What I wish for you now

And that's a wish that I know can come true

CARE.CHECK*: "What do I need right now?”

How often do you ask yourself that question?

Who answers when you do? Your conditioned mind, your inner critic, your wise fiery heart or your miraculous body?

What do you do with the answer? Do you politely notice, harshly judge, tenderly oblige or feel overwhelmed by how confused it makes you feel?

Is it even okay for you to have needs?

Do you remember when you might have learned that it was not?

This week is all about embodiment, somatic experiencing, and a whole new way to see the world. A seeing that does not come from the outside in. A seeing that starts within our hearts.

Let me know what came up for you!

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Hi Care.Friend,

What’s up? What’s new? What’s sweet? What’s weird? 

What’s shifting? What looks stuck? What feels over?

What are you yearning for? Which cravings are letting go of you? 

HOW. ARE. YOU.

A tiny voice in the background of my mind just asked me: “Can’t you ever ask people how they are in a normal way? Why so many questions? Why this addiction to the depth, the waves, the nuances? Can’t you ever let “how are you” be enough? Can’t you just ask “how are you” and let it be?”

And I’m very glad she asked. Because my answer is: No! Absolutely not. NO. No way.

I cannot stop at “How are you?” because there’s so much more we need to talk about!!

And we all know that we very rarely answer the truth when asked this question… Because it feels like a polite offering, not like a genuine invitation to open the doors of our hearts.

We’re here for a Care.check. It’s not a casual exchange between strangers. We’re here for heartled connection and compassionate inquiry. 

This concept of care-checking came to me when I started realizing how hard it actually is to relearn how to take care of ourselves in a way that is authentic and not prescribed. To follow and meet needs we have forgotten how to identify. To follow IMPULSE, instead of directions. To learn the language of our body, without letting the mind take too many liberties with—if not hold complete dictatorship over—how the story gets translated by our brains. 

So we need time to pause, to lean in, to inquire softly, to listen humbly, and wait, truly WAIT, for a response. To have the patience, courage and humility to not make one up when nothing comes up. 

What do I need right now? The most soulful question we can ask our own hearts.

If yoga, do I need a slow restorative practice or an epic enlivening flow?

If not yoga, is it because I need to go for a run or to throw my rage into a cushion? If not yoga, is it because I actually yearn for perfect stillness in meditation? Or do I just long for a nap? 

If I take a nap, will I then be able to not turn on myself and label exhaustion recovery as shameful laziness? If not, what can I do that would recharge my body without sending my inner critic into a frenzy? 

To find solace, do I need solitude to bathe in my heart’s embrace or do I need connection and the arms of another?

Do I need self-expression or do I need INTEGRATION?

Do I need the power of fire, the strength of the Earth, the fortitude of air or the gumption of water? 

Do I need to expand or to contract right now? Do I need to tend to what’s bothering me or to let it go tenderly? Do I need laser focus or a bird’s eye view? Do I need advice or do I need to empty out?

Do I need to create and share or do I need to contemplate and receive? Do I need to map out my dreams or to blank the canva out? Do I need a vision board or do I need a new perspective?

Do I need acupuncture or breath work? Do I need part therapy or embodiment? 

Do I need it ALL AT ONCE, do I need none of this right now?

It’s not easy. It’s an endless exploration and a boundless journey. The answer is never exactly the same and it’s where most people on a healing journey (aka all of us) tend to get lost!

Because how do I learn something that I have no idea how to do, if I’m the only one able to draw the map?

By following the footsteps of others—but only to a point. 

Other people’s survival guide and awakening tale are food for our guts to learn how to guide us, but they’re not meant to be that one diet we solely, rigidly, rely on. 

We learn from those who walked the path we’re yearning for, but they didn’t get where they are by walking on someone else’s roadway—they paved their own. That’s why we admire and love them so much! 

They’re not extraordinary creatures who knew better than us how to live on Earth. But they remind us that deep down we know how it’s done.

We ARE life... Living is not hard for us! That’s what’s most natural.

Unlearning how to live was the real work… And we’ve done that already. A long time ago for most of us.

Before the age of 30 for sure, before the age of 20 for most! Before the age of 10 for a lot of us… and even before being born for some (when our first home was a womb coated with trauma instead of love). 

Last week I went to an incredibly powerful workshop taught by the one-of-a-kind Luis Mojica. It was designed to explore embodiment through the lens of a performer. 

And one thing was certain for me after this weekend, we’re ALL performers. Some of us also perform art or a craft on a stage and in front of an audience, but we’re all performing all day long. How beautiful to understand that. 

I learned so much from that weekend. It was raw, terrifying, delightful and profound. It was a coming back to the core of our beings.

It was a reconnection to the mundane and a reminder that the mundane is very sacred ground. 

It was an invitation to be seen, by others of course but most importantly by ourselves. Seen through sensations. Seen through somatic experiencing.

What happens when people stay firmly anchored in their body at all times? For two whole days. Even though they’re surrounded by strangers and continually asked to let themselves be seen, watched, heard, held, welcome and let’s face it… judge?

What happens when everyone in the room realizes that their judgments are only projections and defense mechanisms and an invitation to go deeper within themselves?

What happens when I meet my own judgments as invitations to understand myself, my wounds, and the Earth shattering depth of my own heart?

What happens when we truly receive the guidance we need to read our body’s language and suddenly open our inner eyes to the wreckage, the holiness, the bloodshed, the flow of grace, the dark shadowy corners of our inner land and to our center’s everlasting light?

We wake up. THAT’S what happens.

Something shifts. Something that cannot be put into words. Something that can only be experienced and never described. Something within us hits RESTART. 

Let the cocooning begin… The butterfly is not yet, but the caterpillar is no more. Welcome to the mystery, the unknown, the in-between. Welcome HOME.

