The truth underneath it all

Where anger becomes joy and the darkness is just another form of light.

CARE.CHECK*: How often do you check your thoughts?

How often do you take the time to download them?

To study them.

To UNDERSTAND them.

Can you even fathom that thoughts can be choices? That they actually ARE choices already—be it consciously or by default.

Are you ready to feel your truth and meet the greatest love of your life?

If so please keep reading for inspiration and support.

I love you. 

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 Hi Care.Friend,

How are you?

What is shifting within you at this beautiful half-year mark? What is revealing itself to you as Summer comes to warm and shower us with light?

What are you letting go of as a new cycle begins? What are you ready to start?

Those are important questions to ponder. 

I’m learning more and more each day about the power of our thoughts and stories, and I'm humbled by the power we have to create the reality we’re looking at.

How nothing has to change for everything to look different. How everything can change and everything can feel the exact same way.

How it’s never about the outside world and yet, there’s no defining ourselves without it. How everything that happens matters both so much and so little at once.

How interdependence is found in a sacred commitment to independence, and how focusing only on independence prevents us from meeting our people. How we’re meant to be our only rock and savior—and at the same time how we need each other, so very much.

How everything is true on one level and untrue on the next—nonsensical even.

How the same feeling can feel like it’s going to destroy us or free us forever, depending on our capacity to connect with it or not.

How intuitive our language is—and how we still so often misguidedly use our words against ourselves and those we love.

How simple it all is at its core and yet how so profoundly complex it is, once put into form. 

I’m in awe of this human experience. Of what we’re being guided to learn and experience. Of how we get to choose to live with an open heart or with a guarded one. Of the courage it takes us to melt into our fears… and the reward that comes through a subsequent inner flood of love, that never fails to appear. How terrifying that inner well of love can feel when all we’ve known is separation and a scarcity mindset. How freeing it is to be ourselves—and how convinced we are that we can only be safely free if we’re like everybody else. How we always get it right but backwards.

Martha Beck always says that the left brain is masterful at collecting evidence, it just never draws the right conclusions. This is so hard to believe at first… and yet if you’re ever tried to do Byron Katie’s Work, studied the effects of a thought and then applied the opposite of that thought onto a situation, you know by experience how two things are almost ALWAYS true at once—and how the opposite of what we think is usually so much truer than the thought we were holding on to. 

It’s humbling. 

It’s magical…

It’s MIRACULOUS. 

Our liberation is never in the hands of those who oppress us, it’s always in our own hearts. What a relief… and what a responsibility.

Especially in a culture that disconnected us from all our sources of deepest wisdom—our bodies and Nature. Especially for those of us who have been raised against our awareness of that power of Love that created us (or into religions that tend to turn the Magic of Life into a scary old white man, who’s supposed to be on our side but is pretty much always very mad at us for some obscure reason). 

I inherited enough torturous beliefs about the human condition and the world to keep me occupied at my rewriting desk for a lifetime. This is the limit of thought work. We have way too many thoughts to be able to unroot each one of them one by one... But the good news is we don’t really have to. 

We can learn to think on purpose, as Brooke Castillo calls it. 

We can decide to sit with ourselves and really lean into OUR truth—that is the truth that doesn’t necessarily look true but feels true.

A truth that might seem uncomfortable, inconvenient, paradoxical or unpractical, but a truth that also feels like a glass of cold water amidst a heat wave, like a hug from the one you love most right before falling on the floor in tears, like a rainbow after the longest storm, or a hot chocolate in February. A truth that feels like softening, opening, expanding and breathing fully—maybe for the very first time. A truth that might be vertiginous but that also feels exhilarating. A truth that might sound like a tragic ending and yet also brings up the promise of the beginning we’ve been waiting for a LIFETIME.

A truth that allows us to finally fall back in love with our bodies and to melt back into them as a result. To understand that numbness and excruciating pain might be the first sensations we reconnect with… But that it is worth it. So worth it. Because underneath it all our dreams are dancing still, undeterred,  and a quiet joy we had forgotten existed can greet us, enliven us and remind us of our true nature.

A truth that changes everything because suddenly…

… we can surrender our perspective to a greater power, to the healing kiss of unconditional love. We can let our troubles fall onto the floor—and finally retrieve the ability to really see them for what they are, now that we’re not carrying them on exhausted shoulders. We can let gravity ground us and welcome the guidance of the sky.

Suddenly, we can give ourselves the permission to start again, to revert to a blank page, to start both from scratch AND from experience. We can relearn how to trust our gut and bow to our heart—thereby freeing our minds from a burden they were never meant to take on. We can let our essence inform our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, instead of our broken culture.

Suddenly, we have agency. We have choices.

I did not know that this kind of truth is always available before. I still forget it so often. But I'm living that truth more and more, and watch everything morph, shift, change.

I feel different every day and at the same time so much more myself each minute. I’m successfully unlearning patterns of being I’ve been scripted in for three decades and it feels unsettling, dizzying, wild, dangerous almost. And I’m reconnecting with parts of me that know that my dreams matter, that my joy is sacred and that there is nothing, NOTHING, to be afraid of. Ever.

It feels like a rebirth. It feels like freedom. It feels like love.

