A Love Letter to Me (and you)

Your lowest point is the doorway to your highest self

~ Alan Watts

What is the Love Letter?

Every year I find myself so inspired by my crazy life, my passionate soul, and my wild heart that I write myself a love letter. This is one of my most sacred rituals that I perform every year. It doesn’t matter when I write it as I always follow the natural flow of my life and trust my intuition as to when it needs to be done; and without fail I’ve done it every year since 2015. One of my favorite parts of this process is… a year will go by and I will completely forget about it; and then somehow as fate would have it, I find it or remember it - and read it again exactly when I need to.

So why share this now?

Well, this love letter to myself is inspired by July 2024 (Past) Jess’s love letter to her future self - July 2025 Jess, which I uncovered in an old journal a few days ago.

2024 Jess was going through a lot - honestly, it was an incredibly challenging year that I’ve written about before, which you can find here. Everything I knew and held dear - my friendships, health and relationships were all dissolving at the same time - you’ve experienced this before when life dogpiles you - generally when you’re hanging on by a thread already - my mentor / best friend / spiritual mom from San Diego had died, I was healing my body from a mildish/majorish surgery and debating leaving who I thought (for so long and so deeply… think: past life dreams and memories and Deja vu’s) was the love of my life.

2024 Past Jess had the courage and the foresight to write Future Jess a love note telling her how proud of her she was for leaving, for walking away (even if it was more of a pathetic crawl), for keeping her integrity, protecting her inner child, and for always being authentic and leaving a relationship when it no longer served her. To be honest at the end of last year this relationship was starting to wound me deeply. I felt it was at these major moments is was when I needed him the most and I chose to leave anyways. Months later (so recently) when I told my amazing therapist / mentor, Andy, about this later, he exclaimed that ‘yes! this was the weakest i felt and therefore the strongest i became!’ - which always reminds me of that quote from GOT that I quote (perhaps too) often.

“Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?"

“That is the only time a man can be brave."

~ George RR Martin

I returned from Edge Esmeralda only about a week ago and happened upon the love note I wrote myself in 2024 and started to reflect on how painful the end of last year was, and honoring the girl that I was, and how proud of myself I am for choosing myself first, and growing into the woman of my dreams, AND all the subsequent blessings that have flowered underneath my feet since then.

When I find my love letters to myself after year(s) it brings me so much joy and peace to know that my Past Self is looking out for my Current and Future Self. If you’ve worked with me you know how often I send love and strength and tenderness back to Teenage Jess and pull on wisdom for Future Jess. Allowing love to flow through all my different timelines (The Council, if you will) integrates me deeply in my truth and my inner trust.

My Love Letter to ME

I will be honest, I do have a bit on anxiety posting this because I’ve never made one of these love letters public before as they are deeply personal and they honor all the cool things in life that I am brave enough to do. Therefore there is a part of me that feels like it’s too “braggy,” or “cringey” but here I am doing it anyways - as we all know life begins at the end of our comfort zone.

So here is my love letter to myself, and I invite you / hope this inspires you to do the same:

Dear Jess,

I am so fucking proud of you. You overcame something that challenged every fiber of your being, that broke you open and tore you apart; that momentarily destroyed you and made you question everything - the universe, your intuition and yourself - you showed up, as you always do, with an infinite well of resilience, of strength; your trust in yourself and in the universe, that it will always take care of you, is truly unshakable; it’s a masterpiece. You jumped off a cliff and the universe caught you, you fell and you trusted the wisdom of Rock Bottom being a shamanic place of transformation. You took your time to heal, honoring the slow days, honoring the ‘no’ days, not speaking to anyone except your dear roomie Quentin when he asked if you needed more water or snacks. Weeks and months later you rose from the bed onto your hands and knees and finally planted your feet firmly, feeling the support of the earth pushing up against you. Eventually you began to walk, then run, and then frolic, once again finding the wisdom in play.

You started to ground even harder in your routine, even allowing the perfectionist inside to take control for a bit maintaining sobriety, food restrictions and daily exercises. You began the re-engagement of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual work. You dove deeper into shadow work and healing inner child wounds, learning more about yourself and family dynamic and how to understand things better and quicker in the future. You stayed present with your emotions and cried when you were sad, allowed anger to move through you elegantly and gracefully and held your own heart (with the support of very wonderful friends). You continued to climb, to walk, to yoga, and Pilates, focusing on physical health when mental health became too “efforty” and sped up or slowed back down into an acceptance of the present moment, depending on what was needed at the time.

