Rock bottom... and Awe.

How a tree, a canyon, a song... how AWE can change the course of your entire life in a few fated seconds (and why we need awe more than ever now)

CARE check*: What gives you Awe?

Do you know?

Is it Nature, is it Art, is it Love?

Could you cultivate this relationship with awe, seek it out, romance it and bow to it this week?

Can you make it a priority?

Can you treat it as the most precious resource and as if your life depended on it?

Because it DOES.

I hope this week’s letter can highlight those parts of the healing journey that we do not talk about enough yet—and that we’re called to bring back to the forefront of our existence as our world so urgently needs healing and repair.

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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?

One of my favorite shows ever closed on Broadway last week. I did get to see it three times and there’s a cast recording to hold on to, so I won’t complain too much… but I had hoped it would run for much longer than it did. It actually closed after only three months after receiving no Tony nominations. It was led by Idina Menzel and centered on the most majestic californian creatures: REDWOODS. It was raw, deep, enchanting and cathartic. It was the medicine we needed in a culture that struggles to remember where true healing comes from.

And I believe it was profoundly misunderstood…

… because it was showing the true colors of unprocessed grief.

Our heroine was at the end of her rope and that made her desperate, brash, demanding, and incapable of dealing with anyone else’s emotions or struggles but her own. She was not pleasing, she was not self-sacrificing, she was not nice nor nurturing. She was no longer willing (or able) to pretend that you can still function in a world hollowed by loss, as if nothing had ever happened…

So in a nutshell, she was breaking a lot of the rules that get you accepted as a woman in our society—especially a woman who has had the audacity to outgrow her twenties.

… and because it was not about some grand heroic quest won thanks to the boldness of one’s courage and sword, it was about the journey within.

It was about meeting your edge and surrendering to it, instead of ruthlessly fighting to overcome it—as our culture instructs us to do even at times within the most well-intended healing spaces. It was about bowing to that inner collapse until it can turn us into the ashes needed for our inner phoenix’s rebirth.

It was about the death of what no longer serves and soul reembodiment.

It was about coming back home to the sacredness of Nature to be nursed back into wholeness, instead of numbing out the pain as if caring was a character flaw.

As the one-year anniversary of her son’s death approaches, Jesse, our main character, snaps and leaves New York—and her wife— on a whim, without a note or any explanation. She gets into her car and starts driving, running away from any cues that would remind her of her son’s deadly overdose and from any feeling trying to finally be acknowledged and felt through. She drives on and on until she arrives to the Redwood National Forest… and that’s when something suddenly shifts within her.

A beautiful moment follows in which she’s just walking among the trees and starts humming as if remembering how to breathe for the first time in a decade... And she doesn’t know it yet, but she’s fallen in love. Or should I say, she’s fallen back into love.

Because that’s what Awe will do to you. It restarts your entire life by awakening your heart, thereby reminding YOU where the source of it all comes from..

Now this moment resonated through the marrow of my bones because I know this feeling by heart. Yes, I know it by experience.

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Rock bottom

I first reached rock bottom on my own journey in 2015, the year I turned 30. I was frantically climbing the ladder of Medicine and Academia, convinced that the absolution I had been dreaming of since birth was waiting for me at the top, and therefore fully committed to the path I was on. I was completely oblivious to how far away from my center I had strayed, severed from my love for singing and for New York, and resigned to live as a martyr since it was the most noble way to justify a life of constant suffering and self-denial.

I remember thinking that other people seemed to have figured out how to do joy and that it made sense to spare them from the duty of the oncology ward. After all, cancer had been part of my life since I was a little kid, so it made sense to keep my curse all to myself and dedicate my life to it so that other people would be able to spend their entire existence shielded from the reality of that disease.

I had no notion of my own PTSD and thought I was being practical and disciplined. I thought God had a message for me and that the message was that I had done something terribly wrong at one point and that it was my job to make up for it now.

I wish I could hug 30 yo me… and I hope that through this page, I am somehow sending her some of the energy that allowed her to keep going.

And so I turned 30 on January 4th, trusting that my redemption act was working and that this decade would be lighter than the last! I fully trusted this until January 7th… the day when the therapist who had allowed me to pull through my teenage years was killed in a terrorist attack.

I hadn’t seen her in the past two years, because residency had felt too demanding to sit on a chair and talk about everything I was so deeply committed to avoiding… but she still felt like my safety net and like my lighthouse in the storm. I had no home to come back to, so she was the closest representation of a safe haven that my heart could hold on to.

