Old Souls: The Weight Of Being Here

Do you feel like you're visiting this world rather than living in it? Like you missed the manual everyone else seems to have?

This meditation is for the old souls — those who carry a weight they can't name, who see too clearly for comfort, who find meaning in glimpses rather than sustained happiness.

We won't try to fix what isn't broken. Instead, we'll explore what it means to carry this weight consciously. To stop pretending it isn't there. And to discover that you're not alone in it.

Includes a 12-minute guided somatic journey: Being With the Weight.

If you've ever felt like you don't quite belong here — like something in you is tired in a way that sleep can't fix — this is for you.

By Abi Beri | Somatic Therapist | Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Online

Transcript

So,

Welcome everyone and thank you.

Thank you for listening.

So,

I'm just going to say something and I want you to notice if something in you responds.

Do you ever feel like you're visiting this world rather than living in it?

Like somewhere along the way,

You miss the manual that everyone else seems to have.

The one that explains how to want the things you're supposed to want,

How to play the games you're supposed to play and how to feel at home in a life that never quite fits.

And if something in you just said yes,

Maybe quietly,

Maybe with a kind of exhausted relief,

Then this might be for you.

It's the experience of being what some people call an old soul,

Though honestly,

The phrase has always felt a bit too tidy for what I actually mean.

What I mean is the weight of being here.

The strange exhaustion that isn't quite depression,

Isn't quite sadness and it isn't quite anything you can point to and say,

That's the problem,

Fix that.

It's more like a heaviness in the cells.

It's a feeling that life is something to be endured between brief glimpses of something real.

Just stay with me here.

I want to be clear about something from the start.

I'm not an expert.

I'm not here to fix something for you.

I'm not going to give you five steps to feeling lighter or tell you to practice gratitude and watch the heaviness dissolve.

And if that really worked,

You'd have done it by now.

We all would have.

Instead I want to do something different.

I want to sit with you in this.

I want to say out loud some of the things that many of us may have felt,

But rarely hear reflected back.

And I want to explore what it might mean to carry the weight,

This weight consciously,

Not to make it disappear,

But to stop carrying it alone.

Because here's what I've learned from my own life and from sitting with people that I've worked with.

The weight doesn't necessarily get lighter,

But how we carry it can change.

And sometimes that makes all the difference.

So we live in an age of labels.

And don't get me wrong,

Labels can be very useful.

They can help us make sense of experiences that felt chaotic,

Find communities of people who understand us and access the support that we need.

But labels can also become cages.

When I was trying to understand why I felt so fundamentally out of step with the world around me,

I collected labels like they were going to save me.

Depression,

Anxiety,

Complex trauma,

Attachment issues,

Highly sensitive person,

Empath,

Spiritual speaker,

And more.

And each one captured something real,

And each one failed to capture the whole.

Because the thing I was trying to name wasn't a disorder,

It wasn't a pathology,

It wasn't something broken that needed fixing.

It was more like an orientation.

A way of being in the world that doesn't match what the world expects.

And I'll say this again,

A way of being in the world that doesn't match what the world expects.

An old soul is the closest that I've found.

Not because I believe I've literally lived many many lives,

Though who knows,

But because it captures something about the exhaustion.

The sense that you've already seen through the games everyone is playing.

The difficulty getting excited about things that seem to motivate everyone else.

Now let's talk about success for a moment.

Because if you're anything like me,

You've spent years feeling like a failure for not wanting what you're supposed to want.

The corporate ladder,

The impressive title,

The house,

The car,

The curated social media life,

The dinner parties where everyone talks about promotions and property prices and stocks,

And you're just sitting there thinking,

How is this it?

How is this what we're all working towards?

And you can't say that of course,

You can't say,

I find this all meaningless,

And I don't understand how you don't without becoming the weird one,

The negative one.

The one who needs to work on their mindset.

So you learn to smile,

Nod along,

And play the game just enough to survive.

But something inside is dying.

And I'm going to say something that might sound arrogant,

But I don't mean it that way.

The problem isn't that you're broken,

The problem is that you see everything too clearly.

You see that the emperor has no clothes.

You see that so much of what we are told matters,

Doesn't matter at all.

You see that the game is rigged,

That the metrics are meaningless,

And that we are all running on a treadmill that goes nowhere.

And once you see that,

You can't unsee it.

The weight that you carry,

Part of it is the weight of seeing.

The exhaustion of being awake in a world that rewards sleepwalking.

And see if these words land,

I'll say them again.

The exhaustion of being awake in a world that rewards sleepwalking.

And I want to get personal for a moment,

Because I can't talk about this honestly without acknowledging that some of the weight isn't existential.

Some of it has an address,

A history,

A reason.

So for me personally,

My 20s were difficult,

And that's the polished version.

And the unpolished version involves addictions,

Anxiety,

A broken marriage,

False accusations,

The kind of injustice that makes you question whether the universe has any fairness in it at all.

And I picked up coping mechanisms,

Drinking,

Drugs,

Compulsive behaviors,

I'm still untangling.

But the body remembers,

The nervous system remembers.

So you don't go through something like that and come out unchanged.

And here's what I've come to understand,

Both personally and through my work as a facilitator,

As a holistic therapist,

That trauma lives in the body.

It's not just a memory in your mind,

It's a weight that you carry in your cells.

A constriction in your chest,

A vigilance in your nervous system that never fully turns off.

And some of the heaviness that I carry now is existential.

The old soul stuff,

The seeing too clearly,

The not fitting in.

But some of it is also literal.

It's stored in my tissues,

It's the unprocessed residue of years of survival mode.

And I think that's true for many people who identify as old souls.

We are not just philosophically weary,

Many of us have been through some extremely tough things,

In this life,

In childhood,

Sometimes even through ancestral lines,

That have quite literally weighed down our bodies.

Now let me put on my holistic therapist hat for a moment,

Not in a literal sense.

So when your nervous system has been through significant stress or trauma,

It often gets stuck in certain patterns.

Some people get stuck in hypervigilance,

Always scanning for danger,

Never quite able to relax.

And others collapse into what we call the dorsal vagal shutdown.

The freeze,

The numbness,

The I can't do this anymore,

Of a system that has given up.

And many of us escalate between both.

Moments of anxiety and hyperarousal,

Followed by crashes of exhaustion and disconnection.

The heaviness that you feel,

The sense of life being something to get through,

That's not just philosophy,

That's often your nervous system in chronic low-level shutdown.

It's a biological state and it's not a character flaw that you have.

The dorsal vagal state,

Or the shutdown response,

Has evolved to help us survive when fighting or fleeing wasn't possible.

It's the mouse going limp in the cat's mouth,

The body's last-ditch effort to endure by checking out.

And when life delivers blows to you,

When injustice keeps coming,

When the pain keeps coming,

When the world keeps not making sense,

When you keep having to survive situations that shouldn't exist,

The shutdown response can become a chronic background state.

So if you have ever felt guilty about your heaviness,

Like you should be more grateful,

More positive,

More alive,

Just know that,

Or consider,

That your body might be doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.

That's not failure,

That's adaptation,

And I'd also say that's intelligence.

Now here's one of the cruelest paradoxes of being this way.

You often have a gift for connecting with others,

For seeing them,

For making them feel understood,

While feeling utterly alone yourself.

Now,

I have literally zero people in my life that I connect with on a deep level.

Now that doesn't mean I don't have friends and I don't have a life.

I have a partner who I love,

And that's real.

But that soul level resonance,

That feeling of being truly known,

It really doesn't come from anybody in my life.

Now in those brief moments of presence,

Sometimes I feel it,

From the divine,

From something bigger than me.

And it comes strangely enough sometimes,

From strangers,

Just by looking at them.

And that's a strange way to live,

Isn't it?

To resonate with people you've never met,

While feeling disconnected from almost everyone that you're surrounded with.

Now I used to think this was my trauma,

My attachment wounds,

My inability to trust,

To let people in,

To be vulnerable.

And maybe partly that's true,

But I've also come to wonder if it's something else.

Maybe the frequency that we exist on simply doesn't match the people that are around us.

It's not better,

It's not worse,

It's just different.

Like a radio station that's slightly off on the main dial.

The people who tune in,

Tune in deeply.

But most people are listening to other stations.

There's another layer to this that I think many people in healing professions especially understand.

That when you become the one who holds space for others,

The therapist,

The healer,

The person who everyone comes to with their pain,

So who holds space for you?

Now I sit with people's trauma all the time.

I witness their pain,

Their darkness,

Their struggle.

To make sense of lives that have been unkind to them.

And I can do that.

Something in me knows how to be present with suffering without being destroyed by it.

But when I go home,

All the heaviness that I help others carry,

Who carries mine?

And that's not a complaint,

It's just the truth.

And I suspect if you're still listening,

You might know something about this dynamic too.

Now the wounded healer is such a cliché,

But it's also real.

So many of us who are drawn to helping others are doing it,

At least partly,

Because we know what it's like not to be helped,

Not to be seen and not to carry the weight.

Alone.

Now I don't want to sound dark and negative like there's no light,

Because there is.

It's just not the kind of light most people talk about.

It's not the sustained happiness of living your best life.

And it's not the Instagram version of fulfillment.

It's more like glimpses,

Brief openings where something real breaks through.

Now for me,

Those moments come when I chant.

There's something about being near someone who has touched a deeper truth that creates an opening.

A window where the weight lifts and something else becomes possible,

Even if it is just for the moment.

They also come when I'm recording like this.

When the words are just flowing and I know somehow they are going to reach the right person at the right time,

If they have to.

They also come in moments of genuine presence,

Not being present as a practice,

But those unexpected cracks where the mental chatter stops and there is just this.

And I've stopped expecting more than this now.

Not in a giving up way,

But more in a releasing of expectations way.

Now I don't think I'm going to wake up one day feeling consistently light and happy,

Because that's not my path.

It might not be yours either.

But the glimpses,

They are enough.

They have to be enough.

Because they are what's real.

And maybe that's the secret that old souls eventually learn.

That meaning doesn't come from sustained states.

It comes from moments of genuine contact with something true.

And those moments don't require you to be fixed or healed or finally happy.

They just require you to be present when they arrive.

Now if you are still here,

I want to invite you into a gentle practice.

And this isn't about fixing the weight or making it go away.

This is about being with it differently.

So if you're driving or you need to stay alert,

Maybe save this for later.

Or if you can find a comfortable position,

Sitting is good for this.

And if you like,

You can let your eyes close.

And just begin by feeling your body in the space now.

The weight of you.

Held by whatever surface is beneath you.

And feel gravity doing its work.

Pulling you gently down.

Anchoring you here.

Notice your breath.

You don't have to change it.

Just watch it for a moment.

The weight moves in and out without you having to do anything.

And now very gently,

I want you to acknowledge what you're carrying.

Not to analyze it.

Not to understand it.

Not to fix it.

Just to acknowledge there is weight here.

Where do you feel it?

Maybe in your chest?

Maybe in your shoulders?

Maybe it's the heaviness behind your eyes?

Tiredness in your bones?

Just notice where the weight lives in you today.

And now I want you to try something.

Instead of trying to get rid of it.

Can you simply say yes to it?

Not yes I want this or yes this is good.

But simply yes.

I acknowledge you're here.

And you might even silently say this or receive my words.

I know you're here.

I'm not going to pretend you're not.

And just notice what happens when you stop fighting it.

When you stop trying to make it go away.

Or understand it.

Or fix it.

Just letting it be here.

I am here.

There is this weight in my body.

And I am okay with that.

Now bring your attention to your feet.

Feel them from the inside.

The weight of them.

The contact with the floor.

Or the surface beneath you.

And see if you can send your awareness all the way down into the ground below.

Imagine roots extending from your feet all the way down to earth.

The earth has been holding heavy things for billions of years.

Mountains,

Oceans.

The bones of every creature that has ever lived.

And it can hold yours too.

You might imagine some of that heaviness flowing down through your body.

Through your legs.

Through your feet.

Into the ground.

Not getting rid of it.

Just sharing it.

Letting something larger hold some of it with you.

Letting something larger hold some of this with you.

And now I want you to bring to mind a moment.

Just one moment.

A moment when you felt something real.

It doesn't have to be a big moment.

Maybe a glimpse of beauty.

A moment of presence.

And a time when just for a second the weight had lifted.

Let yourself feel that moment in your body.

What did it feel like?

Where was the lightness?

Where was the opening?

And both of these are true.

The weight and the glimpses they always exist side by side.

You don't have to choose between them.

Now before we finish I want you to place a hand somewhere on your body.

Maybe your chest.

Maybe your belly.

Just somewhere that feels right for you.

And then silently or out loud say this to yourself.

I am still here.

I am still here.

I am still here.

Despite everything.

Despite the weight.

Despite the ears that were unkind.

Despite not fitting in.

Despite the not connecting.

And despite the heaviness in yourselves.

I am still here.

And when you are ready now just take a breath.

Feel your feet on the ground.

And very gently you can open your eyes.

And welcome back.

Now I want to leave you with this.

If you are someone who feels the weight of being here if life often feels like something to be endured between brief moments of something real you are not alone and you are not broken.

You might be an old soul.

You might be carrying trauma that hasn't been fully processed.

And you might be someone who sees the world too clearly.

Who feels too deeply.

And who doesn't fit the moulds you were handed.

Probably all of these things at once.

I don't know you personally.

I don't know what your path looks like.

I barely know what mine looks like.

Now if this reached you if something in your body,

Something in your chest said finally someone said it thank you.

Now the purpose of listening to this was not to fix you but just to let you know that I see you.

You are not carrying this alone.

And we are carrying this together.

Even if we never meet.

So thank you for listening.

And until next time Namaste

Reviews

I feel seen. What a rare gift that is.

🙏 The rawness of life softened. A kind meditation where I felt a beautiful shift in the beginning of a new perspective; where once there was resistance and a need to try and untangle, I felt relief, acknowledgment and acceptance 🙏