I’m reclaiming parts of my body that have been so numb I thought they were gone forever.

Sensations are slowly coming back in my pelvis and in my throat. They both bring back the pain, horror and anguish that led them to close up for the better part of my existence. Yes. Of course.

Because as my coach always reminds me, the pain that got in and couldn’t be felt then needs to be felt now to come out.

But it is worth it again and again, because—as a human being and as a singer—they are also the parts of my body that are meant to bring me the most incredible physical joy.

And so that journey is not only worth it, it feels holy, empowering, necessary and like MAGIC.

It feels like the purest form of love.

It feels like being embraced back into a home I had never known I was a part of.

It’s vulnerable, terrifying, tender—and it’s, once again, miraculous.

One part of me that got awakened last week was incredibly angry—but in such a different way from any anger I experienced before!

That anger did not feel heavy, constricting or thought narrowing. That anger felt like joy.

JOY!

I know… Counterintuitive, right?

But it really did.

And all that that anger was asking me to do was to tell my truth kindly to those I love, to leave those suffocating rooms I don’t need to trap myself into anymore… and to DANCE.

That anger made me see all those so-called problems I’m facing as precious opportunities to laugh and create even more art. To own my freedom.

That anger didn’t feel like the urge to change anyone else’s choices or behaviors, it felt like being me, fully, unapologetically, at last. That anger was not waiting for anybody’s apology—that anger couldn’t care less about what anyone thinks about me—that anger was only focused on getting one promise out of me:

the promise that I am done underestimating me.

That anger made me dance into my light until my shadow could see how brilliant this world is. That anger made me promise I would never ever use my shadow again to hide from my light, because my light needs me.

That anger did not ask me to hit the walls, it invited me to dance for hours. All alone in my apartment. I danced like I hadn’t danced in a decade. I danced for the sheer joy of it—angry, free, celebrating the darkness and worshiping the gold that never fails to come out of it. Dancing, laughing, singing on top of my lungs.

Unraveling.

Reappearing.

Celebrating all the wounds that might never heal completely, and all the scars that will never be erased. Celebrating all the bruises, the inner breaks, the shattered veins that were never loved back to wholeness. Celebrating all those who humiliated me because they didn’t know that words kill more young people than guns ever will. Celebrating those who still don’t understand why I left, and who vilify my intent, because that’s so much easier to project blame than to look in the mirror. Celebrating the fact that I could never run away from my own eyes, no matter how fast I ran, and that my songs brought me back to life. They guided me back into my traumatized body. They reopened my heart. They soothed my mind. My songs saved my life. Celebrating the gut-wrenching depth of this life’s experience—and all the kindness and compassion that Grief and Shame came to teach me so patiently. Celebrating all the chains that still suffocate my lungs and weigh on my stomach. Celebrating all those that came into my life only to teach me that those we love can die in an instant... Celebrating all my wrong choices that tied me to a cross I didn’t know I was responsible for burning. Celebrating the fire, the alchemy. Celebrating the burn, the agony. Celebrating the redirection. Celebrating where it led me.

And that’s when it hit me. Why so many people will not accept that rejection is only redirection… Because you can only see the redirection IF you let it redirect you.

Because you can only understand that it was good and kind and oh so loving, once you’ve let yourself break open, collapse into a puddle of melted identities, until the fire dries it all away and turns everything you believed in into ashes… and once you can discover the phoenix within. 

Only after the rebirth can you know why you had to die this way. Only if you let Life redirect you will you understand that you were indeed on a path that was leading you nowhere fast. Only then. ONLY IN THE AFTERMATH.

I believe that’s what Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard meant when he wrote “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Today I am so grateful to those who were brave enough to hurt me. They led me back to the only one who could save me. They guided me back into my heart.

They guided me away from where I wanted to lose myself, so that I could find my way in.

I am so grateful for my story. I wish I could have learned it all another way... Obviously. I’m not grateful I had to endure it. But I am grateful for all that happened within me thanks to it.

I’m grateful there’s always a sign that I’m not where I belong when I’m not when I’m meant to be. I’m grateful the Universe has my back and is ready to break it if that’s the only way to reconnect me to my truest dreams.

I’m grateful it hurt everywhere I tried to exist but where I was singing. That’s how I knew that singing was not a hobby or a luxury. That’s how I learned what singing means to ME.

That’s how I knew that Art saves lives—and that devoting my life to the arts was therefore just as precious and life saving as medicine! If not more…

Because Art is also life GIVING. And what could be more sacred than that?

I’m grateful I get to be me, and that includes every part of my story.

Andrea Gibson wrote:

“I said to the sun, “Tell me about the Big Bang.”

The sun said, “It hurts to become.””

May you revisit your life and rewrite it ALL as the Big Bang. 

May you realize that it was just what it took to create YOU as powerful, breathtakingly beautiful, eternal and expansive as the Universe. 

May you receive yourself as the work of art that you are, and know that you cannot erase what happened to you nor decide everything about tomorrow… BUT that, right here, right now, you’re the one holding the pen that will determine everything. 

Because you’re the one who gets to decide what it means.

I’ll leave you with the lyrics of my latest song about Anger: ‘Finally.’

May you be gloriously angry, joyous, YOU, at peace… and free. 

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

Always,

leo