What Comes After You Remember Who You Are?
The work of living it
I have been on a journey of re-membering myself since the time I was very young. Even during my early years I had an uncanny sense of who I was, although I certainly didn’t have the words to articulate what I knew. I recall feeling as if some part of me had left and was waiting for me to call it back. I know that might sound strange, but as a child I sensed things that others didn’t. I was raised in an environment where it wasn’t safe to be myself so survival became my way of moving through the world. Those “missing pieces” hovered elsewhere, until I was able to create a safe enough space for them to return.
Painting, writing, sacred ceremony, illness, physical training and all the deep inner work I’ve done became part of that return. I didn’t think of them as separate paths. Each seemed to take me somewhere another one couldn’t, and over time I felt more and more of myself coming back. It was never about remembering something that I had forgotten. Re-membering has been about gathering the pieces together to become whole again. With each painting and poem, each sacred ceremony, more and more of who I had always been was revealed. But revealing truth and embodying it aren’t the same thing.
What I never anticipated was what happened when I finally felt that wholeness in my body. The knowing was not enough anymore. My body insisted that I learn to live that truth.
There is something very different about knowing who you are and actually living it. Once that knowing settled fully into my body, I could no longer pretend I didn’t see the places where my life contradicted it. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see the ways I overrode myself or the price my body had paid for years of doing so. Knowing became less comfortable because it began asking more of me.
My last sacred ceremony drove that home with a force I couldn’t ignore. I came out of it knowing that I was fully here now, the scattered parts of myself home at last. Yet I had no idea how to live this way. There was nowhere else to go, no other version of myself to become, no spiritual experience that was going to remove me from the ordinary work of being in this body and living this life.
It took months before I began to feel more at home with that.
Those months were disorienting because I kept waiting for embodiment to feel more settled than it did. I had spent so many years retrieving parts of myself that I assumed there would be some sense of arrival when they were finally home. Instead, I found myself face to face with the life I had built while those pieces were still scattered. I could see more clearly where I was still living from old reflexes, where I was overriding myself, and where I was asking my body to carry a life that no longer fit who I was. There was nothing wrong with the remembering. I simply hadn’t realized how much would have to change once I stopped leaving myself.
One of the biggest changes has been in the way I relate to my body. Over the years, my relationship to my body was adversarial at best. I saw it as something to conquer and fix. If my weight rose too high, I dieted. If I needed more strength, I worked harder in the gym. As a child my body was shamed for how it looked, how it functioned, and how much it desired. As a result, I developed ways of tamping down my sexuality, starving my desires and making it obey my commands for more. More strength, more work, more of whatever I thought I needed to overcome the judgments of others and most of all myself. We were not friends and there was no listening when my body complained. I pushed through.
Now I don’t experience my body as the problem anymore. We aren’t adversaries. My body is not keeping me from living; it’s carrying the cost of the life I already lived. That distinction has changed almost everything about the way I care for myself now.
My body has become my ally in creating whatever life comes next, which means I listen differently. I treat myself with more gentleness. I pay attention before I act instead of waiting until my body forces me to stop.
After years of illness and debilitation, everything I believed I needed to be OK, has fallen away. I’m not physically strong and able anymore. Its been years since I’ve been on a hike or walked my dogs. The price of living the way I have has taken a huge toll. But lately I’ve been asking myself what I need, what my body needs, to begin the road back to life. It isn’t more work and it isn’t returning to the gym and pushing myself through a workout. One thing lit me up when I thought about it–a walk with my dogs. This wasn’t exercise with a purpose. It was listening to what might make my body happy. This was me turning toward life.
So I got up one morning and asked my husband if he was up for a short walk. He’s struggling with health issues too, so this was a big move for both of us. When our dogs saw us putting on our shoes and the leashes came out, they could barely contain their excitement. That alone, filled my heart. The walk was short and days later I’m still feeling the aftermath, but as soon as I’m able I’ll do it again. That’s the difference now. I didn’t push myself the next day or the day after or the day after that. I’m waiting until my body tells me that its ready to do it again. I’m OK with that. We’re a team now.
I’m approaching medical care differently too. For years, if someone offered another possibility for fixing what was wrong, I felt compelled to try it. Now I ask a different question. Does this feel right for my body now? Sometimes the answer is no, even when the treatment makes sense on paper. I’m learning that I don’t have to subject myself to one intervention after another simply because I want to get well. Waiting is no longer the same as giving up. Sometimes waiting is how I stay in relationship with myself.
The old me would have measured the walk. It wouldn’t have been long enough or fast enough, and if I managed it once I would have expected myself to do more the next day. I don’t want to live inside that measurement anymore. I have nothing left to prove and no desire to go backward. After re-membering comes living what I know, and what I know is that who I am is already enough. I don’t need to keep improving myself in order to deserve my own life.
That changes the meaning of doing. A walk doesn’t have to become exercise. Making something doesn’t have to become a product. Writing doesn’t have to justify itself by becoming a book or an article or a way to build my business. I can touch cloth because I love the feel of it in my hands. I can move paint because something in me wants color. I can write because words let me see the threads of a life that I might otherwise miss. And when one of those things becomes an accomplishment, I can enjoy that too, but the accomplishment no longer has to be the reason I began.
Even the way I bring my work into the world feels different now. The books, reflections, conversations, podcasts and workshops aren’t things I need to do because I think they’re necessary to build a business or stay visible. They’re ways of sharing what this life has taught me. That changes the energy of all of it. I’m not trying to make my life fit around the work anymore. The work comes from the life I’m actually living.
What comes after re-memebering?
Living.
And I think this is the part of remembering ourselves we don’t talk about enough. Recognition can change everything, but it doesn’t finish the work. Once those pieces come home, they need a place in the life you are actually living. What you know has to begin changing how you choose, how you rest, how you care for your body, what you give your energy to, and what you are finally willing to stop doing to yourself.
For me, that has turned out to be quieter than much of the journey that brought me here. There isn’t a revelation every day. Most of it happens in ordinary moments: taking a walk because it feels like life, then resting for as long as my body needs afterward; saying no to another medical intervention when something in me says wait; going home when I’m tired; making because I want the experience of making rather than because something needs to come from it. These choices may look small from the outside, but this is where embodiment has become real for me.
I spent much of my life gathering the scattered pieces of myself and bringing them home. Now I get to find out what it means to live with all of me here.
Continue the thread
Re-membering brought the scattered parts of me home. Living asks something different: to make room for all of who I am in the choices I make now.
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