"It takes a long time to fully become who you are."- Björk

I’ve been thinking a lot about the body. The other day I shared this post in which I’m reflecting more on how much of our lives we spend living in this meeting point of what we were and what we are, how the body is the container for these intersections. This field for all that needs to be expressed, relieved, experienced. It’s where it all starts. The accumulation of past memories co-existing with the possibilities of new projections, a future. The body as an expression of the past and what’s yet to come. I know I talk a lot about this topic, in one way or another. They say we often write about one big theme, I guess this might be mine: Who are we in this in-between? This space which often is known as the present. However, for this month’s letter, the invitation is to look from the body’s perspective. Bessel van der Kolk who is a psychiatrist and researcher who studies trauma says:

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself… The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage”. To give language to what we know, to let the body feel what it feels, to look within takes courage, to bare attention to our ambivalence takes courage. To visit these intersections of the person you were and are becoming takes a huge level of bravery but I don’t know if there's any other way to be, to exist in this complex world. The more we understand that our bodies have this enormous capacity to hold the space for our past, current and future experiences, to regulate our emotions, to speak to us. The more we can sink deeper into the aliveness of life, in it's expression. The more we can follow when it talks. In a year that death and grief has been so much part of our vocabulary, let the body be your way back. Your return.

With love,
Mari