by Vienda | 19 Apr 2022 | personal update
Imagine…
Walking into a thick, tall pine forest. With each step, the trees grow denser and slowly start to block out the sunlight until it is almost entirely dark. A constant twilight descends. It is neither day nor night. I am neither fully here nor elsewhere. I am half awake half asleep. Half broken half whole. Half grieving death half reaching for life.
I start to stumble unable to see where I am going. A subtle panic advances escorting every step. Memories… memories from the many lives I’ve lived in the past 40 years, distress from the many hurts I’ve felt the past 40 years, regrets from the many mistakes I’ve made in the past 40 years… rise up and humble me. All the things I had left untouched, unresolved, unanswered, unwitnessed, unacknowledged haunt me.
I cry for 18 months until there is nothing left to cry about. I forgive all I had shared pain in, atoned the regrets and felt the ravages left by a lifetime of bypassing the extremities of my humanity. The path through the forest, still in that twilight half-darkness, beckons me to continue despite the many junctures at which I question my sanity, my life, my purpose, my place in the world and everything I had once thought to know true.
Then slowly, day by day, little speckles of light start darting through the trees. The forest floor becomes dappled with sunshine as the trees grow slighter. Tiny moments of joy begin to creep into what had become a hardened and heavy heart. Involuntary protection from the aches it has persevered. Endless desolation is replaced by recognition of beauty. A new soft loving openness breathes itself into me.
And there I am. On the other side of the darkest forest, I have ever moved through. An initiation is complete. Maiden to mother. Truths revealed. Maturity claimed. Limitations frontiered. A new woman has emerged.
After 2 years of really intense growth and healing, I am coming out with an entirely new version of myself. While I’m still walking into life like an unsteady newborn I’m really excited and heart-wide-open for what this newest iteration of myself is bringing.
On a pragmatic level, there are so many aspects that have been named, faced and redefined. All things relating: romantic relationships, platonic relationships, familial relationships, and in particular my insolent unwillingness to the way I have played out childish narratives in all of those. All things feeling supported: finances, the entire concept of belonging, having and providing myself with a physical home both bodily and environmentally, community and the paradoxical intersection between my codependency patterns and tendency towards avoidant attachment responses when triggered. All things spirituality: how I had spirituality bypassed all of the above because I was too spiritually evolved and had already transcended it all until my spirit guides LOL’ed into their coupes of cava and hauled me back to my humanness reminding me that I am as evolved as the next person I walk beside and judge.
It has been a journey. I’ve made it past the edge of the treeline after that mammoth cosmic forest swallowed me whole halfway through 2020 and spat me out only days ago. Thank you for your patience while I figure out how life works on this new playing field again. Thank you for being the dappling light of love and encouragement, even if you didn’t know it, on the days I felt the darkest. Thank you for being there alongside me.
From one mere mortal made of stardust to another, I salute you.
by Vienda | 24 Mar 2022 | personal update
This note is coming to you from seat 22B of a Vueling aeroplane on a 55-minute flight to Barcelona. It’s my first flight since leaving Mexico pre-pandemic at the start of 2020. The cabin is eerily quiet, a few people quietly muffling through mask-covered mouths, we have been spaced out with seats between passengers kept free. A flight attendant is pushing a piece of luggage, whose wheels squeak as she passes, to another part of the plane.
I pull my mask down to take a sip of water from the small bottle I bought in the airport to see me through the flight. Normally I would bring my flask but I am travelling with a tight constraint of hand luggage only for our 3-day-2-night girls weekend.
This flight is bringing me so much nostalgia. Gone (for now) are the days of lighthearted travel and whimsical interactions. The past two years have left us fractured with limited reprise. I personally hardly recognise myself compared to the woman who last boarded a plane.
There are times in life when it asks you to take everything you ever thought was true and deconstruct it in such a way that the only thing that is left is fierce and fiery truth. The woman I am today is no longer shrouded in a cloud of wishful thinking and denial but instead has humbly submitted herself to the truth. And the truth is, that it’s all so much more uncomplicated. It, being: life, purpose, and what we truly need. What really matters is simple.
The past 18 months have been the deepest wintering of my life. Both in terms of my surroundings (there was no summer in the UK last year) and in terms of my soul journey. In times when I thought it couldn’t get any tougher, it did. What happened was a pragmatic and practical pilgrimage to clear the way and make space for true healing, health and joy.
