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I was about 45 minutes into a somatic immersion this afternoon when I noticed thoughts surface in regards to a course I created a few years ago called Wild Woman Wellness, specifically the online version. Perhaps it was just soma speaking. Afterall, that course is deeply rooted in somatic practice and so maybe it was two patterns of energy firing off and merging.

I don't know and it honestly doesn't matter. What matters is what came with those thoughts was unmistakable: an abundance of energy, an urge to return.

The energy continued moving through me until about 20 minutes later, when my watch signaled the end of the immersion. I sat down at my Mac, still carrying that charge, and logged into Wild Woman Wellness Online.

The first three numbers of the passcode provided for double authentication: 3:08.

Okay, I see you Universe. (38 is a significant number for me.)

I am greeted by the course's introduction, which in the first section includes a welcome note by yours truly. I press the arrow to go to the next and immediately laugh as I read its title, "Now turn it up and dance." I click on it and am immediately redirected to Spotify, where it plays Alessia Cara's "Wild Things."

I think to myself "I forgot all about this," and let it play. As the lyrics return to me, I begin to cry. 

Let me iterate... this was three years ago. And yet, while I feel so close to this version of me, I also feel I'm a lifetime away.

Of the thousand women I have been in my life, the one I lived over the last eight years... she was my favorite.

And yet, I can't be her anymore.

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with realizing the version of yourself you loved most can't exist in this season of your life. Not because she did anything wrong. Not because she failed. But because the conditions that allowed her to exist have changed.

Yes, I did the inner work. I devoted myself to healing, to listening to my body, to creating a life that felt increasingly aligned with who I was. (I still am.) But we don't become ourselves in isolation. We are always in relationship with the environments, people, opportunities, and seasons that shape us. We are both conditioning and conditioned, always, at the same time.

For those of you who've lived long enough to shed the favorite version of yourself, you know how deeply sad this is.

Because the grief isn't only for who you were.

It's also for the life that held her.

The relationships. The work. The body you inhabited then. The hope you carried. The innocence you hadn't yet outgrown. The particular constellation of circumstances that made that version of you possible.

So when I heard that song again, I thought I was grieving her... more.

But as the music continued, I realized I wasn't only grieving the woman I used to be.

I was remembering where she came from.

And that's when I remembered something else.

While Wild Woman Wellness was created as a space for women to cultivate a deeper relationship with their bodies and strengthen their inner authority throughout their wellness journeys, it was also an offering to the women who came before me — women who did not have the same opportunities for rest, care, and wellness that I have today.

When it launched, I created a post pairing this song with photographs of three generations of women in my family: my grandmothers, my mom and her sisters, and myself with my sister and our cousins. I chose this song because, to me, it captured the spirit of these women — their willingness to forge their own paths, live authentically, and carry a wildness that didn’t always fit neatly within the expectations placed upon them.

This song doesn’t just connect me to that season of my life. It connects me to my own lineage and to the qualities that have endured across generations: the women who rebelled, the women who loved fiercely, and the women who carried hope and heart through circumstances far more difficult than my own.

Maybe that's why this song still undoes me.

It doesn't just remind me of a former version of myself. It reminds me that every version of me belongs to something much older than I am.

As that realization settled in, another one quietly followed.

One day, this may be how my nieces remember me.

That thought brings tears to my eyes — not because I hope to be remembered this way, but because it reminds me how stories are carried. How women shape one another across generations, often without realizing it.

I was shaped by women who carried so much with so little, and somehow still passed forward enough love, enough courage, enough life for me to become who I have been.

And I am so deeply grateful for them. But I am also aware of the conditioning that asked them to carry so much — and the cost that came with it.

And maybe that's why, over the past year, I've felt so much rage.

Not at them.

At the conditions that required women like them to become extraordinary simply to survive.

Somewhere along the way, my body stopped recognizing our ability to make so much out of so little as a gift.

I started to sense what might become possible if the women in my family — including me — didn't have to carry quite so much.

Anyways, as the song came to its end, I noticed its length... 3:08.

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Photos courtesy of Avi Theret on Unsplash

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