Three months in Seattle. I am finding my feet.
Aloha dear friends
I turned 51 on Thursday, the day after America’s big celebrations on 4th of July. It was a different kind of birthday. This time last year I was in Johannesburg, celebrating turning 50 and about to embark on a life changing trip to Hawaii. Now, here I am settling in Seattle, not far from Hawaii, and last year I had no idea that I would be here this year. How life can change in a heartbeat.
For the first time in my life, I celebrated my birthday in summer. My birthday is often the coldest day in winter in South Africa. (The day I was born in 1967 in Johannesburg, it snowed!) The universe delivered the most exquisite sunset at the end of the day on Thursday. As if to say, “Yes. You have done it, and you are in the right place for your soul right now.”
Change is never easy. Nobody said it was. And if you have read my earlier emails or blog posts, you’ll know it’s been a roller coaster ride emotionally in these past three months, settling in a new country. I have hit some really dark places and have had to find ways to ride the waves of emotions and navigate my way through them. Not surprising though. Moving your entire life across continents and hemispheres is bound to cause some emotional turmoil, right?
But I have also surprised myself! I have surprised myself with the way I have continued to move through the dark places by sitting with the emotions, in what felt like a swirling, wailing mess, and then using the tools I have learnt over the past 13 years to get me back on track. I’ve been using intuitive doodling most days. (follow my doodle journey on Instagram, or click here.) Warren and I went to Portland to do Soulpainitng with my Soulpainting teacher, I’ve been dancing in the lounge freely, crying when I need to cry, asking for help, being vulnerable with my husband when I’m feeling really low or high, and practicing the Hawaiian Huna principles from my Kahuna Massage work, as well as receiving bodywork, even if it hasn’t been Kahuna Massage. And I’ve done yoga almost every day.
I am slowly meeting like-minded people and starting to share the gifts and aloha of Kahuna Massage here.
This BIG move.
AS I reflect on this move, I know I would not have been able to make this step any earlier in my life, or even a year ago. The experience has shown me just how much we need to trust in the greater unfolding of our lives with more ease and surrender. When you want something badly enough, it will come about eventually. But you have to practice patience. The timing has to be right, and when it comes, you will know it as a big YES from the depths of your being. I have experienced this kind of Yes, at all the big junctures in my life, trusting it is from my intuition.
I am really a big ‘ninny’ and I have mostly lived a cautious life. Except for the times I’ve responded to that big Yes! I like home (I’m Cancerian), I love my family a lot, I get deeply connected to people because I am an empath, and in my young life, I didn’t take many risks. I felt that life was living me, I was not living life. I didn’t know how to create the life I wanted. I didn’t even know what ‘wanting’ felt like. I was too focused on the needs of others, and doing the ‘right thing’, to really be in touch with who I was. Maybe this is normal for most of us, in the first half of our lives.
Fast forward to midlife crisis ( or “midlife unravelling”, as Brene Brown calls it), and we can become more of ourselves as we launch into the next phase of life. If we allow ourselves the freedom to take time to get to know what we truly need and want, and do what is right for that deeper part of ourselves, we will find ourselves travelling in a magical world.
Not without it’s ups and downs, of course. Life continues to be a series of births, deaths and rebirths, cycles of destruction and renewal, but overall, we are able to see the bigger picture of flow and support from a greater Source, or the universe or God or whatever you want to call that support, but only if we let go and stop trying to control every detail of how we want life to be.
I have been wanting to live somewhere outside of Johannesburg for probably my whole fifty years. When I was young, I felt like a fish out of water. I am a crab. A water sign. An emotional empath. And I need water to soothe my soul. Johannesburg has no water to live nearby. I have dreamed of living in a house on the sea, where I can see the sunset every day.
In 2005, when I was still married to the father of my children, we explored moving to Australia with our two girls to see if we could make this a reality. Alas, the universe had other plans for us. So we headed back to Johannesburg. Strong lessons still had to be learnt before I was ready to make such a big move away from my family.
It took thirteen years and a lot of learning, inner work, change, growth, heartache and loss to learn the lessons, grow my strength internally, and really find my feet, and my wings.
For those of you who have known me for a long time, you know I have issues with my feet. It started in 2007 with inflammation of the bones in the balls of my feet, and this meant I could not walk barefoot on the ground.
If you are someone who suffers from anxiety, and a very very busy mind, you will know how important it is to be able to walk barefoot to ground yourself, and to calm your nervous system.
