In the fifteen years I’ve been writing this newsletter (in all its iterations), I don’t think I’ve ever taken this long away from sending you emails.

I didn’t know I would need to, or I’d have said something. By the time I realised I had nothing to say, I was in the middle of it already. I think everyone’s inboxes are so annoyingly full all the time that taking up space to say ‘hi/ not-hi. I have nothing to say’ is as rude as simply sending you drivel under the guise of maintaining consistency because that’s what some marketing expert somewhere says you should to do build audience.

So you didn’t get drivel, or a notice.
You are, however, getting honesty:

I’ve been going through a total rearranging of self and haven’t been able to articulate much. I like sharing when I have something useful to say, or something beautiful to say, or a perspective I think needs to be shared. When it’s just about my life it feels self-indulgent.

But, it’s been weeks and I’m finally starting to come back together and I feel like I now have something to say. I spend a lot of time thinking-- quite cynically-- about the internet, marketing, and audience building and how much I dislike the entire machine of it. My work is authenticity, and authenticity is by nature organic, not curated. Not calculated.

So forgive my self-indulgence, but I am writing to you from having just started to unfurl again after one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I flew back to California a few weeks ago for a twofold mission:

1. Attend my sister’s wedding and see my whole family. There are a lot of us and we’re quite spread out, so us all getting together all at once is rare and wonderful.

2. Finish packing up my house, arrange a shipping container, sell what I wasn’t going to take to the UK, ship the rest here to London. My plan here was also to pull back my energy from my home, the land, the mountains, the last 20+ years of being woven into the ecosystem.

-The first was a joy (though I will be honest even though most of my family reads these emails-- there was a lot of family drama/ emotional and healing conversations).
-The second was preemptive- my house hadn’t sold. But since I was there, I figured, why not do it now so that I don’t need to fly back again when it does sell. The energy pull-back was necessity. I had woven myself so deeply into the land where I lived that I felt like I was split between two places now that I’m living in London. I couldn’t energetically maintain both, and felt like my tie to the land in California was preventing me from fully rooting where I am now.

My house represented so much to me: it was the first place I’d felt safe in so many years. It was a place my ex and I poured ourselves into renovating. It was perfect and stunningly beautiful and right on the edge of the wilderness-- I could actually just walk outside my front door and straight into the mountains-- a total dream. It was a place where I had transformed, and created, and been so unbelievably happy. And. It was the place where my husband left me out of the blue, where my world shattered into pieces, and where I spent the first few months after this snowed in and completely isolated. I had loved it. I’d been broken there. It had held me as I came back together.

The complexity of emotions felt so painful that I really wanted to never go back again, to just pretend it had never happened. Start over in London and let it fade from memory.

Except. It was there. I had to go back. I had to face it down. I had to do it right: retrieve my energy fully, let go of the grief, let go of the pain, find gratitude for the sanctuary this space had provided me. I also had to physically remove all my stuff from it-- a practical necessity!

“I’d love to go to California for a week,” one of my gym friends said, when I mentioned that I was dreading my trip.
“I’m not going on holiday though. I’m going to do something really hard.”
“Still. Look at the weather here right now.”

Dread a lump in my gut I packed. At some point on the way to the airport I decided that doing things properly was important. I wanted to be fully present.

The thing about the Heart Path is that it helps you contain the complexity of a situation. The heart space has an almost infinite capacity-- emotionally, energetically, and nervous system wise. When you leave the centre of yourself, the world becomes reductive because you only have capacity for so much. You have to cut pieces of yourself off because they don’t all fit. A situation becomes either terrible or good; a week of intense work becomes either a family celebration or a chore; a person is either their fulfilled or broken promises; a home is either the perfect house or the terrible things that happened within it.

On the Heart Path though, all of that exists at the same time. You don’t need to land on one in order to define what’s in front of you, but can simply allow the complexity without categorising or labelling it.

I landed in LA, rented a car, drove 4 hours back to my house, let some of my energy flow back (it felt like the roots of a plant coming back into my body), slept. Woke up, packed, took things to the dump, sold furniture. Went on a run, cried over how much I love the forest and how much I’ll miss it. Retrieved more or my energy from the mountains-- like a delicate extrication of the threads of myself that had woven themselves into the land and vice-versa. Slept. Drove an hour to my parents house, hung out with family, went to party number one of many of wedding festivities, slept. Woke up, lay in the sun, celebrated some more. Let the energy of my connection with the desert flow back into my body. Cried some more. Drove back up the mountain to my house, walked the land, prayed, thanked it, packed more. Drove back down to my parents’ house, celebrated. Drove back up. Worked. Drove back down. Partied with the family. Spent time with my siblings and nieces. Danced for hours at the wedding itself. Slept.

