That's it. It's that simple...

About Truth

CARE.CHECK*: What is your relationship with Truth?

One of devotion, or one of fear?

One of light, one of shadow avoidance, one of integration, one of grief?

One frozen in the past or everlastingly placed in the future?

One that feels vibrant, enlivening, healthy?

One that feels numb, decaying, irrelevant?

Let’s talk about Truth today, dear Care.friend—because Truth is the very foundation of all there is, and finding ways to connect and express our Truth is as vital for our hearts than oxygen for our bodies.

Hope this week’s letter feels needed and supportive!

I love 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? What’s sweet? What’s tough right now? 

How are you digesting your food, your thoughts, your emotions? 

What happens when you look into your own eyes in the mirror? Do you feel overwhelmed by love or fear? Do you feel numb, indifferent, angry? Do you feel grateful, proud, relieved? All of it at once? 

All of it is okay. All of it is welcome. Always.

My best friend reminded me this morning that Truth is what is. 

That’s it. 

It’s that simple. 

Truth is what is. 

And my coach, also wrote once on her beautiful IG page that “Surrender is Truth”. Just Truth.

Truth acknowledged, expressed, ACCEPTED. 

That’s it. 

It’s that simple. 

I don’t surrender by becoming someone I’m not. I surrender by becoming who I am. Which means embodying me.

I don’t surrender by lying to the universe—or to my heart—so that I can look good on paper! I surrender by saying: “This is what is coming up for me. This is my dream. No matter how seemingly mundane or grand or impractical or improbable. Here it is. That’s my dream… show me what happens next.”

I thought I might have injured my singing voice last week, in a very deep and impactful way. I got so scared. I felt so alone, so lost, so vulnerable.

Thank goodness I have two of the best vocal coaches on Earth in my corner, and they both assured me that my vocal chords were still perfectly vibrant and healthy. They both concluded that the problem was muscular and patiently guided my larynx back into alignment—where it belongs—right above my heart who yearns to sing for this world. To sing from morning till dawn. To sing. That’s it… It’s that simple. That’s my ALL.

What my heart (and  I) want is to sing. 

To sing… and be heard.

To sing and feel received. 

And that is heard and received, first and foremost, throughout my OWN grieving inner world!

To prove to myself AT LAST that my mother couldn’t take away what mattered most to me.

Because she took nearly everything. 

She took my ability to feel. She crushed my ability to love. She severed my trust in the world. She kept me from visiting one of the people I loved most, who ended up dying without knowing how much the lonely young girl downstairs loved her.

She broke my bond with my desires, my hunger, my breath.

She bought me beautiful gifts to apologize for the ordeals of the day before, and then took them away the following one—more often than not by breaking them in front of my tearful eyes. That was until the day she took my ability to cry... 

She convinced me I was to be feared, managed, hated and that my birth had had the same effect on Earth as the one of Hiltler’s. She attacked my every dream. She detested my every friend. She despised each young man my heart yearned to open for.

She broke my secret vaults no matter how hard I tried to seal them so that she wouldn’t read them (Well I guess I should thank her for that actually… Thanks to her assaults on my privacy, I started learning English at 13 because I knew she would never have the patience or drive to do it too. I found a way to write my truth away from her.) 

She took my pride away after any accomplishments I tried to celebrate, as a dedicated student, awakening artist and sweet young woman. She took my connection with awe and nature and shamed them out of me, until anguish could take over my entire world.

She took away almost everyone I grew up with, by convincing them that I had been abusing her since I was a kid (!) and that me “leaving” her was the last straw of my devilish schemes to destroy her. 

She also nearly took my life.

She took A LOT. 

And then, I did forfeit my will to sing on the altar of my Mother and Father wounds for two decades…

BUT she didn’t take my singing voice. She couldn’t. It stayed here, safely hidden and frozen under my skin.

And it’s thawing now…

Thawing into gold and love. Into tenderness and strength. Into beauty and light. Into song. 

She didn’t take it away from me, but there are parts of me that still confuse Life and the woman who birthed me. It’s an easy confusion.

Deep down we all know who truly created us, but it’s easy to confuse the vessel and the creator, right? So I’m always afraid Life will take it away now.

And I’m even more afraid that I will take it away from me... 

The way I crushed my own hopes when I left the sweetest boy one could ever love, because my trauma told me there was no way for us to survive our love story (and he was not the only one I couldn’t trust myself to love fully). 

The way I had forgotten that singing in New York was the reason I breathed for, for twenty years. 

The way I hurt my own sacred body, time and time again, when I didn’t know how to free that anger and pain in any other way than by turning it against myself. 

So parts of me believe that I cannot be trusted with what I love most. Parts of me are really scared that joy only leads into torture and loss. Parts of me are stuck in a time where hell was my actual experience… and they will never come alive into the dream I live in now, if I don’t give them a voice. If I don’t give them a way to come forth and witness how much has changed within me and without. A place where they can sing and be heard and be known. A place where they can sing, IN NEW YORK. 