I’ve realised that the real work is in clearing the way. Always.
It seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?
That the only way to move forward is to stop and look around at what we have always done and decide whether that’s actually what we want in our lives. And then to clear the path through facing our truth, burning it down, clearing the blocks/beliefs/ideologies that we then recognise as false.
It seems counterintuitive because we’ve all been socially conditioned to believe that our worth/success/wealth/deservability is a reflection of how much we do, how hard we try, how many goals we meet. So we do more, try harder, reach for bigger. And it’s never enough.
Which feels deflating and defeating. But the conditioning is deep and strong. So we berate ourselves. “I’m clearly not doing enough”.
But our souls. Your soul, and mine. They know. They know this isn’t true. In fact, it’s so inaccurate that our souls send us depression and anxiety and injuries and breakdowns to remind us. To bring us back home. To truth. To what really matters.
Because it’s not about how much you do.
It’s about how you be.
It’s about your energy and how you interact with and approach everything within you and between you. It’s the energy with which you show up each day, each living breathing moment that you are given this gift, the miracle of life.
I had to check myself and the narrative I had started to create in my mind, thoughts and words in recent times. Life sometimes tears us down, but how we respond to it, is what matters. I didn’t really have a choice. Life compelled me to peel back the layers and address some of the ways I was victimising myself, giving away my own power, playing within lines that neither match my desires nor hopes, and shirked responsibility for some of the ways my life was unfolding. I had to witness parts of myself that I do not like, and allow them to crumble so that nothing stands between me, who I am really am and life, anew.
For the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, I see clearly, what is before me. Who I am. And that every desire, impulse and ambition is tied to an underlying intelligence that we are all part of. Guiding us back to the truth.
That being is all there really is.
And within that ‘being’ exists the messy, non-linear, unpredictable and extraordinary human life experience.
Ok… so when I started this note, I wasn’t expecting all of this to stream out of me like this, but here we are. We’ve just had an announcement from the captain that we are beginning descent so I am leaving you with the things I originally opened my laptop to tap out a note to you for.
The answers to the two questions I have been asked most frequently about my two offerings:
1. the difference between mentoring, coaching & therapy
2. 10 steps to figure out your ‘thing’ for when you’re not sure what your ‘thing’ is or how to start it
Enjoy!
I know I’ve been gracing you with my thoughts, words and heart a little more frequently recently. Let me know how you feel about it in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
by Vienda | 1 Feb 2022 | Biz + Blogging, Intuition + Manifestation, personal update
So much of life is optional, not mandatory.
But we forget that, don’t we? We inflate ourselves with a grandiose succession of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and find ourselves slipping beneath the surface of why we came to Earth in the first place. I am absolutely certain that we are here to have a profoundly enjoyable experience. To sip on the ecstasy that is a life fully lived. And yet…
The past few weeks I keep bumping up against the fact that my entire system is currently rewiring itself. Every time I think I’m done, every time I impatiently try to move on, life puts me back into my place, into the present moment and makes me feel every emotion until I am fully purged. I’ve been in a season of doing the slow, incremental, unglamorous work of questioning one belief system at a time.
Redefining my life, my work, the way I use my time, my existence piece by piece. Remembering anything is possible when I work through patterns and conditioning like an archaeological soul excavation. I’ve had to let go of so much and questioned myself so deeply and had to teach my nervous system that it’s safe through it all one breath at a time.
I keep surrendering to these waves of needing to be still and rest as new information settles into my bones. All these initiations of deeper understanding and wisdom, a continuous cycle of death and rebirth, as old ideas and paradigms are dying in the face of new ones blooming. I find myself incapable of doing anything productive in these moments that sometimes last for days and I keep having to remember to surrender to it. To not fight or resist it.
There’s a rewiring on fundamental topics happening:
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- How I nourish myself and what that means in the face of a wellness industry that thrives off convincing me to follow trends
- The intersection of worth, value, output and income and how we have been fed the idea that they are conditional
- How nature, the feminine and creativity are one and the same and require uncompromising protection right now
- That how and where we invest our time is where we invest our lives…
This is why I am excited to present to you: BOUNDARIED. A 2-hour Zoom workshop with me and my spellbinding friend
Claire where we teach you to have the audacity to map out your own hours and the self-authority to do something different to the cultural norm.
