Returning Home to Yourself
By: Kelly Caul
The Healing Thread: May
This past Friday was one of those moments that deeply reminded me why I opened Empowered Spaces.
I gathered in circle for the opening of The Heart of Healing with seventeen other humans, all of whom spend their days bringing care and healing to other individuals, families, and communities. We slowed down together. We felt our feet on the ground. We witnessed and were witnessed by one another.
Before we go further, I want to invite a small pause. Maybe feel your feet against the floor, notice any support beneath you, or connect with your next breath, if it feels available.
A Collective Body
Prentis Hemphill, whose work I return to again and again, teaches that there are some things that are too big to feel in one body — that we need a collective body to move them through.
There is so much moving through us right now: grief, uncertainty, the weight of a world that does not slow down. And it is asking for a collective body to hold it.
A Few Inches Behind Our Eyes
Most of us spend our days a few inches behind our eyes: thinking, planning, tracking, anticipating the next thing before the current thing has even finished, then maybe thinking some more. For those of us doing care work, this is practically a job requirement. The nervous system learns to stay a step ahead, to scan, to brace, to override the body's own signals.
So what a radical act it becomes, then, to choose to slow down, to connect, to feel your breath moving through you, to let the tears come, to pay attention to what is actually happening inside you — and to decide that it matters.
This is what I mean when I talk about returning home to yourself.
We don't practice this to retreat from the world, or from the work, or from the people who need you.
Returning home to yourself is the practice that makes it possible to stay present in this life of yours, with more of yourself intact.
What Gets Witnessed Begins to Move
Your body has been here all along, holding everything you've moved through, shaped by everything that has been asked of it, waiting for you to return.
And when we practice this in community — when we can finally name out loud the conditions that are shaping us, when we can practice presence and awareness, when we don't rush in to fix or regulate our feelings away but instead build our capacity to hold them — the weight begins to shift. We no longer have to hold it alone.
What goes unspoken often stays stuck in the body. What gets witnessed begins to move.
That is what I saw on Friday. And it is why this work matters.
An Invitation
What would it mean to return home to yourself today, even for just a moment? Not to escape what is hard, but to arrive in it more fully, with yourself.
Maybe you can find even a small moment to ask yourself, as you would ask someone you truly care about:
Dear body, dear friend, what do you need in this moment to feel more supported? More connected?
You don't have to do it perfectly. It just starts with slowing down, and turning toward yourself with a little kindness.
With love and care,
Kelly
This piece originally appeared in The Healing Thread, the monthly newsletter of Empowered Spaces. If you'd like reflections like this delivered to your inbox each month, you can subscribe below.
What helps you find your way back to yourself when you've been living a few inches behind your eyes? Leave a comment or reach out — I'd love to hear from you.
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