I’m on the third day of bleeding.
Yesterday I spent hours going as far down into my body as possible, in both dance and stillness. Screaming and breathing.
I let myself have it.
No impatience. No urgency.
And my body’s still starving for that kind of attention. That kind of focus on its needs.
Providing undivided focus for every sensation no matter how small, letting it move without judgment or agenda.
There’s no manipulation in that spot.
There is only “is-ness”. Reality of the moment.
The throbbing of connection reaching from throat to the length of the sternum into the belly and pussy.
The trust I’ve cultivated with my body is incomparable.
As a teen, I used to joke, “My mind wants one thing and my body another, so they’re constantly at odds.”
Then I developed hypochondria to the point of my own heartbeat being unbearable to listen to and feel.
I diagnosed every twinge of stomach discomfort to be a sickness and put myself into panic that I’d have to vomit and be sick again and feel bad.
I’ve fainted in church from self-induced stress, in front of my entire school. I’ve had to lock myself into multiple bathrooms for hours due to sudden nausea and diarrhea.
I couldn’t feel anything below my neck when my friend group started bullying me in 5th grade after I broke my pinky finger due to another friend and I got excused from joining the class camping trip.
For the next 7 years, my school experience would consist of daily humiliation, pain, fear, isolation, shame, and collapse. And by the end of it, I was dead inside.
My older sister told me so a while back, completely nonchalant. “When I talk to you, it’s like you’re dead.” She was right, as shocking as it was to hear back then.
I’d closed my heart off, not only to the outside, but to myself.
As I’m writing, I can feel my heart on fire. Molten and hot and alive. There’s no one and nothing that can take this away. It’s mine. I’ve gone through so much.
For three years, I’ve waded through a swamp. I dreaded life. I didn’t want to be here anymore. What was the point when every day consisted of the same despair? I didn’t have the tools to navigate in this darkness yet. No one came to save me.
I remembered how I’d tried to self-harm as a young child, but my mother caught me before I could actually do it.
I remembered how I’d stroke my arms every night to somehow deal with the anger, fear and grief swirling through my body as I prepared myself for another day at school.
I remembered how I felt when my mother had a stroke when I was 8 years old, how I almost lost her, the indescribable overload of horror in my already dysregulated nervous system.
I knew I had to endure. I’d endured so much worse.
And then I got a universal download. I knew my next step. Life brought me into the presence of a man who slammed through my defenses, unearthed my most prevalent trauma, and brought me to the path of embodiment.
I can now look back on my life and see how it was all training. The preverbal trauma of losing my twin in-utero; my soul choosing a body with multiple threads of generational trauma, the loss of our homeland and nationality, war trauma, emotional and physical abuse by family, an absent father; generational abandonment and scarcity wounds.
I’m on this planet to heal it all—in myself and, in embodying that healing, also in others.
Connecting with my Prussian ancestry was like the final exhale after a lifelong marathon. It’s a mutual love that’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. It’s a blazing oven that burns away everything that isn’t pure, soul-encompassing love and joy.
It’s hard to find the words to describe the state of non-nationality non-cultural identity that I lived in. It’s hard because self-rejection is so ingrained into German society that, now that I’m physically experiencing the connection to where I come from, the difference is beyond astronomical.
My mind has known that my parents and grandparents are Prussian, but I never let it penetrate deeper. I never let the grief of what we’ve lost touch me—homes, graves, architecture, cities, villages, dialects, culture, land, traditions. I never let my bones tremble in awe of what ancestry means, how so many churches and birth certificates have been deliberately destroyed to erase 900 years of history.
After so many years, I know what I’m here for.
And I’m choosing to expand in love every day.
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