Singing, trust, surrender and love

How we dance our way back home

CARE.CHECK*: Is your body a stranger or a dear friend?

Do you speak each other’s love language? Do you know that you’re on the same side?

Do you let your body guide you, do you listen to the YESs and to the NOs?

Do you answer when your body calls? Do you even notice?

Do you trust your body? If not, why not?

This is one of the most foundational and loving relationship we’re given to experience and nurture.

I hope this week’s letter will be an invitation to lean closer when your body whispers and relearn how to embody your own sacred personal temple.

I love you. 

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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 :)

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 Hi Care.Friend,

How are you feeling today?

How is your body doing?

How open (or guarded!) is your heart?

How connected do you feel—to others, to this world, to yourself? 

And please let any answer be okay and beautiful.

Please let any answer be exactly what needs to be right now.

Self-connection is not about perfection. Self-connection is about what is.

There’s no goal, here. There’s no doing it right or wrong.

Self-connection does not come from doing-energy—as my trauma coach would phrase it—it comes from surrendering-energy.

It comes from asking ourselves:

• What’s going on for me right now? What’s showing up?

• What needs tending? What needs integration?

• What needs me to lean closer and what needs me to take a step back.

• Which feeling am I learning to feel safely? Which feeling am I NOT ready for…

• How is my body talking to me? Through pain, through numbness or through joy?

• And can I see the value of all three and commit to listen, to be with, to… surrender?

My singing deepened this weekend. My voice expanded like never before.

It was humbling, empowering, and magical. It was an answer to a prayer and a dream coming true song after song. No note felt out of reach. No part of the song untouchable. 

And this joy of singing that I can almost never experience—stuck between the constriction that comes up when I breathe and the numbness that still protects me from what I’m not yet ready to remember—was bubbling right under the surface.

I felt so grateful. 

Grateful to life, for creating me a singer. Grateful to my body, for trusting me to come back online. Grateful to the songs that kept me on Earth. Grateful to Sylvie, for being my guardian singing angel and such a loving, skilled, patient, embodied, sacred guide on my way back to my inner singer. 

I felt so grateful for our capacity to heal, overcome, and turn darkness into light—this capacity that makes it all worthwhile.

And then what always happens when my singing journey leads me to free a part of my body (this time my shoulders), a new part of me in need of healing came knocking on my heart, to ask Love if it could be its turn to be unchained, thawed, unfrozen.

And so I met a new kind of pain... A wave of horror and grief that came from the deepest chambers of my pelvis.

It only lasted a few seconds before I could snap out of it (or to be more precise, before my body pushed me back out of the feeling of it). But it happened again and again.

It happened every time I allowed my singing to reach down my spine and touch that newly unearthed void, ever so gently. It happened 4 or 5 times and it felt both terrifying, dizzying, and so desperately needed.

The pain felt both all encompassing and, strangely, very far from me. As if I was experiencing someone else’s experience through some kind of strange mediumship.

I know that feeling very well by now. It’s what happens when we reconnect for the first time with a deeply repressed memory: that part of me has been exiled from my consciousness for so long, my system doesn’t recognize her as “me” anymore.

Oh how grateful I am for somatic work and for Internal Family System to have given me the language and knowledge I need to be able to stay with the experience, without believing myself broken or crazy.

As a former physician, it can be very hard to allow trauma healing to come forth, because of how pathologizing western Medicine is. I haven’t been taught to trust the body in Med school—and even less so our emotions, I have been taught that the body is flawed and needs to be constantly corrected!

I believe this is the reason why all of our modern treatments have so many side effects… Because they were created with the right intention (helping) but based on a flawed assumption: “the body is the problem.”

They were created with the intent to attack the disease, instead of realizing that our job is only to support the body so that the body can regain its ability to heal. 

But we’re learning… And trauma healing has been one of the most instrumental fields to help us shift the paradigm that is making us all so sick.

In that paradigm, feelings are dangerous and must be tamed and avoided. In that paradigm, we can only learn about humans within books and not by going within. In that paradigm, we do not only promote self-disconnection, we celebrate it. 

We have unlearned how to feel, but we can reclaim that ability now. We can show up for each other so that we can understand how to feel SAFELY.

We can relearn how to remain embodied when we review our inner stories in order to untangle them AND how to drop the story to feel its effect long enough so that the release can happen. Because that’s how we enable the alchemy that our hearts have been created to bring on Earth.

The alchemy of healing. The magic that we were all gifted with. That allows us to turn the darkness into light. To turn pain into beauty. To turn suffering into wisdom. To turn endings into beginnings and beginnings into awakening journeys.

And so a new exploration begins under my skin… and I already know that the reward will be a greater embodiment of my sacred dream. The reward will be even more singing.

So I’m ready.

And I know that the deeper I go within, the slower I must go. The more softness and tenderness I will need to rely on—because the deeper the repression, the deeper the wound. Because I also have remembered a lot by now, and I know that if this is even rawer, it’s going to require time to build the capacity to come back in…

Which brings me to the life-saving notion of CAPACITY.

There’s no safety without understanding capacity.

The capacity we have. The capacity we’re meant to build.

Until we hold capacity, we face fragility.

And that’s okay. Because, thankfully, we’re not meant to stop there.

I cannot heal everything today. Not even while mostly knowing how.

I have my knowledge, I have my tool kit, I have my reopening heart. Great! I’m in a much better place than I was five years ago…

AND I don’t have capacity for most of the feelings that are still trapped around my core. 

Knowledge is empowering and knowledge is a great foundation. But healing is experiential and can only happen in the wordless, in the now.

Healing comes from within, from the inner well of love that beats our hearts and through our bodies. Healing comes through feeling, which requires breath, which is the first embodiment of love.

