This entire year has been a year of clenching.
Body curled inward, tight. Neck stiff, shoulders closed.
Like many of you, it began with a move. Transition. That cavernous word. As global nomad’s, we call many places home and movement seems to be our mantra.
Whether welcome or unwanted, whether reentering after living on the field, being forced to move during a pandemic, or moving to secure a life of greater freedom, it leaves the body holding.
Transition is like navigating the world underwater.”
Ears full of pressure, sounds muted, movements slowed, the landscape blurred and shifting like coral drifting and wafting with the tides. The world feels dampened somehow. At the same time acute. Acute because the survival instincts and trauma brain are firing with new environments and fresh dangers. It’s strange to feel both deadened and skin prickling with cortisol electricity simultaneously.
“Moving geography felt like a chosen darkness I’d entered into.”
All light extinguished. All steps uncertain.
Then there were the collective griefs of 2020: COVID-19, concern for loved ones, isolation from support systems, injustices against black brothers and sisters, rallies, political debates, a President’s callousness in the face of suffering of the oppressed, and navigating overwhelmed medical systems, or for me personally, infertility. The stressors piled high.
My whole body a war zone of resistance.
Sometimes you don’t even know how tight your muscles are tensing, until you experience release.
Sitting on my white duvet, I called my life coach. She was somewhere in the mountains of Utah in an RV traveling towards Zion National Park. I’d been there before and seen the red and blue earthed layers of sandstone. The peace of the wild moon and blackout night full of stars. I wished I was in that RV with her on the open road.
We were talking about the upcoming IVF process and how exhausted I was. We dug deeper into the layers of control I try to use when I get scared.
Planning for every potential outcome gives me the illusion of safety.
My whole life I’ve tried to prepare for all the outcomes, because if I was prepared maybe they couldn’t hurt me as badly. But life, unexpected happens. Much like my departure from Uganda many years ago, after my body broke from burnout.
But I couldn’t control this. Life within God’s palms, not my own.
My life coach said quietly,
“I notice you seem so tired because you’re trying to control for step sixty five when you could be focusing on step two. You’re already worried about how you’ll manage life with a toddler, newborn, and your career when life already feels overwhelming, and you’re not even pregnant yet. Does that sound true to you?”
I hated it when she was right.
“I’m not even sure how to stop doing that,” I sighed, “It’s so ingrained in me.”
Then she asked me a question:
What would it look like to open your hands instead of clench them? To just be in this river and allow it to take you where it’s going no matter the outcome?
Moving had been one planning nightmare of mess and deadlines.
IVF was even more so. The managing of calendars, planning out medications, making doctor’s appointments for sonograms, injecting medications properly every day, not missing a dose or supplement, getting things “right.” It was so much pressure for this “one last shot.”
Taking my hands off the wheel felt reckless. Surrender seemed cowardly, a tiny white flag of acquiescence.
She continued:
Can you think of a time when you were simply allowing things to be?
I remembered the days after reentry from Uganda to California, where I went trail walking, paying attention to nature, to the curl of a leaf’s spine and bird making it’s nest, to blue expanses of sky, things larger and beyond me, to things that just were, that I couldn’t control at all, and how it helped me release.
The following day I went away on a solo retreat I had planned for a month knowing I would need time alone to prepare for the upcoming cycle.
I drove up the winding, tiny gravel roads of Rio Grande nestled in the mountains, until it felt like I was literally in the middle of nowhere. I had to call my Airbnb guide to find it.
The tiny red house was easy to spot. It stood out like something from a Grimm’s fairy tale against the backdrop of the El Yunque rainforest. What made it special was the mango tree that grew live right through the middle of it as if one with the forest. The epic backdrop reminded me of the mist rising over the Ruwenzori mountains in Rwanda, or the lush vegetation of Congo’s Virunga mountains.
I pulled my chair to the edge of the forest, my legs tickled by the long grasses. Mango trees towering next to me. Below me, the wind in the canyon sighed with breath, the lungs of nature. A waterfall cascading in the distance. A rooster crowed on a farm nearby, reminding me of my life in Uganda.
The El Yunque mountain peak means “the anvil.” The clouds rolled off the mountain, their own ecosystem, billowing grey and full of rain, they moved in tandem with the wind. The clouds shifted almost as though they originated on the mountain. As I watched them, I felt my body melting into the seat underneath me, my breaths elongated, matching the forest.
Those clouds: they could choose to be broken on that anvil, or let the allowing of the wind funnel the flow of their course.
The stepping outside myself to something larger than me, unruly, untamed, uncontrolled. Yet even this powerful thing:
“Nature, allows itself to be carried. “
The trees bending with the wind, The clouds breathed in a sigh from the mountaintop, the grass waving with a song. The trees painting vibrant green colors that absorbed me.
It was all bigger than me, I didn’t have to carry it.
All I needed to do was ride the waves, feel the echo of the canyon expand with breath, as if saying:
Life is bigger than you—Allow it.
“Surrender isn’t saying I don’t care. It’s saying I don’t have to force it. “
Finally, my ribs compressing with out breath, I unclenched my fists and let go.
As I did, I felt this whispering spiraling up from somewhere deep inside me:
Your children aren’t in the palm of your hand, they’re in the palm of mine. Love is saying to release. There will be enough.
I didn’t have limited resources, as I thought I had.
When I was connected to the earth, to nature, to God, there would always be enough breath.
The wind would keep on sighing through the rocks in the canyon, breathing for me when I couldn’t.
I put my hand to my chest in self-love and spoke the words,
“I’m grateful for your strength, for how these difficulties have shaped you.
I put my hand on my womb,
Body trust what will be, will be.
I spoke it as a blessing.
The world needs us to breathe.
All outward revolution is an inward journey of love expanding inside us.
We cannot lead people to healing when we deny ourselves love.
Ministry to ourselves is the beginning of ministry to the world.
The peace of the mountain is carried inside us:
Look up. Look up at the clouds, and breathe. And allow. Allow them to move through you.
I want to hear from you. What you’ve overcome this year.
How are you learning as a global nomad to have peace in unrest?
With hope and love,
**If you need tips for self-care during this time of unrest be sure to pick up my eBook by subscribing to the blog, and other free resources here. And as always, if this resonated please give it a share so we can build a more beautiful world together
