A journey to the underworld

there's a journey calling our names

CARE check*: Have you ever heard Her voice?

The call of the Great Mother within, the song of the Great Mother without?

Have you found your way back yet into your own inner bottomless well of Love?

What has helped you most on your journey? Which books have come to bring you back home, one united page and heartbeat at a time?

What do you need most right now to reconnect and embody the fierce love and embrace of your inner parents?

I hope this week’s letter can remind you that our emotions are the web that reconnects us to the center of our center, and that there is always a way back to who we’re here to become—no matter how far we have strayed from our inner deep knowing.

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In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

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Hi CARE friend,

How are you?

It’s a wild ride this Earth adventure, right? One you might not always be so sure why you signed up for… I hear you.

The compulsion to numb, to tune out, to close our eyes is real and that compulsion is valid… The human race has spent decades planting Fear in every place it could reach, and we’re at harvest time. So of course we’re terrified! It makes sense, and that’s okay.

That’s okay because we do not have to swallow that Fear. We can choose differently today. We can choose to hold our Fear instead of projecting it, and we can choose to shower it with Love. True Love. The kind that only comes from within. The kind that transforms, awakens and heals. We can start planting Love within and all around us and know that one drop of Love is strong enough to turn a valley of Fear into the most glorious and nurturing ocean.

When water kisses tenderly and patiently the Earth day in and day out, it creates the Grand Canyon… the same is true with us.

We can kiss the Earth with our feet everyday if we only remember to bring presence when we walk. We can kiss the Earth with our bodies when we go back into the arms of the Great Mother at night, when we finally surrender to our need for sleep—yet another sacred part of lives that we’ve been trained to see as useless, unproductive and expendable.

And we can also kiss the Earth with the tears that we’ve been forbidden to cry:

I believe Grief is the missing element for the human race to resuscitate… and thrive.

The more I explore my Anger, the more my Grief can resurface. And the more I explore my Anger and Grief, the more Love I find in every corner of my being and every corner of my existence.

It really is that simple… and it really is that hard.

Because there’s no shortcut. The way to our inner treasure is down and through the dark. It lies way beneath our skin—it lies at the center of our inner Earth, it lies within our hearts.

The darkness truly is where light is born. Within the boundless universe we get to look at every night. In the innermost chamber of our hearts. The darkness truly is where Life takes form too. In the depth of the majestic ocean. At the center of our wombs.

We look for what we need in all the wrong places and we wonder why we feel so out of sort. We disconnect ourselves from the source that lives within and exhaust ourselves by searching it where it will never be found. We run away from our shadow as if our lives depended on it, unaware that the shadow is where we have been awaited since birth for our lives to truly begin.

This all feels so relevant to me right now… Because we need to rekindle our inner sturdiness more than ever as the world screams in pain, and because I deeply need the support that only I can give myself as my father is slowly dying.

We’ve this in-between period where every silence could mean that I will never hear his voice again. I know it’s always true with anyone, but we usually have reasons not to go there! Thankfully, it is mostly safe to assume that our loved ones are okay when no one calls to say they’re not. But with my dad, at the moment and being estranged from a big part of my family of origin, it’s not as clear. [Anyone who thinks that estrangement is a choice or the easy way out never had to live neither with the grief nor with the consequences.]

My dad’s been sick for many, many years, and during those years he accumulated many candles that also weakened his body. He’s not gone yet and I do pray that he will still be around for a few months, but the doctor within me knows that it doesn’t look too good.

Now I’ve been terrified of losing my father for as long as I can remember. It started when I learned at 13 that Death can claim those you love most at any moment, without asking for permission nor leaving you a note of explanation or regret. The fear worsened when he got diagnosed with cancer when I was 21. And it turned into angst in 2018 when he spent nearly a year in the hospital overcoming an infection that could only be released by removing his bladder AND months of IV antibiotics. The surgeon had feared that he would not wake up from such a surgery, not when living in an elderly body with cancer and when operating on a zone that had received extensive radiotherapy… but he was willing to try and my father pulled through! And the surgeon, a dear colleague of mine, marveled at how fast he was out of the ICU.

Yes, there’s been many ups and downs with my dad over those last two decades. With his prognosis, with his weight, and with our often beautiful and often harrowing relationship.

I’m hoping with my whole heart that he will hold on until I get my travel authorization to go and visit him in France! I’m hoping I’ll get to hold one more time this hand that guided me to kindergarten every morning way back when, and that bittersweetly waved goodbye four years ago, when I boarded a plane that allowed me to move 3000 miles away from my broken past and into the arms of my New York dream.

I’m hoping that I will get to tell him in person (and not only on FaceTime, and not only in writing) that I love him, that I’m glad he was my father even with all that did and didn’t happen, and that I WILL do the work to forgive all the trauma I inherited from him as well as all that he couldn’t give me, because I am devoted to the Love that I did receive and all those other shared memories that I will forever cherish. I will feel my Anger and I will feel my Grief. I will feel them until they turn back into Love.

I’m hopeful and he’s septic. I’m hopeful and he’s losing weight rapidly. I’m hopeful and I’m realistic.

