The Living Body
Part Four | The Body That Keeps Becoming
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus
I found the perfect quote to sum up my reflections after my visit to Cumbria.
The coastline hasn’t changed much from when I was a kid. The familiar places still held stories of my family and it was lovely to spend time alone wandering places that would mean nothing to anyone else, but to me holds so much more.
After stepping away for while I recognised I wasn’t the same woman who had been there last time. That time to reflect was so needed this year, creating enough distance from the noise of everyday life to notice myself again.
There is a temptation to think that this healing journey has an end point. That one day we arrive, healthier, calmer and wiser, and from that moment onwards we simply maintain those changes and foundations.
Life has taught me something very different. The living body is never finished. It keeps asking us new questions because life keeps changing.
As children, our bodies learnt how to survive the environments we were given. They adapted before we had language, before we had choice, before we understood what stress, grief, safety or belonging even meant. Those adaptations became patterns, those patterns became identities, and for many of us they quietly shaped decades of our lives.
Then we decide it’s time to deal with it. Life cannot go on as before. We untangle old beliefs, process memories, soften the nervous system’s constant vigilance, learn to trust ourselves again.But the story doesn’t end there.
Because just as we begin to know ourselves more deeply, life changes once more.
Relationships change, Parents grow older, children grow up and leave home, ew opportunities appear, loss arrives unexpectedly, hormones change. Our bodies ask for something different. Once again we are invited into another version of ourselves.
There have been seasons over the last few years that have changed me forever. Life placed some enormous challenges in front of me, but it wasn’t only those moments that changed me. It was the realisation that I had been living like this for years. Juggling, carrying, pushing through and believing that was simply what life required. This time, though, I couldn’t keep doing it. My life had to change and more importantly, the way I related to myself had to change. That, I’ve come to realise, was where the real healing began.
As I reflected on the last year, I noticed something I might once have ignored. A few familiar patterns had quietly crept back in, a little more rushing, a little less space, a diary that had become just a little too full. The subtle feeling that if I wasn’t producing, I somehow wasn’t doing enough.
Years ago I wouldn’t have recognised those signs until I was flat on my back or having another flare. Now I can start to hear the messages before they become too loud. That might be one of the greatest gifts this journey has given me.
As I move towards the end of perimenopause, my body is changing again in ways that would have frightened me at one point. Lower oestrogen has altered my energy, my recovery and the rhythm that once felt so familiar.
But at no point did I find myself wondering how to get back to where I was. I would never actually want to go back. The woman I was before worked incredibly hard and survived more than she imagined.
But she also overrode her body, believed slowing down meant falling behind and measured her worth by what she could achieve or hold for everyone else.
I feel compassion for her, but I don’t want to become her again.
This part of my life, this season is asking something different and I want to answer it differently too.
To build a life that my body can continue to thrive within, that means walking more, because movement settles my mind as much as it strengthens my body, lifting weights to support the decades that still lie ahead, running because it makes my heart race and brings me confidence that my body is still strong and has capacity. Choosing food that nourishes my gut, my hormones and my energy and finding sleep that is medicine. Returning to meditation because it reminds me who I am beneath the noise and leaving space in my weeks where nothing is planned, trusting that some of life’s richest moments emerge when there is room for them to arrive.
These may sound like lifestyle changes but they aren’t. Walking more won’t change my life on its own, neither will lifting weights, choosing different foods or protecting my sleep. Those are simply the outward expressions of something much deeper, a relationship that has changed.
This is why I do what I do and offer it in different ways. Lasting change isn’t simply learning to think differently. It is not mindset at ALL.
It is changing the relationship we have with our bodies, our emotions, our memories and our identities deeply enough that, when life changes again, as it always will, we are able to change with it. Calmly and with clarity.
The nervous system naturally seeks what is familiar and that sometimes keeps us living inside versions of ourselves we have already outgrown.
The work is not to become someone else or to punish and shame yourself for who you are, it is to gently create enough safety that we can keep becoming who this season of life is inviting us to be.
Maybe what Heraclitus understood was that we never step into the same river twice. Not because the river has changed or that we have changed. But because both are continually becoming.
Questions to carry with you
There is no practice again this week, only an invitation to notice.
Take a slow walk, sit in your favourite chair, or find somewhere that allows your thoughts to settle.
Then ask yourself:
Where in my life am I trying to return to an older version of myself?
What has this current season been trying to teach me that I may have been too busy to hear?
What patterns still belong to an older chapter of my life?
If I trusted that slowing down could create more life, not less, what would I choose differently this week?
Who is my living body asking me to become now?
You don’t need to answer them all today. Sometimes the most profound changes begin not with finding an answer, but with asking a better question.
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