The truth about us, resistance and our voice

And about the power of a well crafted WHAT IF

CARE check*: What is your relationship with Resistance?

What do you make it mean? About you, about your body, about what you’re doing.

How do you handle it? Do you force, do you push, do you back away, do you disappear?

Has it worked for you?

I hope this week letter can open a new door and offer you even the tiniest shift in that relationship that has the power to change our entire lives… for the better.

I love you

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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,

I want to start with a heartfelt thank you to all of you for being here:

This budding platform is one of my greatest loves and, since Monday evening, we are 100+ here! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your trust, your time, your presence… and I am more committed than ever to show up here unapologetically honest and fully surrendered to this extraordinary journey we call Life.

Thank you for being here ++

Extraordinary…

Because it is extraordinary.

Even when it’s gray, even when it hurts, even when it’s BEIGE, even when.

We are balls of stardust and love walking on a spinning planet lost in a boundless universe. Our bodies are doing more to keep us alive at any given second that we could ever achieve in our entire lifetime—and we don’t need to pay any attention to any of it for the magic to happen. There are babies being born right now at every corner of the world… AND baby stars shining their first rays as I write, in parts of space we can only dream of and never see! Trees can communicate and hold each other through their roots, and flowers are modeling to us how to bloom, no matter what, wherever we look. There are creatures at the bottom of the ocean that have never seen the sky… and there are birds who could never imagine what it means to be earthbound. A stranger can hurt on the other side of the globe and my eyes can cry the tears that they are forbidden to express. A singer can write a song on a rainy day that will bring the sunshine somebody else needs to hold on to Hope years, if not decades (or even centuries) later. My heart can turn my feelings into words and those words can seed into yours and turn into love.

We live in a culture that has unconsciously disenchanted the world, thereby disconnecting us from what we need most, the sanctuary of Nature and the temples that our bodies are… but we get to remember that Awe is our birthright.

Our culture has cut us from our emotional world and taught us that there is only danger in the darkness and only goodness in the light, thereby blinding us to our ability to feel, create, heal and alchemize… but, as I always say, the darkness is a nursery of stars that we get to recover and surrender to now.

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A fire’s wisdom

On Saturday evening I was supposed to go see Gabor Mate way uptown for a talk I had been looking forward to for months. Unfortunately I never made it there.

There was a fire on the subway tracks ahead of us and, after spending what felt like an hour trapped in between two sessions with dozens of other worried New Yorkers trying to ignore the smell in the wagon and to pretend that it was completely normal to be at a standstill, our subway backtracked to 96th street and everyone was asked to evacuate the station.

At that point the smoke was undeniable and the fear so thick it had become palpable, but I marveled at how we all had each other’s back. There was no pushing or pulling. We were all aiming for the door but we were not willing to leave anyone behind.

It was a quintessential New York moment. A moment where you can witness that New Yorkers might not have time for nonsense, which includes performative niceness, but they are incredibly KIND.

I don’t believe we ever were in real danger, but greeting an underground fire is not what you look forward to on a Saturday night… and there was no making it to Gabor Mate’s talk in time.

Still I walked home feeling so thankful for how much we all care about each other, whether we always remember that we do or not.

I thought about the firemen who came to take care of us... I thought about the MTA people who mobilized to find a way to get us to safely rewind our tracks. I thought about the coordination that those kinds of moments demand! and my heart felt warm.

Yes, we have lost our way as a species and time is running out for us to awaken, course correct and deal with the consequences. Yes, most of us feel raw, tender, under-resourced and unmoored at the moment, and rightfully so. Yes, we’re at a SOBERING tipping point in Earth school, and since we refused to learn our lesson about uncertainty in 2020, we’re getting an even harsher reminder that no matter how much we want to think that we can now control the universe, we are not in charge, we will NEVER be in charge, and we were never supposed to be.

We all care about each other,

whether we remember that we do or not.

Yes, all of that is true… AND.

And there is a beautiful invitation to return to Love, somehow made even more potent now thanks to the contrast that chaos offers us.

Sitting in that subway train without service or a friend to talk to, I decided to practice a meditation taught by Martha Beck. I looked at my neighbor one after the other while thinking “I love you, and you love me”. And I remember all of their faces as I type… I felt so moved by the light that I could see in their eyes while their bodies tried to mask up the fear and unrest that we were all experiencing. Some folks had gone into Flight mode trying to make jokes (that mostly didn’t land) and/or to analyze what was happening, and some folks had gone into Freeze, their agitation only betrayed by the bouncing in their legs. But when our gazes crossed, we smiled at each other and for a few seconds, there was nothing to be afraid of. We had each other! We were each other.

It was not an easy moment for anyone but everyone was respectful of the tiny space that we shared and coping in the best way we could. Coping again not with danger, but with uncertainty. In that in-between moment where we know that something challenging is happening, and we don’t know yet how hard it’s going to get nor how quickly we’ll find ourselves on the other side of it.

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Fearing uncertainty

Now we always associate uncertainty with bad outcomes because we have a negativity bias. That’s a feature of our brain that is very useful for survival but not so helpful in regards with our ability to live.

