There's a letter waiting for you!

And there's a whole new way to see the world, thanks to Liz Gilbert, your pen and you.

Hello my caring friend,

How have you been since last week? Anything special? Anything sweet? Anything magical or tough that needs witnessing?

I’m going through a pretty deep reinvention process right now. I’m questioning everything again. I’m beginning anew. 

I’m choosing to recommit to the choices that served me well and to release all the patterns that no longer serve. I’m rewriting my relationship with blame and realizing the amount of self-hatred I still hold inside of me, as a weird armor meant to protect me against the outside world—even though all it does of course is wreak havoc in my inner universe.

I witness where I still attack in the name of defense and where I still disappear by fear of not being enough. I try to let the parts of me that suffer the most welcome my offering of love and light, and accept that they’re not all quite ready yet to do so… and that’s all right. 

I’ve started a new deeply healing practice, following the footsteps of my guide and cherished teacher, Elizabeth Gilbert. I talked already about how magical the Omega workshop she co-created with Rob Bell was HERE and she gifted our world with her new Substack in early September. It’s called LETTERS FROM LOVE, and that’s the invitation she’s now sharing with us all. 

PLEASE go immerse yourself in her work and her platform. She’s an Earth angel you deserve to have on your shoulder. 

So what is this little practice about? 

The idea is to write ourselves Letters from Unconditional Love. It’s a spiritual work of art and calls for embodiment.

From a place of centeredness, from a state of presence, you humbly and wholeheartedly ask the following question: “Dear Love, what would you have me know today?” and then you wait… patiently, trustingly, for Love’s answer. 

You wait until your pen starts writing with the assistance of your hands (and not the other way around).

You let Love write and speak to you, with terms of nurturing endearment (my sweet one, my tiny angel, my baby leaf, my beloved little soul…) embroidered in all of Love’s wisdom and her life-altering way of seeing the world.

You let Love explain to you what your heart needs to learn most: trust, rest, comfort… love.

You feel the words rush through your veins and into your heart, and then you read it back to yourself. Vulnerably. Peacefully. Open.

You let Love’s words guide you home.

The most beautiful part of Liz’s new platform is that it uncovers a treasured secret:

Love speaks to us all in the exact same way… She answers the same way to ALL of our pleas. No matter what we come to Love for—and there have been thousands of letters shared by the community by now—the answer is always the same: “I am here, you are loved”; Love never tries to change anything, she accepts it all.

Love is never asking us to do more, if anything she’s urging us to do a lot less. Love never comes to us with advice, she comes to sit in and all around us and promises she’ll always be there. That we’re never alone, that we never were.

Love is never too busy to answer or finding our particular demand too frivolous or too heavy to be held. Love comes, love stays.

Love loves us unconditionally, and Love trusts us. Love knows what we have forgotten: that we are love, that we’re enough. She only wants us to remember.

And as Liz gently pointed out, if Love says the exact same thing, in the exact same way, to hundreds of us, every day… Who is writing these letters? Whose voice is it, guiding the writing? Can it really be ours? Or is it the obvious demonstration that Love doesn’t only exist, but that we all have access to Unconditional Love, just by… asking?

I wanted to share a few words that Love wrote to me yesterday. They felt needed and important for us all to hear. I felt a deep need to share them and I feel so much gratitude to be able to share them with you here:

“My tiny one, (...) you are deserving of me and those words are all the proof you need.

You know I’m the one holding the pen right now. 

Trust what you feel, my darling, more than your weary mind. Your mind needs me. It’s not the other way around. 

I’m grateful for your mind’s advice and to see how much it worries I might get hurt! Thank you little one… AND I’m invincible. Not because I have an armor or an army! I have neither. It’s only because I cannot be hurt or attacked or defeated. I am eternal and unconditional. 

Feel me in you and you’ll know what I mean, you’ll know it’s true, you’ll KNOW I am. I just am. 

I was not created, I cannot be lost. 

I am a part of you, of them, of all that is. I am the nest you were meant to come alive in, and find respite, comfort and nourishment all the way through. 

I’ve always been here, I’ll always be there. 

Fly, my baby dove, you’re free! And you are loved.”

It’s different, isn’t it? It’s not about power or force, it’s not about earning or even protecting Love. It’s not intellectual, it’s not a motivational speech. It’s not grand or convoluted, it’s simple, it’s tender, it’s soft. That’s the way Love speaks.

