The way home is a scary one

But that's okay because we're not meant to stop there.

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CARE.CHECK*: What is one dream you have? Something that is more than a goal, something that comes from Soul—not mind. 

Something you think about constantly, or something you haven’t allowed yourself to think about in years.

What do you think would happen if that dream came true? 

How would you feel? How would you wake up in the morning? What would you tell yourself when you go to bed at night? Can you take a moment to really think about it, to visualize it, to feel into it?

It might seem like a trivial exercise, but it’s actually an extremely important one.

Why does it matter so much? Keep reading for context and support on your way home (because that’s what our dreams are… that’s how sacred they are).

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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, Rick discovered Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by AI Gwyneth Paltrow :)

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 Hi Care.Friend!

How have you been my lovely human? How does Earth look like to you at the moment?

How does your inner weather impact your world?

As I was mentioning last week, times are somewhat tough for me at the moment. I’m surrounded by a lot of walls and I’m under a lot of rain. And those are not walls that protect me from the downpour. They are walls that seemingly keep me from where I’m trying to go to find shelter from the storm.

As I was telling my closest friend, Aline, earlier today, the only thing that keeps me afloat right now is when I remind myself to look for meaning in everything that happens, to remember that I know it’s painting a broader picture I just can’t fully grasp yet, and that everything is happening for me (and not against)…

That doesn’t mean I feel good or grateful at all times, and to be quite honest it feels mostly like dying and I’m lucky to have had a solid gratitude practice for years, because if I was just starting out, it would be impossible for me to tune into that healing energy. To connect with the unfaltering beauty of the roses that surround me while I type or with that sunbeam dancing on the building across the street, as if to say “here honey, see how easy it can get.” 

Also on the topic of appreciation, one person who’s always high on my list of reasons to feel full of thanks and awe is Aline. And I don’t believe I’ve ever told you about her!!

So here’s the little tribute I had written in her honor on Valentine’s day, when Liz Gilbert prompted us on her magical substack, Letters from Love (do a favor to your heart, and check it out if you haven’t already) to write a love note about our favorite human:

“I met Aline nine years ago—when we were both residents—and from our group of 5, we were the least close for the first six months. We went along very well but we were also very different.

And then one evening, all 5 of us gathered for drinks and I felt this overwhelming need to leave at once AND to hug Aline. It made no sense to my brain (I was NOT a hugger back then) but my heart held no doubt... I hugged Aline with all the love that lives in me and went home to cry.

Little by little, we grew closer and closer, and since 2019 she has been my beacon of hope, safety and kindness. That's when I started my trauma healing journey, when everything stopped and began again, and when I decided to leave everything (my country, Medicine, my ten year plans, my trauma bonds and my beliefs) and to cross the ocean to embody my lifelong dream: singing in New York.

She never says what I expect her to say—just like Love. She listens with her whole being and only speaks from her heart. She's teaching me what love looks and feels like, as I slowly rebuild the landscape of my inner world.

She helped me find permission to sing, to write, to breathe, to dream... and to come alive. She is the sun in human form: radiant, beautiful, generous beyond words and the embodiment of compassion.

She's a creative, a fountain of care, a magical mother and a unicorn woman.

She loves animals and rainbows and children... and she's my friend, and she is the proof I hold to, when Fear begs me for proof that we can indeed trust Love and Life.”

And so what is the meaning I’m finding in my current ordeal?

It’s the felt realization of how important it is to care and dedicate our all to our sacred dream. 

Why?

Because on our way to our dream, we become who we were meant to be, which is who we’ve actually always been—underneath it all, underneath the fears, the self-doubt, the defenses. It’s who we are at our center, at our core. It’s who we are in our purest form. It’s soul energy meant to take a human form… and to do that, we must carve the angel we are, out of the stone we’re stuck in—to be build on Michaelangelo’s insights. 

Because the angel is already here, our job is only to dig for it. And I’ve come to believe that we somehow choose the life we’re here to live, as well as our own unique divine assignment… and that we receive the necessary set of challenges for us to carry the exact armor we’re meant to outgrow and then free ourselves from, in order to find our way home. 