EVENT INFO
Full Moon — Wednesday, February 16th
9am LA / 12pm NYC / 5pm London / 6pm Barcelona / 4am Sydney
2-hour Zoom Workshop
£35
Everything is changing. Everything is changing.
And it feels… terrifying. But also, so good.
We are all biologically and intrinsically motivated by the desire for more. More of the good stuff: more ease, joy, love, pleasure, abundance, time, presence, connection… Because by nature we are pleasure-seeking beings. It’s an urgent need for satisfaction. An inbuilt reaching for our own evolution.
Just like all of you my life and work are ever-evolving, shifting, growing. I am currently in the process of scaling my business and it is stretching me in ways that I haven’t been stretched before. I paid the biggest tax bill ever in December and the VM business became an LTD company because it outgrew my little sole trader setup. I hired a new accountant and set up payroll, and then went ahead and soft-launched two mentoring programs for 2022 to my ‘Her Way’ peeps… And then days later, after a few conversations with people I respect whom I shared my niggling feeling that something wasn’t right with, cancelled those programs, refunded my students and went back to the drawing board.
It was both exhilarating and frightening. Birthing something from inside you that is bigger than you, is no small feat. I’m leaning into some really new terrain and going all-in but my nervous system is saying “are you sure this is safe?” so there’s that inner struggle and the work of soothing and supporting my body so it can hold space for the expanse of what I am calling in.
And it reminds me that there are always two things at play in our evolution:
1. The conscious, surface desire for more. To expand, to grow, to evolve.
2. The subconscious, interior desire to feel safe. To stay with the confines of what it knows.
Every time we learn and grow we face an inner struggle that comes with the discomfort of stretching and growing pains. The unravelling and deconditioning of beliefs, systems and structures, while holding ourselves in a foreign no-man’s land to leap forward into the unknown more-ness of our desires.
I’m so enthusiastic and also, so so so confronted by the largeness of what I want to offer the world, an extension of the insight, healing and growth I have myself moved through the past two years, and I won’t pretend that I don’t feel some impatience and frustration with myself and the non-linear path this journey is taking me on as I wait for the nudges that move me forward. I have to let go and trust.
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by Vienda | 10 Jan 2022 | Body Image + Food, personal update
Dec 5
Finally, the blood is here and she is full and juicy and red and gushing. After a 47-day cycle, nothing is more satisfying.
So much is coming up for me right now. About life and aliveness. About men and the masculine in my life. About polarity and equilibrium.
I miss feeling wild and free and just ALIVE. I’ve become so domesticated the past 8 or so years. In order to heal the trauma and habitual fight-or-flight patterns I’ve had to slow down, create safety and self-regulate but at the expense of feeling that buzz of aliveness from the constant drip of cortisol — the only addiction still wired into my cells.
I used to live one day to the next, totally absorbed in each moment in perpetual survival mode. It was exhilarated and I loved living in the emotional chaos of one adrenaline rush to another in the form of a lifetsyle that meant never being settled, feeding off uncertainty and danger, defying conventional society.
I wanted to change. I chose to heal. I knew I had to stop chasing the chemical highs that were my normal from growing up in an unstable environment. Yet I mourn a version of myself and my life that was once my own. I feel complacent about my life. I feel rebellious and filled with rage at a world that has gone mad under the guise of protecting itself from the unpredictable nature of life.
The past two years have shocked me into a fearful complacency that I am not familiar with. I am trying hard to shake it off. Is it age or is it too much comfort that makes me fussy about details like the just-right firmness of a mattress and how the morning light creeps in?
There was a decade of my life where none of that mattered, years spent sleeping in strange uncomfortable places bouncing awake bright-eyed and filled with enthusiasm. Like the time I fell asleep on a chair in the middle of the Mexican jungle waiting for the world to end. It was 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. To awaken at two in the morning to the sound of distant drums and following that sound to a circle in a clearing. Where I stripped off and danced and sang in the rain until the sun rose with 50 strangers whose names I did not know.
is that life over? Is our world so regulated that I will never experience this kind of spontaneity and freedom ever again? Is that girl I once was gone?
Replaced by sensible bedtime rituals and daily routines to protect the fragile vulnerabilities of my human body and mind. I miss the liberated wildness from a life where I did not care what happens while fiercely appreciating the tenderness and sanctity of life I have now. I want to find an in-between those two versions of my world. A “middle way” as Buddha suggests.
