Hello my caring friend,
Today I thought I would write about what the name Care.check means to me, but I’m not sure it is what will get written through me.
I have begun to write you daily notes HERE on substack (that I also share on Threads if you prefer to connect with me there!) and this morning lit up a spark in me that wishes to become a fire for us here.
I’ve decided to write those notes everyday in case you wished for us to connect more, more often, more deeply.
Not more deeply in the length of what I share, but more deeply because I write those notes even more intuitively than those letters. I let my heart tell me what I need to know and hear, I let the God of my understanding explain to me what I feel, what I am to surrender to, who I am to become. Today… Right now. Whether I feel ready for it or not.
I write to know what I know.
It has always been my way to reconnect to this precious inner world that my trauma tries to keep me out of. Not out of spite! No, those traumatized parts of me mean well and still see me as an helpless, defenseless, endangered child (a bad combo). They want to protect me from feelings that must have felt unbearable in such a young body—I can after all barely bear them now when a flashback knocks on my door.
So in those early morning hours, when the sun is still rising and the world waking up, I let the most secret part of my heart share with you a song of love, or inspiration. A few words that are as much a prayer as an intention. Those few words that feel like they are rooted in the deep “I” that unites us all—and not in this “little me” that we are trained to see as our whole person.
And this morning my heart offered this question for me to ponder, for us to sit with, welcome, and slowly answer… guided by the stillness inside that I call our soul:
Can a heart ever be broken?
And what if what we call a broken heart was actually… an open one?
I’ve learned that we come into this world pure and innocent, connected to the truest truth of who we are. I’ve learned that we come here with a dream and a special flavor of love, meant to help us create the ocean of goodness that all creation is about. I’ve learned that there is no fault, no flaw, no defect, no missing part in the essence that breathes our bodies and beats our hearts.
I’ve learned that nothing can break our hearts.
I had never realized before that I knew that.
However, a lot of things can put a lot of chains around our hearts. I’ve learned that too.
Some of us inherit these chains and come into this world already bearing this challenge. This has been proven by epigenetics and the broader realm of trauma science. We come into this world bearing gifts, and bearing challenges. Those chains can come from a long forgotten ancestor or they can start growing while we’re still in the womb. It’s not to blame the mother! No one would choose to hurt someone they love. And no mother is immune to the unconditional love she feels for a child, even when she’s numb to it, even if hate is the only feeling she’s aware of.
But ‘so within so without’ is never as true as it is for a mother who bears a little child. What happens in her inner world during the pregnancy will impact the inner and outside world of her little one.
So we come into this world with chains around our hearts and we do not know that. We think that some are kinder, some are stronger, some are wiser, some are heartless. No, we’re not. I deeply believe that we’re all the embodiment of pure goodness at our core. We carry invisible chains, that’s all.
Chains that can lead us to escape or to fight, to tune out or to fake it all. Chains that get us deep into trauma bonds or lost into endless wars. Chains that feel so heavy that some of us don’t really know how to breathe anymore… Chains that feel so constricting that we get cut from our ability to love.
I’ve witnessed the chains around the hearts of those who broke what I thought was my heart. I’ve seen in their eyes the glimmer of light trying to reach the surface, and the despair that came before anger, shame or cruelty took over their minds and mouths. I got tricked into thinking that it was my role or even in my power, to save them from the inner jail suffocating their hearts. I told their hearts “I see you, I’m coming” and forgot about mine… Forgot that you cannot give what you don’t have. Be it freedom or the ability to access the courage, strength and healing compassion that can only be found through one’s heart. I saw that there was good inside of them and forgot to remember that I was good too. I took their struggles on my shoulders and let the struggle bury me alive.
Until they broke my heart so deeply that my survival instincts took over and carried me out of my grave, out of their nightmares, out of their immediate reach. At least, that’s the way I viewed it until now.
But this morning, while writing to you and to myself, I realized that it is not the way I understand it any more. My heart was never broken, nor could it ever break. My heart was just waiting to have the space to expand and the light of its love was just waiting to be uncovered. I can now see my heart covered in chained and unable to move or send the waves of kindness and truth it was always meant to send through my body, and through this world. I can now see how the metal covered most of the beams trying to find their way out, from my inner sun to the shadowy parts of me that I call ego. I can see that everytime something breaks, it is not my heart, it is one of the chains that was holding it prisoner.
So, of course, it usually comes with a flood of grief, guilt, horror, anger, or with a downpour of actual tears when I experience a “broken heart”. But that’s not because my heart is in pain! That’s because I have been in pain, and stored it all inside. Because instead of rushing through my body and teaching me what I needed to learn, pain was turned into metal, into suffering, into a chain around my heart.
So when the chain breaks, my heart does not just eliminate this unwanted energy, my heart transmutes into love. Because the heart knows that pain was not unwanted, it was a misunderstood messenger delivering a message I needed to hear, to listen to, to hug into healing, to bathe in light and alchemize into inner gold.
Indeed, the heart doesn’t judge the pain that kept it prisoner, the heart offers infinite compassion and genuine curiosity to understand what the pain was so scared of. The heart doesn’t chase away the pain, the heart finally feels it. The heart looks at its jailer and says “I’ll be your shelter now, you’re home, you’re safe, you’re free”.
Our hearts don’t break, they open. Our pain is not a sign that something went wrong, it’s an important part of our experience. The chains are meant to break, and that is meant to be a painful process. Nothing has gone wrong! It was supposed to be this way; and that’s okay.
It’s because we couldn’t feel the pain that it turned into chains, not because it was coming to imprison us. When we’re finally feeling it, it can finally turn into love; and what was believed to have broken our heart can finally do what it was meant to, which is make the heart grow stronger and glow brighter.
If we let it break… The chain I mean.
And if we let it open… It being our world-changing, generous, creative, extraordinary heart.
I hope those words will allow you to view the story of your past anew, to acknowledge the chains that ground you and to find the healing force that is here, always and forever inside of you.
CARE.check:
Take a few seconds to journal about what it means to you to rewrite the story of our broken hearts, into the idea of them breaking open first, and then the realization that our hearts don’t ever break, and they don’t break open either. Our chains break and our hearts, who never closed—nor could ever close, since love only loves and loves and loves even more—can show themselves to the world the way they’ve always been and will remain forever:
Open.
With kindness, love and light–because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.
Always,
leo