We’re all very skilled at designing terrifying “WHAT IFs” but it’s harder to come up with more empowering and uplifting ones:

What if it worked out better than I could ever have imagined? What if I am closer to my dream than I think? What if they loved me as much as I love them? What if people actually loved it when I sing? What if I got what I want? What if something good is going to come out of this? What if it is going to be so much easier than I fear? What if it was going to be the sweetest day ever?

** How did those FEEL?

** Can you meet them with that same open-mindedness that we’ve been trained to offer our fear mongering WHAT IFs?

** AND can we talk for a second about how we call the latter “REALISM” and the former ones “delusions”?

Because let’s be very clear: BOTH are fantasies. There is just no way to know how the wind will turn in the meteo of our lives.

It’s time for us to rewrite the narratives that cripple us!

Cynicism is NOT wisdom and optimism is not deadly.

We associate uncertainty with bad outcomes

because we have a negativity BIAS.

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Uncertainty is front and center on the world’s stage. Uncertainty is front and center in my personal life as well.

As I’ve been writing about in the past weeks, I’m being molded into the next version of me and it’s not a comfortable process. I’m tightly contained in the in-between, with very little room to move forward as the bridges that tied me to my past have all caught fire.

I guess that subway adventure was a pretty accurate representation of the overall arch of my current storyline... In both cases, I’m being asked to find my way home, while being immobilized where it hurts.

And that’s okay. Because pain is not a sign of danger: pain is here to say that intentional attention is required for us to feel safe again.

Pain is not here to hurt us, pain is here to show us that we need LOVE.

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It hurts when I sing…

It hurts when I sing.

That’s a truth I do not want to accept but Truth doesn’t really care if we agree with its existence or not. Truth is FIERCE! Truth is here to save our lives, not to keep us comfortable. Truth is here to show us the way home, not to make us feel at home where we don’t belong.

Once seeded inside of us, Truth has a mission and Truth will not be tamed or silenced: if we don’t want to hear or see it, we are the ones who need to close ourselves off… to ourselves.

We only ever have two choices: To embody our truth, or to leave our bodies.

It hurts when I sing, physically.

My lungs and rib cage are frozen in time, still bracing against the constant attacks of my childhood environment.

My neck has been mostly numb since the day my mother tightened her fingers around it… but when you sing, your larynx moves, and when a traumatized larynx moves, it hurts. This is not “bad” hurt. This is Nature finding a way back into movement, knowing that movement is LIFE! But it is painful nonetheless.

My back is trying to escape the wall she had pushed me against by pushing my sternum forward, which doesn’t allow the breath to flow from my lungs into the world in a way that fully supports my heartsong.

My left shoulder took the most of the impact as she was trying to push my mother back… and whenever my larynx moves or whenever I’m startled and inhale a bit too sharply, my shoulder tightens right back into an armor that is neither needed nor beneficial anymore: it got me through the worst once! It’s misguidedly keeping me from the best now...

My belly hardens and my right hip turns to stone when I need them most to melt into sound.

It hurts when I sing, emotionally too.

Because when you breathe, you feel. This is why it is so healing! This is why singing is not only life saving, it is life giving. Because singing is breathing EMBODIED. It’s breathing turned to form thanks to our hearts partnering with our vocal chords. It’s the purest form of alchemy.

AND it’s widely confronting.

If you have any kind of trauma (and if you’re alive, you do), singing will bring them forward so that they can be showered in Love.

And if like me you have singing related trauma, this phenomenon will be increased ten folds.

Singing is like a warm breeze thawing the ice that formed around those emotions that we didn’t know how to feel. The Grief that we couldn’t cry. The Fear that we couldn’t shake. The Anger that we couldn’t SCREAM. The Shame that we couldn’t comfort… This sense of too-muchness that so many of us carry on our weary shoulders. This sense of not-enoughness that we somehow all wrestle with while thinking that no one can understand what we feel.

Singing is Love and Love cares.

Love will not see wounds and just walk away. Love will ALWAYS come closer. Love knows we matter.

So, in that way, singing is the ultimate act of self-reclamation!

If we can let ourselves sing from the rawness of our inner being, and not only sing under the dogma of our internalized bullies.

If singing can be beautiful just because it is, and not only when it’s perfectly on pitch, perfectly balanced, perfectly accurate rhythmically.

And this is the promise I’m finally ready to make to myself:

To sing for the love of singing. To sing without an agenda, without asking my singing to be perfect or palatable—or even received. To sing because I NEED to. To sing because this is who I am and because my heartsong belongs in this world, whether I can trust that or not. To let myself know that I know that, because I know that it is true for you and absolutely everyone else! And I’m a part of everyone. To sing FOR my pain and not against it. To sing to come alive without asking my singing to support me in a way that I am not willing to support it.

When you breathe, you feel… and singing is breathing EMBODIED.

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The gift of Resistance

I was reminded of Newton’s third law this weekend and how RESISTANCE CREATES RESISTANCE. How this is the only way it can be.

We so often forget that the rules of Nature apply to us too, because we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that there’s Nature on one side and us on the other side. We think we own Nature. We think we are Her “guardians”. We forget that we ARE Nature—no more and no less than a bug, a lion, or a tree.