☽
Dec 8
I am moving through the final threads of healing something around men and the masculine. I have been carrying a thread of disappointment around with me the past two years as I make peace with how my own conditioning has led me to participate in and enable the patriarchy and take responsibility for my piece of upholding a sick and imbalanced perspective. With this recognition, I have witnessed so many disappointments. Men, so self-unaware, so entitled, so irresponsible, lacking integrity, shielding their fragile egos with little lies. There is a holy rage running through me and I need to burn it out.
As I feel it I heal it. As I feel it I redefine it. As I feel it I see another path. As I feel it I let it go.
☽
Dec 20
I woke up late and pulled on leggings and a jumper to jump in my car. I picked up a friend at the end of her road and drove to the most south-western point of Mallorca. We hiked up a hill that made me pant and sweat and groan until we were greeted by views of an island that looks like a dragon’s head rising out of the sea. We sat at the lookout and snacked on carrots and nuts and let our hearts fill with the nourishment of nature’s beauty. We scrambled down a cliff face where the path fell away and trudged through bushes and grasses to find our way until we were met by the glittering sea again. I stripped down she did too. Naked we tiptoed our way into the cold winter sea until our bodies submerged. We screeched with delight as our breath was returned after the initial exhilaration and remembered what it is to feel alive.
☽
Dec 25
After months of stagnancy, physical and emotional pain and drudgery, and wading through sticky molasses-like energy, so much are finally shifting again. I have almost finished my Compassionate Inquiry course with Gabor Mate and not only is it fuelling me on so many levels professionally, but it has also offered me a new perspective on my own childhood trauma and the tools and practices I have around handled these aspects of myself.
If the last two years taught me anything it is the deep capacity to hold space for the darkest parts of myself and others in such a way that it is so safe and easily transmuted. My emotional maturity has new layers to it. I used to bypass and diminish the aspects of myself that required validation of ugly emotions and feelings but I don’t do that anymore. It is all welcome here. My capacity and compassion have been broadened and expanded. It is so safe to go to those places within myself now. Which is significantly mirrored in my work.
☽
Dec 29
I just woke up from the strangest dream…
I was a slave, working for a wealthy family. It was set on the seaside in an almost apocalyptic version of the ’80s or ’90s. I owned nothing, got paid nothing, just slaving all day every day and rushing in some meals in between. I felt like I had zero choices zero possibilities, nothing to live for. I wanted to die. I felt at peace with that decision.
Two of my slave friends, a daughter and her mother felt the same so we decided to run away to kill ourselves. The mother had access to syringes and poisons that put you to sleep forever and we planned everything meticulously. We ran away from the house we were enslaved in and met up in a slaves room of a hotel one night.
Each of us had syringes filled with this poison each sitting on a single bed. I was so ready for it to be over I rushed to put the syringe in my left arm and pushed the liquid into me. As I lay there on the bed I started to feel really sleepy and I thought this is it this is my time. I was at peace and content to go and fell asleep.
But then later I woke up. I looked over and saw my friend and her mother dead on their beds. And I looked at my arm and there was a big swollen bulge where the poison had gone in. In my rush to get it done, I had pressed it into the muscle of my arm instead of a blood vessel and my body had neatly protected itself from the poison so I find myself, alive, breathing, with a second chance at life.
I have nothing except my life. I realise something. I am free! I always was free. All I had to do was make a new decision and act. All it took was to leave the situation I was in. All it took was a leap of faith. Life wanted me to live. It always does. We can always make a new decision and act on it. Liberation is literally a choice away.
Wild. What a wild dream.
☽
Jan 6
I have had a devilish relationship with my body and its fluctuating weight since I can remember, like most women I speak to. I have a small frame and put on and lose weight equally as easily, but staying in that self-determined “perfect” state has been near impossible.
I “feel” the best and like my body the most when I’m slender. When I’m slender I’m not eating. I’m newly in love or stressed or heartbroken or travelling in a country where I don’t control my meals. I wonder if that feeling that I’m chasing is actually love. The love of a world that validates a woman when she is slim and gives her snide side-eyes when she’s not.
Why is it that we live in a world that celebrates women for their girlish figures? It is normal at 40 to still want to look like you’ve hardly been touched by the life that you’ve lived?
Most importantly when do we begin distinguishing between our conditioning and our true desires to redefine what we really need to feel good / loved / safe?
