Love is the only cure to lovelessness

About Love, Courage and the journey back to our core

CARE check*: What does Love mean to you?

What does Love look like, feel like, how does Love sound within and all around you?

What sparks the Love that beats your heart to flow, softening you open and fueling you towards the pause or the action that your gut knows you’re meant to take?

Are there parts of you that distrust Love?

Are you ready to surrender to Love’s call, and if not do you know why?

I hope this week’s letter reminds you that there is nothing shallow, fragile or complacent about Love… and that Love is the only answer we can give to our world’s burning questions.

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Hi CARE friend,

How have you been?

What have you learned this week?

What have you released, rethought, rewritten, reframed since last week?

Have you slept? Have you watered yourself and your dreams?

Have you paused? If not, can you do it now?

We’re in the in-between right now. I think we can all feel it. A lot has changed all around us and we’re not clear yet on what it means. We know an invitation has been extended, but we’re not sure where it leads or what’s required of us. Power dynamics are shifting all around the world, and it’s noisy, it’s scary, it’s divisive, it’s painful… It's a lot.

So where does that leave us?

Here, and now.

How cliche some will say. How fundamental I would offer.

It’s the second time in a few years that Life is asking us in no uncertain terms to pause. To stay. To go within. To remember where the light comes from.

The lesson looks different, sure, but the theme is blatantly obvious:

Human Life is in danger, the errors of our ways are catching up with us, a change HAS to come, and we’re the means through which it will unfold—for better or for worse.

And so the main question to sit with right now is who do I want to be and become?

I mean, the pressure is here… There’s no way to escape it, it’s everywhere. So how do we diamond up?

If you’re able to read this, chances are you’ve been on Earth for a few minutes already, chances are you’ve witnessed and contributed a lot more than you’re giving yourself credit for. So what have you learned that we all need to know right now?

One thing that feels very present to me right now is that Love is the only cure to lovelessness.

Which means that withholding Love cannot solve a problem rooted in lack of Love.

If what is lacking is Love, Love is what is needed and Love is the only solution. (And I have yet to encounter a problem that did not stem from a shortage of Love.)

We live within a strange culture where Love has been desacredized and commodified. Love is a concept that some people do not even believe in anymore! Can we talk about this? It’s like saying I don’t believe in oxygen. Love is our essence and, yet, some people feel so disconnected from themselves that they’re not sure that what they’re made from and of even exists.

Let’s pause for a second and let that sink in. A lot of us are unsure that love is real.

But thankfully Love’s foundational feature is unconditionality so Love doesn’t care whether it’s acknowledged or not. Love IS. Love prevails.

Now, among those who do believe in Love, there is also a pervasive fear that Love could be a liability, or that it could ever be disempowering.

That’s another staggering theory, that could only take hold in a culture so deeply severed from its own center…

Love is the only true power on Earth. Love is at the core of resiliency, Love is indestructible. Love is real life Magic. Love is the only ally that can never falter and Love is the source and destination of Life.

So how do we RETURN to Love? Simple, yet not easy: by reembodying it.

Love cannot leave us; again, Love is the force that beats our hearts, Love is the air we breathe in and breathe out, Love is every fiber of our being and Love is the energy we call Soul—Love is literally who we are.

But even if Love cannot leave us and if we can’t ever leave Love behind, fact is we can leave ourselves.

And the way back is not always, if ever, a smooth ride.

Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about the Hero’s journey, this adventure that we are invited to embark on to become all that we came to Life to be. This journey without, that allows us to grow, expand, take form and bring forth the magic that we and this world so deeply need.

The Hero’s Journey is how we embody the light. It is the continuation of birth. It is the blooming of Life. It is about manifestation. It is about realizing that the limits we see are only reflections of the limits we think.

It is the call and answer of our inner healthy masculine. It is glorious, beautiful, necessary… AND it is not enough.

Because there’s another journey that is just as crucial and on which we have a lot more catching up to do as a collective.

It’s the HeroINE’s journey.

Described beautifully by writers such as Maureen Murdock and

Dr Sharon Blackie

, it’s a journey within, a reclaiming of the underworld.

It’s what allows the flowers to blossom, because it is how our roots can take form and ground us into the embrace of the Earth… so that we can safely rise. So that we can be fully nurtured. So that we can take flight and still know that we belong. It’s how the light is born.

It’s the call and answer of our inner feminine, and it is the invitation that the world demands that we respond to right now.

I know it looks like everything is falling apart at the moment, but I personally believe the world is entering its fallow season.

We have been building structures that do not work for thousands of years and as we human beings always tend to do, when we realized that something was amiss we started by doing even more of what does not work!

But we’ve reached the point where there’s no amount of doing, running, pushing through, armoring and doubling down that can shield us from owning our mistakes and facing their dire consequences.

And projecting blame will not help… Full heart-centered accountability is the only antidote. Which entails full body and soul responsibility for what can be done now.

We’re at the tipping point and, even if it hurts, I hope and trust that good will come from this.

Because when we reach such an extreme, we can no longer forgo awakening to the limits of a belief system, of a behavior, of a paradigm, of a way of life.

We have to take a hard look at the wreckage and then remember that even through our eyes, we can imbue the world with hate or with love.

A year ago, two words started to dance within my psyche. Tenderness, and Descend. Two things that I had been resisting for decades.