And so if resistance creates resistance, there’s something we need to relearn urgently in our culture!

Because we’ve been taught to FIGHT resistance (sigh: we’ve been taught to fight everything…) We’ve been told to push through the pain, to overcome it, to be at war with it, to kill it, to admonish it. And here is Resistance, that deeply loving part of us, just trying to tell us that we have a wound in need of tending BEFORE we can proceed.

Do we listen and say thank you? Of course not, we meet it with a sword. Digging the knife even deeper into our own cores, and losing the wisdom that was trying to help us not only grow, but heal…

So here’s my invitation this week dear CARE friend:

** What if instead of vilifying our resistance, we met it with reverence and humility?

Because our options are NOT limited to either attacking it or tuning away completely.

Because our options are NOT limited to breaking ourselves apart until all that’s left of our bodies are ashes OR just leaving our bodies completely to live from the neck up, thereby forfeiting our strongest connection to our own magic…

Because our best option when meeting Resistance is to STAY. To just stay with it, and to listen to what our deep soulful knowing is trying to reveal to our confused psyche.

Pain is not meant to make us move away, pain is here to ask us to lean in. Pain doesn’t call for speed or force, it requires slowness and LOVE.

** Can you identify one area in your life—maybe a small one, like a tiny resistance that you feel towards a hobby, or maybe the most vital one for your heart, as singing is to me— and can you invite Resistance into a conversation?

And notice that I wrote CONVERSATION: not a rant, not a debate, not a hostile interrogation, not an accusatory plea.

** Can you ask that part of you what it is trying to say to you? What is it trying to protect you from?

Because it IS trying to protect you: contrary to common beliefs, Resistance is not showing up to ruin your life! It is showing up because deep down it is convinced that it is the only way to save it.

** What is the unmet NEED driving all this?

Is it PERMISSION? If so, can you take the time to review the stories you inherited around doing what you loved or on how it is “selfish” to follow your dreams?

Is it SAFETY? If so, instead of badgering yourself for not having the capacity yet to show up in the way you want to be, can you move back on your own side? Can you start by acknowledging that you’re TRYING and that that is already SO beautiful and worthy? And then can you find a way to support yourself while you figure out how to overcome what feels so unsafe and arduous?

Is it REST? Are you just too tired, too overextended, are you just stretched so thin than even what you love requires too much energy? and, if so, how can you lower the stakes so that you can still show up for the love you deserve to feel TODAY, while adjusting your habits so that Rest can be reprioritized in the name of tomorrow?

Is it HELP? We have romanticized the idea of independence to the level of insanity in the west… but we do need each other! And it’s not only okay, it’s precious. And if you’ve ever been asked to help anyone for anything, you’ll know how invaluable, meaningful, energizing and heartwarming it is… and therefore what a GIFT it is to let someone else help us when we need it.

** Whatever it is, can you give it to yourself in the smallest way this week and let me know what happened, what changed, what shifted?

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Answers need questions to be born

I tried this approach earlier this week and asked my weary body what she needed, as I woke up achy, tender and feeling incapable of singing…

And my body replied: “I lose Love when I sing”!

When I sang as a kid, I was breaking the golden rule of staying silent, small and invisible until I was summoned and needed. At some point on my trauma journey, the only way I could survive was to numb everything out and for that I had to stop singing for 15 years. And since I’ve started singing again, I’ve been harassing my wounded body so that she would sing again the way I sang before being so deeply and repeatedly violated.

So I project on others the fear that they will hate me if I sing, that they will not like what they hear, that they will not listen and receive what I have to give… but I am the one doing this to me.

Indeed, I realized how unforgiving I had been to myself the night before when my larynx didn’t tilt the way I wanted in class, when my shoulder couldn’t unbrace fast enough for me to sing freely, when joy couldn’t find a way around the dam I have put around my emotions to survive.

I realized I had just been feeling unsafe! And ironically had become unsafe to myself in return.

I realized what my body wanted me to become aware of, and how much I needed that recognition: I am withholding love from myself for not singing in a way that allows me to love myself again (!)

I am so glad I listened to what Resistance had to say to me... I am so glad I am even more deeply understanding what’s happening to me.

I’m so glad to have realized that I’ve been singing as a prayer for self-reclamation, while shattering my own sense of self-allyship the second I start to sing.

What a hopeless pursuit that was! And so OF COURSE my body braced. Not because she didn’t want to comply… because she was trying to help me realize what was not working, what will never work.

Message received Body… I will do better. I will lean in.

Resistance was trying to help me realize what was not working.

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Your voice matters

Let’s all promise to each other now to operate with the underlying assumption that WE MAKE SENSE, and that there is a reason—a good, valid, IMPORTANT reason—for us to feel the way we feel.

Let’s move back on our own side with the gumption of a Mama Bear and the fierceness of a lioness.

And please please please consider tattooing on your heart that YOUR VOICE MATTERS: that is your voice, your heartsong, AND the voice of your pain.

What if it was the missing link we’ve all been searching for for so damn long?

WHAT. IF.

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

leo