Healing requires both time and timelessness.

It requires time because we’re not ready until we are, and that readiness is achieved through the illusion of time. But even if healing happens incrementally, it always and only happens in the now, which is the only true reality.

What I mean by that is that our left brain allows us to assemble every moment (every “now”) in a linear fashion which gives us the felt experience of a past, a future and a present moment. It creates a sequential story that we can then call a life. It’s a beautiful feature of our brains! It brings storytelling into being and allows us to harness so much beauty, wisdom and meaning from our everyday lives.

But still, the only moment that ever truly exists beyond thoughts is right now. The past is made up of memories, the future created from projections. We are all only ever experiencing “right now”.

And right now cannot be experienced through words, only through presence.

This is why so many of us have turned towards meditation. This is why we need time in Nature so much. This is why awe is so powerful! Because for a second everything stops… And that’s how we suddenly realize the aliveness of right now.

And so in this present moment, I have a level of capacity that is determined both by the level of self-connection I’ve been able to foster over time and by the level of self-connection I’m able to access right now.

There’s the capacity, the inner spaciousness, I can embody on my best days, when I’m feeling rested, safe, loved and resourced, and there’s the capacity I can embody right NOW, depending on my surroundings, my felt sense of non-threat, my felt sense of connection.

And both are perfectly okay! What matters is the noticing.

When I’m feeling anchored into my center and heart, when I’m feeling supported and cared for, I can go much deeper into the witnessing of my trauma responses. Because I can do it SAFELY:

I can be the love that embraces the fear and the shame. I can feel my anger or my grief until they transform back into love. (I wrote about this alchemy here.)

When I’m feeling malnourished from the inside out, fragile, alone, I can’t go too close to the hurt without getting swallowed up by the story, entrapped into the flashback, lost into the despair and terror and rage that immediately follow.

That’s the difference between trauma healing and retraumatization.

If I visit my past or my future without a solid anchor into the loving embrace of right now, I risk falling into shame (fueled by my memories of the past) or into fear (fueled by my projections of the future). 

And most of the time, we need co-regulation (aka someone else who can stay present, embodied and by our side) to be able to truly dive into our wounds in a way that imbues them with love, instead of drowning us into misery’s river.

And so we must learn that slow is the answer. Or more to the point, we must unlearn that fast is better. 

Reembodiment is an awakening process, it calls for reverence, tenderness and surrender. 

We come back in with the most patient breath. We collaborate with the body and respect all its defenses. We celebrate the little yess and we celebrate the big nos. We move slowly even when the body’s door is wide open, and we stop immediately even when the body’s resistance seems mild and ignorable.

It’s a dance. A sacred one.

It’s a promise to listen to our inner guidance. The body is not trying to be difficult or stubborn. The body is only trying to protect us and to communicate.

The body is saying “Not right now dear one, give us a second”.

The body is asking “Can you let me move in a way that feels good right now? Can you let me lead? Can you ask the mind to step back?”

The body is whispering “This is not the way, precious. Let me show you what would serve.”

The body is pulling the brake because “You were just not ready to listen and I had to keep you out of the fire.”

The body is begging “I need your help right now, I need blanketing, I need nourishment.”

The body doesn’t ask us to fix or save, the body only asks for our presence, for our commitment to remain connected—for as long as it takes for our energy to shift, for the emotion to be released, for the whirlwind of thoughts to calm and settle down.

And in truth, the body doesn’t ask! The body SERVES.

To be able to dive into our wounds in a way

that imbues them with love,

instead of drowning us into misery’s river.

And the body knows what I have capacity for or not.

Right now my body is saying “You do not have capacity for that memory yet, honey. BUT you could handle this tiny wave of feeling... You were ready to be made aware that there’s something to be unearthed here. That’s all. That’s it. That’s PLENTY. Patience, my dear.” 

And so I listen. And so I pause.

And so I surrender. 

We didn’t dive back into the wound with my coach yesterday.

We only tended to the activation that followed.

We only inquired what my body needed, for me to be allowed back in.

It started with a few breaths that already felt like too much.

I thought I would faint. I thought I would break. I thought, for a second, I might die.

But then I didn’t.

The body gently rocked me back into my heart, and once I was anchored there—and with the constant support of my coach—waves of pain, of horror, of disgust could be freed. That’s when I could rock my body into presence. 

We took it painfully slowly… and that was already so much to take in!

I had to shower my mind with love constantly, so that it could accept to release the need for stories and understanding.

Because it was not about understanding. It was about FEELING. It was about healing.

It was about freeing the energy that is currently protecting me from the wound.

Then, only then, will I be allowed closer to what happened... And that might take days, years, or a lifetime. Who knows. And that’s okay.

What matters is that the alchemy has started. The shift has begun.

That part of my body and I know that the other exists—and that’s more than enough. That’s all that’s needed. Intention! Presence… LOVE.

And so I’ll keep on singing, and so I’ll keep on healing. 

And so I’ll keep on healing, and so I’ll keep on singing. 

Because that’s ALL it’s about.

Once again, there is no goal here or finish line.

Only love.

I hope this will inspire you to tend to your capacity, to understand what that means, from within. To trust your body a little bit more each day and fall in love with the temple you’ve been invited to live in. I hope this letter will feel like a beacon of hope and kindness on your journey home, and help you know that you are not alone on this path of healing.

We are not alone, ever.

We have each other, we have our bodies, we have our hearts. We are loved and we are cared for.

Take great care of you, of your body and trust that your capacity is always growing, deepening and expanding whether you can fully witness it or not.

I’ll see you again next week!

With kindness, love and light—because I truly believe they’re our most sacred offering to this world.

Always,

leo