For years I lived mostly from the neck up.
My body carried me from one obligation to the next. It was the vehicle that got me where I needed to go, the thing that held everything together while I kept moving forward.
I noticed it when anxiety settled into my chest or when rashes bloomed across my skin. My body was always speaking to me (and still does). But eventually, it has to raise its voice.
Otherwise, I only lived inside it. I wasn’t really in relationship with it.
A lot of my life was spent trying to think my way through living, believing I would feel better when I understood enough. If I could just read the right book, ask the right questions, untangle the right story, find the missing piece.
I thought if I could understand everything, maybe I could finally feel safe.
But bodies don’t speak in thoughts. They speak in sensation.
Recently I finished reading The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand. I found myself taking photos of pages and filling my notes app with quotes, and little thoughts I didn’t want to lose. The book wasn’t telling me things I didn’t know, but it gave language to something I had already been living.
My body remembers.
My body grieves.
My body knows the way home.
Looking back, I can see that I had been drifting away from myself long before my miscarriage.
I had become heavy in ways that had very little to do with weight. I felt dense and inflamed. At times I still do, I am not free of this, but it is dwindling. I had been working and holding too much. I was carrying layers that felt protective, and those same layers were keeping me from fully experiencing my own life.
I was trying so hard to keep it all together.
And then grief arrived.
Grief will not ask for permission. It just arrives. Sometimes when you hear a song, see a friend hurting, or even when you see something beautiful. Grief is not polite. It cracks things open.
I think about how a crab must leave its old shell to grow. For a while, it becomes soft & vulnerable, exposed without the protection it once depended on. The old shell no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t fully formed yet.
That in-between space.
A little bit like becoming someone new while still learning how to hold yourself.
I don’t say that because I believe suffering happens for a reason or because loss is somehow a gift. I would never wish that season on anyone. But somewhere inside that heartbreak, I could no longer keep abandoning my body. I finally had no choice but to come back.
Old tears surfaced. Tears that felt older than me. Ancient tears. Tears that had been waiting years to shed. My body was speaking a language my mind had never learned to translate.
So I stopped trying to fix it and I started listening instead.
I walked. I stretched. I danced while dinner cooked. I stood barefoot in my backyard. I noticed the birds and the bunnies. I talked to trees and the wind. I started to pay attention to the quiet intelligence of the natural world and wondered if it had been speaking to me all along.
I learned that animals don’t think their way through terror. They shake. They rock. They move. They sway. They let an experience travel through them instead of becoming them.
I began wondering what it would feel like to trust my own body that much. To let things move and to stop gripping so tightly. To stop believing everything needed to be figured out before I could begin living.
One image from the book has stayed with me.
The hummingbird. She isn’t greedy for sweetness. She depends on it. And her appetite isn’t excess. It’s life.
Many of us learned to distrust our appetites. Not just for food, rest, beauty, slowness, creativity, or joy. Especially as women, we’ve often been taught that smaller is safer or being quieter is easier. That wanting less somehow makes us more worthy.
What if our appetite is not something to control, but something to listen to?
Saying yes when your body asks for sleep, a pizza or warm soup. Saying yes to dancing, music, an energy drink or a glass of wine. A walk. A scream, A cry.
Creativity works this way too. It can’t be forced. It’s something we feed.
Maybe that’s why I keep returning here. To document what brings me back into relationship with being alive. The small rituals that remind me who I am beneath all the striving. The moments when I stop fixing, over-explaining, performing, and perfecting.
It is about listening, noticing, being & slowing down to make tea or cookies while humming or dancing.
There is no arriving at a finish line. There is only the relationship. A relationship with my body, my grief, my joy, my creativity, the natural world, and this life that keeps asking me to participate in it.
Movement brought me back into my body, but what I’ve been learning is how to listen to it and say “yes” again.
All the Yesses to following what brings me alive and trusting that my body knows the way and has been pointing the way home all along.
xP