I have hobbled along for the past eleven years, searching for ways to ground myself in the absence of that method, and for shoes that work for my tender footsies – I taught Nia dancing for three years wearing ugly khaki green crocs, and spent a year matching bright orange takkies to my wardrobe. The last shoes I bought in South Africa were turquoise takkies that had to go with everything, including my wedding dress just before we left for the States!
I have had periods of years where I could massage and dance barefoot on wooden floors if my feet were warm, and then other times when I could barely walk. The bones in my feet are just old apparently . I was told I have ‘geriatric feet’! Lovely. I’m only half a century! Age is but a concept, isn’t it?
And now I am here in Seattle, finding my feet, both literally and figuratively.
Minding the body mends the mind. I know this and have experienced how movement and body therapies help to sort the busy mind out, and calm the nervous system. The daily practice of yoga is something that a friend once told me got her through her terribly hard divorce, and so I quickly found a yoga studio here that suits me, and doing a daily yoga class has helped to strengthen not only my body and my emotional self, but also my feet. My next step now is to go and dance with some Nia people here in a place called Sammamish.
The week we landed at the end of March, we had to rush to the shops to find warm, waterproof appropriate shoes for me, as it was anywhere between 2 and 10 degrees celsius and raining outside. I was determined to be able to walk around the beautiful forests and lakeshores that surround Seattle and my feet were not going to hold me back.
Eight hours and about eighty pairs of shoes later, I came out with one bright blue pair of Hoka One One trailrunning shoes, with the apt slogan “Time To Fly”. It felt like the big step I had taken to leave my home country, leaving behind all but one person that I love, was a step towards finding my feet and my wings.
I wasn’t mad about the blue, but wow! I was happy to have them.
A Little Fashion In Seattle
The fun thing about living in Seattle, is that it is very cosmopolitan. When we flew over from Dubai, I noticed that the plane was full of Indians from India. Whole families, including 90 year old grannies, were flying over to live with their children or grandchildren who have got jobs in the tech industry here. With so many Asians working for Microsoft, Google, and Amazon here in Seattle, there are a lot of different fashion styles. I love how the Japanese and Chinese women dress. Americans tend to stay in neutral colours, while the Asian women dress in all kinds of colours, mixing and matching different styles, and they wear sneakers with everything. A dress any length will have sneakers, white or black or coloured, underneath them. I have come to think it is very elegant, and so I am doing the same now with my blue Hoka’s.
These HOKA’s have taken me to so many places in the last three months. I am truly grateful that my feet are thriving here, and I have been able to walk to see these beautiful places. Another way that I have found a sense of grounding in this new space.
Walking in the snow on Mount Rainier last Sunday was the first time these feet have walked in snow ever!
Reflecting on the past three months, I realise that there have been many firsts for me.
One of these is living in an apartment.
Another is having a view of water and the magical sunset shining into our lounge each day. Yes, my dream has come true.
We moved into our new, slightly more permanent apartment three weeks ago. Microsoft had kindly given us temporary accommodation for two months until our container arrived, and then we had to move. So, while we look for a possible house to buy, we will be renting this magical spot on the shores of Lake Washington in a city called Kirkland. (There’s a strange syncronicity in the name of this town for me: my Grandfather’s brother changed his surname to Kirk, when he was a journalist for The Star newspaper in Johannesburg. So I have an uncle called Peter Kirk, and there is a park in Kirkland called Peter Kirk park. Makes it feel like this is the right place for us.)
Another first is that I gave my first Kahuna massage to a new American friend last week. She was blown away by the effects of it, and it grounded me in exactly the way I knew it would. Giving and receiving massage for me is like breathing air. And I was even able to go barefoot for the first time in a long time, as I was massaging on a carpeted floor in our lounge. It felt like freedom.
So here I find myself in a home, with a view of water and trees, living in what feels like a treehouse, and I can watch the sunset from my lounge every day. This is certainly a case of ‘dreams do come true’, and I feel blessed and grateful every day.
In the ancient Hawaiian view of life, IKE is the principle that states ‘Thoughts are real forces. Thoughts create your reality, and the world is what you think it is, so be aware of your thoughts”. I do not have perfectly clear or clean thinking – not by a long shot. In fact, half of my wobbling into darkness over here has been because I have found myself descending into thoughts that have been negative, and self-annihilating, with my ‘perfectionist’ shouting loud and clear at me that I am not good enough at anything. And then I got even harder on myself for not having ‘perfectly clean’ thoughts! I went down a dark rabbit hole there.
