You are not broken

- Nor could you ever be.

CARE.CHECK*: What does the word Shadow bring up for you?

Are you afraid or fascinated by the dark?

Do you connect with its beauty or does it disconnect you from yours?

Can you trust your inner goodness? Can you trust that there is, in fact, no monster hidden in your inner closet?

Can you at least trust me enough to receive my invitation to consider that healing doesn’t come from obliterating our shadow… but from integrating our shadow and our light?

Hope this week’s letter will feel like a warm candle on a cold winter night, reminding us that without the darkness… there is no way to see the stars.

I love you. 

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IF YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THIS INSTEAD, you can use Speechify, an app through which this Care.Check letter can be read to you by a Care.robot.friend :)

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 Hi Care.Friend,

How have you been? Since last week, in July, since the beginning of the year?

What keeps on popping up as an invitation to grow, to ground, to expand, to rest?

What feels strangely sticky or stuck?

What feels magically flowy and soft?

As July ends, it marks the two-month mark in my new apartment. Two months into this very powerful reset. And a lot is actualizing for me right now.

I’m revisiting all of my relationships (with people, with my body, with my voice, with food, with sleep, with Life! With. Everything.)—as I commit more and more to finding more softness, tenderness and ease in my every day. As I commit to a felt sense of safety, in every area of my experience that I have some sense of control or agency over.

I’ve also started theater lessons! A life-long dream.

And I’m making breakthroughs after breakthroughs on my singing journey… while experimenting with new ways to support my healing journey every week.

It’s a very unsettling period and, yet, I’ve never felt more grounded. It’s very vulnerable and, YET, so deeply empowering. 

Because there is so much power to be found in unraveling. I wish we talked about that more! 

And another thing I wish we talked about more are the true felt experience of regulation, and the importance of pairing it with integration.

Because regulation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling WHOLE.

And feeling whole doesn’t come only from finding regulation, it is also and mainly born through integration. 

When Shadow is welcome, accepted, met with grace, compassion and a fierce willingness to STAY. 

When Light is met with reverence, surrender, excitement and with the willingness to melt our armor on the altar of our hearts. 

When we understand that there is no duality in Shadow and Light. 

Because Light is born through Shadow, and Shadow is reborn thanks to Light. 

When we  recognize that we ALL are Shadow and Light, and that it’s not a character flaw nor a feature to get rid of! We’re meant to be Shadow & Light.

Our Shadow is where our assignment to grow lies and our Light is where our assignment to contribute spurs from. 

Our shadow is just as precious as our light. And, ironically, our unwillingness to face our shadow—our tendencies to want to repress it, to throw it under the rug, our compulsion to run away from it, to try to eradicate it, to negate its existence—is born from Shadow (not Light). 

Yes I want to dive into the lushness, beauty, enchantment and wise enlightening depth of your heart. Of course I do—who wouldn’t? But PLEASE also invite me into the rawness, fragility, messiness and profound awakening depth of your wounds. Both hold all the magic of the universe

I want it all. Because I want INTIMACY. I want true love.

For you, for me, for us all. 

And love doesn’t divide, love unifies. Love doesn’t say “I’ll love you unconditionally as long as you meet those conditions”, Love says “Waoh, who knew you existed until now?” Love doesn’t say “I will accept nothing less than perfection”. Love says “If perfection was needed, perfection would exist in this world (and it would be a very boring place where no growth can happen and therefore no love can expand).”

Love doesn’t see anyone as broken, because we’re not made of stone or glass. We cannot break! We can freeze for a moment, we can feel broken most of the time, but we are made of stardust and love—not wood, not steel.

We’re ethereal creatures living in a soft body temple—not statues or robots entrapped in an actual rigid armor.

Shadow and Light

I’m not broken. You’re not broken.

But that doesn’t mean we’re reconnected to our wholeness just yet. 

And the sad thing is that we’ll never be, if we fall prey to the lie that we’re meant to feel good in order to heal, to fulfill our destiny, to thrive. It’s of course even worse if we believe that we’re meant to feel awful and burnout to succeed! But any either/or is designed to remind us that we’re thinking from our ego consciousness and not knowing from our soul.

When rooted in a regulated nervous system and anchored in our integrity, YES, we mostly feel good. We feel a quiet sense of joy, an inner safety, a sense of belonging, and we can access our ability to hope, our inner well of overflowing kindness, our knowing that we are connected to it all. 

But those are only the flowers that come after the plant has let itself seed, root, grow, mature and bloom. And flowers are beautiful, but they’re not the only part of us that matters.

On our way to regulation, we must feel it ALL.

The pleasant emotions we all yearn for AND those uncomfortable invitations that shake us to our cores. We must burn our anger into wisdom, we must winter our grief into kindness. We must tremble our fear into courage, we must collapse our shame into compassion. We must surrender to Life with a fierce intentionality. We must TRUST that there is no feeling we cannot feel and that there is no feeling that “shouldn’t be”. We must feel until feeling doesn’t scare us anymore. We must feel until all parts of us can come alive again. We must breathe through the numbness until it thaws into awareness. We must follow our awareness without a map, without an agenda, without expectations. We must drop our addiction to asking others for directions and understand that each in our own way, we came here to be a guide, not a worshiper. We must believe that there is nowhere to be but here, right now, and trust the timing and the process of our own life. We must be brave enough to stop comparing ourselves to others and bold enough to try for ourselves what others are proclaiming will never work. We must try every rhythm until we can understand which rhythm is ours. We must forfeit our will to control how it looks and devote ourselves to following how it feels. We must create ourselves back into who we know deep down that we’re meant to be. We must trust that we know who that is—even if, ESPECIALLY if, we have no idea who that is.