Home being our heart… that sacred temple inside our chest where our dream lives as a spark, only waiting for our love and care to turn into a wild awe-inspiring and nurturing fire.

Some of us were lucky enough to have parents who looked for our spark from the moment they met us. They helped us understand how to tend to it and how to allow it to grow and glow, since our arrival on Earth. But that “some of us” is a very small minority of us. 

And even then, many other challenges come on the way of the dreamer to make sure that they don’t get lost in their mind and plans, and that they awaken to this extraordinary adventure we call Life—thereby understanding that it is not about worldly achievements, it’s about a divine calling to become the light we were sent here to bestow. 

That’s my current understanding of Life and that feels true in every fiber of my being.

In a recent letter that I downloaded from Love, she wrote that obstacles are the path. That they’re not an anomaly, they’re not a glitch, a mistake or an inconvenience, they’re needed and vital for our dream to come true.

And it makes sense to me, because here’s what I’ve discovered: to come back to the center of our being—where our spark awaits to become a manifested dream—we need to face every wound, every fear, every ounce of self-doubt, every lie we learned growing up about the so-called bad and the so-called good, and about what is supposed to be right and what is supposed to be wrong (and don’t get me started on who’s supposed to be God because that hateful soulless white patriarch I was introduced to as a child is a scary concept that needs NOT to be discussed on this page).

“ A divine calling to become the light we were sent here to share with others.” 

And I can see it all so clearly now… How that journey has unfolded within and for me.

Yes, it was hard to go through Med school and become a physician. Yes, there was a lot of imposter syndrome to reckon with, and I did sacrifice my youth on the altar of a system that destroys more than it heals, which is a heartbreaking realization… but it was never nearly as hard as it has been for me to find my way back to singing. Because I was mostly wrestling with our culture’s demons, which is one of the best ways to escape from our inner ones.

And on my way from Med school and to the mic, I made a lot of 1° turns that allowed me to experiment with this process of realignment. So I’m happy to share what I’ve learned so far.

Interestingly, the journey from physician to coaching was tough but easier than the journey back to writing and learning how to share what I write… and that was nothing and is still nothing in comparison to my journey to sharing my songs and singing voice—even if only with myself, even when I’m alone. Once again, the closer we move back to center, the most magical it gets AND the more trauma healing it takes.

Finding the courage to jump off the ladder I had been climbing for more than a decade in France to start it all in New York took a lot of self-work and trauma healing. So I naively thought that once I would have crossed the ocean I would be done. I thought I would have arrived and could finally live out the joyous, magical, creative life I never got a chance to taste when I was a child. 

“ Wrestling with our culture’s demons,

is one of the best ways

to escape from our inner ones.”

But that's not the way it works.

Because Life doesn’t owe us compensation for what we went through… and also because, as Anais Nin among others taught us, we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. 

So the more we come back to the center of our being, into alignment, into integrity, the more aware we also become of all our unhealed wounds, all our scars, all our limiting beliefs and all those protective mechanisms we call “I”. 

Indeed, our sense of identity is mostly crafted out of protective parts, who have adopted a pattern of self-talk meant to keep us in check and on the least dangerous path. The path of fitting it, of making sure to follow the steps that were prescribed to us and that must be followed in an order that looks acceptable to others. A path on which we constantly adapt to our environment, living in a constant state of hypervigilance and numbness—while playing roles that are meant to keep us safe but only make us feel drained and lost. 

So basically the opposite of the path that we’re meant to pave for ourselves, through the light that permeates through our heart from our spark, and on the way to the dream we’re literally meant to bring into life.

And as Carl Jung highlighted: “If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's”

On our way to our center, we meet every layer of our armor: 

Every thought we’ve learned to put on a loop so that they can keep us on track, and that ends up only keeping us stuck. Every emotion we didn’t know how to feel or that we were allowed to meet and breathe through, before releasing it into the world. Every behavior that comes from a misguided culture or well-intended adults that taught us how to perform, instead of teaching us how to lead from the heart, because they didn’t know how. Every pattern inherited from generational trauma. Every fear that we’ve never known how to love. Every ounce of anger that we turned towards ourselves because we were told expressed anger was dangerous or inacceptable. Every tear we were not allowed—or showed—how to cry. 