She also felt like the only one who truly knew me. At that time, most people around me thought that my mother was dead and that I just had a slightly troubled relationship with my stepmom. Not that I ever outwardly lied, but people assumed... I only referred to my mother as my father’s wife and they knew I had lost a parental figure in my youth and that it was the reason I was training as an oncologist. So it made sense! And it made it all so much funnier and acceptable for everyone.

For many, not talking to your mother is a crime, while not talking to your step parent is self-respect, even if the reasons for not talking to them are the same. We tend to worship blood relations to the point of forgetting that our true essence is not blood but Love.

And so here I was, “alone again… naturally”.

I hope that through this page,

I am somehow sending 30yo leo some of the energy

that allowed her to keep going.

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A choice to make

Now there’s another feature of this unfortunate plot twist that was going to change my life forever. Because as you probably have experienced when someone you deeply care about dies, every conversation you ever had with them tends to start playing on repeat in your head, whether you’re on board with the program or not. And when those conversations were between an abused teenager and her therapist, those conversations are not warm, fuzzy and fun...

Which can be even more disturbing when you’re trying to live knee deep in denial that any parts of your story that didn’t fit the narrative of the happy childhood you yearned for ever existed.

My bubble burst in the most violent way and that’s when the flashbacks started to become daily occurrences. All the inner voices of my younger wounded parts started to scream at me and that year felt like the longest descent through hell.

And you know what the saddest part was? I couldn't call my therapist to help me go through any of it.

In any case, that tragedy—as tragedies often do—started my healing journey.

Maya Angelou did teach this to us all through Oprah:

“Whatever happens say thank you, Darling. Because you know God has put a rainbow in this cloud.”

This promise has been my lifeline more than once [and it has yet to let me down]!

So that summer I had a choice. Ending my journey on Earth or finding another way to relate to myself and to the world.

One particularly hot and steamy summer night, I chose the former option… and right after making that decision, something rose up from the deepest part of my being and I started singing “AFTER THE STORM” from Mumford and Sons.

I had just discovered this gem of a group the week before and I didn’t know I knew that song by heart! But my heart was not going to let me give up, so she sent me the anthem that I needed to hear and sing to hold on to this precious existence. And it worked.

I was never the same after that night. I had been rocked back to life by Rock bottom and gratitude slowly replaced hopelessness as my daily companion.

I started meditating and started to build a new relationship with Life. I reconnected with my story and started remembering not only the horrors of my past but what had brought me joy through it all: I remembered that I loved singing and that I loved New York. I had reasons to live for beyond the Oncology ward.

I wasn’t ready to start walking to my dream again yet… but I stopped running in the opposite direction.

I stilled myself where I was… and I can now see how it all ultimately led me back to my heartsong in New York!

“Whatever happens say thank you, Darling.

Because you know God has put a rainbow in this cloud.”

— Maya Angelou

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The Grand Canyon

Unfortunately, in November 2016, I started what would be the equivalent of a fellowship in the US and that slowly brought me back into all my old patterns. There was no time to meditate, dream or breathe (or so I told myself).

Martyrdom claimed me to its cause again, and it was a brutal year of self-denial, inner boundaries trumpling, exhausting hours at the hospital and gut wrenching baths into my patients’—and my own—desperation.

For a year I lived in apnea and was slowly withering away, but the good news (I guess?) is that I hadn’t started any kind of treatment for my PTSD, so even if the bone-deep exhaustion helped numb it out somewhat, I couldn’t completely forget again neither what had happened to me… NOR how I had survived as a kid: By singing and by dreaming of becoming a New Yorker.

I also remembered a very healing trip in California, where I had been hosted by the most loving family for three weeks in San Luis Obispo. I remembered the embrace of the desert and the awe that imbued the desert nights, even if I had no words for Nature’s embrace yet—I was way too disconnected from my body at the time to be able to feel the body of the Earth.

So that summer I started singing lessons again… and I also planned a beautiful road trip on route 66 with a friend.

The first few days felt more like punishment than relief as my back gave out when we arrived. I was in unbelievable pain that was only made worse by the constant driving from one motel to the next. But then we arrived at the Grand Canyon… and something changed me forever.

The view that restarted my life

I stepped out of the car right after the park entrance and took in the ocean of beauty that was standing majestically, and unapologetically, in front of my eyes. At first it took my breath away, but then it gave me back the breath of life. I felt tears in my eyes, coming from the innermost corner of my heart and my body suddenly came back to life.

I remained intensely emotional for our three days there—which was probably even more annoying to my avoidant friend than my back pain had been prior to that! But honestly… I didn’t care. That man was the epitome of selfishness and the first cracks to my addiction to codependency had been made by the healing Beauty of the Canyon.

