A Missing Friend

With every breath, the world and we are made new,

though we are unaware of this renewal within our continuing life.

- Rumi, Masnavi

How healing through the body helped me rediscover self-care, self-love, and the quiet friendship within

For a long time, I don’t think I fully understood that one of the relationships I most needed to repair was the relationship with my own body.

I had lived in my body, of course. I had moved through the world in it. I had pushed through tiredness, ignored discomfort, carried grief, held tension, kept going, and done what needed to be done. But I don’t know that I had always known how to truly listen to it.

Like many people, I had learned to relate to my body through what it could do, how it looked, how it performed, or how inconvenient its symptoms were. Pain, tightness, exhaustion, anxiety, shutdown, or emotional overwhelm could feel like interruptions. Problems to fix. Signs that something was wrong.

Much of this healing has been facilitated through Counselling, the Path Retreats, the Diamond Approach and Somatic Experiencing. These pathways have helped me release trauma and patterning, slow down, listen inwardly, and begin to understand the body not as something to fix, but as a doorway into presence, truth, and a more compassionate relationship with myself.

Over time, and through my own healing, I began to understand something different.

My body was not working against me.

It was trying to speak.

The wounds I carried were not only thoughts or memories. They lived in sensation. In contraction. In bracing. In the held breath. In the ache in my belly, the tightness in my chest, the heaviness in my limbs, the places that had learned to protect me long before I had words for what was happening.

As I was guided to listening more deeply, I started to meet parts of myself I had been separated from. Not in a dramatic way, but slowly, gently, and often quietly.

There were places in me that were tired from holding too much.

Places that had learned to stay alert.

Places that had been waiting for kindness.

Places that did not need to be pushed, analysed, or improved, but simply met.

This changed the way I understood self-care.

Self-care became less about doing the “right” things and more about rebuilding trust with myself. It became the small act of noticing what was happening inside me before rushing past it. It became pausing. Softening. Resting. Drinking water. Noticing what touched my heart. Tears. Saying no. Taking space. My nervous system calibrating to safety more often.

Not perfectly. Not all the time. But more than not.

Self-love revealed its self as noticing, sensations, thoughts and feelings.

It became less of an idea and more of a relationship. A way of being with myself when I felt messed up, vulnerable, ashamed, reactive, lonely, or afraid. It meant learning to stay close to myself, even when old wounds were touched. It meant recognising that the parts of me I had judged or tried to overcome were often the very parts that needed the most compassion and friendliness.

There is a kind of loneliness that can happen when we become disconnected from our own inner life. We can be surrounded by people and still feel far away from ourselves. We can be functioning, caring for others, working, helping, showing up - and still sense that something essential is missing.

For me, healing through learning to notice through the body has helped me find my way back to that missing friend.

The friend was not somewhere outside of me.

She was not someone I had to become.

She was the quietness, the presence, catching the judgements before I believed them.

The more I learned to listen to my body, the more I began to feel the closeness to myself. My body became less of a thing to manage and more of a doorway into honesty, tenderness, and belonging.

This is not always easy work. Healing can bring us into contact with pain, grief, anger, fear, and memories the body has carried for a long time. But it can also bring us into contact with aliveness, warmth, strength, clarity, and a deeper sense of cosiness inside the bones, skin and self.

I have come to believe that the body carries not only our wounds, but also our way back.

Back to presence.

Back to care.

Back to the self we may have had to leave behind in order to survive.

And perhaps this is part of what healing asks of us - not to change, to be better, but to return slowly and lovingly to the friend within who has been waiting to be remembered.