I’m 3 days post-op, leg elevated, with my sweet Ushas patiently riding this pause out with me.
Just days before my leg hardware removal, I caught the train from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side to meet with Leah, a beautiful somatic healer now in her 70’s. She came recommended to me years ago by a vocal coach I worked with shortly after my mom’s death and the initial leg injury.
Since April, I’ve been rooming with a couple of cacao ceremonialists in Brooklyn – a flashback to the home I once lived in when I last had roommates in NYC. And with so much life and distance, I now see the contrast of a life I was once immersed in.
Constant movement, little stillness, and the subtle ways we can lose touch with ourselves in the pace of modern life… a distant memory revisited.
A week before surgery, I spent a few days in California at my dad’s house, selling my car and retrieving my dog from her dog hotel. And this visit found me in the middle of my father’s sudden departure from his 15-year relationship. Watching his ex-partner and her daughter grieve a version of him they idealized, rather than the version I was all too familiar with. Whilst my entire experience with him continued to linger in the liminal, an unwitnessed truth that existed quietly beneath the surface of their relationship for years. What came as a shock to them, an abandonment riddled with emotional withdrawal, was not at all a surprise to me.
I craved space to be fully present with what I was feeling… to be witnessed in my process. And Leah’s table is the one place where I trust I’ll meet myself. The most potent inner child integrations I’ve had came whilst laying on her table.
So I went… and I cried, and I mothered myself. And I came out with profound work that I’m carrying forward: embodying the mother I desire to be. Mothering myself sweetly, with compassion, love, action, kindness, and presence.
I’m currently in a Ketu sub sub cycle (Jyotish) – paired with Rahu Moon flavours. That’s a very inward-feeling cycle, and I’m feeling deeply moved by everything. Including the news that my famed mentor just miscarried, another coach friend just entered surgical menopause at 41 after suffering ovarian torsion, and that a woman I’m living with has normalised drastically irregular cycles for the past 4 years.
It was nearly a year ago that I’d started to experience chronic ovarian cysts, unbeknownst to me. I’d been enduring progressive sciatic pain earlier that year, which I assumed were linked to compensatory patterns from the India car accident. I worked with a women’s physical therapist and pelvic floor therapist, and the only connection I could make was that I was constantly stretching beyond my capacity and not moving enough. Both were true. The stagnation led to growth in my tissues, but I was also in survival mode, whether I want to admit it or not. And that kept me from seeing the cyclical pattern of my flare ups.
So, after a self-pleasure injury, followed by my worst ovarian cyst cycle, I found myself in the ER late last fall. And that’s when I decided it was time to return to myself. That it was time to close the chapter with my family, and to pour back into me and start preparing physically and practically for motherhood.
Fertility is everything to me. And I willingly sacrificed my fertile health for the sake of doing the emotional work of integrating my maternal lineage. But, enough was enough. It was time to draw a line. My fertility is no longer something I’m willing to negotiate with.
And that’s what embodiment asks of us. It asks us to attune. But conditioning asks us to push… hard. And maturity asks us to constantly find the middle path.
I’m in tears, grieving the losses of women close to me, grieving the loss of the many versions of me that have been in constant dissolution, and metabolising the incredible gift this life has been – that I’ve had the great fortune to slow down at the expense of my body, but not at the expense of my heart.
I’m writing this for every woman whose body speaks ahead of her capacity to hear. You’re being prepared.
Tonight my leg is elevated above my heart.
My nervous system is finally still enough to hear what my body has been trying to say for years.
And somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the dissolving identities, beneath the women I’ve loved and lost versions of…
I can feel her.
The mother in me.
Not the archetype.
Not the performance.
Not the aesthetic.
The woman who knows how to listen before life has to force her to stop.
Let this be a validation, a confirmation, that embodiment is your calibration. Not me, not the group of women you’ll join in retreat or mastermind, not the money you’ll make, not the business you’ll build, not the mother you’ll be, not the identity… but your actual felt experience.
Your body is always speaking. The question is: are you ready to slow down enough to hear her whispers before she screams?