All of it is stored inside of us and the closer we walk back toward our dreams, the less we can ignore any of it. 

And that’s the reason why so many of us never find the courage to go back in and recommit to the treasure that is hiding right beneath that surface we call skin.

Because it hurts.

It really does…

It’s scary to the point of feeling life threatening. Making our dreams come true doesn’t happen by walking idly on a golden road surrounded by rainbows and daisies. It requires us to enter the darkest forests, loneliest deserts, and most cutthroat prisons of our inner world. It demands that we let ourselves burn into rage in the fire of our anger and that we dive in the abyss of an ocean of grief and sorrow that words cannot help us to understand.

Because our dream is going to cost us everything we thought we were and thought we needed to have, until we can BE again everything that we truly are and connect with the beauty of our authentic needs.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's”

Carl Jung

I went through it all to leave Paris and find my way to New York. I remember the agony. I remember the terror… The griefful days and the nights of anguish. The relationships that crumbled, and the self-connection that slowly rewired what feels true or not.

I remember that it also felt like everything was falling apart and that there was no way to foresee if anything would come out of the rubbles. 

And I know IT’S WORTH IT.

I’m going through it now on my way back to singing and I’m rewriting what agony and terror feel like in my bones. I feel like everything is breaking, bleeding, purging, without any access to help or hope.

Because you don’t only face your self-doubt and your fears on the way in, you also take a deep dive in the quicksand of your self-loathing, while you blindly look for the roots of your self-hatred. And that means connecting to all the trauma that disconnected you from yourself in the first place—from those mundane daily attacks on our humanness, to the intergenerational curses that sever entire families from their humanity. 

And yet I know what’s on the other side.

So again, I know IT’S WORTH IT. 

I know better than to give up, because I’ve been here before and I know, I KNOW, it’s the way forward—and that when you feel like you’re dying, you’re being reborn.

And being birthed is anything but a smooth and sweet process... It’s bloody, it’s messy, it’s a leap into the unknown and an act of complete surrender you can never take back. It’s trusting that there is light at the end of the tunnel, while suffocating in the dark.

I hadn’t realized that flying over the ocean was only the first step of a journey that would take me a lifetime to complete. I hadn’t realized that one goodbye doesn’t release 35 years of trauma. I mean of course I knew… but I then confused denial with hope.

What I hadn’t realized was that I had only scratched the surface by reconnecting to the story of it all, before I was ready to feel any of its impact.

I thought thinking and speaking about it would heal me... I thought lifting the veil of denial was the only act of bravery I would be required to unleash. I was still lost in the idea that our mind is what defines us. And I thought that remembering I had a body and a heart would be enough for me to move back into them. I was innocent.

“You can’t heal what you can’t feel” wrote holocaust survivor, psychologist and Earth angel-woman, Edith Eger, in her beautiful healing guide called The Gift.

And I’m feeling right now. I’m feeling it all.

I wouldn’t wish my inner experience to my worst enemy… and yet I wish the sacredness of what I also know I’m reconnecting to to each and everyone of you.

On your way to your dreams, you’re going to meet all your inner demons. But the good news, my darling Care.friend, is that those demons are actually deeply loving creatures that are only waiting for a kiss, a kind hello, and a genuine “I LOVE YOU” (key word: genuine) to turn into spirit guides. And those spirit guides will then commit to your dream in ways beyond your wildest hopes for support.

And I want you and me to know that WE’VE GOT THIS.

We were made for this.

For what entrapped us within our armors AND for the dream inside of us that has the power to melt that armor on its way out into the world. 

And when we lose our faith and forget how to rekindle our spark, we’ve got each other. 

We’re here to remind each other of how precious, strong, worthy and loved we are.

The trick is to not get lost INTO each other, and to remember that our only job is to lovingly send everyone back into the sanctuary of their own hearts.

So let’s go home now… Let’s make our dreams come true.

THAT’S how we’ll heal our world.

[I’ll be taking a much needing break next week, so there won’t be a new Care.Check before March 28.]

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

Always,

leo