Hey, I don’t have answers. Nor am I cured. I lie here writing this laughing at the absurdity of me wanting to starve the softness of 5kg off my bones. That’s why I’m asking questions here.
I think my period is due.
☽
Jan 9
Every time my blood returns I celebrate. I have celebrated and loved my cycle since I was 23, naturally compelled by the secret mystery that lives within me. Every month it’s a delight when those first twinges of my uterus lining tearing, move through me bringing me back home into my body. I am grateful for the cyclical capacity to let go and release emotionally and physically over and over again, reminding me that I can trust the rhythms of life. Nothing lasts and nothing is lost.
![closing the loops [a ritual]](https://viendamaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/DSC_4146-Edit-1.jpg)
by Vienda | 31 Dec 2021 | personal update
2021: Trial by fire.
Today, I am closing the loops. An energetic loop is the container of something that began that needs to be closed. A calendar year, a relationship, a trauma cycle, a life. These are all energetic loops.
2021 found me pulled under the current and tumbled in the backwash of a turbulent world that I had actively opted out of a long time ago. I held my breath and froze. I stopped dreaming dreams for myself this year.
I pulled back this year. I sat back on my haunches and allowed the currents of the world to wash past me while I waited. I plucked at the thorns in my heart and planted wildflowers in terracotta pots on a balcony that was not my own. I watched them grow and loved them through the shortest summer and their even shorter lifetime.
I was held afloat by the women in my life this year. Women who saw me and heard me when I felt I had nothing left in me. I hurt for a world that is unfamiliar to me and over and over I keep wondering if it had always been this way but I had not noticed while I was firmly living in a fairytale world of my own creation.
I drove a Fiat across 4 countries this year and learned to parallel park on narrow winding streets that lead to stairs into the sea. I fell into an obtuse coma fuelled by loneliness and self-reflection and revisited childhood trauma after childhood trauma and grieved all the grief I had suppressed. I needed to feel it all, to heal it. I grieved my past hurts hoping to create space for the light to come in. But mostly, I waited, sitting back on my haunches, for the tide to change.
Until today. Until today, when I decided I would not wait for someone or something else to close those loops for me. I have sovereign responsibility to myself and my life experience. This year has walked me through the fire and taught me energetic mastery. I know where the line of my fierce embodied discernment lies, where I am no longer available to participate in old patterns, and where my wholehearted “yes” lives.
Energetics is the feeling of truth in our bones. It’s the energy that runs through each moment and reveals its core, its verity, the integrity of the current moment and those interacting in it. We work with energetics every day to witness, amplify, conceal, move through what is. More tangibly, energetics is the intersection of our patterns, learned beliefs, and choices. Energetic mastery is how we consciously choose to act on them. It’s our intentional vibe.
When energy loops need to be closed, meaning, they are still open, we feel them leaking our energy leaving us feeling frustrated, tired, confused, foggy, avoidant, crazed, anxious, lethargic, ungrounded. I wonder if you want to close the loops with me too.
Today we have an opportunity to consciously close out open energy loops that need to be closed out before we head into 2022. Today is a beautiful opportunity to kick off this upcoming year with intention, presence and self-love in the form of letting go of what’s ready to go.
CLOSING THE LOOPS RITUAL
— Take inventory of the open energetic loops in your life by writing down a list.
— Determine which loop is the most exhausting/pressing/ scariest and begin there.
— Address it. Either make peace with it, or have that hard conversation, or set that boundary (and keep it), or scream it out. Whatever you need to do to move it. Go through your list until you’re done.
— Watch/feel/sense your inner energetics rearrange themselves. You may feel tired all of sudden and that’s ok. That’s the release. Rest is encouraged after this ritual is complete.
— Burn your list or shred it up while setting the intention “I give permission for any old, stuck energy that no longer serves me to be released with absolute ease from my body while I rest/nap/sleep. Thank you, body.”
— Enjoy the reset, rest, celebrate, feel liberated.
by Vienda | 27 Oct 2021 | personal update, Travel + Freedom
I stuff Danger in his crate, hug my friend whose backyard AirBnB in Chichester I’ve rented for the past week and climb into my car. A soft low mist is hanging over the country roads as I drive towards Newhaven to catch the ferry across the English Channel. It’s romantic, mystical, the perfect picture to leave this island with as I trade it for another.
Apprehension of the border crossings ahead leaves me feeling tense. There’s an inner conflict growing within me, as I try to merge the version of myself that I have known from the past who would travel through the most questionable situations with complete grace and trust, and the version of myself now who feels overwhelmed and drained by the unpredictable uncertainty of the everchanging travel rules that make zero sense to me. I want to be cool, chill, at ease… but instead, I’m leaning into the subtle fear and trepidation reminding myself that whatever happens, it will be ok.
Boarding the ferry offers a welcome respite from my concerns. They check nothing as I leave the U.K. Even the security guard who is supposed to inspect my car asks me to open the trunk, takes one look and says “That looks very neatly packed, I’m not going to mess it up!” and then advises me to hide the houseplants so that I can smuggle them into France. I have 4 hours to fill and answer emails on the shoddy wifi and manage to press publish on a fun article I write on 13 films and series to inspire entrepreneurial women.
On the other end, I slowly roll through passport control prepared with my test and documents where I “on my honour solemnly swear” not to have the C-word and to get out of the country within 24 hours or isolate for 7 days. The 3 men squeezed into a tiny booth are excited to talk to me. As the only young woman amongst 200 pensioners in their mobile homes and 50 cyclists on tour, I imagine I am some respite to their boredom.
They look at my car, packed with life-things, the cat crate on the passenger seat and delightedly ask “You finish with UK?”. I assume it’s a rough translation for ‘are you leaving the UK?‘ and smile and nod. They celebrate with looks of glee and French-British rivalry is evident on their faces. They don’t ask me for my papers the I hurriedly had printed and then painstakingly filled out the night before. Nor my negative test. They look at my passport and see that it’s European and then pass me the scanner to scan Danger’s microchip. He’s cleared and they wave me off. After all the government elucidation on the website, I am surprised. I had anticipated an unpleasant inspection and interrogation.
I drive out onto the road towards the only hotel I have booked for the 4-day journey ahead and remind myself ‘right side, we are on the right side now’. I am surprised at how natural it feels. The relaxed entry into Europe makes me wonder a few things. One, I wonder if all these ridiculous rules have less to do with a virus and more to do with politics. I’m starting to believe that this pandemic has become a convenient excuse to globally tighten control. Two, I wonder if, since they didn’t ask for my paperwork, I am no longer forced/required to get out of France within 24 hours. Because a 10-hour drive tomorrow to make it out in time is terrorizing. Four hours later I arrive in Orleans. I decide to risk it. I look at the map. It’s a 12-hour drive to the ferry port in Barcelona and book another hotel in France for the next night 6 hours drive away.
Two more full days of driving ahead, I have a lot of time to think. I think about how I haven’t been very present with myself nor my life recently. I think about how I’ve been feeling like a body operating on autopilot. I think about how I miss feeling immersed and enchanted by the human experience despite its ebbs and flows, ups and downs. I think about how I used to be able to transcend and override fears and doubts quickly. I think about how I used to pride my ability to be present with things, moments, hours. I think about whether pride is an ego-driven feeling and if it’s spiritually healthy to recognise one’s strengths. I think about the fact that I have concluded that, no matter how consistent and comprehensive your spiritual practices are, they cannot compete with a lifestyle and culture that requires you to be racing forward, geared in the direction of more, more, more all the time. I, at least, cannot be the centred, present, whole I like being in this world.
I think about how, when I was at my happiest I had very few things, commitments, nor agendas. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved travelling to developing countries. No one holds you to the expectations of your culture and society to ‘pursue validation via success’ when you are in a culture or society that values being present, making food and family connections. Most of all I think about how I miss bathing in my own essence. I’ve been busy/avoiding it/feeling tense/uncomfortable in my own skin. I’m feeling the duality of shame and disappointment in myself, I want to be better than this, while also having compassion and understanding, for a life that has felt hard lately.
There is a moment, in a hotel room in the south of France when the pain back pain from my recent injury wakes me. I turn to see that it’s 1.30 am… and I breathe into the area, massage it and work on it the way my physical therapist and osteopaths have taught me, consciously thinking words of healing, release and learning when suddenly the pain subsides, and my left hip relaxes back down to its normal position for the first time in weeks. The body always holds the score. While I still can’t intellectually make full sense of it all, I know this injury is here to teach me something big and meaningful and necessary.