It’s not the first time I have this kind of experience, but it’s the first time I live through it through a fully somatic lens. It’s the first time I’m being invited to only follow impulse without deciding neither where it starts, nor where it ends. 

It was a free fall within ourselves and, once more, when I met rock bottom I wasn’t fractured into a million pieces by an unforgiving stony floor. I found myself enveloped by the most loving, tender embrace of love.

I landed on the softest mattress and bathed in the warm soothing cottony bath of grace that I have been dreaming of since the day I was born. 

I was reunited with a part of myself I had never truly connected before… and she’s the most endearing terrified little orphan outcast.

She had no one in the world before this weekend. She didn’t know I was here all along! How tragic that she spent a lifetime in isolation… How miraculous that she will never feel that she has no one to rely on again—not even for a second!

She was an exiled child in despair, lost in a dark world where adults are monsters and God has been forbidden to enter. She sleeps in a little cave, her hair is dirty and her skin is covered in mud. She sleeps in a cave because that’s the only place where she feels safe.

Through authentic movement, thanks to that workshop, I could find a way in and visit her corner of my inner world.

I embodied her pain and for the first time, I let someone witness how scared and exhausted and full of grief and terror I truly am. What a PRIVILEGE to be witnessed this way. By someone who had no impulse to try to console or fix or rescue me. Someone (many someones over the course of those two days) who knew that I’ve got this! I’ve got me. That I’m not a victim or broken just because I feel terror or grief! Someone who knew that THIS is strength, courage, empowerment, and the entire point of this difficult, wondrous, journey.

And of course the horror that lives under my skin is not the whole story. I’m also full of joy, of hope, of laughter and light! But I’m done only allowing those to be witnessed by the world. I’m ready to be me, entirely.

That little girl thought she would die many times over. She almost did. That little girl remembers the car door that was violently shut down on her hand just because, she remembers the numbness that allowed her to not feel the pain that no one would come to ackowledge and ease. That little girl remembers how the adults made her feel like her own body didn’t belong to her and like her own body was meant to be brutalized, violated, bruised or—and that was her only solace—neglected. That little girl remembers what I don’t and she’s not ready to fill me in. That little girl was all alone before last weekend! And now, that little girl has me.

My soul-healing coach wrote to me: “The body is a brilliant teacher. The integration after a big experience is not on our timeline, and the digestion little by little.” 

I FELT every word.

This past week was an initiation into a new way of being. A complete surrender to what came up, and a complete surrender to what was not ready to be known yet.

After that, nothing in my usual self-care seemed healing or nourishing to me. 

Journaling felt pointless! It felt like I was writing from the old me. It felt rehashed, recycled, disingenuous. 

Yoga felt brutal, only dancing could soothe me—when I didn't overdo it (which I did. Obviously! I’m learning). 

I ached in stillness and I ached whenever I was moving. I needed to alternate between the two almost constantly. 

Food was an adventure—as for anyone who ever lived with an eating disaster and then goes through such an awakening week. 

This weekend, I went off the grid. I put my phone on airplane mode and let everything be. No clock, no agenda. I decided to just follow impulse all day and let the day and my body show me who I am becoming, who I’ve always been, and what I truly need. 

I listened to my own songs until I could feel all the grief, love, anger and tenderness that inspired each word, each note, to come through my heart and voice into this world—to greet and heal me.

I cried, I shaked, I hugged my exhausted body and I received my own embrace enthusiastically—acknowledging the starvation, the aching, the unmet hunger, the self-abandonment and this sacred reclaiming.

I read chapters from four different books that I felt called to pick up or buy IMMEDIATELY—and didn’t question why or where it was leading me.

I reluctantly paused my morning pages for two days but ended up receiving the most life-altering insights, when suddenly my body led me to my writing desk in the afternoon.

Eating felt easy and organic again. The nightmares were intense but they also came bearing beautiful gifts. I felt myself soften AND I felt a wild sturdiness come over me.

I felt myself turn into a living contrast, and that’s how I knew that it was “working”.

I witnessed in awe the magic of it all. The healing elixir.

The collapse into nothingness that the caterpillar needs, to die to its old form and be reborn into beauty.

That’s what re-embodiment truly means.

Those last ten days have been intense and extraordinary. Those last ten days have been emptier than usual and fuller than ever before. Those last ten days have been giving me back to me.

And I wish that for you my dear Care.friend. To find the spaces and guides that will whisper your heart’s name in a way that you cannot ignore, so that you can find the door that leads into the garden of your own being.

Through deep self-care, we find self-connection and through self-connection, self-creation happens soulfully. But self-care is not what we’ve been taught. There’s no rule, no right or wrong, no recipe.

Self-care is whatever allows you to remember how to be. It’s the call of a lifetime, it’s our hero/heroine’s journey. It’s where we meet the divine through the gates of our humanness that allow us to retrieve our humanity.

It’s a book that has no beginning and no end and that you’re the only one able to both write and read. It’s for you and for you ONLY—and that’s why it’s so precious and healing! 

And please have no fear, because the more you you are, the more you heal; the more you heal, the more you reembody your authenticity; and the more authentic you are, the more loving, creative, lively, wise and generous you will be. 

When you take care of you, you melt the armor, you surrender the shield and your heart can start leading again, shifting all that you are and all that surrounds you into enchanting love that inspires and heals. 

By taking care of you, you take NOTHING from others! You just turn yourself back into a gift.

The gift you were sent here to be. The gift you were always meant to receive.

The gift you then get to share effortlessly, just by being.

The gift you already ARE.

The gift that is staring back at you in the mirror, begging to be celebrating, unwrapped and FREED.

I’ll see you next week!

With kindness, love and light—our most sacred offering to this world.

Always,

leo