Why does it need to be an either/or?

Some debates keep us stuck and serve no one

In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)

---

Hi CARE friend,

There is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

Because writing is how I figure out what I do (and do not) know, and because there’s a dynamic I keep witnessing that makes me pause.

My current understanding of this pattern is that we’re stuck in a patriarchal framework in which everything is seen through the lens of hierarchy. And so instead of seeing things as interconnected—which they are, as Nature keeps on generously demonstrating to us, hoping we will finally remember this essential truth—we tend to try to rank everything.

What’s impacting what? Who is the strongest? Who’s in charge? Who’s wrong, who’s right, who’s winning, who’s to blame?

And this leads us to very strange and—in my opinion—sterile debates that keep us stuck and serve no one.

The two examples of this that caught my mind are the debate about whether thoughts or emotions come first… and the debate on what matters most when training a singer: the holistic healing of our breath patterns or the intricacies of the tongue, larynx and mouth relationships.

And what troubles me is that instead of looking at all of those as connected, mutually beneficial (or detrimental) and of paramount importance, we end up fighting as if only one of them COULD matter, and as if those who do not see that have to be wrong.

---

Before and after the vocal cords

I see a lot of voice teachers for instance get enraged at the idea that focusing on breathing in a singing lesson matters. This is mesmerizing to me.

A particular teacher that I will not name once wrote that if you care about your student’s breathing patterns you’re confusing human beings with systems. I was speechless.

Because what are human beings if not… systems??

Here is an excerpt from the Merriam Webster definition of a SYSTEM:

A regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole, such as (...) :
- an assemblage of substances that is in or tends to equilibrium, 
- a group of body organs that together perform one or more vital functions, 
- the body considered as a functional unit (...).

Check. Check. And check.

And here’s what I have personally observed as it relates to singing:

When I am breathing in the way my body is yearning to, my larynx thrives and most of my problems with root tongue tension and phrasing take care of themselves

AND

… when my tongue and neck feel free and relaxed and when my phrasing supports the song I’m singing, it gets much easier to breathe with my full body.

Those are interconnected, not competitive—and they could NEVER be mutually exclusive!

---

Thoughts, emotions… and thoughts

In parallel, I see a lot of articles or posts explaining that a. *thoughts are the ones creating emotions* OR b. *emotions are the ones creating thoughts*, and that not only does realizing *a* or *b* change everything, but if we got that sequence in the wrong order we’re screwed… but are we?

Here’s what I have personally observed after five years of soul searching and hundreds of hours of coaching both as a coach and as a coachee:

Thoughts create emotions, and when we get curious about the story behind our feelings, we always witness that we make sense at the deepest soul level.

I cannot feel optimistic if I’m telling myself that there’s always a catch to unearth and I cannot feel hopeless when I think about all the love that surrounds us even on the darkest days.

AND emotions, especially when unprocessed, create thoughts! When we get curious about our emotional state first, we always get a new perspective and understanding towards the thoughts inhabiting our brain at that very moment. As polyvagal theory specialist Deb Dana teaches: “Our state determines our story”.

If I’m feeling scared, my thoughts will naturally focus on reasons for this fear to exist and if I’m feeling awe, it’s much easier for me to think about the gloriousness of Life.

---

Those do not need to be either/or!

Truth is where there is Love there is connection, and where there is connection there is interdependence. We impact each other, whether we want to or not. We impact each other whether we’re aware of it or not!

We are emotional beings who think and thinking beings who feel. We’re both. So of course our thoughts and our emotions will influence each other!

Life is a dance, not a computer program. Those debates do not free us, they keep us stuck on what doesn’t matter. Who’s on top of the pyramid is not the relevant question when looking at parts aligned in a circle.

What matters is to be met where we are now so that we can know what needs tending for our inner sense of harmony to be restored.

• Some of us are more connected to our bodies and some of us are more connected to our minds. That’s what will lead us to either enter our healing journey through thought analysis or through feeling our way back to center.

• Some of us already breathe freely and will benefit mainly from guidance focused more on what happens after the air starts vibrating the vocal cords! Some of us (and I would argue most of us) have highly restrictive breathing patterns and will go nowhere until the part of the equation that gets the air to the vocal cords is taken care of.

---

About the thoughts & emotions LOOP

What I have noticed is that at some point talk therapy has served its purpose… and that if not paired with embodiment, we become stuck.

Understanding the story only goes so far after all, there is also a need to RELEASE all that the body has had to carry when we didn’t have capacity for release. Indeed, understanding why I couldn’t feel my grief as a kid is a great step to reclaim the inner permission to grieve I’m yearning for! But then I still have to do the grieving for the healing to happen.

