A lot is ruminating in my heart these days, so much so that it’s been hard to find the words, which, for someone like me who has always reached for language as my first relief, feels like its own kind of reckoning.
Words have been my way through for as long as I can remember. But in the last several years, something has quietly shifted. I’ve found a softer, older kind of knowing, one that lives beneath language. I’ve come to call it embodiment: the understanding that my most truthful reality is felt through my body, not reasoned through my mind.
This trip to Italy showed me what that looks like in practice.
David and I have talked about skiing the Dolomites for years. And yet every time we got close to planning it, my hesitation showed up, specifically, my right knee, a partial knee replacement I’ve been putting off. Until last December, when something in me simply said: let’s do it, let’s ski the Dolomites.
That moment didn’t come from my mind. It came from somewhere deeper, a place that knew, the way the body knows things before the mind can articulate them, and it said, ” We will find a way. You cannot miss this.”
The fear that followed was real. What if my knee gives out? What if I fall, the way I fell in Switzerland two years ago, and breoke my ankle? But rather than holding those fearful messages myself, I named them out loud to David, and his gentle reassurance, as I told him, was a balm to my spirit. Something in me exhaled. I moved toward the trip not bracing for disaster, but ready to be present for whatever it brought.
This is what I’ve learned to call a polarity, when two opposites turn out to need each other, when the very thing you feared becomes the thing that sets you free. I had been afraid my body would get in the way of this trip. Instead, it became the reason I was fully in it.
Because I couldn’t be casual on that mountain. I couldn’t coast. I need to be awake to the moments in front of me, aware of my healing broken elbow, my uncertain knee, the memory of the ankle break in Switzerland; they demanded something of me on every single run: real attention, honest listening, constant conversation with what I was actually feeling. I had no choice but to be completely present.
And that presence required by the very fragility I had feared became the doorway into something I can only describe as supersonic aliveness.
The polarity that undid me with gratitude: my physical limitation became the precise instrument through which I felt everything most deeply. The vulnerability became the entry point to presence. We have traveled a great deal together, David and I, and I do not say this lightly, but this was one of the best trips we have ever taken.
I keep returning to that December, yes. When the embodied knowing spoke before the mind could overthink it. When something beneath the fear said, “go.” There is no perfect version of this. There is only the version you actually take.
What the Dolomites gave me was the lived proof of what I teach: when we surrender the need to control the experience and agree to simply be in it, something opens. Not despite the difficulty, but because of it.
My body knew this before I could find the words.
And now, at last, I know it too.
With love from my corner by the sea,
Sarah