It’s out of my hands, and this week is a crucial portal as we wait to see if the antibiotics and his life force are enough to allow the bacteria to move out of his kidney or not. It’s out of my hands and so I know that the only place I can redirect my Fear to is to my heart.

I had this very acute realization last year (and I wrote about it HERE and HERE) that there’s a difference between Anger and Love on one end, and Fear and Shame on the other.

Anger and Grief, when felt, turn back into Love. Anger shows us our limits, Grief shows us our depth. Both bring us back to center. I experienced this time and time again, and again last week when I went to a Rage Cage with a friend. I unleashed my anger on those poor plates that got smashed against the wall—and that paid for crimes that only humans can commit—and I came out of that “cage” overflowing with Love for all that is (including my blood family). But Fear and Shame NEED love to be felt and alchemized. They’re not the essence, they’re the void. They don’t show us where our integrity has been breached, they’re signals we’ve stepped outside of ourselves.

Anger and Grief are the guardians of our wholeness. Fear and Shame are signals that they are parts of us that have not been reclaimed yet, that are fragmented, cut from source and cut from our heart.

So the way we show up for those emotions need to be different!

Anger and Grief need to be felt, danced, EXPRESSED through Art, words, or movement.

Fear and Shame need to be MET with the fierceness of a loving lioness who just realized that her cubs are in danger.

Oh yes… May we all relearn how to see the parts of us who are in pain as wounded lion cubs in desperate need of our care, attention, PROTECTION and embrace.

Indeed, if you’re like most of us, you probably see those parts of you as dragons instead. You probably cast them out, ignore them, resent them, and even despise them at times. You believe they’re putting you in danger and that it’s their job to move away…

That’s because we’ve been trained to be scared of our wounds instead of taught how to tend to them. We were told that pain is the problem, and forgot that pain is actually the messenger that was coming to warn us that there’s a problem in the first place. We blame pain and try everything in the book to eradicate it, thereby never receiving the wisdom that we so desperately need.

But that ends with us. That ends right now.

We’re done with this blaming the victim epidemic. We know better, we choose better, we choose to be on our own sides: FROM NOW ON.

The shadow is not here to kill us, the shadow is our promise of rebirth—and I, for one, am ready to reclaim this vibrant inner queendom.

Now I do want to specify what I mean by “ready”, because I’ve made the mistake of running too far deep below before. And as writer and jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz highlighted: it is just as dangerous to repress and run away from the shadow as it is to try to integrate all of it at once.

As I keep reminding myself: too much darkness is the same as too much light, both render us blind.

We blame pain and try everything in the book to eradicate it,

thereby never receiving the wisdom that we so desperately needed.

I’ve started reading one of those books that you know will restart your life. It’s the third one I have read on this particular journey of awakening the Mother inside.

It started last year when I read MEDITATIONS SECRETS FOR WOMEN (by Camille Maurine and Lorin Roche) and thereby realized the extent of decolonialism and demasculinization I had to do inside.

Sometimes it feels like I have more ingrained misogyny in my bones than blood stem cells. Both my parents were raised by cold, often cruel, traumatized women, and so it’s no wonder that their mother wounds are so abysmal. On top of that, my mother is the embodiment of the wounded maiden and she turned her unexpressed rage toward the world (and toward herself), so neither my father nor I witnessed a redeeming example of the strength, magic and AWE that women are born to embody and bring forth into this world. My problems grew even bigger when my father acted like the way my mother behaved was “normal” for women.

I had unconsciously disavowed the feminine within me and refused any plea from my inner maiden for redemption. I had cast her out in the dark forest and never looked back, I had no idea she even existed.

That is, of course, until my body and Life forced me to remember.

Because my heart knew better than to let me go on on my Hero’s journey once it had outlived its usefulness. And even if I didn’t want to admit it at the time, that journey had not kept its promises.

I spent my twenties and early thirties climbing the “ladder”, I even slayed the dragon, but when I saw the view from the top I cried in horror! It was the opposite of the Heaven that the fathers had promised me. It was lifeless, heart crushing and soul draining. I have never felt more empty or lost.

That’s when, deep down below, I caught a glimpse of that so-called dragon… agonizing.

Thankfully I knew better than to look away, and so I stared and stared and stared, until I could see that creature’s eyes, and I was awed by the fierce kindness and extraordinary aliveness that was reflected back to me. I saw how free and sovereign and radiant and needed she had been. I saw that she had always been mine and that it was my power, not my flaws that I had been asked to forfeit to join a club I had never truly wanted to be a part in.

I also heard her whisper my name and I heard her sing her dying wish:

“Come home my darling, it’s not too late, come back to yourself, come back to me”

It was the summer of 2019 that it hit me. I was only 34 but nothing in my body was working anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time I had had my period and absolutely everything hurt. My digestion was in disarray, and my inner world was a landmine that I would not invite my worst enemy to visit. I was at the end of my rope, BUT I had started singing again. So unbeknownst to my mind’s schemes, my heart had had enough and she had sent out the call to the Goddess so that she could come and reclaim me.

