I. Love. Life.

“The life within me, the life within all of us, is desperate to be.”

• As usual, I’m taking my annual summer break from social media, so I’ll be away for the rest of August, returning at the beginning of September.

I’VE BROUGHT MY VAN to the ancient site of Whichford Castle, which was probably built in the early 13^th century. As I drive through the narrow, overgrown entrance, I see the remains of the old moat – home to carp and dragonflies. A natural spring rises nearby from the Holy Well in the woods. It apparently runs through Holycombe campsite and then over a waterfall. Because of this spring fed medieval moat, water has been running through this place for centuries.

Much of the world is experiencing drought at the moment. My work as an Essence Coach could be said to explore ‘inner drought’, amongst other things.

What does it take for our innermost waters to keep flowing, and what happens when they don’t?

Our own flow can easily become dammed, which then disrupts the natural expression of longing, feeling, pleasure and desire. Often, the dam was built long before we were even born. Patterns of self-denial can travel through generations. We’re then left to take on the stagnation of what our ancestors couldn’t express or allow themselves to want.

I DON’T REMEMBER EXACTLY when it was that I began to long for happiness, but it was certainly in my twenties. Now that my life’s work is guiding people as they dream new lives into being, I understand longing differently. It’s the movement of something essential within us, a deeply submerged current pressing upwards, wanting to flow. But at the time, when I felt this yearning, I looked outside of myself for something that would bring me happiness. I was like a child in a pantry, standing on tiptoes, chubby fingers outstretched towards a jar of cookies that was unmistakeably out of reach.

SINCE TRAVELLING MORE IN my van, I’ve discovered a tickly, contented pleasure from walking through a campsite in my pyjamas as the sun comes up. I love the casual, at home, relaxedness about it. Wandering past people’s tents with my bed hair. Listening to the snores, whispers, and giggles of the other campers, slightly muted by the dewy canvas that conceals them. Soaking up the early morning sun on my face, feeling my cheeks lifting in a wide smile.

These days, when I think of happiness, the experience in my body is entirely different. I’m no longer standing on tiptoes, reaching for something outside of myself. My journey has taken me in the opposite direction, towards the feeling itself, and the dams within that were preventing it from flowing.

Now, there’s a fizzy, bubbly sense of revolving in my lower belly, a glowing warmth in my solar plexus. My heart inflates and this nourished swell brings a deep impulse to make sound. Today, that sound comes as three words.

I love life.

THIS ALIVENESS WAS ALWAYS within me. What has changed is my capacity to identify with it and let it flow.

Our essence contains our truth, our life, stored carefully. Just like a seed in a cool, dark drawer, safe from storms and frosts. This means that no matter how many times we were made to feel incomplete, wrong, timid or vulnerable, there’s a deeper aspect of ourselves that remains clear of these hurts.

It was this place that was calling to me in my twenties. Beneath everything I’d come to believe about myself was an inner fountain I’d forgotten, murmuring through the endless drought I’d mistaken for my truth.

Living life from our essence, versus living within a dammed-up landscape, creates a very different life. Much of what we learn about ourselves growing up becomes the inner terrain constricting the flow of our essence. The dams that hold us back are built from beliefs, adaptations and conclusions about who we are and what’s possible. I think of these as man-made thoughts. When these thoughts dictate our path, we can spend our lives roaming manufactured roads that lead to dead ends or fenced-in lanes.

I now understand how, over time, repeatedly thinking and responding in the same ways strengthened the well-worn neural pathways in my brain. In my twenties, I had no idea that I was ‘choosing’ a route. A thought arose, my body responded, I behaved accordingly, and the familiar destination became further evidence that the thought was true. I’m not good enough. I’m not safe. I have to work hard to be worthy. I can’t have what I want.

I spent decades travelling roads laid down by a much younger version of myself forgetting my truth.

SITTING ON THE WOODEN deck of my van I can smell the sweet, old-papery scent of sun-baked grass. Climbing up here felt a bit nerve-wracking, a miniature version of how it has felt to inhabit this more nomadic lifestyle that my essence has been singing to me over the years.

At first, I tried to disregard the sense of something within, deeply submerged, desperate to rise. If I busy myself for long enough, surely it will pass?

And yet, over the years it only grew more insistent. This is because the life within me, the life within all of us, is desperate to be.

In the energetic body, water is associated with the sacral area, home of feeling, desire, creative flow and pleasure. This area is often blocked.

Perhaps our waters have frozen. Feelings that couldn’t be safely expressed – sometimes for years, or even generations – ice over.

Over the years, I felt my own frozen feelings gradually crack down the centre, speaking to me through acute back pain – the only form of communication I left my body with – trying to coax the warmth of my attention away from my mind and back into my belly to melt the generations-long ice age.

Now that my waters have thawed they flow into places that had been living through a decades-long drought.

WORKING WITH MY BODY has been essential for my liberation. I couldn’t think my way out of patterns that existed beneath conscious thought. I had to learn how to be aware of what was happening inside me.

