Seconds after standing, the next wave of contraction came, and she pulled me close to her. I clung to her, and my head gently landed on her shoulder as the wave of contraction washed over my body. It was one of my first experiences of fully letting someone hold me, mostly because I had no choice.

She had severe neck pain which had been present for years, and during the somatic session, it became clear to her that the pain was a way that she was punishing herself. She was punishing herself for being in an environment where she had experienced trauma, punishing herself for not following her intuition and leaving the environment.

“Hey baby, how was your day,” I asked as he hopped into the back seat of the car. 

“Not that great,” he responded as he furrowed his brow.

I looked back at him in the rearview mirror. “What happened, love” I asked. 

“I had to do some testing today and it made me mad” he said, with audible anger in his voice. 

I was cozy in bed with the blankets pulled up tight. I had just crawled into bed when the ticking of the heat turning on started. As I lay there in the silence of the night listening to the ticking of the heat I began thinking about a prior version of me. 

I began thinking about the woman who would lie in bed at night, cold and shaking, and praying that the tick tick of the heat would start. 

Hours later, I was finishing my nighttime routine and getting ready for bed. My phone was on silent, sitting on the headboard. I heard a buzz and knew that someone had texted me, but I wasn’t in a space where I wanted to check my phone. My nervous system was calm, my mind was calm, my body was calm and I wasn’t interested in taking the chance of changing that right before going to sleep. 

There were versions of me who would have tried to prevent her from having the book fall on her and scare her, but this version of me knows that sometimes we need to experience the consequences of our own actions to understand why we shouldn’t do something. So I sat holding my cup of tea, watching what was about to happen.

Years ago, I would have known I needed to attend the workout, but I would have felt resentful that it would be so difficult. I would have whined about it to friends and woken up on Sunday morning dreading the workout. It felt nice to be in a different mindset now.

As I stood staring blankly out the window, I recognized that I was thinking rather than being present with cooking or looking at the view that had originally caught my attention. Why was I in my head, I wondered. It would have been easy to process that question in my mind, but that simply meant doing more of what I had been doing. As I shifted my awareness into my body, into presence, I realized just how uncomfortable my body felt.

I closed my eyes and moved my awareness from the outer landscape to the inner landscape of who I am. I can remember days when I would have tried to rush this process, but those days are long gone. I now allow a slow and gentle shift as I sink into myself, knowing that the process will look and feel different each time. 

I washed the dishes that had been left in the sink the night before. 

I emptied the dishwasher and reloaded it. 

I started a load of laundry and folded a load left in the dryer from yesterday. 

I wiped the crumbs and spots off the counter and wiped them down with a towel.