CARE.CHECK*: Do you tend to ask for directions to people who’ve never been where you want to be?
Do you trust your gut and heart to guide you there, first and foremost, or do you believe other people are better equipped than you to tell YOU where to take your own journey?
Do you check who you’re asking for advice or do you turn every decision into a conference call with everyone you meet?
Do you turn to others for help, or for support?
And do you also believe that you probably know better than most what they should be doing or not?
Those are very deep questions to ponder... Those are life altering answers to uncover.
I hope this week’s letter will feel like a loving invitation to come back to your center and harness the power of that inner compass that only you can see! and therefore follow.
Because you’ve got you.
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 a Care.robot.friend :)
Hi Care.Friend,
What’s new for you this week?
What have you learned, unlearned, uncovered, confirmed since last week?
I’m moving tomorrow and I’ve decided to dedicate this week to a deep reinvention.
This is not the first time I do this, but it is the first time I do this from a place of knowing how powerful those moments are:
I’m reevaluating everything.
What’s moving in with me (things, habits, VALUES, people, commitments)!
What’s meant to stay behind…
Which healing containers are still serving?
Which teachers speak most directly to my heart.
Which words am I taking with me.
Yes, words…
Because the words we use matter so much.
Anything that follows the statement “I” has the power to uproot or ground our entire life experience.
And I believe we are called to choose those defining words with the support and guidance from our intuition and heart—not from our mind.
Our mind will then rely on them to get us where we want to go, but ONLY our gut and hearts know where we’re meant to arrive.
So one word I’m leaving behind is “coach”… It never felt right. And I’m also finally ready to part, for good, with the identity of “Physician”.
That doesn’t mean I want to stop sharing everything I learn about what wounds and heals us anymore. Of course not.
That doesn’t mean I won’t do everything I can to provide a safe, loving, mirroring and embrace for those who grant me the honor of wanting me by their side!
Those commitments are still very much alive at my core. Actually, I’m double down on those commitments.
But I'm releasing any remaining identity linked to CARETAKING, or to HELPING.
* Anything that follows the statement “I”
has the power to uproot or ground
our entire life experience.*
Let's see if I can accurately explain why this decision feels so sacred to me right now...
I believe that nurturance and help are part of our nature, they come through us spontaneously—in varied shapes or forms—whenever our heart is open.
I also believe help is meant to be the impact, not the prior motivation. Help is meant to be an answer to a call, not a call looking for an answer.
And I have witnessed that it’s very hard (and I’m starting to think impossible) to help someone else without a personal agenda—which can be conscious or not—when we identify as a caretaker or as a helper.
By definition, inner strings will attach themselves to what we do. Because if we NEED to help, our reason to help becomes primal! Consciously or not once again, we’re helping to fulfill our own needs—NOT the needs of someone else.
And that also means there’s an outcome to reach: people being helped and cared for… according to OUR definition of what it means.
Which makes it all about us.
* ONLY our gut and hearts know where we’re meant to arrive.*
Here’s another striking phenomenon I’m noticing:
When I am NOT trying to help or take care of my loved ones, they reflect to me how much my presence make them feel inspired, cherished and supported. They tell me how witnessing my life, journey and inner exploration HELPS them! They thank me for the safety I bring into their lives, as they explore what feels unsafe in their own shadow and experience.
I ALSO witness that whenever I want to help, I start feeling restless. I feel more and more disconnected from them with each interaction. I feel like I know what they need and want. I sometimes even trick myself into thinking that I know better than them what they need and want! That they would be happier if they listened to me… That they are suffering in ways that don’t need to be.
* Help is meant to be an answer to a call,
not a call looking for an answer.*
And there can be some truth to that for sure! But that does not mean that my way would work better for them… Actually, it can’t.
Because only we can know what we need at any given moment, which includes what we have the CAPACITY to accept, receive, explore, harness. What we are willing to spend in time and energy for that area of our lives at that exact moment… What feels true, aligned, important!
And sometimes what feels true and aligned is struggle, exhaustion and distress. Sometimes we need to connect with a wound by putting salt on it, because there are so many protective mechanisms between that part of us and us, that without pain we’d have no way of knowing that part is even there.
And sometimes we just don’t have any capacity for any change, period. Not even positive ones.
I cannot know what you’re ready for. You cannot know what I’m meant to experience.
