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.
