Our humanness is not a character flaw
And why this platform is now called CARE check: Reclaiming us
CARE check*: What is your current understanding of self-care?
Have you ever defined it for yourself? Have you ever experimented with how it FEELS like?
Do you even know what feels caring to YOU? Or what feeling caring feels within you?
What if it had nothing to do with what we’ve been taught to associate with that word?
I hope this week’s letter will feel like a potent invitation towards self-reclamation. Because we need you. We need all of us.
We’re at a crossroad… and Love is counting on us.
In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)
Hi CARE friend,
How have you been lately?
What feels exciting? What feels heavy? What might be ending? What is beginning?
It’s so important to learn how to truly answer these questions—even if only to in the confine of our own hearts.
To connect with the core of our being and check not only with the mind but with the emotional marrow of our bodies. To ground into our very being, and to anchor within our hearts with reverence. To give words to our inner experience and take the time to not only think about what’s happening but to feel ourselves through existence.
We’re so much more than the boxes we’ve been trained to check. We’re so much more than we could ever imagine… We’re Love embodied and vessels of creativity. And our sacred calling is to remember that now.
We NEED each and every single one of us to remember this right now.
Before we self-destruct as a species... Before the Earth needs to edit us out. Before we stray so far away from our center that we end up lost to the world—and to ourselves—in every way that matters.
We’re Love embodied and vessels of creativity.
Redefining Self-Care
As a reminder, this platform is not about the common definition of self-care. It’s not about being calm at all costs, taking more vitamins than we can count, having neatly organized to-do lists that please our left brain or eating chocolate while taking a bath.
It’s a HEART commitment.
It’s a promise that we make to ourselves and to the world to reconnect with and reembody who we truly are—which includes our sense of aliveness, and our ability to bring Love into form.
It’s a surrender to the spark and sacred dream that beat our hearts and a new understanding of what it means to give, receive, serve and LIVE.
It’s about redefining self-care as a devotional practice, as a radical act of self-reclamation.
This is why I renamed the platform CARE check: Reclaiming us.
This platform is not about the common definition of self-care.
CARE check: Reclaiming us
Because in order to understand self-care we need to redefine what CARING means, first and foremost! We need to reconnect with the depths of our love and the limits that a life on Earth entails. We need to reclaim ourselves: body and soul.
Because we are the energy we bring in every room, in every project, in every creation, in every relationship. We have so much power than we realize. And awakening to that is not just our birth right, it’s our most sacred assignment.
Because when we truly care for ourselves, we feel not only cared for but also CARING. So it is the ultimate win-win:
The more we care for ourselves, the more care we receive, and the more care we have to give. And, as everything in this world of form that comes from Love, it radiates from the inside out.
Because when we take care of ourselves, we also free everyone else from having to tend to our own beautiful needs that we’ve all been shamed into denying and thereby struggle to honor for ourselves. We still need each other but we don’t depend on everyone but our own hearts’ guidance. We’ve got our own back! And that’s how we become someone who truly has everyone else’s back to.
Because taking care of ourselves is how we UNDERSTAND how to truly care for others.
Because when we take care of ourselves, we not only reclaim ourselves but we also remind everyone else how it’s done… and why it matters.
Wholeness
We were talking last weekend with a dear friend of mine about how we believe we are looking for perfection, but what we actually not only need but yearn for is wholeness.
And wholeness means, by definition, that no part of us is left out.
So we can only reach wholeness by releasing any ideas of so-called perfection.
We can only reach wholeness by romancing our inner darkness as much as we welcome our inner light. By reimagining the darkness into the loving, fertile, life giving soil that it is (and by no longer fearing the fake monsters that only exist in our own projections).
We can only reach wholeness by letting ourselves come undone when we need to, and by allowing Life—instead of our mind—to dictate the agenda and flavor of the day.
We can only reach wholeness by letting ourselves come fully ALIVE—which requires us to embrace the unknown, the messy, the unplanned, the heartaches and the rage. Which requires us to embrace the mundane, the magic, our need for joy and our need for rest. Which requires us to bow to our unadulterated, precious, fallible, awe-inspiring mostly and gut wrenching at times humanness.
