Mira Rao

Lately I have been reflecting on the pressure we can put on ourselves when we find a path of healing or growth. I’ve noticed a tendency to expect to “progress” substantially…and quickly..
It’s an understandable impulse.

The relief and hope of those first shifts…can be intoxicating. As we notice we feel a little better, a little different…it can make us want to continue growing as intensely and as quickly as possible.
But … it doesn’t work that way.

In my own life last year, the collision of peri-menopause and peri-burnout made me learn this lesson once again, from scratch.

It was deeply humbling.

Having devoted much of my professional and personal life to understanding how my brain and body worked and what they needed, the embodied toolkit I had gathered to navigate life was HUGE.

But my toolkit simply didn’t work any more.

I was meeting myself in a whole new body, and greeting a mind that was reconfiguring itself into something I didn’t recognise.
This new me needed and demanded different things to feel well. Things I didn’t know how to do yet.

For the first time in years, I felt truly awful and I wanted relief. And just as I witnessed in my clients, I wanted fast results.
But as I searched and scoured for answers, for new approaches, I noticed that the more I pushed and pressured things to change, the more lost I became. I felt like I was trying to grow in quicksand, my footing slipping with every step I attempted.

Eventually, I slowed down. I let each small step land. I removed the pressure and remembered that we, as organic systems, are governed by homeostasis.

Our systems will always prioritise familiar stability over unfamiliar improvement. Which means that feeling “better” doesn’t always register as better to our system - at least not at first. When change comes too fast, even when it’s positive, it can feel destabilising rather than relieving.

Adaptation requires time and tolerable change, signals the system can integrate without overwhelm - more like ripples moving through the system than waves crashing us onto the shore of disorientation.

And so part of healing and growing becomes learning to trust slow change - especially when progress doesn’t show up or feel the way we expected it to.

**THE YEAR I RETURNED HOME TO MY HEART**

When I was a teenager I used to take buses and trains to unfamiliar suburbs in my home town and just wander around, trying to get myself to nowhere. I'd walk down streets I'd never heard named, longing to lose my way. For brief moments I floated in that sweet in-between that travellers know so well. Until I stumbled onto the next major road: another heaving artery pulling me back to the heart of my terrorised suburban life.

Who knew that the biggest adventure of my life would be the one I would take through my own heart, enclosed and comforted in the four walls of my teenage home.

After a twenty-year long escapade through intensity that is.

I had became a master escape artist - a Houdini if you will. No life situation was too tough for me to outwit and unchain. Not a single unplanned, stupid or dangerous getaway was able to unhook me from the rush of escape. Hit me - a new city. And again - a new job. I need more - a new circle of friends.

Latest obsessions would quickly deaden into abandoned passions.

I craved escape more than anything else because I kept imprisoning myself; in corporate jobs that restrained me in straight-hair and pinstripes; in relationships that drained rather than sustained. Under the pressure of other people's imagined (or sometimes real) agendas, I got really, really good at contortion. I was constantly pretending and bending myself into the appropriate, appreciated shape. With all this, escape was easy because I was never really there in the first place - my presence an illusory shadow cast across those new, unfamiliar and ever shifting landscapes.

Until I finally realised no matter how much I bent, twisted and turned, I could never escape myself.

And thus began my long journey home to myself.

That year, I barely left my bedroom and yet I changed more, saw more, understood more about myself and humanity than 100 previous daring flights taken out into the world had ever taught me.

Day after day, I used to lose myself in the very same 100 metre walk through my local gardens. Every plant, every paving stone was familiar and yet every day was a completely new adventure - each morning a different bird song rang out, a new leaf or flower emerged, a ripe plump fruit that adorned the branches the day before, had tumbled to the ground.

During that time I learned that when I am no longer deforming myself into shapes that never fit in the first place, when I stopped running away, life is still an adventure indeed, just one in which I can quietly, calmly, choose my own.

For today, may you know that you are safe and peaceful enough to remove your hand from the escape hatch and gently embrace the ups and downs of life. May you realise that you are free to choose your own adventure.