Be in this with me.
That’s the message that came through loud and clear. It wasn’t so much a message as it was a plea. It bubbled up on a nebulous wave of grief-sorrow-fear-pain-ache.
Be in this with me.
The past year of my life has had sweet, beautiful moments—joy, love—but it has also been a relentless kick in the face of physical pain and weird, random health issues. A string of health issues, if you will. It feels like you become chronic in one area of your body and then the entire thing falls to shit.
And when it comes to physical ailments, it is so easy to just check out of your corporeal being, to float away, limbless.
In the last year, I began the long-overdue process of reconnecting with my body after years of abusing it via vices, bad relationships, toxic workplaces and a string of other things that were slowly killing me.
Be in this with me.
That was the first message that came through when I actually slowed down enough to hear it several months ago. And I don’t know if it was because I was loopy on pain killers, up pacing my house at 4am because the nerve pain was so acute I thought I was going to die, or if it was just an intuitive inkling, but when that message came, the stars aligned and for the first time in my life I actually went: Fuck it. Let’s do this your way.
I stopped. And I just allowed myself to be there with how much everything sucked and how awful I felt. I didn’t resist it.
We all carry so much trauma. Even if you had a generically “happy” childhood or whatever, there are still things we pick up and carry unconsciously. There are interactions and experiences that leave us scarred in some way.
One of the things that hurt me the most as a child was feeling unseen and unheard. And in the middle of just be-ing with my body, I realised, hilariously, that for the majority of my adult life I’ve been re-enacting this trauma repeatedly. Hell, I’ve been actively inflicting it on myself (see aforementioned vices, bad relationships, toxic workplaces etc.).
Be in this with me.
The joke is that I thought I was doing a great job meeting myself. I meditated. I did yoga, therapy, self-care, spiritual immersions, the work. And while all those things were helpful, I realise now that they also became another way for me to check out of the experience of actually being in my body when all my body has ever needed from me is the safety of me dropping in, witnessing it, even if—especially if—it’s in agony.
Because the truth is: I am the safety that my nervous system has spent decades searching for.
Pain is a teacher—it’s something I’ve written about here before. And pain brings incredible wisdom, but we can lose that wisdom if we’re not fully embodied in whatever experience we’re going through, whether it’s physical or mental pain, a shitty job, a relationship—whatever it is, we need to be in our body throughout it all.
Be in this with me.
For me, this looked like surrendering to what my reality currently looks like. It looked like not forcing my healing by constantly chasing something that could help. It looked like advocating for myself, yes, but also trusting the medical professionals to do their job. It looked like not fighting my pain, but making peace with it—if something hurt, then I just let it hurt.
Somewhere along the way I realised that a lot of the pain wasn’t just physical—I mean, it was—but there was also emotional pain present.
I found a knot of grief hidden behind my lungs that had been stopping me from taking a deep inhale for years.
I found a deep ache of shame in my stomach that made eating difficult.
I found the weight of emotional abuse in the clicking of my neck.
I found the remnants of several years working in a toxic industry in the spasms that kept occurring in my shoulders.
Descartes sold us such a lie when he boiled down the entirety of human experience to: I think, therefore I am. That statement needs to be revised to: I think but if my body doesn’t feel safe then I will suffer and what I actually need is to BE rather than am.
I be rather than I am. It’s a subtle differentiation.
I am still in pain.
I am still in the drudgery of healing.
But the more I be in it, the more held I feel. And the more I hold myself, the more I’m certain that while my healing may not look how I expect it to look, I will be healed in some way.
Be here with me in this.
I be, then I am.
This is beautiful and devastating, like only you can write Amy 💛