Finding my intuition by listening to my body
In late Winter / early Spring of 2023 the plan looked like this: I would be in Ecuador for the month of March, living in the capital city of Quito in a hostel to teach yoga 2x a day and help with food service in exchange for free room and board. I’d work for 5 days and then have 2 to travel and see the country. Step out of the comfort zone and learn something new, right?
The Reality: I was in Quito for 2 weeks but after safety concerns and started listening to my body and in doing so I built my intuition. I decided to came home early. Both grateful to be out of a sketchy situation and sad to feel like I missed part of an adventure.
Maybe plan was faulty from the start. If I was 24 or 28 years old maybe this would have made more sense. If I didn’t have a husband, mortgage and dog maybe. But I I was 38 and creeping closer to 40. There were folks who were in the hostel on a gap year…I could legit have been their mom. I don’t drink or party like kids in their 20’s. I like to read my book and have tea in peace, going to bed by 10:00 pm. Clearly this was a mismatched expectation. The hostel was great and seemed well-loved by all…but this wasn’t a match for me and my body wanted me to know that.
For starters, there was the noise, a LOT of it. Now, I’m no country mouse so city noise typically isn’t a problem. I pop on my brown noise (better than white or pink noise, believe me!) and an eye mask to filter out my surroundings. But Quito has 2 million people and the hostel was right by a market and a busy intersection. A loud, energetic and historic market meant early mornings and drifters late into the night. The market was the target of a police raid, including one while I was teaching yoga and had to maintain a sense of calm. Another raid with the police marching down the street felt scary and alarming. I tried to shrug this off with the, “I’m from Baltimore” cliche. As if being from a mid-size American city known for “The Wire” and violence / murder made me better equipped at seeing “shit go down.”
My intuition from my body started to speak to me. My body was saying, “Sister, it’s time to go, you do not feel safe or nourished, so you can leave at any time.” Her way of telling me this was a chest heaviness, like an elephant walking over the heart, very very slowly. I felt headaches and had tummy trouble. I knew the body was telling me something so I had to really take time to notice when the signals were the loudest.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out the trigger. The source was the sound of footsteps coming towards a closed bedroom door. This triggered a deep childhood wound, one rooted in violence. My dad had a bad temper and often there was some minor infraction that tipped off his temper and we never knew what was coming next. The sound of footsteps felt like uncertainty and a lack of safety. “What would happen when the door opens…would I be okay or get hurt?”
When I was a child I couldn’t leave this situation. I was literally stuck there and the emotions and feelings were of course stuck in my body too. If you’re not familiar with this concept your next required reading is “The Body Keeps the Score.” I couldn’t give myself the safety I needed…so my comfort zone became the lack of safety, the not knowing what the footsteps behind the door would bring. I was comfortable with being on edge and hyper vigilant. And it trapped my nervous system.
Safety is relative of course. I currently occupy a petite, white, cisgender female body which will feel different degrees of safety in different spaces compared to other bodies. So the noises from a market or footsteps might not be a trigger for someone reading this. Theirs might be the smell of dill or a match book. They might not be aware of a trigger for feeling unsafe. Our safety is a social construct internally / individually as well as externally / in the collective. Through the deep listening to my body telling me what was safe for me, I knew I had to leave Ecuador early.
Then a whole additional wave of feelings hit me: meta-emotions…feelings about the feelings. (And I’m not even a Pisces) Mostly I felt guilty. It feels like we’re on the brink of WWIII and I still have healthcare, can pay all my bills but I’m worried about my cute little nervous system and some low key childhood trauma. Ego came in to say, '“Who are you to be sad, you asked for this position? Who are you to be concerned about safety when kids in West Baltimore see their parent shot on the corner and then go to school the next day on an empty stomach?”
Brene Brown calls this “Comparative Suffering.” The idea of, “She / he / they have it so much worse than me so I really can’t complain.” Comparative suffering takes away the truth that my feelings have the right to exist completely independently of what else is going on for other folks and the world. I feel what I feel. Hard stop. Me feeling guilty for feeling my feelings when other folks have their own feelings doesn’t change any of the feelings, for me or for them.
My body has been sending me an alarm to leave or walk away from a situation / get more safe for years and I just kept hitting snooze button. It’s why I drank in college, if I could numb the signal to leave then I would just stay and do “the cool thing.”
But through meditation, yoga, breath work and journaling practices I have become better at hearing and listening to the alarms from my body.
This requires space to notice and then choose the response (see Victor Frenkl quote on the homepage of this site) That’s what happened in Quito: Ego said, “It’s comfortable to feel unsafe, you’re good at that, remember.” Spirit whispered through my body, “Sister, you can keep yourself safe. Do what you need to do.” The response became clear when I gave myself the chance to listen.
Now I see the lesson a bit differently: My comfort zone was the pain, the fear and the uncertainty. This is where I grew up. So to get out of the comfort zone didn’t mean learning the language of Spanish, it meant learning the language of my body. And when the body was giving me the sign to GTFO, I finally listened to it. As a kiddo my body was giving me the sign to flee but I couldn’t. So now, 20+ years later, I finally listened and said, “I will walk you to safety. I will give you what you are asking for.” Being able to give myself the safety I need, that’s the jump out of the comfort zone for me, that’s where the magic happens