Truth telling has always felt like one of the most sacred quests on Earth to me. But I've also seen how Truth unskillfully delivered can destroy more than it builds.

I’ve also learned that Truth is highly subjective. That Truth is contextual. That Truth once put into words becomes limited and loses one of its greatest features: its fluidity. 

I’ve also learned that Truth is not only a quest but a responsibility. That we’re meant to look for it, to tend to it, to surrender to it. We’re meant to witness it day in and day out and watch it shift, deepen, disappear in the chaos of our shadowy storms, until it can be reborn in a radiant inner rainbow. 

I’ve learned that Truth is not here to serve me, I’m here to serve Truth.

I’m meant to wake up in the morning, asking Truth (and not my brain) who Truth is, by asking Love what she wants me to know today (Thank you

Elizabeth Gilbert

for teaching us that).. 

I’ve learned that Truth is always in movement! and yet can only truly be accessed in complete stillness. 

I’ve learned that Truth heals and liberates, no matter how much it hurts and feels hopeless to receive it.

Andrea Gibson

reminded my heart that “Even when truth is not hopeful, the telling of it is”. 

And that’s reason enough to bow before Truth. Humbly, vibrantly. 

I’ve learned that being a truth teller is my way in, my way out and my sanctuary. 

I’ve learned that it is one of our most vital needs and one I need to devote myself to meet, if I want to unchain my heart for good and finally, finally, FINALLY sing freely.

As most trauma survivors, I’ve also mastered the art of cutting myself from my truth… and it is all at once an enlivening, dizzying, terrifying, gut wrenching and sacred adventure to reclaim it. 

When you have believed in lies for years, to survive, it can be really hard to convince your nervous system that “true” Truth can now be our salvation and doorway into belonging.

But. Truth. HEALS. I believe that with my entire being. 

And the more I tell the truth, the more I sing. That’s ALL the confirmation I need that Truth is the way home, the way back into being, the way, the answer, the beginning of magic.

So how do we say our Truth kindly? 

To others, yes, but once again first and foremost to OURSELVES? 

How do I accept that I am the one who “chose” to believe their lies for so long without falling into a muddy river of shame? Because I need to own that truth if I want to reclaim the power to edit the stories that were handed down to me and nearly destroyed me. If I want to check for myself how many people I have actually hurt, hated or killed… In order to investigate my so-called hitlerism and compare it to a life I’m so actively devoting to embodying love and kindness in every fiber of my being.

How do I admit that, for a while, I couldn’t be trusted with what I loved most INDEED, because I was convinced I would destroy it and that what I loved most should be shielded from me? How can I admit it without collapsing in an ocean of suffocating grief, while looking at how I shattered my own dreams… so innocently? Because once again I need to do that to realize that trying to protect what I love most “from me” was actually the best way I knew how to protect what I loved most, at the time…

Which means I COULD be trusted with it, in a twisted way. And I can definitely be trusted with it now, anyway. I’m ready to prove that to myself.

How do I unleash my singing voice by accepting that no matter how convinced my system is that I’ll get killed for it in the very near future, not singing is the surest way for me to die right NOW? 

How do I feel this fear when fear is cutting my ability to feel away? 

One loving breath at a time I guess. 

One trusting heartbeat at a time. 

One brave song—or at least one adventurous note—at a time. One truthful word melting into healing music until the warmth of love can thaw my armor back where it belongs, into nothingness.

Truth is what heals us; and running away from Truth is what imprisons us. 

Writing in English is my only safe place and it makes sense. She can’t hear it. She can’t read it. She can’t understand it. That’s the one thing I ALWAYS could hide from her!

But I’m not hiding anymore.

And now it’s time to not only write in English, but to SING in all the languages that Truth leads me to embody!

So here I am, sharing this incredibly vulnerable post, trembling, and feeling, and awake, and alive.

Here I am feeling braver already because I’m showing up here for what I love most: 

Us. Truth. SINGING. In New York.

Truth is one of our most vital needs.

May we all be the mirror and the hand that we so desperately need on our way back to our spark and dream. To that sacred place at the center of our hearts that holds the secrets of our being. Those secrets that become our truth when we finally find the strength and inspiration to acknowledge them and embody who we’re meant to be.

Which is who we already are beneath the shield. Who we’re meant to receive, as the gift of a lifetime. Who we’re meant to offer to the world. Shadow and light integrated into the most vibrant truthful song. A truth that wakes us up and a truth that reunites. 

We are born truth seekers and we get to surrender to what is. That is the invitation that this world is yearning for us to receive.

Under our skin there is only goodness and magic—and they only get freed if we let Truth guide us back toward our center. Not only today, not only once, but every second, CONSTANTLY, in this infinite dance that we call life.

I want to hear your truth, dear Care.friend.

And I want to share my truth with you, wholeheartedly. 

Let’s promise each other that we’ll keep on showing up for Truth and that, each in our own way, we will never ever EVER again let anyone (not even ourselves!) keep us from singing.

I’ll see you next week!

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

Always,

leo