Tenderness got you badly wounded where I grew up. And descending meant dying. So all I could do was throw myself out of my body to cut myself from my own pain, while I ran frantically through the brambles, looking for a way out, reaching desperately for safety.

And like so many of us, I forgot to stop running. Even when the fire was so far behind me that I could not even see the smoke climbing its way to the clouds.

I kept on running as if my life depended on it and, on most days, it still feels like dying to sit still.

But one cannot take root while they’re striving to escape. It’s physically impossible.

And there’s a reason why metaphors are so impactful, it’s because what happens around us is also what happens within. If our energy is trapped in a cyclonic dance, we can never feel our center, let alone embody it. And when disconnected from our center, we cannot feel.

And when we cannot feel, we cannot know who we are, truly—beneath the masks, the conditioning, the trauma and beyond the mirage of what we have been taught to deem as normal and what we have been trained to repress, disown, vilify or misunderstand about the most potent features of our humanity.

Only through stillness can we root.

Our roots will strengthen if tested once they’re made, that’s also true, but they will not hold if they’re tested too early.

And that’s why it takes tenderness to descend. It takes a felt sense of safety.

It takes patience and care and trust.

It takes surrender to a process that so many of us have been trained to fear.

It takes willingness and devotion to the idea of “staying with”.

Staying with the discomfort. Staying with the uncertainty. Staying with what hurts. Staying with what we desire and are so afraid we might never receive.

It takes tenderness to descend.

And it takes so much courage and strength to reclaim tenderness as a pillar in our ways of being… but as Maya Angelou reminded us, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently”.

We need courage right now, there’s no going around it. But we can use our courage to fight what is and create even more war energy OR we can use our courage to stand for and with Love—thereby coming back to where the source of our shared strengths lies, where the source of our shared humanity lives: at the center of our chest, where Love awaits, resides and leads.

What the human world needs now is to remember Love. And that is a shift that can only be done from the inside out. Contrary to what we’re trained to think, Love is an inside job. One that serves the entire world.

We feel Love because of our thoughts and because of the way we perceive the world. No one can actually make us feel Love, it’s impossible. No one can make us feel hate either for that matter.

Our thoughts are the only drivers of our emotional world.

Which is why I can cut myself from receiving the most loving act if I think about something terrifying. And you can feel love in the coldest and loneliest room if you think about your beloved or about your sacred dream.

We are so much more powerful than we know. We have so much more agency over our reality than we realize.

And so if we want a more loving world, we need to be the channel and the vessel for that Love to come forth and take form.

And how do we do that?

By pretending that all is well, sending “love & light” to those who are scripted in bullying behaviors and turning off the news, the texts, the truth of what’s happening beneath our skins? No. Denial is not Love.

By judging the people that we see as the problem, consciously or not stripping them of their humanity, building fences around our ideals and trying to force those who think differently to adapt our ways because we’re sure it’s the only solution? No. That’s the trap that got us where we are now.

To find our way back into Love, we need to retrace and reembody the way back IN.

We need to find the source of Love within.

We need to intentionally turn our attention towards what allows us to feel safe, inspired, rooted and open to the world. And we also need to devotedly look at the thoughts, trauma and behaviors that make us feel scared, cynical, unmoored and walled up. We need to do both Light AND Shadow work.

We need to use the salt that the world is sending at us in salves right now, as a way to locate all our unhealed and unconscious wounds. We need to allow those triggers to show us where our alarm buttons lie, so that we can unearth what is stuck within our psyches, our bodies and around our hearts.

AND we need to surrender radically to our innate ability to find joy, hope, Love and beauty is all that is, in all that surrounds us and in all parts of us.

We need to be our own caring parent that turns off the news when our inner world is getting overflowed with doubt, fear, anger and sorrow. We need to do that BEFORE it drives us to reckless reactions that might look impressive and bold in the moment, but that do not serve the big picture and only add fuel to fire or create more divisions… forcing everyone further into their positions. And we need to ALSO do that before it turns us numb and incapable of responding in any way, shape, or form to the demands of these trying times, the needs of our everyday life, and the callings of our sacred dream and heart.

We need to awaken our inner responsible adult and stay mindful of what is going on all around us, while remaining crystal clear of what is within their circle of influence—so that we can do all we can do, nothing less and also NOTHING MORE.

And we need to be the wild embodied heart that we are, and bring ourselves back time and time again to the altar of our joy. YES. We need a radical commitment to keeping ourselves full of inspiration and awe… Because those are the only power sources that can fuel us sustainably and allow us to support ourselves and each other when Hope is harder to spot and therefore harder to follow.

We need to love ourselves into Love and then pour that Love into the world.

Dear CARE friend, the darkness is a nursery of stars. When it gets dark, we come back to what is essential… and when what is essential is embodied and cared for, it turns into a Love that can withstand any storm.

Lovelessness will never cure lovelessness. What lovelessness calls for is Love.

So please let yourself become a student and devotee of your own heart. Please ask your heart everyday:

What do you need to widen? What kind of spiritual and creative food do you need me to provide for you? What do you need to feel nourished and vibrant? What do you need me to think and commit to? What do you need me to stop doing? What do you need from me right now?

Living from and for Love looks different everyday so those answers will morph, evolve and sometimes drastically change from one hour to the other, but trust, trust what your heart says… and trust yourself.

Living for and from Love is not only enough, it’s the sacred assignment we cannot afford to postpone for one minute longer.

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

leo