The Mind-Body Connection
The year was 2021- peak covid lock down. I was living in a cute little ground floor apartment in Coogee, right near my favourite beach Gordon’s Bay. Myself and my roommate had developed a very sweet routine of setting up a fire each night in our backyard. We’d sit out there for hours. What made this experience so grounding and cosy were the banksia and bottlebrush trees that surrounded the space -- their low hanging, billowing branches felt like a warm hug. This was a sacred space of devotion for me.
Living in Australia during this time was extremely unsettling. We were not allowed to have guests over, police patrolled the beaches moving people on who were laying in the sun, helicopters flew overhead every day. It was tense, destabilising and stressful on the nervous system.
Having a backyard with trees and grass to ground on was a luxury. And this night time fire routine had become a ritual of solace and peace that I had come to depend on.
One morning I woke up late, as I often do, and walked outside to sit under my favourite trees and meditate. But was immediately struck by the massacre that lay before me. My neighbours, a couple upstairs, had been “gardening” all morning. Our cozy little fairy den now looked like a backpacker hostel party spot. Where there had been a small circle of 2-3 benches surrounding a fire pit, there were now enough chairs to fit 10-15 people.
But worst of all, they had hacked at all the trees. Where there were once bushy, outward growing natives branches, there were now jagged and bare stubs of tree that to me looked like wounds.
Immediately I asked what was their intention. The guy said he wanted to make more space to have a party (we’re still in the “no guests” government covid rule mind you), and they sawed the trees down to bare bone in an attempt to make them grow tall and straight, not fat and round and wild as they naturally do.
I was utterly devastated. I walked up to take a closer look and saw that the massive branches they had cut down were now lying next to the trees in piles taking up space anyway. It was such a strange, nonsensical scene. Those branches belonged on the trees :(.
The guy said we could use them for firewood. But as the branches were it was impossible to use them as wood. Being huge, if not the size of actual trees themselves.
I was absolutely furious. For so many reasons. This was not only an assault to my sacred space of peace and solace, it felt to be an assault to The Feminine herself. I was consumed with rage at the fact this man had taken it upon himself to hack at these trees in an attempt to make them the way he thought they should be- tall, skinny and “in order”.
I dragged the piles and piles of gorgeous, blooming native branches onto the lawn part of the yard and I took my anger out on the situation by chopping them up into pieces of wood for the fire. Organising them by size. Kindling, medium to large. This took me hours. I was utterly possessed. I had to give meaning to this, what felt like, tragedy. The branches had to become wood that we could make use of otherwise this degradation of beauty was all for nothing.
Within a day or two I started having strange symptoms in my feet at night. Soon a blistering rash emerged on my toes that was unbearably itchy and uncomfortable. They would get so overwhelmingly hot I would have to wrap ice packs to the tops of my feet as I slept. It got so bad I went to the doctor ( a rare occasion for me) who said it could be “Covid Toes”, eye roll — another one of those random diagnoses that was being flown around at that time. I ended up having a biopsy and was diagnosed with chilblains which are caused by cold or damp weather, which didn't add up as it was the end of summer. They offered a steroid cream as treatment which I didn’t use.
I knew something wasn’t right on a spiritual, emotional and physical level. I couldn’t move past what happened to my garden, every time I went outside I felt triggered, my feet were rashy as hell which was frustrating me constantly – it was time to call in some help.
At this time I was part of a community of somatic practitioners where we all participated in session swaps to develop more mastery in our craft. So I reached out to one of my peers to help me touch the spot I couldn’t reach on my own.
Through gentle guidance she coaxed the anger out of me. I was able to express it and release it using breath, sound (a lot of sound), movement and touch. I was also able to make the connection between what happened in the garden, my anger and the rash on my toes. The feet are a part of the Root Chakra energy centre which represents home, safety, belonging. The rash was a physical manifestation of my destabilised root chakra from having my safe space tampered with. But also the anger that I was aware was there, but not truly feeling all the way through.
As days went by and I integrated the session, it also became clear to me that it was time for me to move out of the apartment, as the dynamic with my roommate was no longer serving me. A truth I had known for weeks but had not wanted to consider as I had moved half a dozen times over the previous years and months.
When we don’t listen to those whispers of inconvenient truths from our intuition, the body will eventually scream. And life will create whatever situation it needs to, to get you to move.
Within a few days of the session the rash had subsided and I had the clarity to start the process of finding my next home.