I wish for you to experience so much peace, ease and abundance today. All day. Every day. Of course I do. With my whole heart! AND…
I remember how incapable I would have been to connect with any of those pre-2020! Those words made no sense to me… I was frozen in shame, anger and grief. So deeply frozen that I was numb to all of it.
So, at that specific time, what I needed was an earthquake, not a hug. I couldn’t stand being touched anyway , because suddenly I realized how much everything, e-ve-ry-thing, hurt!
[And I thought it meant that something was really wrong with me, since I had very little recollection and understanding of all that had happened to me.]
We need to be ready before we can heal.
We need a felt sense of safety to heal, and at first safety is found in familiarity. That’s not actual safety of course… but that’s what our nervous system registers as normal! And a perception of normality can be filtered as a situation of non-threat by our nervous system—even when normal is anything but.
* Sometimes we need to connect with a wound by putting salt on it,
because there are so many protective mechanisms
between that part of us and us,
that without pain we’d have no way of knowing that part is even there.*
So we need to redefine normal first!
That’s why representation matters so much. That’s why reading saves us. That’s why songs open and/or soften us—showing us a new way to feel, relate, and understand the world, from the inside out.
We need to redefine what normal is, before a new definition of normal can drive us into a new reality—and only when we feel that it is SAFE to move into that change, can we let that reality be.
* At that specific time, what I needed was an earthquake,
not a hug.*
This is why it always makes me pause when someone reflects harshly on their self-development (or entrepreneurial) journey and belittles themselves for not knowing at step 10 what step 1000 would be. I hear them say: “I wish I had started that on day 1 and that's therefore what you should do!” But I don’t agree.
We cannot find our voice before we meet our own inner silencing. We cannot find our voice before relearning that our voice is meant to be expressed, not tamed. We cannot “manifest” the perfect partner before we learn how to love who we are so deeply and unconditionally that we can actually choose our partner from our heart (and not from our wounds). And we can only “manifest” them when we love ourselves enough to let the person we love most love us too!
I mean, if I truly believe I’m damaged goods and unworthy, and if I believe you’re a miracle hiding in a human body, I will want you to move AWAY from me, not in with me.
* We need a felt sense of safety to heal.*
For example, I always knew I was meant to sing and yet I had stopped. My best friends know I’m meant to sing and tell me so, yet I still struggle to give myself permission! Because I can’t let myself sing if I don't believe that singing is aligned with my identity.
Kindness is my highest value. Respecting others’ peace is very important to me. So if I believe that my singing is an inconvenience, mean, selfish, noisy, unwanted, resented (or worse: detested!), OF COURSE I will not sing!
We have to discover who we are before we can embody it.
Understanding that is truly life changing.
* We need to redefine what normal is,
before a new definition of normal can drive us
into a new reality.*
THANKFULLY, The more I heal, the more I realize how singing is at the core of my identity.
Indeed, the more I heal, the more I hear myself talk about singing. The more I see my love of singing reflected in every piece I write. The more my singing voice feels free, welcome and received.
And, of course, the more my singing voice is freed… the more I sing!
AND the more I sing, the more I come alive, the more I see my life transform effortlessly, and the more love and joy I feel.
Win-win-win-win, because the more joy and love I feel, the easier it becomes to believe that singing is a gift! A gift I’m meant to receive and embody… And a gift I’m meant to share, with ease and generosity.
* We cannot find our voice
before we meet our own inner silencing.*
When I forced myself to sing from a place of woundedness however, I was only reinforcing the patterns that were keeping me prisoner. I would sing while feeling terrible about it… and then I would feel terrible at singing. Worse, I would internalize that joy and love are meant to hurt. It was hopeless and it was torture.
Healing had to come first. That’s how I finally landed on a virtuous circle… I heal, I sing. I sing, I heal.
Singing is my why. Healing is my how .
And that leads me back to where generosity comes from. And why the identity of “caretaker” or the compulsion to help can hinder our capacity to be generous! How counterintuitive, right? And yet…
I do believe that artists are very generous beings, sharing their heart with others so that others can remember where their own hearts beat.
But I had to believe that I had something to give, BEFORE I could associate generosity to my core identity.
And it’s funny, because a lot of people use the word generous to describe me, which contrasted with how ungenerous I used to feel.
That’s how I learned that you can’t feel generous when you feel empty!
And you can’t feel generous when helping is not a choice but an identity.
* We have to discover who we are
BEFORE we can embody it.*
I am learning now that I CAN keep all that I know, sing, compose and write for myself.
I am learning that I COULD keep all of my time and energy focused only on me.
I am also learning that I truly don’t want to…
And that that’s what generosity means.
Before I couldn’t know if I wanted to or not, because I didn’t even know I had a choice.
* Artists are very generous beings,
sharing their heart with others
so that others can remember where their own hearts beat.*
On top of that, I really wasn’t sure I had anything to offer.
I still often tell myself that people listen to my songs to indulge me. And when I believe that, I only share my singing and songs with my singing teachers and with my best friend. Why? Because that serves the belief that they “have” to pretend to love it.
In parallel, I would only share what I wrote with people I knew, which allowed me to tell myself that they were pretending to read and resonate with it (or to select people that I knew would NOT resonate with it, at all. Sneaky me).
I couldn’t share any of my creativity with others before I changed my view on creativity. Before I reconnected to my sacred dream and heart temple. Before I understood what I truly believe about our spark and journey (you can read about that HERE).
I couldn’t leave Medicine before I realized that singers and writers were the ones who had saved my life—not physicians!
I had to realize that if I wanted to give forward the blessings I had received, I HAD to embody my artistry and unlearn all the shaming messages I had inherited about it.
* You can’t feel generous when you feel empty.*
And on that note, one line that felt particularly life changing to me came through Glennon Doyle, when she wrote in ‘Untamed’ that:
“This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
Reading that line was a before/after moment for me.
I have lived an unusual life in many ways… Having collected so many samples of life’s Tragedy before turning 30, I’ve always felt like the odd one in the room.
For the better part of my existence, my experience felt unrelatable to most, as they would very openly tell me, and my choices didn’t make sense to them at the time. Interestingly, many of them have made similar choices since then, but I didn’t have any elders to guide me on my road of self-creation back then (most of us didn’t).
Going no contact with my mother was incomprehensible for 98% of the people I knew at the time. Of course it’s also because I didn’t have the words to explain what was happening, while she was very vocal about how loving she was to the cruel, ungrateful and unstable daughter I was supposed to be.
For instance, I was harshly punished for skipping classes I never skipped, during most of my school years. But who would believe me? And who on Earth would have the idea of checking with my school who was telling the truth? I mean, why would she lie about this right? On the other hand, a skipping-school troubled teenager (which is how they saw me) would definitely lie about skipping school… Wouldn’t they? I genuinely understand where they were coming from.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of course, because today is not about her. Today’s about us reimagining who we know ourselves to be.
“This life is mine alone.
So I have stopped asking people for directions
to places they’ve never been.”
Glennon Doyle
Because, as per a quote attributed to Goethe: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”
It takes so much imagination indeed to understand ourselves and what it means to be us, when living in a society that not only told us who we were meant to be before we could talk but that also remind us that there are less than 10 acceptable ways of being TOTAL for all of humanity (!).
And so even though everyone supports my decision of going no contact now, I had very little validation at the time. I had to pave my own way. I had to not only leave her behind, but to also say goodbye to most of my family members, to the approbation of society, and to a lot of my own friends (that hurt…).
That was also my first glimpse at what unconditional love looks like, because others showed up for me in ways I could never have dreamed into being…
Human hearts are miraculous. Please never ever forget that, no matter how tall the shadows of those who surround you on any given day!
When I lost one of my parental figures at a very young age, no one around me understood what that could mean (I’m referring to my chosen family of young personsof course, adults could have understood but I had no adults to confide in).
When my therapist was killed, most of my friends had never sought any form of healing yet. They had no reference or perspective to understand the hole that had just been carved into my sense of anchoring. And to be fair, since it wasn’t something we talked about in France, most of them didn’t even know I had been seeing a therapist!
No one understood my instinctual love for New York and how I knew that I was meant to live in a city that was an ocean away. No one understood either why I would choose to learn English in parallel of school when I was 15! The fact that I would decide to write only in English at such a young age didn’t make sense to anyone but to my heart—my heart knew that New York was my future! AND my heart also realized I needed to write in a language my birth mother could never understand (since she had no notion of privacy and would search my bedroom savagely anytime I stepped out of it).
