I normally just post twice a week on here. This one hit home, so it's coming to you today instead.
A week ago I found out that someone I've known for over fifteen years, a spiritual teacher, in one of my own communities, took her own life.
I'm not going to write about her here. That's not this piece, and it's not mine to write.
What I can't stop watching is us.
The tributes have been beautiful, some of them.
Underneath the tributes, the speculation has already started. The kind where people arrange the facts into a shape they can live with.
She taught shadow work. She was about to launch a new course.
Somehow, in the telling, it took her out. Like the work itself turned on her.
None of that is actually relevant. What I want to talk about is how we respond.
How someone can hold the most impactful work in a room and still not be held herself.
How we do that to our teachers, and how we do it to ourselves.
Part One: The Night I Was Fourteen
I was fourteen, maybe fifteen.
It brought me back to a night I haven't written about before.
I found my mother on her bed, comatose. A bottle of pills beside her. The phone still in her hand. On the other end, a woman was asking, in Dutch, "what's happening, what's happening?"
My mother had called an ambulance herself, then gone under before it arrived. Somehow the phone was still live, still in her fingers. This stranger's voice asking a question nobody was answering.
I don't fully know how I did what happened next.
I think I pulled her up by her hair. I got her into the car. I did not have a driver's licence, and you cannot legally drive in Holland until you're eighteen.
Somehow I drove her to the hospital and parked the car without crashing it. In that nervous system state, at that age, that's its own small miracle.
They rushed her in to have her stomach pumped.
Here's where it gets complicated.
I don't think bittersweet is even the right word for what's coming. Not for her. For me.
The man my mother was seeing, the affair, came to the hospital. My father was living abroad at the time, and my mother had given this man a key to our house. You make of that what you will, I certainly have my opinion about it.
He'd gone there, found the pills gone, worked out we weren't home, and started calling every hospital until he found us.
He came and found me in the waiting room. We hugged. We cried. His daughter was a friend of mine, which is its own strange detail to carry.
How complicated can life actually get?
He told my mother his wife wanted a divorce. It turned out she didn't. Her best friend had confronted my mother about the affair, at a dinner party we'd hosted. Driving home that night, my mother had been in tears, feeling betrayed.
Still, somehow, I was the one holding on to this man for whatever comfort he could give me in this moment of pain.
My mother's pain. Not mine, technically. Except it was entirely mine too, and there was nobody checking whose pain I was allowed to be in.
When my mother came to, in that hospital bed, she didn't see me. She only had eyes for him.
After a few minutes standing there I felt exactly what my partner Alex would call it now, decades later: "what am I, chopped liver?"
So I left. I drove the car back to my parents' house alone.
A friend was walking his dog past the house. Saw the lights on. Knocked on the window.
I burst into tears in his arms. He held me.
I want to stay with this a moment longer, because it matters more than a quick sentence can hold.
Being held, properly held, by someone who wasn't asking anything of me, undid something in me faster than words could have.
That was after a night where I'd been the one holding everyone. Physically hauling my own mother into a car.
It moved. The way held grief does. It moved from his arms into something else. Physical touch became sexual touch, and I let it. For a while there was real relief in that, a kind of relief I hadn't been offered anywhere else that night.
Afterwards I felt empty. Not ashamed exactly, though the shame arrived later, on schedule, the way it always does. Somebody, somewhere, would call that promiscuous.
I'd call it a fourteen-year-old's nervous system finding the fastest road out of a night it had no other way to survive. I'm not going to pretend I fully believe now that the road was wrong.
That's not unusual. Physical touch becomes sexual touch more often than any of us admit, especially in a state like that, wired open and hunting for release with nowhere else for it to go. That may be exactly what a body needs.
The judgement that lands afterwards is rarely about what actually happened. It's about the fact that you needed it that badly at all.
That's led me to something I still teach now, decades later: when you are wanting, more than anything, to be held by someone, that touch can still lead somewhere else entirely, and often that's exactly where the release happens.
I called my father at eight the next morning.
My father was abroad with my brother and his wife. My sister was studying abroad too.
There was no one. I didn't call anyone, because I didn't want to bother anyone.
That's what a third child does, sometimes. Doesn't bother anyone.
He came back immediately. Furious at my mother, and supporting her anyway, both at once.
Here's what I understand now about that night that I didn't understand then. It wasn't actually the beginning. It only felt like it.
It was the loudest version of a lesson I'd already learned, thirty years earlier, in a much smaller room.
Part Two: Where The Giving Started
I was four.
I gave my grandparent a drawing. I remember watching the whole room shift. The attention, the delight, the way a small thing I'd made rearranged the air around me.
Nobody sat me down and taught me the lesson. My body just filed it: giving something is what makes you matter. That's where the over-giving actually started.
The hospital, thirty years later, was the same imprint, at volume, on a night with far higher stakes than a piece of paper.
When you're a teenager and you're made to choose between your parents, when you're the one who cleans up the mess and drives the car and holds the phone, it doesn't teach you anything new. It just confirms, at full force, what a four-year-old already worked out with a crayon.