For a long time, my desire for happiness seemed incompatible with who I believed I was. This is because while I was longing for a life that I loved, that was joyous and free, I was trying to get there by travelling the same internal roads.

This is where I’ve come to understand the difference between identifying with our trauma and identifying with our truth or essence. When we identify with our trauma, we don’t experience its conclusions as old thoughts, beliefs or adaptations. We experience them as who we are. I’m not good enough. I’m unsafe. I’m unlovable. Life is hard. I have to struggle. I have to prove myself. The thought and the self become indistinguishable.

When we learn how to identify with our truth, we realise that beneath the roads that never take us anywhere new, there is something real. Our essence. The waters within that are ready to surge, to flow.

Sitting on the roof of my van, I feel it – the aliveness within me, gushing unrestricted.

Instead of automatically travelling those well-worn neural pathways, I developed enough awareness to see that a thought travelling through my mind isn’t necessarily the truth.

Now, when the urge comes – to climb up onto the roof, to live a life of freedom – and my thoughts try to disregard the upswell, I can notice what’s happening. Rather than becoming a marionette to this old pattern of denial, I can step back and see the strings: the unconscious thoughts attempting to dictate my life, forcing the lifeforce within me into a man-made dance that knows only the same old steps.

And then I can begin to flow differently.

I VISIT A WILD sauna at Whichford Mill enjoying a stunning wood-lined sauna made from a 1960’s horsebox, and cooling off in an icy little ‘meander’ from the river Stour or lowering myself into a spring-filled bathtub surrounded by wildflowers.

The dance between heat and cold can be incredibly liberating to a body constrained by the past, held tight, in a near-constant state of anxiety, as mine was. Moving voluntarily between these extremes coaxes the body out of its habitual patterns. Heat relaxes and opens. Cold plunges me sharply into the present. As I focus on maintaining the depth of my breathing while the icy river curves around me, there’s no room for yesterday, tomorrow, or the well-worn roads of thought. Instead, all my attention is in my body, alive with sensation.

After my first round of intense, dry heat and gasp-inducing cold, I venture back into the sauna. As the warmth begins to penetrate my body again, I feel the lifeforce within me flowing like a geyser. Something that was once frozen isn’t simply thawing. It’s erupting!

I. LOVE. LIFE.

WHY would we deny such joy? Such power? Such aliveness?

As I say these words to myself, and imagine putting them on the page, sharing them with my audience, I feel the history in my body, the conditioning that built dams, clouded the skies and constricted the river of my life.

Guilt. Fear.

How can I love life when so many others don’t?

Haven’t we heard things like, ‘It’s all right for you.’ Or, ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’

When we forget we’re nature, we internalise these words. They become judgments about how much aliveness we’re allowed to express.

Would we stand alongside a gushing river, watching the frothing rapids, the sparkling water, listening the hypnotic burble and say, ‘Who do you think you are?’

To stand beneath the fantastical cascade of a waterfall and think, ‘Show off,’ is ludicrous.

And yet, when we only learn to identify with ourselves as man-made, we accept these social messages as truth. We contract around our joy. We temper our excitement, apologise for our pleasure, build dams around the very life that wants to move through us.

ON MY FINAL MORNING, I sit in the stone circle at my campsite aware of ancient things – the remains of a castle, the water that has travelled through the land for centuries.

Breathing and sensing traces of people who lived here long before, I suddenly feel my attention drawn to the surrounding trees. I see my breath flowing through them – up through their roots, along their trunks and out into the sky through flickering, green canopies.

I feel the life in me.

I feel my waters, bubbling. I feel the flame in my solar plexus, warming those waters. Steam rises and fills my heart with air that is loving, generous, devoted.

This tender feeling passes through my throat and become the voice that I share with you, dear reader, right now.

It also becomes a song of gratitude that I sing to my truth for waking me to the life I came here to live.

It feels so clear to me that the ways we’ve learned to contain and suppress the desire within can be released. What has constrited generations doesn’t have to continue constricting us.

The river doesn’t diminish its flow because there’s drought elsewhere. When the land is parched, we need the rivers that are still running to flow.

Looking at it this way, I see the madness of a cracked, dry riverbed denying the flood that comes to hydrate it. And I can begin to grasp the responses of others differently too.

‘It’s all right for you.’ ‘Who do you think you are?’ ‘Don’t show off.’

These words aren’t evidence that something is wrong with our abundance, they reveal another person’s own dams and frozen waters, their difficulty receiving nourishment from a life that’s flowing freely before them.

Instead of protecting each other from our aliveness, what if we allowed ourselves to flow abundantly? My joy does not diminish yours. In fact, allowing my waters to flow will help you remember the waters within your own ecosystem.

I love life.

Finally.

As always, wishing you creative contentment.

Gabriela, Tree Goddess x

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading and spending this time with me here. If something touched you, responding in a small way, a few words or a heart, helps this piece reach others who may need it today, and keeps this space relational rather than one-sided.