AND embodiment alone can also keep us imprisoned of unconscious narratives that we need to become aware of so that they can lose the hold they have on our psyches.

Because if we only release the feeling, the thoughts might be less frequent and powerful, but at some point that part of us who never received the touch of our own love is going to speak again: through projections or through our dreams. So we might end up stuck in an endless cycle of releasing our anger, our fear, or grief, without realizing that it is fueled daily by an inner voice we do not know how to acknowledge or reparent.

Which means again that we need BOTH.

We need to understand ourselves and we need to EMBODY ourselves.

And yes some people can restore themselves into a thriving human soul through thought work alone, but I believe this is because they were never deeply severed from their bodies through trauma. They know how to feel organically, and this is why thought work alone can enable the release.

And some people can restore themselves into a thriving human soul through embodiment alone, but I believe this mostly happens when their specific trauma were mainly physical and/or happened later in life, when a healthy and loving ego was there to help them process the thoughts in real time. In this case, the embodied nervous system is the only part of us that needs healing and embodiment is how we heal our body… because embodiment is Love.

But for most of us, there’s a need to tend to the story and its effect. We need to connect with the story, relate to it and understand the impact it has on us. And when tending to any unexplained “effect”, we need to also get curious towards the story that either created them or that is keeping them alive. So that we don’t fall prey to new stories that do not serve.

And more importantly, we actually do not NEED to attack those who choose to take care of themselves in a different way! Because we do not need them to give us permission to heal in the way we need to by choosing the same path; we need to reclaim our own medicine for ourselves and share it with those who need that specific brand too.

What benefits you will most probably benefit me… BUT that might still not be what I need right now:

If you’re in desperate need of water, that doesn’t mean that shelter has become irrelevant but—and especially if you already have a shelter—me giving you my house will not cure your thirst.

I need sunlight as much as everyone else but if I spend all my days roaming outside while starving, food is what I need—not another sun bath.

We need to trust each other and trust that everyone knows best what is beneficial to them at that moment—for that particular part of their journey, in that body no one else has ever inhabited nor will ever experience, and with the mindset and emotional realm that is leading them at that time.

We need to both understand AND embody ourselves.

---

Affirmations

We do not need EITHER to shame practices that do not work for us!

We get to either be curious on why this is not serving us and what we need to tweak to make them our own, or to let fly what doesn’t apply (as I heard the wonderful Kara Young say yesterday in a fascinating conversation with Leslie Odom Jr at the 92 NY about failing up, Broadway, and Life).

And one example that comes to mind here are AFFIRMATIONS.

Some are adamant that they will save your life and some need the world to understand that they are useless. Some despise those who do not know how to use them and some ridicule those who rely on them.

But again, why??

Truth is affirmations can be incredibly powerful and life-altering. They can also be useless and at times harmful.

They do not “work” or “not work”—they can work and they can not work depending on how you craft and use them.

If you only repeat a sentence you do not believe whatsoever, it won’t help—and especially not if you’re doing it defiantly to prove that it is a ludicrous approach…

If you’re not connected to your body, you might not realize that an affirmation can actually trigger you—thereby enhancing ALL your trauma responses, while you tense up a little bit more with every word.

The truth is affirmations only work if we believe them OR at least deeply wish to give them a chance. They only work if they create an emotion within you that serves your dreams, goals, purpose and/or sense of self and Love.

This is why we need to choose our words with intention and devotion so that they resonate at the soul level and through the marrow of our bones. We also need to connect with how the affirmation FEELS, not with how it sounds.

And it can be helpful to phrase them as a question when it’s a tough paradigm shift to integrate, adding a WHAT IF at the beginning of the thought we want to practice (eg: what if I was deeply loved and supported beyond my current understanding and ability to witness? What if things were going to work out?).

Beliefs are just practiced thoughts. Nothing more. And most of our thoughts fly underneath the threshold of our awareness, especially when we’ve been thinking them on repeat for decades and since we were very young.

This is why we can end up believing things that are self-harming, adversarial, or even in contradictions with our values—because most of those beliefs have been ingrained within us when we were too young for discernment.

And this is also why it can be so incredibly exhilarating and humbling to review what we think about money, genders, ethnicities and those traitorous notions of right and wrong!

Having been raised in a misogynistic family system for instance, it took me years to unlearn that boarding a plane piloted by a woman was not suicidal! I also noticed a belief that men were better doctors than women even though I was a physician myself AND even though the physicians I admired most were mostly women... so the first time one of my best friends told me I was a feminist, I thought she had gone mad!

Because I was loyal to my beliefs, and I didn’t realize yet that my values were showing a very different story: the one written not by my trauma but through my heart. The one in which women, men and gender-fluid folks are partners, equals, and beautifully interdependent.