That was a before/after moment in my life that I had no words for or context at the time. I had no idea what was happening to me, I just knew that there was no point in resisting it… and that it was good.

I knew that even if tears and emotions felt like a death sentence at the time, in this special context, I was safe.

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The curse has been broken

I believe that’s what we see unfolding within Jesse when she first sees the Redwoods… and I believe this is why she then harasses the couple of foresters she meets, as she begs them to first let her climb one of the trees and then to let her live for a few days on a platform built in one of them (a Mother tree called Stella).

I remember trying to convince my travel companion to stay just for one more day in the Canyon (and obviously I would have begged for us to stay just one more day after that too) but there was no keeping him away from Las Vegas.

The contrast between what I had just experienced in the world’s greatest open sky cathedral and the way I felt when entering Sin city (which was just recovering from a terrorist attack a month earlier, to add to the traume reenactment) is hard to put into words now. My nervous system went into complete shock, and I ended up hiding in the hotel spa’s zen room until it was finally time to leave.

Again, I couldn't understand any of this at the time, but of course, it makes perfect sense to me now.

Healing is not “achieved” in just one moment of course, it’s a lifelong journey.

But every journey is made of steps, and some of those steps will irremediable change the course of your life.

Those moments can be hard to identify right away because, even though everything changed in that second—for and within you—at the level that matters most, nothing seems to have changed in your external world for weeks or maybe months or even years after that! But the spell has been cast. The curse has been broken.

The seed has been planted in your heart and your inner Redwood is getting ready to sprout and support you forever more…

As the story unfolds, Jesse finds herself again thanks to the shelter and sanctuary provided by Tree Stella. She meets her anguish, her deepest fears, her crippling guilt AND she rekindles with her sense of playfulness and joy. She meets herself and remembers that she’s so much more than the stories that torture her weary mind, as she finally lets her grief wash over her.

And a few beautiful songs later, she ends up alone on a platform near Stella’s top, while a fire journeys through the forest. That’s when she reconnects with this resiliency that beats our hearts and inhabits every fiber of Nature in the same way that it enlivens each cell of our bodies. She then dies to her old self and awakens reborn, after finally letting herself dream of her son and receiving his song from the ether.

She now has a long road back to New York, a marriage to rebuild and a whole new existence to birth into form… but she has remembered what feeling whole means—and she will never be the same after that.

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We can’t repair in fixing mode

So, no, nothing is “solved” by the end of the show because it’s not a show about fixing, it’s about repair.

It’s about understanding that even when we’re convinced that we’re broken beyond any hope of relief (as she angrily explains when one of the foresters shares her belief that we, as part of Nature, have the ability to overcome everything), repair will happen through us when we stop running away from a loss that has already happened. When we stop trying to outrun a feeling that lives under our very skin. When we stop rejecting what is and pause long enough to let it transform us back into Love.

This show is a treasure that I will forever be grateful for. I hope we’ll get a revival, and that by then we’ll all have moved back into our hearts so steadily that we can understand the lesson and promise that the musical represents.

In the meantime, the fact that this story made it to Broadway at all already feels like such a beautiful sign of how much our consciousness has evolved.

We’re going through extremely challenging times as hate and terror parade daily on the forefront of our awareness and news channels… But let’s remember again the words of the Earth angels and wise women that paved the way for us so that we would know what to hold on to in times of struggle:

Let’s remember Maya Angelou’s promise because there is a rainbow in every cloud… and thus clouds are by nature rainbow incubators.

It is the paradox of Life on Earth: good spurs not only from good but also from bad.

Earth school delivers us a very hard curriculum but we are not fragile egoic creatures, we are embodied love. We have what it takes to alchemize lovelessness into love because the cure is the name of what ails us!

Lovelessness is the only challenge we ever truly come across—be it in a million different forms—and so Love is only ALWAYS the answer, the solution, the antidote.

And because Love is born from the inside out, finding Love means and requires finding OURSELVES.

But the good news is that, as Jesse demonstrated, even if you run away to the furthest distance you can muster, you can only ever run towards yourself—and Love is always going to be there, with open arms, to welcome us into the most healing, warm and powerful embrace.

So let us trust our joy, and let us trust our pain, my dear CARE friend.

Our emotions are not obstacles to overcome, they are the portals to enter. They’re not the executioners, they’re our guardian angels. They are not there to end us, they’re here to show us that whatever happens, we can—and we will—begin again.

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

leo