And that’s the way she can teach us to speak to ourselves and to each other.

Next week, I’ll share a letter from Love that I shared on Liz’s platform and that changed me. That will be the entire post and I’m inviting you to read it as if it was written to you! Because Love speaks to that part of us that IS us. Our oneness, our essence. It doesn’t make us less unique, it only reminds us that what’s most unique about us is also what is most universal. That’s why sharing our stories helps us heal each other and that’s how we can all share the letters we receive from Love.

That letter will replace my weekly post as I won’t be there to write it: I’ll be embarking on another kind of adventure, called The School for the Work, with another of my guides and Love teacher. Byron Katie.

I’ll spend a week with a like-hearted family of strangers, to learn how to deeply question our unique and yet deeply universal painful thoughts with the most simple and yet most potent tool of all. She calls it either Inquiry or the Work. 

It’s based on four questions. You learn all about it HERE and witness how it’s done thanks to her sweet podcast. I also highly recommend listening to Loving what Is, one of her first books. Listening gives you access to Katie’s healing voice and energy, but you can also read it of course.

It works by introducing a painful thought (he lied to me, she doesn’t care about me, they took something from me, there’s not enough time, I will never succeed….) to four questions and to play with them with what she calls the turn-arounds.

• Is is true? (and the answer must come from the stillness within—because the ego came up with the thought, so of course the ego believes it).

• If the answer was YES, then the next question is: Can I absolutely know that it’s true? 

• Whether we found a YES or a NO to the previous questions: How do I react, what happens, when I believe this thought?

• Who would I be without that thought?

By the end of that first part, the story has usually already been changed but we don’t stop there. We then play with all the possible opposites of our initial thought and must come with three reasons minimum why the opposite is just as true or truer. That part is life changing in ways that cannot be described… 

There’s no deeper way to realize how powerful our perspective is to shape the way we experience the world. It allows us to see how our thoughts fuel all our emotions, and how they dictate our behaviors. It makes it obvious that we are not the one doing the thinking and how automatic our thought processes actually are. It highlights where we were projecting a narrative—or the past—onto an otherwise quite neutral circumstance.

We witness the way we took part in the dance and how even our 1% participation can explain the 99% of the other person. We get our ability to love unconditionally back, our access to joy, our well of wisdom. We realize that our agency was never lost and only hidden in the muddiness of our confused minds. We see how humoristic the human ego actually is…

By the end of this meditative exercise, because Katie makes us first flush out our thoughts by a thorough analysis of the story built around it—thanks to what she calls the “judge your neighbor worksheet”—we feel like a different person. 

Try it whenever you feel called to.

It’s the greatest gift you can give to yourself, no matter how much the ego resists it.

My ego is clearly resisting it right now. It’s conflicted between :

• intensifying all the reasons why other people are “for sure” the problem (“leo! Come on”), BEFORE I go to California and question why my ego calls facts,

• and the vivid awareness that anything we think about someone else, we will have to test on ourselves during the turn around phase. (Indeed the example “he lied to me” becomes “I lied to him…” “I lied to me!”. Ouch.)

I know that I will be forever changed by that experience. I know that my outside world will have been entirely reimagined, once I’ve remodeled my inner one.

I know there will be a before and after! I know I will dive into the deepest parts of my psyche, places where it’s dark, cold and haunted by terrifying monsters and ghosts (or so the ego explains)... I know also I’ll come back kinder, humbled, loving and rooted in the grace of the world.

I am excited and terrified. I am ready and I am not.

I’ll write to you all about it for sure! And I will walk my talk and find solace in the practice I’m inviting you to take part in: I’ll download daily Letters from Love.

---

Care.Check: Write yourself a letter from Love… don’t think about it, just do it. 

Subscribe to Liz’s substack to get weekly prompts and reminders of how it works, by magic, through Love. 

Let this process introduce you to a voice that cannot be disappointed or harsh, to a voice that lives inside of you. Let yourself be held and healed by the warmest energy one can ever hope for and witness how ACCESSIBLE love is.

Bathe into Love’s wisdom and kindness, as she guides you to rethink what we’ve been taught about our roles, our purpose, our mission, our human journey. 

Share this practice with all the hearts that need it—which is every heart that beats. 

My caring friend, let yourself trust that you’re worthy of Love just enough to get to the place… where Love can prove it to you.

---

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

Always,

leo