It doesn't imprint that you did something wrong. Everyone will tell you it wasn't your fault, and they're right. It doesn't matter, because that was never the imprint.
The imprint is quieter than that, and older than that. You learn that you matter, that you're important, by giving.
So you give. To show it. Over and over and over again….
Years later. My sister is dying.
I've watched myself do the same thing again since, in a completely different shape.
For a period, I was part of something called Unconditional Sex. An experiment, with someone, where the rule was simple and absolute: the moment the sensation left, whoever felt it leave said so, and we stopped.
No negotiation. That was the entire agreement.
What I learned from that rule mattered almost more than the sex did.
Most people assume a man would take an arrangement like that and be grateful for it. Some were. A real number of them, the moment I said stop, tried to keep going anyway, tried to talk me back into it, tried to make sure they still got what they'd come for.
The ones who didn't, who actually stopped the second I said it, taught me more about what safety in a body feels like than any training I'd paid for.
Underneath all of it, the truthful reason I was there at all: it was how I got my relief during a year I could not otherwise bear. My sister was dying, and I did not have language for that pain. So my body found a door instead.
Was it soothing. Was it bypassing. Was it simply the body doing the one thing bodies know how to do with unbearable feeling: move it, however it can, wherever the door is open.
I still don't fully know the answer. I'm not sure it needs one.
Part Three: Back To Now
I've worked with mothers whose daughters took their own lives.
I worked with a mother who had to offer her own baby as a sacrifice inside a cult. How does anyone come back from that.
I have been shown, myself, what it looks like to be offered a portal out of this life. An actual way to step out of the 3-D world we're living in. Every single time, something has brought me back.
My children. The thought of what they'd feel.
To say we understand what happens in someone's mind when they're shown a portal like that, and they take it, is arrogant. I won't pretend to.
This week, in my body.
I want to name what's actually happening physically, because it's stranger than grief usually gets described as.
I've known her fifteen years. In all that time, I don't think I've mentioned her to Alex more than once or twice, in passing.
Alex said to me this week, "I've never seen you like this."
Tearful. Thinking about her constantly. My legs finding their way up onto a chair at ninety degrees before I've even decided to put them there.
A death that distant should not be doing this to a body. Except trauma doesn't file things by how close you were to someone. It files them by what they touch.
Bessel van der Kolk's line gets quoted so often it's turned into a slogan, so let me say it as the plain fact it actually is: the body keeps the score.
A nervous system that once hauled a comatose parent into a car and drove her to a hospital at fourteen does not forget that it can happen again. It waits, filed away, for the next thing that rhymes with it.
Someone who held everyone, not being held by anyone. That's the rhyme. My body found it before my mind caught up.
That's why I'm lying flat on my back most days this week, legs up on a chair at ninety degrees.
It's a message to my nervous system more than a stretch. There's no need to run, because a body braced to run doesn't put its legs up for anyone.
That's why I'm doing cross-body movement. Right hand to left knee, left hand to right knee, slow, over and over.
Crossing the midline like that is one of the oldest tricks a body has for moving a stuck charge out of itself, the same physics underneath EMDR's alternating stimulation, though what I'm doing isn't EMDR. A body processes what's stuck sideways more easily than it processes it head-on.
That's why I'm shaking. Actually shaking, hands and arms, when I lie there.
Animals do this after a threat passes, and most humans clamp down on it, because a shaking adult looks alarming to everyone watching.
Peter Levine spent decades studying that clamp-down. What he found is that the shake is the discharge, the nervous system completing something it didn't get to complete at fourteen.
I'm not stopping mine.
Part Four: The Actual Breadcrumbs
I crossed 35,000 followers on Instagram today. I thought that number would feel like a straightforward good day.
Instead I've been tearful, and proud, in the same hour. I've had to learn something in real time, AGAIN: those two are not in competition.
A body can hold a milestone and a grief at once, and it doesn't need you to pick one and perform it convincingly…. right?!
My brand is called Feel Fully You. That's not a tagline. It's the actual promise…. and man oh man, have I grown into that brand, through thick and thin…
There's a particular irony in having to decide, on a Thursday I didn't plan for, whether I'm actually willing to do that in public…. be vulnerable, be real, show ALL pieces of me.
I built a business on the promise that the felt experience is the honest one, and today that promise came due. I'm paying it, tearful, shaking, thumb to forefinger, in front of anyone who wants to watch.
I'm writing about it and speaking it out loud too. That's its own kind of moving it through, and it's the only reason this piece exists at all.
Looking back at all of it. The drawing at four. The hospital at fourteen.
The man, the friend with the dog. The years with Unconditional Sex while my sister was dying.
I don't see a woman who kept making the same mistake.
I see the actual breadcrumbs.
Every one of those was my body finding its own way through something no one had given me a map for. It's exactly why I teach what I teach now.
This is what it actually means, every single day, to keep following the breadcrumbs.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette