters.

More and more of us are awakening to the fact that none of this is working. 

We’re more anxious than ever, trauma is ubiquitous, millions are starving while a few are drowning in money, our healthcare systems are collapsing, the world’s political stage seems to follow the script of an old satirical movie and our dear planet is begging us to stop, to SEE, to intervene!—and to stop destroying ourselves by destroying all that keeps us fed, watered and oxygenated. 

It just doesn’t make sense. And we all know that a hypothesis is confirmed or rejected based on the results it yields, right? Well, the results of our culture’s hypothesis are blatantly obvious: we’re not heading in the right direction, our beliefs are flawed, our ways to achieve success are leading us to our ruin (!), and we’re taking everyone and everything with us on a road that none of us truly want to travel anymore.

A gift of our times is that we get to compare what’s happening in every corner of the world, and thereby to unroot the fallacy that led us to believe that we’re the only one experiencing what we’re experiencing. We can see that “it” is not a “THEM” problem, because everything impacts all of us. And most of what we witness stems from one thought error and one only: the ILLUSION of separateness.

Separation from Nature. Separation from each other... Separation within ourselves.

Now the good news is that there’s no separation! It’s an illusion created by this false sense of self that we call the ego. We do not have a life, we ARE life—and what happens to you happens to me and what happens to Nature happens to us too. And beliefs are not easy to disempower, but it is still easier to change a thought than a fact.

We like to say that we live in unprecedented times, but isn’t that always true?

Again, Life is constant movement… so it’s meant to be the way it is. However we are living in one of those pivotal moments, where the errors of our ways have reached a point where they either get corrected or we’ll get edited out of the story.

And that’s scary of course, but that’s also EXCITING: because I trust us.

I trust that we will choose to change our ways. And I trust that we will all realize in time that the only way to change the world is through each of us coming back into ourselves and fully reconnecting with our inner world.

We’re ALL good inside—and no matter which mask and armor we feel compelled to wear or have been taught to hide behind, we are all centered by a vibrant beating heart and we’re all made of soul energy and love. 

And deep down—when we’re not blinded by repressed emotions and exiled trauma or numbed out by exhaustion and spiritual malnourishment—we ALL want to help.

And we all CAN. 

But again not by controlling our exhausted mind, other people, or the outside world, because control is by nature forceful, brutal and disempowering.

No. We can help by dropping in and meeting all of our parts with the love they’re craving. We can help by embodying the vessel we were given to walk this Earth and by melting into our body’s intelligence. We can help by devoting our lives to the Love that we are and that is all around us.

We can take full responsibility for our nervous system’s health and regulation, and that starts by remembering that regulation is not about feeling good! It’s about feeling WHOLE.

Indeed a lot of people confuse regulation with feeling good. AND then, a lot of people confuse feeling good with looking good! (That’s because so many of us have completely forgotten how to feel.)

And therefore a lot of people confuse regulation with fawning or functional freeze. 

It makes sense, because after spending years in fight or flight, it can look like “progress” when we’re suddenly “OKAY” with everything. We’re not entering arguments anymore, we’re not constantly trying to change or improve or fix. We think we’re “going with the flow” because, to us, the flow means our to do list and other people’s expectations.

And we might LOOK like we’re at peace! but numbing is not peace… and it has a cost that can be even greater than the cost of conflict.

Because conflict might at least awaken us, when freeze and fawn only disconnect us from our liveliness and soul connection. 

As a reminder, dysregulation happens on a continuum that looks like a ladder. 

• At first, when encountering a real or perceived threat, our systems get fueled by energy that leads to fight and flight responses. 

• If that doesn’t get us out of what feels like danger, the brakes come in and we end up stuck between that rush of energy and an outer constriction, which severs us from our ability to release our grief, fear, shame and anger (or joy!!). That’s when we fawn or freeze.

• And if there’s no resolution, our system ultimately collapses—and we end up completely drained of all energy. I wrote about this in more detail HERE and HERE.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that finding our way back into fight or flight energy is how we unfawn and unfreeze. We need fire to thaw the ice that keeps us stuck in that limbo state of trauma-induced self-protection—in which a large majority of us will spend their entire existence in.

And as long as we vilify our emotions (or if we consider ourselves broken or unable to “repair” our own selves), we have no way to break this cycle—because our nervous system will only shift when it is convinced that we are safe again!