But finding myself in this apartment with this view, and a dream realized, proves to me that even if we just change a tiny bit of our habitual ways of thinking, keeping track of how we are talking to ourselves and about ourselves, and if we keep moving toward seeking the sensations of joy and deep peace, then life will move things around us to bring us what we seek. We just have to be gentle with ourselves.
The same thing happened with finding myself getting married to a wonderful man, and a day filled with intense Joy and love at our wedding celebration in February. I couldn’t believe it was me. It felt like this must be someone else’s life, and I had to pinch myself.
To get to this point, I have had to learn to let go of so many perceptions and expectations of how I think life should be, or how I or other people should behave. I’ve had to delete the ‘should’ word from my vocabulary, and release any thought that brought with it a sensation in my body of tension, clenching or contraction. Any thoughts that do this to our bodies, will stop the flow of life going through us.
A friend who has witnessed my life closely since 2013 recently said to me during my ‘wobbling’ phase, “You must remember that things work out. You have to trust that things fall into place. Your life has a certain alchemy and magic to it. I have watched this over the past few years.” It was a good reminder to me to look back and see where I have come from, and be grateful, instead of being anxious about what the future holds.
I have come to believe that navigating this journey of life is about four things:
1.Loving yourself fiercely so that you can love others more fiercely,
2. Letting go of expectations
3. Trusting that a bigger something is taking care of us all in the uncertainty of life, and that everything is really all right, just the way it is. No matter how hard it seems, or how ‘wrong’ we may judge it from our limited perception.
- And of course there’s gratitude. Always be thankful.
Call it faith, call it surrendering, call it trusting in something larger than ourselves, it’s a muscle that has to be strengthened, and when we lean into trusting, magic really does happen.
What we have to do, is take care of ourselves on the inside. Sweet treats and external pamperings are one step of the way on the physical level. But more than that, we have to really dive deeply into connecting with our souls in such a deep way, through the vehicle of our bodies and our intuition. We need to learn to love ourselves with such intensity that we can feel ourselves become a shining light, an extension of that godly, universal light that heals the world, and that even in the darkest moments of intense emotional upheaval when we feel we are being destroyed by our own mind and it’s chaotic, critical thoughts, we can tap back into that divine source of joy and life within us that will keep us breathing and bring us back to living life fully, and set us back onto our feet, so that we can continue to shine a light for others in their times of need.
These are the waves of births, deaths and rebirths that we must continue to ride while we are walking on this earth, living the human life that is filled with the full spectrum of emotions. And if we can survive it, and better still, thrive with it, what a glorious life it can be, if only we will endeavour to love our own selves more wholly and fiercely, and not give up when the days feel dark.
Only when we love ourselves this fiercely, do our needs get met, our desires come to fruition, and we are able to fill up with more joy than ever before, ready to give out more to the world that needs so much love to heal it.
So, my dear friends, fill up your cup before you give to others, and please, please love yourself more fiercely. State your desires, then let go and trust that a bigger picture is unfolding, and that you will find yourself in a space better than you could ever have imagined. Don’t worry. Everything is okay and you are supported. ( I tell myself this every morning when I wake up. I need constant reminding.) Trust that your feet will take you wherever you need to go, if only you will let go of trying so hard to control everything.
My feet are finding their way here. I have no doubt. They miss African soil, and the earthy gravitas of Jozi, but the watery effects of this lake that is in my world now, is what my soul needs to soothe it, and my feet will be able to walk in green forests and shorelines here, trying out new paths.
I miss you and my family in Jozi wholeheartedly. And in this missing, I find a new part of myself that is not clinging to the old, or yearning for what was, but riding the waves of emotions that arise, and opening to deeply feeling the longing and the missing, as well as the joyfulness of what is here now in front of me. My feet are finding their way, as my breathe returns to my body, and my soul is feeling lighter, and I feel expansion is possible.
It is true that what you seek is seeking you, and wherever you go, there you are. So it doesn’t matter where I go, my feet will be my feet, and my thoughts will be my thoughts, and I will love them all the more fiercely and with gratitude.
Take exquisite care of your beautiful self and love yourself more fiercely, no matter what.
Thank you for reading my ramblings. I feel more and more drawn to sharing my thoughts with others, but often wonder why I do this – it’s an intuitive impulse I am following. So if you have gained anything from reading this, please share with me. I would love to know how you are doing, and if there is any way I can support you from afar, let me know.
Please stay in touch as part of my ohana (family).
Comment below or email me on loukesb@gmail.com. (I will no longer be available on the brenda@manawa.co.za address.)
Warm Love and aloha blessings,
Brenda
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