And reclaiming me she did:

Everything lined up to cast the absolute perfect storm that would leave me so burned out to my core that even my savior archetype started wondering if dying would not be a better offering to the world at this point than overcoming. So I surrendered my armor to the floor, unveiling the emptiness ravaging me, and Life immediately rushed my dream back in to revive me.

Something shifted and I looked around me as if coming out of a trance. I saw all the pictures of New York on the wall and realized that I was only surviving at the moment for that one hour a week where I would meet my wonderful voice teacher and sing.

And so it finally hit me… Being a physician in Paris, trying to save a mother that was never truly mine and that had transitioned two decades ago anyway, would never allow me to become the singer in New York I have always known I came on Earth to be.

It was hard to renounce 15 years of labor dedicated to a fake dream. It was hard to realize that I had sacrificed my entire youth and that I would have nothing to show for it but battle scars from a war I had never wanted to be a part of. It was HARD to admit that I could have been so wrong about what mattered to me and what my offering to the world was meant to be. It was excruciatingly hard to announce to the world that I was leaving Medicine (and the nobility of the oncology ward) to reclaim an artistic dream that so few understand (and even less people celebrate), and it was especially hard to do it as a people pleaser, amidst a pandemic (oh. the. optic.)

It was hard and yet it felt simple. Because once you remember the voice of your heart, you can never confuse it again with the sound of Culture.

Like Sharon Blackie wrote in IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED, (and I don’t have the exact quote so I paraphrase), by then I had stopped making any sense to myself! And more importantly, for the first time, I was okay with that.

[And in retrospect this is the moment when I started making sense again of course.]

It always takes a minute to prove those things to ourselves… and dreams do not manifest at the speed of our hearts, but five years later I can confirm that I had made the decision to leave not only my career but my country and to move to dedicate my life to singing in New York, IN THAT MOMENT.

Everything changed after that night, and there was no turning back. Conveniently I was boarding a plan to New York the next morning and had a week there to turn my newly reawakened dream into a plan.

There was no turning back but there comes a time on any journey of self-reclamation when we need to stop running towards the light and sit still, so that we can finally understand what had happened to us and restarted our story in such a dramatic way.

This was hard for me to accept at first but that’s when the next book on my path of Mother energy awakening found me: THE HEROINE’S JOURNEY by Maureen Murdock.

This book changed me forever. I read it last September in four days and read it once again immediately after. I am so deeply in love and grateful to this book. It explained me to me.

It also showed me that there was still something missing on my journey to wholeness. Because in many ways I was still imagining that rabid dragons were at war within me, instead of seeing that those frightening creatures were actually only wild baby lions begging for my attention.

I had made my journey from ugly duckling to swan: I had reclaimed my swanhood, my body and the sacredness of our emotions. But I had not awakened my inner lioness yet, I hadn’t built the capacity to feel those emotions that I had learned to revere.

I had heard the call of the underworld and I had initiated my descent, but I hadn’t found the source of tenderness within that actually allows us to melt into the crust of the Earth, to dissolve the inner shield that surrounds the dark forest and that allows us to enter the dark forest while staying connected to our hearts.

I hadn’t built the thread I needed to hold on to go rescue my wounded Maiden while grounded in Mother energy. I had focused all my heart and efforts on empowering my wounded masculine energy without realizing that my wounded feminine was still waiting for me to reclaim my power! And so I unconsciously entered the forest buoyantly, confident that if I could climb the ladder of the patriarchy, it would be a walk in the park to navigate the land of the Feminine.

Ha. HUMILITY. My dear friend… Thank you for always catching up with me.

And so, as always when I'm ready for the next step, my new guide on my journey of initiation found me: I’ve started reading MAIDEN TO MOTHER from Sarah Durham Wilson.

For the first time, I have entered the dark forest not armed with ideals and dogmas, but armed with compassion and a devotion to my inner safety. I am learning how to tend to my wounds with reverence and devotion instead of seeing them as inconvenient setbacks on my way home. They are the way home, they are the way in, and they are the way back into Love.

It is a wild ride this Earth adventure—and this is one I have no regret signing up for. Not anymore.

I saw some very joyous, brave, vibrant and optimistic daffodils blooming in Central Park yesterday, and they were right in the middle of a sea of dead leaves which awed me.

It stopped me in my tracks as I kneeled down to thank those incredibly sweet spiritual teachers who were reminding me that the ending is where we begin again, that we must trust Life because Life made us beautiful and inherently comforting, only hoping that we would let ourselves blossom and shine.

I realized that if those little daffodils could so fiercely reenter the world, without waiting for any tree to awaken first to protect them and without asking for ANY permission, I was bound to find my way in the dark forest. And that I was also not only ready to become the light that I have been looking for in all the wrong places, but to REENCHANT this darkness that I have been taught to fear but that my heart years to engolden and reembody.

The darkness is a nursery of stars. And we are stardust and Love. We are that magical, and we are that needed. Yes we are that important, truly.

So I PROMISE you that I will do the work necessary to reclaim me because that’s all I have to offer to the world!

And I will share every insight gained on this journey because, in the end, we are each other’s mirror and that’s how we get to be each other’s lifeline.

How sacred is that…

Sending you kindness, love and warmth—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not fear anymore.

leo