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For years, the left side of my sacral would flare. An annoyingly dull, heavy ache that would come and go. I blamed hormones. Stress. Old injuries. Energy. I always assumed it was something to fix, heal, release, or balance.

It turns out it wasn't asking for any of that.

It was asking to be heard.

More specifically, it was asking to be obeyed.

What I couldn't see at the time was that my body had been faithfully communicating every single moment I was abandoning myself. Every time I overfunctioned. Every time I overextended, overperformed, overgave, or quietly took responsibility for something that wasn't mine. My body knew long before my mind did. I just hadn't learned how to listen.

That changed about a year ago.

I was sitting with a friend, talking through a situation in my life. She offered a perspective, and while I genuinely appreciated her care, it wasn't true for my experience. I shared what felt true for me instead.

She responded by explaining why she still thought her perspective fit. So I tried again. As I began translating my experience for a second time, something happened that had never happened before.

I didn't just hear myself explaining. I felt my body. There it was.

That familiar sensation in my sacral.

Just enough to interrupt the moment.

So, I stopped. I leaned back in my chair and turned my attention inward.

Instead of translating myself again, I stayed with every sensation arising in my body. I listened as she continued speaking, anchored to what I was feeling rather than trying to change what she was hearing.

A few minutes later, we moved on with the rest of our afternoon.

Later, I realized the only reason I was able to notice any of this was because, by then, I had already been practicing daily 90-minute somatic immersions for a little over a year. My awareness had become refined enough to catch the impulse before it became behavior.

As I continued practicing, moments like this started appearing everywhere. It was staggering.

Not just in conversations.

In every relationship.

I began noticing the impulse to rescue before I rescued.

To explain before I explained.

To repair before I repaired.

To bridge before I bridged.

To overcompensate before I overcompensated.

The sensations always arrived first.

The behavior had simply been my attempt to relieve them.

The more intimate I became with those sensations, the more something unexpected began to happen: listening to my body fundamentally changed the way I related to other people.

Simply because I stopped saving the moment with my own labor.

I stopped filling in the gaps.

And when I stopped filling in the gaps, I started seeing people — not their potential, not who they could become if they healed, not who they might be if I just loved them well enough, but who they actually were.

And that kind of seeing brought a tremendous amount of grief with it.

The grief that I had spent a lifetime protecting myself from feeling.

The patterns that had once looked like love, loyalty, and responsibility began revealing themselves as adaptations. I had learned very early that my role was to stabilize — to compensate for my parents' shortcomings, to be the caretaker, to keep the peace, put the pieces back together, make life more translatable, hold everyone accountable, and quietly do the work myself when accountability never came.

I became extraordinarily skilled at creating stability in environments where very little actually existed.

And for a long time, that skill protected me.

If I could manage a connection, I didn't have to feel the grief of neglectful parents. I didn't have to experience the repeated abandonment. I didn't have to sit with the silence on the other end of the phone whenever I reached for help and no one came.

Overfunctioning gave me something to do with my pain.

But it also kept me from fully experiencing the relationships I longed for.

Because when you're constantly compensating for someone's relational capacity, you never actually discover what their capacity is. You only experience the relationship your labor is making possible.

That has been one of the most humbling realizations of my life.

The very thing that helped me survive was also the thing that kept me from seeing what was truly available to me.

Learning to listen to my body dissolved the role I had carried for so long — the role of the one who notices first, fixes first, understands first, and carries what others cannot. 

And in the strange, symbolic timing of life, as I began stepping out of that role, I also experienced the unexpected ending of one of my deepest earthly bonds. The relationship that had shaped so much of my identity transformed in the most permanent way: my mother left this Earth.

Whether I call it a soul contract, a completion, or simply the unfolding of a life chapter, something in me knew I was no longer being asked to carry what was never mine to hold.

And with that came more grief.

But beneath the grief was something else.

Space.

The space to meet people as they are.

The space to let relationships reveal themselves.

The space to see whether true reciprocity and mutuality are present.

The space to finally experience connection that doesn't require me to disappear inside of it.

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