We can only experience wholeness by reclaming each and every part of us.
We can only experience wholeness by coming back to the truth of who we are.
This platform is dedicated to helping us do just that.We can only reach wholeness by letting ourselves come undone
when we need to.
Coming back to the truth
The truth that we are what we came here to offer—which is why, again, reclaiming ourselves is the most important choice we will ever make (it bears repeating because the inner programing we’re all dealing with runs deep).
The truth that there is nothing to fear beneath our skins, apart from the consequences of refusing to look at what is going on.
The truth that all is born in the darkness, including our brightest light.
The truth that the darkness is a nursery of stars and that it is not only our responsibility but our salvation to visit the dark forest of our unconscious as often as our heart advises.
The truth that both too much darkness and too much light renders us blind! AND that what we need is harmony, never extremism (even when extremism is hiding behind a pretty name such as perfection). We do not even need balance: we need flow. We need both darkness and light, and we need to let them dance together the way they were always meant to.
The light is necessary for Life but the darkness is where Life takes form (be it the universe, the bottom of the ocean, the center of our hearts or the inside of a womb). The fact that one is celebrated and the other one demonized in our culture is only an invitation for us to come back to the only source of knowing that can be trusted no matter what: our embodied hearts.
And so let me tell you about an unexpected tool of self-reclamation that I have been bathing into for the last three months…
We need both darkness and light.
Projecting
Sanford Meisner is considered as one of the greatest pioneers in terms of teaching acting, and I’m learning his technique at the moment. It’s freeing, it works, it’s beautiful, AND it can be extremely confronting for anyone who grew up in a highly dysfunctional environment.
It is for me for sure. Why? Because the entire idea is to project everything you feel on the external world. To “blame” your acting partner and/or immediate environment for everything that happens within you. It’s their fault. They made you upset. They made you feel triggered. They made you feel uncomfortable, elated, scared, angry, optimistic, sad or inspired. They. They. They.
So basically it demands for me to become who I have sworn myself I would never become.
The intention is healing of course in that setting!
As performers, we get to get so stuck within our heads… so the goal is to focus outside of ourselves, in order to finally leave ourselves alone. In order to let ourselves BE.
Because letting ourselves be is the only way to lose yourself fully into your song or character. The only way to tame the voice of this perfectionistic inner critic that means so well and yet wounds us so deeply on a daily basis. To let the art and magic happen through you, to forget that there is a you to begin with.
It’s powerful and highly transformative.
And in this setting you’re not hurting anyone anyway since you’re facing someone lost in the same fictional world... It’s the ideal place to experiment.
And even more importantly, as I’ll describe a bit later, it’s “projection with a twist”: because it’s not coming from an unconscious attempt to avoid ourselves! It actually demands that we inhabit ourselves FULLY.
To let ourselves BE.
The way back to center
Still it’s widely confronting for a human being who has dedicated her entire life to unlearning patterns of projection...
I know so intimately the pain of having been projected on, I swore to my heart that I would understand how to not do that to others. So it feels threatening to my nervous system to experiment with such a shift of paradigm!
And at the same time, we are only free to behave in a soulful way when we know we can find our way back from any patterns that don't serve and when we can receive each and every part of this experience without losing our center.
Well, I have learned that our center is never found in the “middle” of all that we can be.
And so we can only find our centers if we allow ourselves to explore both ends of every spectrum until we find the point that feels like an anchor, that feels like home, that feels like us, that feels like LOVE.
We cannot think our way back to center or follow someone else’s map, we can only experience what our center feels like.
Finding where our center lies is not an accomplishment we can force, it is an answer we get to receive.
Our center is never found in the middle.
Receiving
When you think about it, our connection with both ourselves and with the world around us is entirely dependent on our ability to Receive. And just like with feelings, there is no room for negotiation with Life as far as Receiving is concerned.
We either feel it all or we go numb. We cannot decide to only feel the emotions we like and discard those we find uncomfortable. And in the same way, we cannot decide to only receive what feels good and not what does not. We’re either in receiving mode or not.