Regulation means being with what is. If I’m going through a crisis, if I’m having a very tender and uncomfortable conversation, if I’m exhausted, startled, unsure, lonely, regulation means letting my body shake, cry, scream, dance, sing, write, hide, sleep, be hugged, soothed, supported. 

If I’m feeling A-okay amidst a storm, it is not regulation, it is self-denial.

If I’m feeling underresourced AND hopeful, terrified AND optimistic, enraged AND empowered, raw AND deepened, visionless for the future AND trusting what’s coming, revolted by what could be different AND surrendered to what is, then, only then, am I experiencing what we call “feeling regulated”. 

Regulation is NOT an either/or. Because what could be more dysregulating that splitting ourselves of?

So once again, we need to talk more about integration.

About coming home to every part of our body.

About welcoming home every part of our psyche.

All of it is welcome, all of it is precious, all of it needs witnessing. And none of it is going anywhere!

So if we’re going to live in a house, why not make sure we bring healing, joy, beauty and hope into every room? No matter how moldy, wrecked, haunted or lonely they might appear? After all, we have the key and we hold the magic. WE KNOW how to remodel, innately. 

Please do not keep any part of you silenced in my name ever. Please let me see you, ALL of you, so that I can truly love YOU, so that I know that all of me is welcome too. Please show me those blamy thoughts that you believe will scare me away. I want to understand you! So I want to understand them...

I’ve learned that blame doesn’t come from our inherent sinfulness, because this idea of “sinfulness” is a just fear, not a fact! It was created by the human mind, it’s not a part of any creations brought into form by the divine.

I’ve learned that our blamy thoughts are tender gifts from the Shadow meant to help us understand where our needs are unmet, where our limits are crossed, where our inner truth has been violated—be it by others or more importantly by ourselves. 

Our Shadow is not actually scaring others away from us, it’s scaring us from ourselves. They are the parts of us we don’t know how to love YET.

[Please add a “yet” to this indeed, and witness in awe what happens next.]

The angrier I’ve let myself be, the more peaceful I’ve become. The sadder I’ve let myself be, the joyest I have felt. The more I drown into my shame, the deeper I breathe and the more I dance. The scarier I get, the calmer I feel. It’s hard to describe and even harder to believe until you experience it for yourself.

There is nothing to fear underneath your skin. I keep on repeating this, because I’ve proven it to myself every day, since my healing journey began 5 years ago on 9/9/2019. I remember where I was and how I felt that August… right before I finally touched rock bottom and realized that it was the softest mattress one could ever fall onto.

That’s when I realized that I had been scared of falling HOME all that time!—and that rock bottom is not where it ends, it’s where we all begin again.

Rock bottom is where we meet the cocoon that will turn our caterpillar-ian experience into a butterfly-y dance. The place that will teach us how to end our crawling days and build the wings we need to soar and fly. 

In the darkness only the most fertile soil awaits. A soil that has been hosting our dreams for decades and that is only waiting for some holy water to birth our dreams into life. This is why I also always say that the darkness is a nursery of stars. Our darkness is only stardust that has been forgotten, and stardust met with love turns into light every single time.

So here’s what I know for sure, dear Care.friend, you are not broken AND deep down, at your core, you know that. Your heart is right here to support you, underneath those chains composed of the feelings that you didn’t know how to feel before today.

And torturous stories are keeping you stuck in your head… because those stories were written by the same inner protectors that built an armor out of the chains that keep your heart’s energy hidden from view. Those stories are meant to disembody you because reembodiment would free you back into a world that those protectors believe to be unsafe and inhabitable. 

But the good news is that this world is ours to change from the inside out, ours to shift from nightmarish delusion back into the dreamland it always was, ours to rediscover anew, as we let go of our projections, and as we welcome what was always there beneath the veil—a veil woven by this misguided inner thread, proclaiming that we’re all alone on a planet that we never belonged on.

Because we belong here.

Because this world is beautiful.

Because love has always prevailed, and Nature never gave up on us.

Because WE HAVE EACH OTHER!

And because when we melt shadow and light, we’ve all witnessed time and time over what happens:

Inspiring and sacred sunrises,

Exhilarating and breath-taking sunsets,

Magical and enchanting rainbows…

The Milky Way!

Awe.

Your dream awaits in those dark places you’re so afraid of.

Let us use our humanity as some reassuring Ariane’s thread that can keep us safe, while we enter the labyrinth of our humanness… and let us realize that our inner minotaur is no savage beast! It’s only a roaring baby lion/lioness that is waiting for the right to exist, to grow, to lead, and to free thier much-needed song into this world.

There’s no regulation without integration. There’s no light without a shadow that precedes and follows. There’s no reason to negate or fear our shadow, only a call for inner alchemy. There’s only an invitation to be a model of the kind of harmony that stems from radical acceptance, from a desire to stay with what you don’t know how to love yet, and from the rediscovery of the power, softness, magic and boldness of true unconditional love.

Seek wholeness, not goodness—and watch EVERYTHING change.

I’ll see you next week!

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

Always,

leo