There is a knowing inside you,
Older than your fear,
Older than your wounds,
Older than the version of you who learned to shrink so the world would feel safer beneath her feet.
This knowing does not push for your attention.
It waits in the dark,
Patient and ancient,
Holding the truth of you even in the moments you cannot hold it yourself.
You have felt it before,
The soft flutter beneath your ribs when something was wrong,
The gentle warmth in your chest when something was right,
The ache in your belly when your boundaries bent in ways you did not choose.
This is not fear.
This is knowing,
A part of you that was misunderstood and misnamed because you were taught to trust what comes from outside you more than what rises from within.
Fear speaks loudly because it learned to protect you.
Knowing speaks quietly because it knows you.
Fear tightens your breath and folds your body inward.
Knowing opens the breath and lifts you in a way you can feel but rarely name.
For so long you believed your sensitivity was too much,
Your intuition inconvenient,
Your tenderness a risk in a world that prefers you hardened.
But the parts of you you tried to silence were the very ones trying to keep you safe.
The heaviness you once called anxiety may have been your body whispering not here,
Not with them,
Not like this.
The tightness beneath your ribs may have been your spirit saying this is not yours to carry.
The exhaustion that came without warning may have been your body refusing what it never agreed to hold.
Your knowing does not speak in thoughts,
It speaks in sensation,
In instinct,
In the warmth that rises through your chest when you come close to truth,
In the widening of breath when something real touches you.
In the settling that happens when you finally return to yourself.
You have listened to fear for years,
Now you are learning to lean toward the other voice.
The one beneath the noise,
The one beneath the trembling,
The one that has waited for you to hear it again.
You do not need to chase clarity,
You only need to notice what your body has been telling you in every room you have ever walked into,
Every relationship you have entered,
Every moment you swallowed a truth meant to be spoken.
Your knowing has never left you,
It has been here the whole time,
Waiting for you to turn inward long enough to remember its sound.
Sit with it now,
Feel the warmth in your chest,
The soft shift beneath your ribs,
The breath that opens just a little more than before.
This is not fear releasing,
This is truth returning.
Let it rise in its own time.
Let it speak in its own way.
Let it become the ground beneath your next step.
You are remembering what you have always known.
You are returning to the self who never forgot.