France is beautiful. I take all the no-toll roads. The idea of having to stop the car and run around to the other side every time I need to pay at a toll booth impales me. Id’ rather drive an extra hour here and there and see the scenery. Small cute villages, sunflower fields and windmills, a palace of dreams softly glide past. On the third day of my drive, I go up into the Pyrenees to cross the border into Spain. I need to wee but I decide to wait for one of those cute French roadside rest stops. Three hours later I’m still waiting and desperate and nearly at the top. I finally pull over on the side of the road, skip out into some bushes and pray that my wild wee will go unseen. Back in the car I’m so overcome with relief I miss the exit to Spain and drive into the tiny shiny shopping mall, liquor store and petrol station bespeckled tax-haven Andorra by mistake.
20-minutes down the mountains on the other side I see a Spanish flag and assume I must have crossed into Spain. Eventually, two men in uniform on the ragged edge of a road wave me down and I roll to a stop. I pull my passport out but they just ask me where I’m going and where I’ve come from and tell me to have a good trip. At the outskirts of Barcelona, I stop. I haven’t eaten all day and I run into a shop and buy a cheap sandwich. I’m relieved and exhausted. The final part of my journey, an overnight ferry to Mallorca, is a few hours away.
Danger is an absolute angel the entire way. Happily snoozing in his crate in the car without complaints, exploring the new spaces and demanding cuddles when we arrive in the hotel rooms. Until we get on the ferry. We have a cabin to ourselves but the engine is loud and the motion unfamiliar so he panics and tries to escape into a hole in the cabin wall. Finally, he settles in the little round port window where he can watch the water down below. Neither of us have much rest. I book a pet-friendly hotel 20 minutes out of Palma while I look for our new home for the next few weeks.
Exhausted, bleary-eyed I arrive at the hotel at 6 in the morning. Check-in is not until 2 pm but I hopefully ask if we can have a room early. They tell me to bring my bags in and then wait for a couple of hours. I ask if I should leave my cat in the car or bring him in too. “Cat?! We don’t accept cats.” the receptionist responds. I had emailed them two days earlier to check and received a response saying they accept pets up to 5 kg. Danger is 6.5 kg but no one is actually going to weigh him to check. I show them the email. “We have to wait for management to come in to ask,” I tell them I’ll be back soon and go find my car. I sit down in the driver’s seat, close the door and cry. I’ve reached my limit. I know everything will be ok, but I have no more capacity for anything.
Half an hour later, armed with a list of hotels that will accept us, I walk back into the reception. “It’s fine”, I tell them, “I’ve found another place”. It’s next door. An expensive resort hotel with a private beach, spa and sauna. I walk in and they get us settled by 9 am. Danger loves manifesting the best life for us, always. I have some breakfast at the breakfast bar, take a nap, and go straight into a full day of calls with private clients.
The first four days are full of work commitments. Between working and sleeping and trying to recover my energy from my injury, all the changes, and the long drive I have zero time to explore this new place I hope to call home. I struggle with the fact that I feel so exhausted and depleted. I should be happy. It’s warm. The sun is shining. I can swim in the sea. But I have no capacity for feeling pleasure right now. All I can think about is getting through this week, and letting my body rest and heal.
I start to feel some kind of reemerging. I’ve been here a week. My body is brimming with stagnant emotions that need to be cleared. No amount of shaking and meditating and journaling is shifting it. My mind keeps going to really dark places, filled with insecurity and self-doubt. I find it hard to respond to texts, kind words from friends, or do anything that extends beyond the most necessary. I know this is not who I am, but a response to how my body is feeling. I need help. I go see a craniosacral therapist. Her touch is tender, nurturing, subtle. She confirms that my body is completely depleted and full of sadness, anger… The next day I spend the entire day crying in the car while I try to understand this island, look at some potential apartments, and get an idea of where I might want to live. I’m releasing so much. It’s not pretty but it’s necessary. I need time to rest/cry/feel/read/process. Time that I don’t have right now.
Many parts of Mallorca are starting to close down for the winter. I don’t want to be isolated and lonely and decide I need to stay closer to Palma at least for my first 6 months while I find my feet, and narrow my search to 3 specific areas that give me good vibes when I’m in them, 10-15 minutes out of the capital. I look at more apartments. There’s one I like. It has a balcony with sea views, cute cafes nearby, and feels warm and welcoming. They offer to furnish it from IKEA for me. I negotiate a 100 Euro monthly reduction from the asking price and ask them if they would allow me to give them my preferences for the furniture. They agree. I have a home. We move in next week.
