Healing doesn’t always come softly.
Sometimes it arrives through rupture.
It was early morning, before the sun had risen.
I was riding my motorbike to the gym, moving fast through the stillness of the dark.
And then a collision,
I hit a kangaroo.
Time slowed.
Sound disappeared and in the moments that followed, my body registered impact before my mind could make meaning.
I found myself pinned beneath the bike, trapped, lying in the middle of the road. Panic surged and a fear arose that this might be the end. With bloodied hand I found my phone and called for help, but no one answered.
So I breathed.
I calmed myself, focused, let my body soften where it wanted to tense. Waves of urgency moved through me with the instinct to escape, to flee the danger; but I couldn’t.
So I breathed deeper.
Focused.
Refused to lose my wit.
And then, through my tears,
through the grit and the pain,
I called out to my mum, in Spirit:
“Hey Mum, I need a little help here, please!
I need help to get this bike off me!”
And then I cried.
In those moments, I was so many things—
a child in pain, alone, desperate for support.
A woman, coaching herself to stay present:
Breathe.
Relax.
Focus.
Stay calm. Soften…
I fluctuated between fear and trust,
vulnerability and resolve.
But mostly; I breathed.
Then finally, in the distance,
I saw a light.
I reached for my phone, lit up the screen,
and waved it toward the oncoming headlights,
focused on them seeing me in time,
because I truly didn’t want to be hit again.
What broke open that day wasn’t just my body.
It was the past. It was everything I had stored away
in order to keep going, to keep coping, even to keep growing!
Childhood memories, once buried under layers of productivity and strength and resilience rose to the surface like smoke from a long-extinguished fire.
The anxiety. The tension.
The girl who had learned to be hyper-aware, always scanning,
as a way to stay safe.
She was still with me.
And now, I could no longer look away.
My nervous system, overwhelmed and disoriented,
began sending signals faster than I could process them:
fight, flight, freeze.
Not because I was broken,
but because I was remembering.
The timelines overlapped.
The past touched the present.
And I was drowning in echoes.
I needed to find peace.
But peace isn’t found by bypassing what hurts.
It’s found by turning toward it,
by sitting with the child who trembles in the dark
and saying:
“I’m here now. I won’t leave you.”
Healing, for me, came in quiet spaces.
Not in a rush to fix, but in a soft, steady return.
Craniosacral sessions became a sanctuary,
a space where my body could speak in tremors,
where holding patterns could unfold;
where nothing needed to be explained
and everything was welcome.
The practitioner’s listening hands resting lightly on my body,
and slowly my whole system began to settle.
A deep, ancient settling, as if my cells remembered
what it means to return to the earth,
to the breath,
to the stillness.
I witnessed the body’s blueprint for healing.
With every session my intent was on letting go and unfolding to new life, I saw beneath every trauma,
beneath every defense,
there is an intelligence,
the Inherent Health that waits patiently to emerge.
And yet…
held within my psyche there was shame.
I felt embarrassed to need help.
Embarrassed to admit that Wonder Woman had crash-landed.
That I could no longer carry it all.
That my strength had become my mask.
But true strength, I learned,
is not in the pretending.
It’s in the reaching.
In placing my pain in the hands of another
and saying:
“Can you hold this with me, can you help me help myself heal?”
And they did.
My friends.
My people. strangers too…
They met me in the mess.
They didn’t turn away.
And in their presence,
I found my own again.
Nature, too, held me as teacher.
The trees didn’t ask me to hurry.
The rivers didn’t shame me for being slow or for weeping in pain,
The wind didn’t need me to explain.
I watched how everything in the wild follows its own rhythm
growth, rest, decay, and return.
And I began to trust and feel ease in this cycle.
Slowly I continued to listen.
Not just with my ears,
but with my whole body.
To feel when I was leaving myself.
To sense the pull of old stories.
To pause.
To breathe.
To place a hand on my heart and say:
“It’s okay, You’re safe and I’m here”
And in that presence,
I met her again, the little girl who had carried so much.
I saw her strength.
How much she held without guidance, without comfort,
without ever being told it was okay to let go.
I cried for her.
With her.
And I thanked her.
“Thank you for surviving.
Thank you for your sharp instincts,
your alertness, your fierce love in the face of confusion.
You were never wrong for how you coped.
You did everything you could.
And now; I’ve got you.”
I let her know:
“You don’t have to hold it all anymore.
I’m here.
I am not letting you walk this alone.”
And it wasn’t just her.
It was all the versions of me,
the teenager who hid her pain behind smiles and humorous acts,
the young woman who tried to be strong for everyone else.
I met them too.
And together, we finished the unfinished.
Not by rewriting the past,
but by witnessing it fully together,
By giving it the space it never had.
By folding every version of myself into my arms
and saying:
I am here.
We are loved.
My spirit never left me,
it was just waiting until I could come home to myself.
And in that I continue to integrate into wholeness.
All from the teaching graced by my encounter with the Kangaroo.
********************************************************************
When walking through trauma, anxiety, burnout, or fear:
we may feel pinned beneath something we didn’t choose.
We may be calling for help and hearing nothing in return.
We may feel alone in the dark, unsure if we will be seen in time.
You are not powerless.
There is wisdom in you that knows how to breathe through the chaos.
There is a deeper rhythm beneath the panic.
There is a part of you that can whisper,
“Focus. Stay calm. Breathe.”
even when the rest of you is shaking.
And you can call on your Spirit, reach deep for the strength of your Ancestors, reach out to friends and family, even to strangers…
I was not broken.
I was breaking open.
The body knows how to return to safety.
The nervous system can re-learn rest.
The soul knows how to find light again,
even from the middle of the road, but we need to steer that ship!
It was not the end.
It was an invitation, a kind of kick in the butt to come home to myself…. and to pay more attention!
The past may touch the present.
But the future?
That belongs to me and it belongs to you.
PS- The Kangaroo managed to simply bounce me off as it continued to hop away. I believe it was more prepared than I was in that moment. I found myself speaking with it often from my heart.