That doesn’t mean we let everything enter beyond the sanctuary of our skin! Of course not. We are meant to recruit the fiercest bodyguard of all: discernment.
Discernment is here to inspect every request to enter thoroughly, before sending that person or energy into our heart or on their merry way.
But still, we either keep ourselves in receiving mode (the doors are not locked but there’s an admission fee called INTEGRITY!) or we keep everything out.
We’re either in receiving mode or not.
Projecting (with a twist)
Which brings me back to why Meisner technique is so healing on top of being such a great tool for aspiring actors.
And that’s because it does not only lead us to project our inner world onto the room; it drives us to focus intently outside of ourselves—so that we can receive all the cues coming our way—WHILE demanding that we receive our every body sensation and response to what is happening around us.
It brings us back to the level of instinct and reconnects us to all the richness and presence of the present moment, inviting us to not only notice but juice every little shift and detail happening to our bodies, our partner and in the room we inhabit.
It DEMANDS presence, embodiment, surrender and receivorship.
And it’s intensely relational, which is deeply healing because we are relational beings. Or at least we were before we were taught to hide ourselves behind energetic masks and figurative walls.
We either keep ourselves in receiving mode or we keep everything out.
Celebrating our humanness
I stand by this commitment to bring as much awareness to my projections as I can harness at any given time, but there is supposed to be a difference between the way we live and the way we perform!
(It’s not always obvious because so many of us have been trained to perform the role of “us” in our daily lives, but the difference is meant to exist nonetheless.)
Of course, in “real life”, we want our humanity to lead our humanness… but through Art, we want and NEED to see our humanness celebrated too!
So that we can know that we belong, that we’re not alone, that we’re all going through the same inner tides and that it’s not only normal but SACRED.
Our humanness is not a character flaw. It’s not a glitch in the system, it’s not something to eradicate or be ashamed of. It’s precious, colorful, valid and it’s a portal.
In my current understanding of our evolutionary journey, we went from realizing that we were not only humans but human beings, aka souls in human form. We connected with our ability to elevate, to morph, to overcome our limitations, to become… But the next phase is not asking us to keep on climbing—we were created for Earth, not the ether!
The next step is for us to reclaim our ability to ground, to integrate, to welcome our limits as the wise teachers they are, and to be all that we are.
I don’t believe we were sent here to transcend the human experience, I believe we were sent here to experience it fully—until awe and heartache, enchantment and crushed expectations, hope and acceptance, as well as accountability and grace can all coexist within us and show us what it truly means to exist.
Which leads us back to the call we’re all asked to answer now:
SELF-RECLAMATION.
Our humanness is not a character flaw.
Reclaiming you
When we reclaim ourselves, we become who we’ve needed since birth and we become who we’ve always yearned to offer to the world. We become the answer to the questions that drive our restlessness and sense of disconnection.
When we reclaim ourselves, we liberate ourselves and that’s how we collectively heal. From within each heart, and then FROM THE INSIDE OUT.
When we reclaim ourselves, we heal our part of the whole and when we all do that, the whole thrives.
When we reclaim ourselves, we answer not only Humanity’s but Nature’s plea.
Only by reclaiming ourselves can we ever truly find our way to each other. Because when we’re full of ourselves, we’re full of Life and thereby full of Love! So there’s nothing left to need or take… Only overflow to wholeheartedly offer and surrender.
When we reclaim ourselves, we reclaim all of us… and LOVE RECLAIMS US.
That’s why self-care is the opposite of selfish... It’s an act of service.
It’s the most radical act of Love.
So please please please CARE friend, reclaim yourself for your own sake—because you’re an extraordinary work of Art and you DESERVE to become fully aware of that—AND know that when you reclaim you, more than one ripple effects shake the world back into place:
Because you give us permission to do the same. Because you reenchant the darkness thereby allowing it to create the light and Love it longs to bring forth. AND because we get to see you, the real you—and that is a gift that none of us can afford to pass on.
Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.
leo
Romancing our inner darkness!