Every day, when I come to my mat, I bring a different intention, a different version of myself, a different set of experiences waiting to be met.

Today, I came with pain. Discomfort I couldn’t quite understand or explain. And, if I’m honest, a lot of frustration too, and the kind of despair that wants you to give up.

Why? Why am I feeling this way? With everything I do to take care of myself, physically and emotionally, why is there still so much discomfort?

But instead of dwelling in the why, I chose to dive into my practice and see what might unfold.

This time, my practice gifted me with an image of my grandfather.

He was sitting in his usual chair on the terrace, looking out into infinity. I was younger, and I was hugging him. It took my whole body to hug him. He felt like a tree, or a rock, immovable, my arms unable to reach fully around him.

He always felt very solid to me, like a rock. Someone I could lean on. Someone who could support me simply by being there.

But in this image, I was hugging him and offering him warmth. I wanted him to soften, to move more freely, to be released from the pain he carried and from the past that had shaped it.

I wanted him to experience a freedom that perhaps he had never fully known, or perhaps one he had known only long before I met him, before the war changed his life and his body.

And somehow, this image led me to think about the difference between a rock and a block of ice. Both can appear solid, but ice holds the possibility of becoming water again. It can soften, change state, and move.

🦭Selkie Says: You do not have to force what has frozen. You can offer it warmth.🦭🦭

I began to wonder how much of what we experience as solidity in our bodies might also be a kind of freezing. How much of our holding, our tension, our resistance to movement might be connected to pain we have learned to carry.

A body can feel frozen without losing its inner liquidity.

Fear can teach us to become rigid, to hold ourselves together, to resist movement, and to protect our vulnerable parts. Over time, this holding can become so familiar that we begin to experience ourselves as solid, dense, and stuck.

But perhaps we do not need to break the ice. Perhaps we can rediscover the water within it.

Through movement, breath, sensation, and experiences of safety, we can explore what happens when rigidity gives way to mobility, when holding gives way to support, and when the body discovers that it can be both grounded and fluid.

Not less solid, but less frozen.

Not less ourselves, but more available to ourselves.

The ice does not need to be fought. It needs the possibility of becoming water again.

🦭Softening is not giving up. It is remembering how to move.🦭🦭

And I wonder if this is something that can happen between us too. In the simple act of holding someone, of offering warmth and presence, perhaps we can create a little space for what has been held for a long time to soften.

In that embrace, I was offering my grandfather the possibility of something different, not erasing his past, but freeing him, even for a moment, from the pain that had followed him through it.

I remember that time. I was there with him, in the flesh.

And perhaps, today, that embrace was reaching him across space and time again, continuing to soften something in both of us.

We are not separate stories unfolding in isolation. We are connected through an intricate web of lives, bodies, experiences, and inheritances. What we carry is shaped by those who came before us, just as what we transform may influence those who come after us.

We are all participating in one another’s evolution, healing, and transformation, each in our own time and in our own way. This web does not follow linear time.

This is something I keep returning to in my somatic exploration of the body and fascia, the possibility that, by listening and moving differently, and by creating space where there was once holding, we may discover new ways of being in relationship with ourselves and with the world around us.

I came to my mat with pain and questions. I left with an image, an embrace, and a different way of looking at what it means to soften through time.

What if the body does not need to be melted, but simply needs to experience that it is safe to move again?

➡️ You can watch a short video here of me accessing movement through somatic art practice, and entering an ancestral portal for healing.

When you’re ready to explore this magic more deeply, come join me inside the Selkie Sanctuary. It’s a space for women who are ready to reconnect with their rhythm, release old stories, and rise through sound, movement, and creative ritual.

🦭 "The tide is turning, love, come swim with it!" 🦭🦭🦭