And, obviously, I didn’t grow up in an environment supporting my reverence for creativity and beauty. I was told that Art was frivolous and a waste of time. I knew Art was sacred and lifesaving.
Those are just a few examples of how grateful I am to have listened to my inner compass, when no one else would validate my life choices.
Reading that line in ‘Untamed’ felt like the confirmation that I had been right all along! and it REALLY helped me when I suddenly (finally!) decided to leave Medicine, 15 years in, to move to New York to follow my sacred dream.
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
Goethe
So I too have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. And it’s especially relevant right now.
As I mentioned HERE last week, I’m navigating a particularly uncomfortable situation, in which I am choosing to help someone who defaults to very abusive behaviors when they’re scared (which happens a lot when you think you’re dying). I can see glimpses of Jekyll which remind me why I’m showing up, but I’m mostly meeting an emboldened version of Hide. What. A. Treat.
I’m navigating this while doing intense trauma exploration, committing to deep healing, and awakening my artistry. I’m doing all of this while reimagining who I’m becoming. I’m doing this while moving! I’m doing this amidst other situations that are not meant to be discussed here… In a nutshell, I’m navigating uncharted territories.
And one thing is certain: I will not ask directions to people who’ve never been.
Because no one has ever been me, with this exact life story, on this very day and at this very stage of their healing journey.
That’s true for me right now in a very dramatic way AND that’s just as true for you, no matter how chaotic or easeful your current chapter is.
No one has ever been you, and no one has been where you’re meant to be, dear Care.friend.
As Carl Jung famously highlighted:
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s”.
No one can know what I'm meant to do, not do, accept or let go of, in my current circumstances.
No one can know what it means to be me and what my sacred dream and hearts are asking of me. No one can know what feels true and right and aligned and in INTEGRITY for me. No one can know what my next step should be.
No one can know but you what your journey is supposed to look and feel like, and I hope this letter will feel like a permission slip to NEVER AGAIN ask people for directions to places they’ve never been.
Emphasis on “directions”.
* Human hearts are miraculous.*
Because you can ask them for love and support! Of course! We’re supposed to love and support each other... We need each other so much.
You can also ask them to let you know when you seem to be suffering more than “necessary.” Now, that doesn't mean they’ll be right, but those reflections are always valuable to receive. Especially if you know they deeply care about you and if you value their advice. They’re seeing something. Pay attention.
BUT please remember that only you can then decipher if they’re acting as a mirror or seeing a projection.
You can ask them what they would do, as long as you’re taking it as fuel for your brainstorming, and not as a sign that their way is a better way for sure. We cannot see what we don’t see, so sometimes we truly need another to even know that there’s another way to look at something!
But, again, only YOU can know what to do with that expanded perspective.
You can invite them on your adventure but only if you promise yourself (and me!) that you will never let someone else lead…
This is YOUR ship.
This is your ride, Care.friend.
And I promise you that what benefits you will ALWAYS benefit those you love too. It cannot be otherwise.
It. Can. Not. Be.
I trust you with all I am.
Because YOU know.
You might not know what you know yet, but you know.
So follow your gut and follow your heart—don’t follow someone else.
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s”.
Carl Jung
And as Esther Perel reminded one of her audience members at the Beacon Theater last month—someone who was struggling with how to support a friend who was very ambivalent about their romantic partner (Disclaimer: I’m loosely paraphrasing):
“Your friend is the only one who will have to live with the consequences of their choice. Don’t indulge for a second in thinking that you know better than them what they need. Your only job is to be there for them, WITHOUT an opinion, while they change their mind a thousand times over, while they figure it out as *painfully* slowly as it takes, while they pave one way and then choose to walk in the opposite direction. It’s all part of the process.”
When we advise others, we tend to fall into black or white thinking. We tend to entrap them between the so-called right and the so-called wrong. But that’s not where any of us is meant to exist… and that’s not where any of us can thrive.
We’re meant to co-create a life of radiant colors—and that can only happen when each of us take care of our own personal sacred canva and decide to reimagine FOR OURSELVES what a colorful answer to that particular question will be.
You’re the color.
You’re the artist.
YOU’VE GOT THIS.
* No one can know but YOU
what your journey is supposed
to look and feel like.*
Keep painting the map! You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo