Find a position your body can stay in.
Without effort.
Not performing stillness,
Just settled.
And if something needs adjusting,
A shoulder,
The angle of your head,
The way your hands are resting.
Do that now.
The body knows.
Before the mind.
Catches up.
And when you're ready.
At your eyes.
Gently.
Close.
Take a breath in.
Long.
And without hurry.
I let it go without controlling how it leaves.
And on that exhale,
Notice how the body drops slightly.
Of something that was being held.
Begins.
Just a little.
To ease.
And another.
In.
You don't need to do anything this time,
Except arrive in it.
Bring your attention to the body as a whole,
The weight of it,
The warmth of it.
The simple facts of it,
Being here,
Breathing,
Holding you through everything that has held you through.
And as you rest in that awareness,
I want to invite you to think about something.
You have been carrying for a long time.
How to analyze it and not to fix it.
But just to acknowledge it.
The weight of years of feeling like something needed managing.
The exhaustion of keeping the surface smooth while something else was happening underneath.
You know what that weight feels like.
You have been carrying it for long enough.
To know its shape.
And here is what I want you to consider in whatever way lands most naturally to you.
For you.
That weight was never a flaw,
It was a response.
At some point,
Early enough that you had no real choice in the matter,
Your system learned that the world required more of you than it was giving back.
That's something needed to be managed,
To be protected.
To be kept out of sight.
And it developed responses.
Efficient.
Intelligent,
Deeply human.
Responses.
To meet that requirement.
Those responses served you.
For longer than they should have had to.
They served you.
Let yourself feel that.
The intelligence of it.
The loyalty of a system that was doing its level best.
With what it had.
And now,
Gently.
I want to invite you to think what those same responses have cost you.
The connections that were harder to make.
The rooms that were harder.
To be in.
The version of yourself that stayed.
Slightly out of reach for years.
Both things are true at once.
Wound served a function.
And the function had a cost.
That is not a contradiction,
That is.
.
.
What it means to be human.
To be shaped by circumstances you didn't choose,
To respond in the best ways available to you.
At the time and to arrive.
Eventually.
And a place where you can look.
All of it.
Clearly.
Are in that place now.
And I want to invite you to bring to mind the person you were during those hardest years.
Not with judgement,
But with the kind of honest,
Steady attention you might give to someone you care about who has been through something difficult.
And look at them.
The Hiding.
The isolation,
The going quiet in rooms while the noise went on around them.
The mornings,
The effort of maintaining appearances,
While something else entirely was happening behind closed doors.
And also the other things,
The humor.
That survived everything.
The sensitivity underneath the armor.
A refusal to be entirely flattened by circumstances that would have flattened a lot of people.
The part that kept going.
Imperfectly,
Stubbornly,
And without a mop.
That person was doing the best that they could.
One day.
Got you here.
Rest.
Here in this moment.
The body,
The carriage.
All of that.
And the life that was built in whatever shape it took.
Out of the raw material.
Those years.
There is nothing.
To resolve right now,
Nothing to fix or conclude or decide.
Just this.
The simple fact.
Being here.
The end of a week of honest looking.
And still standing.
When you're ready.
Let some movement return slowly.
To the hands and the feet and let the room come back in.
Gently.
At your own pace.
And when your eyes open Let them open.
To whatever comes.
