It’s funny the little things we remember. Seemingly innocuous things that people say tend to stick with us. For me, it was a comment my Mum made. I was going about my usual day, multi-tasking with my kids, aged one and three. Chatting to her in the kitchen whilst simultaneously doing hundreds of different things – feeding the kids, emptying the dishwasher, hoovering, picking up toys, responding to texts, checking work emails. And my Mum said to me, ‘I feel exhausted just watching you.’ And in that moment, do you know what I remember? Feeling proud. I remember feeling capable and on top of life, and what a compliment for someone to marvel at my energy reserves. The thing was, I was the one who was exhausted. Exhausted beyond the demands of young children. I was exhausted pretending to be someone I wasn’t in the corporate world. By my people-pleasing. Always saying yes. The constant need to prove. The overpacked calendar.
The demands. The pushing. The lists. The prioritisation of everyone else’s needs above mine. It wasn’t long after that I welcomed in the New Year. And for some reason that I didn’t realise at the time, I decided to commit to a three-week yoga intensive course. This yoga course meant that I was to wake up at 5:30 a.m., scrape the frost off my car and head to my local yoga studio for an hour of yoga from 6-7 a.m. Now, being totally honest, I hadn’t chosen it for the exploration of self. It felt like a challenge for my body. It felt like another goal. As I started the yoga course, I was all in my head. I was constantly comparing myself to others. If I could push myself harder, hold the pose longer, try a bit harder, I would be better. The meditative practice at the end felt pointless. I remember thinking, ‘What is the actual point of this? I am not getting any stronger here.’ In these moments, I was preoccupied by the desire to get home so I could get on with my day, my work, my chores, my job. Then a few days in, something extraordinary started happening. My body started demanding my attention. Aches came. I started feeling all the things. Guilt, anger, sadness, grief. I started seeing colours and auras, and I became aware of the whispers of something greater than me.
Then 15 days in, we did a particularly powerful yin practice. A gentle form of yoga where you hold poses for a longer period of time. Yoga designed to help you be. I hated every minute of it. But with each pose I felt a softening. A surrendering. An ache. I remember leaving that class and feeling raw. I was grey. I felt like I was a shell of who I was. The next day I came out in shingles down the whole left side of my body. My feminine had finally had enough. She was ready to be heard. She was demanding my attention through a virus that was showing up down the left side, my feminine side, of my body. As I was signed off from work for two weeks, I got up the next morning and tried to carry on, but some-thing had shifted. I was so deeply tired that I couldn’t keep going. I took myself to bed and slept for several days. When I woke up, I heard a message loud and clear: You need to STOP. You need to listen. Everything in your life is telling you something is off. And for the first time in years, I did just that. I started listening.
It was then that things got really interesting.
Caroline Britton, Soul Activator, Healer and Author of Coming Home to You (Amazon, 14.99) www.caroline-britton.com
