When the Body Decides It Is Time

Eleven years ago in La Jolla, I felt the first small break in a life I kept holding together.

Shedding a life you have outgrown does not happen all at once. It happens in pieces. A business. A belief. A pattern. A version of yourself you carried for years without noticing the weight. Something in me shifted this year, quietly but unmistakably, stripping away my ability to pretend that the old structure still fit. A layer I had been tightening around myself for too long simply stopped holding.

This is not the first version of this piece. I rewrote it more times than I expected, trying different angles, different tones, different ways of explaining what I was feeling. Every draft felt slightly wrong, as if the words were chasing something I had not fully lived yet. It makes sense now. The integration was still happening. I was still shedding. Still rearranging. Still trying to understand what this moment was asking of me.

Nuteese was part of that old identity. So was Saucha Yoga. Both were created with devotion and care, rooted in who I was then. But they belonged to a woman who survived by carrying everything alone. And I am not her anymore. I did not realize how tightly I had been holding these identities until my body began refusing to hold them.

The shedding began before I understood it. In discomfort I kept dismissing. In sensations I tried to rationalize.

There was the heaviness I could not name.

The lymph nodes swelling longer than they should.

The unexpected bleeding.

The fatigue that did not feel like stress, more like my system insisting that I stop pretending everything was fine.

None of it felt dramatic, but it was persistent. A kind of internal rearrangement taking place without my permission. Only later did I understand that my body had begun the conversation before my mind was ready to listen.

Then the dreams came. They were not symbols to decode. They were mirrors.

They showed me endings. Dismantling. The death of an older self.

A phone that refused to charge.

A woman exerting control over someone who had gone silent.

A man unable to move.

A girl suspended at the window’s edge.

An elevator too small to contain the roles squeezed inside it.

These images were not threats. They were reflections of a self I had already begun to outgrow.

Some moments are less about rising and more about finally meeting the woman who has been waiting beneath the old layers.

After a healing session, a small shift moved through my back. Subtle but unmistakable. The sensation spread outward and brought my attention to places I had not realized were holding so much. My chest. My throat. My abdomen. It was not dramatic. It was simply enough to bring me back into myself.

The next morning, my instinct felt different. Not softer. Just clearer.

A small shift, a simple instinct. I wanted her beside me, not behind me. It felt like a sign of how my inner compass was changing.

Without thinking, I lifted Mia into the passenger seat beside me instead of placing her in the back. I did not analyze it. I just wanted her near. A small choice, but telling. It revealed something about the way my inner compass was recalibrating.

Driving home, an unexpected thought landed, snakes in the car, looking for protection. It did not frighten me. It felt like something rising from a deeper place. A few minutes later, a small brown lizard climbed toward the open window and tried to slip inside. I used my glasses to guide him gently back out, then rested my hand on Mia and felt a quiet click of recognition. The moment felt strangely pointed, as if life was mirroring an internal shift. A sign that something in me was shedding exactly when it needed to.

Then came the anger. Not explosive. But precise.

It surfaced as I began to see the gap between who I have been for others and how little some people met me where I stood. The tone in certain conversations. The subtle dismissals. The way a difficult chapter can make others assume you are smaller or weaker. Someone to advise rather than someone to respect.

For years I absorbed it because I was too tired to address it. But when the body wakes up, tolerance dissolves. This was not rage. It was recognition. I was not angry that people failed me. I was angry that I had tolerated what no longer aligned with who I was becoming.

Somewhere in all of this, the truth became unavoidable. It was time to let go of the identities built from endurance rather than alignment. The woman who held everything together alone had done her job. And I honor her for that. But I am no longer living her life.

I let go of Saucha Yoga in La Jolla, at a time when I was choosing a life that was not fully mine. I followed my husband then, believing that devotion meant dissolving parts of myself so he could rise. That ending was wrapped in love, but also in silence. The silence of sacrificing what I needed for what someone else required. I had convinced myself that love required shrinking. And I did it so well I barely noticed the cost.

The view matched what was happening inside me, a landscape rearranging itself.

I let go of Nuteese on a hiking trail in Hong Kong, surrounded by stillness and sky. There was no audience, no announcement. Just the sound of my steps and the steady rhythm of release. I had built it with care and carried it with pride, but the time had come. My body had already spoken, and I chose to listen. Letting go was not a failure. It was a choice to stop carrying something that no longer carried me.

And I am not abandoning the woman I used to be. I am gathering the pieces of her that were true and reshaping their lessons so they can support who I am today. She carried me through more than I ever gave her credit for. And I honor her for that. But I can no longer carry myself in the way she once did. Some parts of that identity were meant for a different season. And they have reached their natural end. What no longer fits is allowed to dissolve. Not in rejection. But in respect for the distance she helped me travel.

This dismantling is not destruction. It is refinement, the quiet release of what has expired so something more aligned can take shape.

I am still learning how to inhabit this transition. I do not pretend to have all the answers. And I am not trying to turn this into a polished revelation. But I am choosing not to numb myself. Not to outrun discomfort. Not to distract myself from what is rising beneath the surface.

Listening has become a discipline.

Trusting myself has become a necessity.

I am learning to follow instinct before explanation.

To choose people who choose me back.

To honor the body when it speaks first.

To see my life as an ecosystem rather than a series of roles to perform.

To let endings be endings without labeling them as failures.

None of this is perfect. It is simply honest.

The shedding did not begin with clarity. It began with the body deciding it was done carrying what no longer belonged.

The understanding arrived later.

This is not reinvention. It is emergence. The slow and deliberate becoming of the woman I was always meant to meet.

I am not rebuilding my life.

I am finally inhabiting it.