The shipping company arrived at 8am the morning after the wedding. I was up at 430, driving up the mountain to finish getting everything ready for them. The shippers arrived in a giant truck, and started packing and loading it all. I left my body. Poof. Gone.

I haven’t actually left my body in over a decade, but there I was hovering over it observing this happening. My hands were cold. Breath shallow.

I went upstairs, leaving them to it, and lay on the floor.

“I want to be present. This is important.” I whispered to myself, and put my hands on my heart.
Slowly my energy crept back in. I started crying (again).

They left, taking everything that made ‘home’ to me with them. A truck packed full of art, books, pottery, heading for a shipping container to get sent halfway around the world to me in London.

I sat on the floor of my empty house and remembered the day my ex and I moved in. We sat on the floor and filled the space with our intentions. Hopes. Dreams. Creating a pathway through an open future woven together by both of us. A coyote had come right up to the house and stared us as we did this. It felt like a welcome.
He called as I sat there on the floor. We chatted about the house and how much we’d loved it. He’s happy now. I’m happy now. It’s been enough time.

I thank the house and pull all my energy back. All of it. It took a long time, and by the end of it I’m emotionally wiped. I go for a run in the forest and pull all my energy back. All of it. It takes a long time and my knee is pretty much shot by the end of it. I sit on the deck and look up at the peak of the mountain and thank it for welcoming me-- arguably, I am an invasive species-- for healing me. For holding me. Whatever remaining roots there are, I pull them back too. Tuck them away inside myself for safekeeping for a couple of days until I got back to London.

When Jamie first left, my friend Aja showed up. She’s a spirit guide coach and she’s truly remarkable at what she does. She kept saying over and over that my life had gone off course somewhere, and that it was imperative that I get back on my own track. When I started being able to hear my own Guides they took it even deeper and kept showing me a bone that had broken and reset wrong. They showed me that my ‘bones’ had reset me on a life path that wasn’t mine, and that it had to be broken not just once but repeatedly to get back on track. That there were different stages to the re-breaking because I couldn’t have handled the re-break all at once.

I thought about that as felt my Southern Californian self flowing back to me. I thought about my love of the land, the wilderness, the people. I thought about all that I’ve learned and become-- I really am SO Californian. And British. It’s not an either-or, because when dwelling in the heart space, there’s room for both. But returning to the UK really does feel like getting back on my own path fully. It feels like I’ve had so many re-breaks of that bone over the last 3 1/2 years, and I can see that I wouldn’t have been able to handle it all at once. This sort-of ‘conscious uncoupling’ (hahaha see- still Californian) from the land is another re-break.

With one last ‘thank you’ I locked up my house. I started to drive away and then stopped: a coyote stood in the middle of my street. We stared at each other for about 10 seconds, then he trotted past me-- close enough to reach out the car window and touch-- and down the street in the direction of my house.

I flew home to London.

I thought when I landed I’d just let all that energy I was keeping safe out again. Except I couldn’t.

I hadn’t realised what a massive deal everything I was doing was at the time-- in the amount of physical effort it took, but also emotionally and energetically.
When you pull a plant out the earth and stick it back again, the roots can get damaged in the transplant, and then they don’t absorb nutrients as easily. The stress of it can affect the plant until its roots recover. It’s called root shock. Pulling that much energy back that fast, I think I gave myself root shock.

I haven’t really been able to do much except show up for my clients, and be really gentle with myself. I don’t usually write posts from in the middle of something-- especially because I feel like if I’m not providing something useful to you then it’s simply taking up space for no reason-- but I feel like I’m finally starting to thaw, and connect with the earth again, and can talk about it. My energy levels are coming back, albeit so much more slowly than I would like. I’m starting to get excited about some of the projects I was starting before my trip. My roots are starting to re-establish themselves. All in one place this time. Home.

So. That’s where I’ve been the last few weeks.

How about you? Where are you? How are you? I’d genuinely love to hear- in the comments or just hit reply.

Big hugs,

Rebecca