Letting go hurts, too.

This weekend my entire body started aching from head to toe. It was as if I’d done the worlds hardest workout, but I hadn’t. I don’t know why or where it came from but everything just HURT. My back, my legs, my hips, my face, my jaw, even my teeth.

I’d wake up in the morning with pain so intense I didn’t know if I’d be able to move at all. It lasted all day and all night for three days straight.

I tried to take it easy. Tried to breathe and move slowly and drink tea and I stayed on the couch and away from my phone and snuggled the family but all along I could sense this undercurrent of “there is something wrong with me”. Honestly, I was scared.

It took three days of inexplicable intense full-body pain for me to realize that I was actually having a healing.

I’ve been doing really deep work these past few months around my body and trauma.

It’s come as a natural progression of therapy and inner work but I suddenly found myself understanding things about my body that never made sense before. I began to fully sense and feel where old trauma still lives in my body; where I feel overwhelm, where I can’t be present, where I check out. I’ve been exploring where in my body I experience triggers and pain and fear, and how my body actually responds.

And last week I had a breakthrough. A felt revelation.

Something big opened up and in a triggering moment where I’d normally go numb or run the other way I stayed. I felt it all. Cried. Released. Felt safe when I used to feel terrified. And then came this pain. It lasted for three days and I felt it all over.

This morning I woke up...and it’s like it never happened. The pain is gone. I feel wonderful. And I realized that what I was experiencing was the felt sense of very old trauma leaving the body. That tight gripping of the nervous system stuck in overwhelm for years suddenly releasing...it makes sense that the release hurts the same way the body aches after working hard.

Because a trauma lingering in the body is lifelong, hard work. A constant, never-ending holding on.

So of course the letting go hurts, too.

Our bodies are so intelligent. Today I am in deep reverence of mine.