You made your sleep a priority and spoke louder about your boundaries and your bedtime - even including a sign for the house that says “please leave by 9” so people were able to physically see your boundaries, you stopped drinking all together (5 months sober!). You cut out poisonous people (even if that meant ending 5+ year friendships! Yikes!) because you realized your pattern is to beg to be loved, that love is hard work and you have to prove with performance that you are worthy of people loving you. You began to look around and clean up your life in every cobwebby corner that was hard to look at, and you loved it all anyways. A week of Imposter Syndrome at a retreat helped you understand that the Perfectionist part of you had now taken over the driver seat and with some mirroring from more amazing friends - shoutout to Vlad, Owen and Ashley you were able to gently allow your messiness to shine once again, realizing that there is no Perfect, just like there is no Destination. It’s all a beautiful fucking mess. And we fucking love it anyways.

Best of all you started to double down in all things that interest you and pull at your soul - including obtaining a Breathwork Coach Certificate as even though we consider ourself illuminated for some magic reason Breathwork can still bring us to our KNEES. Doing this work for so long and working with movement and meditation and trauma and how it’s related and woven into the breath, I knew the breath was magic; but only when I began to fully understand the depth and multitude of dimension of the FUCKING MAGIC of your breath have we expanded even more, softening our edges, becoming kinder, more compassionate, more resilient.

You do not understand the violence it took to become this peaceful.

Something we always wanted to do was to complete another yoga teacher training and so this year we went back to Thailand - one of my favorite countries - to complete a 100 hour yoga teacher training on the spectacularly beautiful and magical island of Koh Phangan!

Speaking of travel?!

This YTT inspired the trip to Asia and the way I like to travel is to see as much as I can while I’m there! We (we = all integrated Jess’s) started in Korea for skin care (highly recommend and I can write another blog on that) Japan for Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Mt Fuji - a literal dream come true. We made so many friends on Koh Phangan and they loved us back so much we were promptly invited to an artist residency that we will complete in 2026!

While I was completing the YTT I was given so many opportunities to teach yoga and sound healing for two different resorts! I danced ecstatically on the beach under a full moon, surrounded by strangers with soft hearts and beautiful minds. I went to a KPG Full Moon Party completely sober, made 50 new friends throughout my journey in KPG alone, and then ran away to climb the big walls of Krabi - another dream come true. I went to the Philippines and scuba dove the reef - some of the most beautiful reef I’ve ever seen, and got to see my best friend David in a happy accident while heading to Hawaii for the very first time.

I literally couldn’t be more proud of you.

And then!? Not only that!?

While we were in Thailand we got two insanely uniquely niche golden opportunities: The Vipassana-adjacent retreat I had been hoping to get into for the past 5 years contacted me and told me I was accepted AND we were given an opportunity to be the resident Yoga Teacher, Breathwork Coach, Sound Healer and Meditation Guide at Edge Esmeralda, a pop up city in California where we ended up meeting so many amazing people and big thinkers and genius designers…

… it just keeps blossoming ….

… it just keeps opening ….

… and I just keep dancing and trust falling …

… and my framily just keeps on expanding and expanding throughout the world and throughout realms.

I Am the Luckiest Girl in the World

I tell myself all the time that I am the luckiest girl in the world, and not only do I tell myself that

I deeply and profoundly believe it.

I am the luckiest girl in the whole world.

I know it, I breath it, it’s my every day intention, my prayer, my through before bed, my waking ritual. I write it in my journals, it’s on my vision board, I repeat it after every synchronicity, every hang-out session with friends, every time it rains, every time I see a rainbow, or a bird or an animal. It’s constantly being manifested for me with every thought, feeling, movement and action.

I am writing this love letter just before my birthday (July 11th) although it never matters when I write this letter, because it is always written.

I felt such a pull to write it because even though we’re only half way through the year these are all the beautiful things that have been born out of pain, and blossomed out of suffering, flowered out of the deep trust I have for myself and the universe and my path.

In all of this spaciousness of healing and loving myself, in all these blessing I have found a profound forgiveness, one (tbh) that I didn’t think was possible.