And so back to my point, thoughts do create emotions. An affirmation is going to create an emotion whether you trust that or not. But this might be creating the opposite emotion if there’s a second voice commenting in the background:

While you tell yourself “I trust in my ability to figure things out” hoping to generate the confidence and gumption that are your birthrights, the inner critic might be arguing “yeah right, like the way you handled the situation at dinner last week… and the way you screwed things up at work 8 years, ten months, 17 days and 3 hours ago”.

In that case you will not be building confidence by repeating your affirmations, you will unwittingly give the reins to the critic to further injure your psyche and body.

Thoughts do create emotions AND emotions create thoughts!

Because the emotions that are stored in our bodies will either allow the heart to receive what we’re thinking so that it can be alchemized into healing or… trigger the inner critic's scrutiny, counter arguments and petty commenting.

---

Interconnectedness

Hens create chicks. Chicks create hens.

Thoughts create emotions. Emotions create thoughts.

Again, it’s a cycle, not a pyramid. No matter who came first at the beginning of time, we’re past that point now and that question is thereby profoundly irrelevant!

It’s not about figuring out the hierarchical pattern at play, there is no hierarchy. It’s about interconnectedness.

And in my two examples it’s about the sacred marriage between spirit and form.

Because we always need to come back to this truth: it’s not about the ether only or the form only. It’s always BOTH. It NEEDS to be both.

Embodied spirit. Spirit AND form.

The thoughts are the ethereal component and the emotions are the embodied manifestation. Spirit influences form and form influences spirit.

Life doesn't reflect that one matters more than the others, because both matter. Sometimes one takes precedence on the other but then it realigns.

It’s not about balance, it’s about harmony. It’s not a dynamic set in stone because by definition dynamics are not fixed.

The hierarchy between spirit and form is not a fact of life, it is a debate that was born in the human mind and that has been wreaking havoc all around us ever since.

Life is both spirit and form, and therefore so are we. We are human (aka embodied) beings (aka souls).

When the breath leaves the body, we transition out this existence… and without a body, the breath cannot take form in this realm.

Again, we can see the thoughts as the ether and the emotions as the embodied. Both matter. Both drive us. Both can make or break us. Both work in tandem. Both are interdependent, beautiful, valid, needed and sources of both healing and suffering.

They can expand and transform us or they can keep us small and stuck.

We do not need to decide to focus on one or the other—we need to connect both of them and integrate them to allow the dance to transport us through Life.

And so it goes with our singing. Our entire body is the instrument! And our entire body is interconnected.

The breath is how we marry the ether to the form that our body represents. It’s how our souls turn into songs.

Just as it is absurd to believe that singing is unrelated to what happens at the level of and above the vocal cords and above—this is literally where our songs take form—it’s also absurd to resume our entire instrument to those tiny bands dancing in our larynx since they are completely dependent on every other part of us to function, and since they will not and CAN not vibrate if air is not passing through them.

All that’s within us needs all that’s within us. All that’s within us is valid, useful, and a vital and brilliant part of the circle. It’s not an either/or.

It’s not about what matters or not for everyone ALWAYS, it’s about what needs tending and love within me, within you and within them, at any given time.

Maybe you need more surrender, maybe you need to be more intentional. Maybe you need to focus more on those around you AND maybe you need to focus a whole lot more on yourself. Maybe you need to lower your shoulders OR maybe you actually need to let them go back up. Maybe you need more strength building, maybe you need more flexibility. Maybe you need more boundaries… maybe you need les walls. Maybe you need to reempower your inner masculine, maybe you need to let your inner feminine awaken and guide you. Maybe you need more time in community, maybe you need more time alone! Maybe you need a lot more structure, maybe you need a lot more flow.

I could go on for hours…

The point is that it all depends on where you are now! And only YOU can know this answer. Nobody else. Because the answer is fluide, nuance, ever evolving and can only come from you. We don’t know what’s best for others—all we can do is share what works for us and invite others to test what works for THEM.

There’s no right way to heal, there’s no right way to come back into alignment, there’s no right way to live.

There’s no wrong way to heal, there’s no wrong way to come back into alignment, there’s no wrong way to live.

There’s what works and what does NOT.

There’s an impact that matches and embodies our intentions or not.

There’s no right or wrong way to enter the circles of Life—and the only way to know what will help YOU is to TRY, and to let your heart tell you if it feels helpful or not.

If it does, who cares whether everyone else agrees it was the best course of action or not? And if it doesn’t, who cares whether everyone else believed it would be the wisest approach?

What matters is not to put the pattern into a box it was never meant to fit into…

What matters is Love.

Let me know your thoughts!!

I’m so curious to know how many of us are getting tired of the tyranny of the EITHER/OR…

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

leo