And we can’t find safety when we’re divorcing parts of ourselves… or when solely relying on the help of an outside savior that we have no idea how to meet. 

I mean think about it… and more importantly FEEL your way through this: How can we feel safe when we’re rejecting a sacred part of who we are or waiting for someone that might never come and might not even exist?

To reclaim our sense of wholeness, we must relearn how to be with ourselves, which means understanding each part of our psyche, reconnecting deeply with our body, and stepping out of those patterns of codependency and hyperindepedence that we’ve all been scripted in. We need to find our way back to our own sense of sovereignty and USE IT to empower each other to become who we were always meant to be. 

And to do that, we cannot stop at regulation. Because that’s not the whole story (no pun intended). As I wrote in And I will NOT try to fix you:

“Regulation is the first step, that’s how we find our way back into our body and how we root and anchor back into our guts and hearts. That’s how we can understand the world again as coming from the inside out and how we can offer to our minds the support system they need to execute what Soul energy is inspiring them to do—instead of letting them run the game, terrified and lonely, as if they were in charge of us. But after regulation must come the second part of the healing journey: integration. If we do not learn how to reclaim, know and love every parts of ourselves, if we do not descend into our shadows and ensure that there is nothing there but acceptance, creativity and love, and if we do not learn how to care for, tend to and embody our light so that we can receive and embody our gifts, we will have missed the mark. Because only through integration will we be able to share our vibrant wombs and hearts with the entire world (which does not have to be a literal manifestation and can just as well be done through the quietest of lives). And I believe that is what this sacred journey called life is all about.”

I know that today’s letter is a bit different from my previous ones, but I felt called to write about the sources of my undying optimism. WHY I believe that we’re not breaking down right now… but actually breaking THROUGH the lies that kept us prisoners for thousands of years.

We fell into the shadow side of our Masculine energy, that led us to repress the Feminine energy that lives within all of us and that knows how to nurture and heal. We got lost in our minds and lost touch with the roots that are meant to keep us united, nourished and steady. We started worshiping the light, forgetting that too much light is just as toxic as too much darkness!—In both cases, we end up BLIND. We demonized all that we cannot understand and, by doing so, we cut ourselves from the magic that surrounds us CONSTANTLY, that beats our hearts, that fuels our dreams and we lost trust in the greatest power that ever was and ever will be: the power of LOVE.

But there is a way back.

And there’s no easy fix for what we’ve done to ourselves and to each other, but the solution is simple still. Because all we need to heal is within us—and when we heal, we heal others. And when others heal, they heal us too. And when we all heal, we stop harming Nature! And Nature being the embodiment of resilience, She does not need our help to recover, She will show us how it’s done! Nature only needs us to do less and to let Her take over.

Because we are not the guardians of Nature, we are Her children.

And so here is my prayer for us all, dear Care.friend:

May we have the courage to look within and may we have the courage to do it with love.

May we finally realize that Byron Katie is right when she explains that Defense is the first act of war, and may we choose to surrender to the grace that lives at our core.

May we adorn ourselves with kindness and compassion, if only for a day, if only for an hour, and witness, simply WITNESS, that the more we give ourselves, the more we have and that the more we have, truly HAVE (which is different from hoarding out of a terror of lack), we cannot help but want to share it with everyone else.

May we rediscover the power of our own love and let it be the love that the world needs more than ever.

May we take the time to understand what our bodies and mind need to regulate and humble ourselves enough to surrender to our needs for integration.

May we stop projecting on others wounds that only us can heal, just because they were inflicted by those who didn’t know better. Hurting them back will not help us—and if they were unconscious enough to let themselves hurt another being, they will NOT be the ones that can help us heal.

May we choose to surrender to Love and trust that trust will come even if right now it feels impossible.

May we give each other the benefit of the doubt and may we let ourselves believe that NOTHING is impossible for a loving heart.

May we remember that no one alive can be alive without a beating heart and that since our hearts are made of love, there is no one that is either immune or unable to love.

Take great care of you my dear friend, as if all of our lives depended on it! Because they do.

Take great care of you my dear friend because you are so worthy of the most gentle, empowering, soothing, inspiring and loving care—and because the only care that will ever truly heal you is the care that comes from within.

I believe in YOU! I believe in us…

I believe.

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

leo