ISSUE 38 - When Your Body Remembers

This week was filled with all the normal preparations for back to school, shopping for shoes, figuring out schedules, meeting teachers, getting back into routines.  But I’ve realized over the last few years that back to school doesn’t feel entirely normal to me anymore.

There were moments during my divorce that happened while my children were at school that were incredibly painful and frightening. Moments that changed the way my body experiences the unknown when it comes to my children.  I don’t need to tell the details of those stories here.  What matters is that my body remembers them.

And so, while another parent may experience the beginning of a school year as backpacks and first-day pictures, there is a part of me that can still become hyperaware.  Are my kids safe?  Is everything okay?  What don’t I know?  Those thoughts aren’t necessarily a reflection of what is happening in the present. They are echoes of what happened in the past.

And this year, I noticed something different.  I noticed that I could hear those echoes without allowing them to become the soundtrack of this season.  Because the woman standing here today is not the same woman who lived through those moments.  She is stronger.  She trusts herself more.  She knows what she is capable of handling.  She knows how to listen to her body without allowing fear to make every decision for her.  And maybe most importantly, she knows how to keep moving.

I went to back-to-school night by myself again this year. And somewhere in the middle of walking through classrooms and listening to teachers, I realized that I have gone to almost every back-to-school night and parent-teacher conference alone.  For a second, I could have looked at that realization through the lens of what was missing… Instead, I saw everything that was there.

I have been the one beside my kids picking out their shoes.  I have watched them move through clothing sizes and grades and teachers and friendships.  I have been there to tell them whose class they’re in, help them prepare, calm their nerves, celebrate their excitement and watch them become more of themselves every year.

Those aren’t markers of what I’ve lacked.  They are markers of a life I have been present enough to experience.  And I think this is where healing and manifestation meet.  Healing doesn’t mean the past never comes back into your awareness.  It means the past no longer gets to decide what you are capable of experiencing in the present.

There will be moments that trigger an old fear. There will be seasons your body associates with something painful. There will be circumstances that remind you of versions of yourself you thought you had already left behind.

The work isn’t always to make those feelings disappear.  Sometimes the work is to notice them.  Honor them.  And then move.  This is one of the reasons movement sits at the center of Manifest in Motion™.

Reflection is important. Journaling is important. Awareness is important. Feeling your emotions is important.  But I don’t believe we are meant to stay there indefinitely.  At some point, the body has to come with us.  We move the fear.  We move the grief.  We move the old story.  Not because we’re running away from it, but because we’re showing our bodies that we are capable of feeling something from the past while continuing to walk toward what is ahead.

That is forward momentum.  And lately I’ve realized how much of my life is evidence of it.  If the woman I was four years ago could meet the woman I am today, I don’t think she could have imagined her.  Not fully.  The mother I’ve become.  The children I’m raising.  The boundaries I can hold.  The relationships I’m creating.  The work I’m building.  Manifest in Motion™.  The dreams that are beginning to take shape around me.

Some of these things are bigger than anything I would have known to put on a vision board back then.  And that has made me think differently about manifestation.  Maybe our job isn’t to perfectly predict the life waiting for us.  Maybe our job is to keep becoming the person capable of meeting it.  Healing creates capacity.  And manifestation asks us to expand into that capacity.

There is a quote I heard recently that has stayed with me, the ceiling of what your mind can imagine may only be the floor of what life has available for you.  I love that.  Because four years ago, I was trying to survive circumstances I couldn’t see beyond.  Today, I’m standing inside pieces of a life that version of me couldn’t yet imagine.  And there is still so much I can’t see from here.

So as my kids step into another school year, I’m choosing not to let what happened in an old season steal the joy from this one.  My body may remember.  I can honor that.  But I can also remind it, we are here now.  We are safe enough to experience this moment.  We are allowed to be excited about what is ahead.  We don’t have to know exactly what comes next.  And we can keep moving toward it.

Maybe that’s what healing really gives us.  Not a life where nothing from the past ever hurts again.  But the capacity to feel what comes up without allowing it to keep us from the life that is unfolding in front of us.

And maybe that’s where manifestation begins, too.  Not simply with what we write down.  But with what we are willing to heal, embody, and move toward.