A real forgiveness that doesn’t end with “I forgive, but…”

On a mountain top, underneath the stars in Northern California, whilst under the influence of certain psychedelics, I felt a light blue pure energy completely wash forgiveness over me and through me while journeying.

In this stunning clarity and inner peace and cleansing wave I deeply realized (not just thought) a truth that sunk into my bones all the way inside to my bone marrow - that what people do to you, how they treat you and perceive you, and judge you and hate you: that is just a projection of how they feel about themselves. Now, most of us know this logically, I know this logically and also emotionally - but this truth merged with the atoms and molecules and waveforms that make up my physical and energy body, and in that way I was able to fully and completely release, and not release in a violent shaking or even letting go sort of way, but a super divine and peaceful softening, a setting free, a liberation, a falling, a settling into a comfy flower bed, a dissolving completely back into my own person / being / truth / body with no one else’s energy, opinion or nervous system wrapped around mine (like a vine that will eventually choke a tree to death.)

In this moment, as I write this;

I am Wild

I am Resilient

I am Kinder, more Loving, more Gentle

I am the Luckiest Girl in the World

and I am Free.

I deeply hope, want, and wish the same is true for you <3

Discovering Ourselves at Rock Bottom

Shamans know Rock Bottom is a deeply transformative place.

As we go through life, occasionally we find ourselves laid out on the floor of Rock Bottom; this is a natural part of living, growing and evolving. Rock Bottom happens eventually or suddenly, quietly or loudly, it affects all of us without bias, and can happen when we lose a job, or partner, or something else we considered ‘stable’ or ‘long lasting.’ We find ourselves here due to emotional upheaval and chaos, mental stress, health issues, spiritual confusion, a loss of a loved one, and many other reasons. Rock Bottom happens, shit happens but most importantly, Shift Happens.

I’ve learned to appreciate Rock Bottom because of the deeply transformative healing that can occur here. Rock bottom is a sacred initiation that cracks us open and allows us to shed old identities to reveal the light of our true selves.

Think about it for a second.

When you are falling you feel like you are failing and therefore you are flailing. There is nothing to hold on to, no one to grasp, there is no life line to hold. You can’t learn anything while you fall - except for how to fall. Sometimes all you can do is exist moment to moment. You are alone, no one can save you, survival is your only focus, your breath is your only friend. Things are breaking around and inside of you - your heart, your illusions, your patterns, your stories, your deeply engrained belief systems, and perhaps your sense of self and who you thought you were.

Perhaps around this time, we reach for a familiar coping skill and find ourselves confused because for some reason it (alcohol, drugs food, etc) doesn’t feel cozy or ‘good’ anymore… this is because as we fall we begin to learn, and a truth a lot of us discover here is that our old coping skill (that used to keep us safe and ‘protected’) is now the one thing responsible for us being kept us separate from the whole. Coping skills are things we learned to help us survive, but as we evolve we end up out-growing coping skills. It can be so scary when the things we used to reach for comfort are no longer comfortable. We are breaking the shell of our illusion.

We are rapidly unlearning the patterns and beliefs that were illusions of safety. Perhaps we begin to see through the illusions of the people around us; are your friends really your friends? A lot of us notice that as we get healthier and set boundaries we lose people around us that benefited from us having no boundaries. Perhaps we begin to see through the lies we told ourselves. Grasping for perfection or self righteousness in ourselves or others are destroyed when those hopes and expectations turn to ash and we realize that just like others, we are flawed. (The good news is that this is okay! More on that later…)

Even though Rock Bottom sucks, it might feel somewhat familiar - we’ve been here before. It’s a scary place because things feel so broken, but in the brokenness there is a deep vulnerability and therefore, the best medicine for us: healing potential.

Maybe we went through something again that we already experienced and we are so frustrated with ourselves, beating ourselves up for making the same mistake again - but maybe we didn’t learn the lesson well enough the first time, so the universe gave us another chance. Or maybe we did learn the lesson, but got too comfortable and forgot, and the universe challenged us with the same problem to see if our self awareness shifted. We can make the same choice with more awareness and more experience. Or maybe the universe is challenging us to be brave and choose something harder this time: perhaps choosing ourselves over another and risking loss and the unknown rather than staying in the familiar.

