Why You Need to Stop Negotiating Your Truth
The Freezing
For the first half of my life I learned along the way to hold myself back from fully expressing. I slowly and surely dismantled, unstrung and shut down my various gifts of expression until I felt completely frozen – as though in a block of ice – unable to speak, move, breathe or be.
I found it hard to be around people because it felt terribly uncomfortable and painful inside my own skin. I held back in every way, until I was completely unable to even feel what I wanted, liked, or needed.
The holding back wasn’t just mental – it lived in my body. In my throat. In my shoulders. In the way I couldn’t take a full breath. Expression doesn’t just happen through words or thoughts – it moves through the body first. And when you shut down expression, you shut down the body’s ability to feel, to move, to know itself.
The Untangling
It’s been an epic journey untangling all the cords I wrapped around my own wings, limbs, tongue, throat and heart. Still now the journey continues with new dynamics and layers that life gifts me, revealing exactly where I’m still tangled.
This untangling happens in the body. You can’t think your way into expression – you have to feel your way there. Through breath. Through movement. Through the slow process of learning to inhabit your own skin again instead of living from your head, disconnected and numb.
Over the years I have learned that this untangling is a grand ongoing work of art, intelligently designed to progressively reveal new miracles to us so we may grow and grow. It’s all cleverly perfectly timed to unfold in perfect bite-size amounts so all flavors and nutrients may be fully absorbed.
There’s no rushing this. You can’t force a flower to bloom faster by pulling its petals open. The unfolding happens at the pace it needs to happen, revealing exactly what we’re ready to see when we’re ready to see it.
Witnessing the Transformation
To witness ourselves unfolding, staying in raw reflection of how far the journey has stretched us – it’s like having the miraculous opportunity of watching a flower blossom or rocks slowly transform by the voice of wind and water.
Slowly, slowly the ocean licks away at the rocks, transforming the terrain over centuries, no end and no beginning in sight and no agenda for any conclusion at all.
These are the teachings of Mother Nature, and all her expressions. She says: it never stops. It all keeps going and every expression is important, necessary, beautiful and won’t last. So enjoy each layer of every breath as it penetrates right now this moment.
Nature doesn’t second-guess herself. The ocean doesn’t apologize for the waves. The rain doesn’t hold back to please someone who prefers sunshine.
Full Expression Without Negotiation
Mother Nature’s full expression is never negotiated. There was never a second guess she once had about if she should rain less hard to please someone.
And maybe that’s what we’re moving toward. Not some perfect state of constant expression, but a return to the naturalness of it. The embodied truth of it. The body knows how to express – we just have to stop blocking it.
Wondrous expression is stillness as much as it is movement – its full force comes not from quantity or effort or wildness or flashing lights – but from the effortlessness that comes with deep surrender to the rawness that naturally floods out from the core truth of one’s being, when simply being.
When you’re truly embodied, expression isn’t something you do – it’s something that moves through you. The body becomes the channel. Breath becomes expression. Movement becomes expression.
Even stillness becomes a form of expression when you’re actually inhabiting it instead of thinking about it.
The Ongoing Work
The untangling doesn’t end. New layers keep appearing. Life keeps gifting us opportunities to notice where we’re still holding back, still wrapping cords around our own throats, still dimming ourselves to fit into spaces that were never meant to contain us.
And maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe that’s just how it works. Like the ocean and the rocks – an ongoing conversation between what we’ve learned to suppress and what keeps trying to emerge anyway.
The work is to keep noticing. Keep unwrapping. Keep coming back into the body. Keep allowing whatever wants to express itself to move through without negotiating it down to something more palatable, more acceptable, more small.
Because full expression isn’t about being loud or wild or constantly in motion. Sometimes the most honest expression is stillness. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s the smallest gesture that feels true in your body, that resonates in your chest, that you can actually feel instead of just think about.
The point is that it’s embodied.
Felt. Lived from the inside out instead of performed from the outside in.
So the question becomes: what are you still holding back? And where are you holding it – in your throat, your shoulders, your breath? What expression is living in your body, trying to move, but getting caught in all the cords you’ve wrapped around yourself?
And can you, slowly slowly, begin to untangle just one thread? Not all of them. Not perfectly. Just… one small cord loosened. One breath deeper. One moment of allowing yourself to feel, to inhabit your body, to express from that embodied place without apology, exactly as you are.
That’s where the unfolding begins. In the body. Always, in the body.
Loving you always!
Meghan