Here, the only thing we can do is allow ourselves to fall, and break, and be sad, and feel all the emotions that we are feeling. We writhe in uncomfortability, and yell, and curse the universe, How dare you! Why is this happening? What did I do to deserve this? All I want is to be happy! Fuck! Here we find a pregnant place of potential where we face the pain head on: we emote, we express, we cry, we journal, we write, we sit with the hurt, betrayal, and confusion. We sit with the pain and the different versions of ourselves (inner child etc) and we learn a valuable lesson: the way not around the pain, it is through.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

―Alain de Botton

Once we find ourselves here at Rock Bottom, once we have sat with our pain, accepted it and therefore accepted ourselves completely, faults and all, we begin to flow with it and through it, and eventually we begin to dance with it.

Here, true healing can begin because there is such weighted stillness, there is deafening silence, there is alone-ness, and there is spaciousness to heal, because there is such emptiness. This is bittersweet and it is hopeful: when something is empty is has the capacity to be filled.

For the first time, we take a big deep breath and face the things that we’ve been avoiding, and we face them alone. No friend, lover, parent or peer can help you here. We are here alone with all our patterns, all our wounds and insecurities. Here is the magical space we can begin to fill up our emptiness with whatever we want. Here we can start to rebuild ourselves, with a solid foundation that we can only get from being at Rock Bottom. Also, if you have noticed my use of the word ‘we’ rather than ‘you,’ it is very purposeful. Even though we are alone in this process, we all go through this at different times, phases and stages of our lives, and therefore, we are united in this void, and I think there is something gorgeous about this grief.

At Rock Bottom, the only one who can pick you up is yourself. You can call on the wisdom of your Older Self, or your trust in the universe (which is also you.) And so we begin again, a fresh start, a leg to stand on, we begin again. We start listening to podcasts, reading books, writing, journaling, creating, seeing joy in the little things - flowers in the cracks of sidewalks, the way the moon looks, the rays of the sun through the clouds, the laughter of a friend. We start to heal in the tiny moments that sew our heart back together. We start to heal by connecting to the innate wisdom that is us, that is our breath, that is our inner knowing that our current situation is not our final destination. We begin to realize that there is a silver cord throughout our life connecting us to synchronicity; and this perhaps this chaotic upheaval that we suffered through was (maybe, violently) redirecting us to a different path. We look back on all our prior Rock Bottoms and see how they guided us to be different, to be better, to be stronger, more resilient, more kind, more loving, more understanding, and most importantly more compassionate toward ourselves and others.

When we are in pain we are more vulnerable, open, and connected to everyone else. When we are in pain we can sit with other’s pain wholly, with empathy, and a deep understanding. We realize that we heal, not to handle the trauma, but to be able to hold the future joy; the joy that is imminent and just around the corner. We only have to allow ourselves to break, and fall, and dissolve; and gently, with patience and tenderness, pick ourselves up and eventually reach back out and engage in life: to chose to begin again, no matter how much it hurts.

I realized a long time ago that every time my heart breaks, it breaks open to hold more love, to hold more vulnerability, more compassion, and therefore to be able to hold more of me.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

In the past, I’ve held on to things for a while, and to quote someone from TikTok, those things that I held onto have claw marks on them from how much I loved them; but I, as we all do, inevitably learn to let go. Life isn’t about avoiding pain, it’s about jumping in and joining the dance. It’s about saying yes to the things that feel good regardless of the possible outcome. It’s about living fully with no regrets.

Lately, when I have suffered through breakups I truly feel into that loss, wholly and sacredly. I sit with myself at Rock Bottom and feel everything and when I feel ready, I begin again. As I get older I’ve come to realize that in relationships, I give my all, and I’m proud of myself for that. No matter the outcome, I’m able to walk away knowing that I gave such big love, and they most likely needed that.

When death finds you, may it find you alive.

~ African Proverb

So be patient with yourself as you win and as you fail. Be compassionate to yourself, your emotions, your mind, and your body. Forgive yourself for not understanding and forgive others for not understanding. Take care of your body, hydrate and don’t underestimate the power of a salt bath or a really good cry. Don’t forget to pause, take a moment to yourself, and connect with your breath. Most of all be gentle with yourself, you are learning, and you are only getting better, flaws and all.

Xoxo

Jess

Note:

This blog is brought to you by the year 2024, it was not my favorite.

I lost several friends, most notably one of my best friends, Tiffany Barsotti. I also left a relationship, sadly but intentionally, with someone who I thought was my forever.