The Practice of Becoming

Chapter Twenty-one: The life i had to live

I am sitting here at the computer with no real idea what I want to write about, so I am going to do what I often do and simply see what comes.

These past few weeks have flown by. So much in my life feels as though it is coming to an end, and I have found myself tying up loose ends, finishing things that have been sitting unfinished and clearing space around me.

There is something exciting about it.

Spring feels close, and with it comes the feeling of new ideas, new energy and creation.

But before I begin again, I feel called to complete.

Completion has never come easily to me. Neither has study, if I am honest. I have never been someone who can sit with information simply because I am told I need to know it. I struggle to learn something unless I can feel it, experience it or somehow allow it to become part of my life.

I learn through living.

Music taught me this first. I did not come to understand singing only through theory. I understood it through using my voice, through performance, mistakes, repetition and the feeling of sound moving through my body.

Ayurveda became real to me in much the same way. I could read the words and learn the concepts, but it was through experiencing the practices myself that the knowledge began to settle somewhere deeper.

Yoga is now the same.

I need to live something before I truly understand it.

And although this way of learning has sometimes made life harder, I am grateful for it because it has taught me to speak from experience. I do not want to teach something simply because I have read it somewhere. I want to know what it feels like to walk through it.

Perhaps that is why lived experience matters so much to me. The practices I now teach did not enter my life as interesting ideas or things I simply wanted to study. They became important because I needed them. They met me at a time when I was living very differently, and when I did not yet know how to sit with much of what I was feeling.

There was a time when I smoked more than forty cigarettes a day. I drank beer and whisky most nights and even more on the weekends when I was playing in bands. For much of my twenties, unless I was working, I was often high on marijuana.

I think people are sometimes surprised when they hear this.

I took my work seriously and could hold myself together when I needed to, but beneath that I can see now how much pain I was carrying.

I did not know what to do with it.

So I numbed it.

At the time, I would never have used those words. I thought I was simply living my life. But looking back, I can see how much I was trying not to feel.

The tension.
The sadness.
The confusion.
The parts of myself I did not yet know how to meet.

This is why I feel such deep gratitude for the teachers and practices that came into my life.

Yoga. Ayurveda. Meditation. Breath. Mantra. Prayer.

None of them gave me a perfect life.

They gave me a way back.

Again and again.

I have now been completely sober for five years. I am proud of that, but I also know that removing the substances was only part of the work.

When the things we use to escape are taken away, we are left with ourselves.

And sometimes that is where the real work begins.

I had to meet fear, anger, sadness, old wounds and patterns I had spent years avoiding. I had to learn that healing was not about becoming someone who never struggled again.

Practice did not make me perfect.

It made me more willing to stay.

To stay with what I was feeling.

To stay when things became uncomfortable.

To stay long enough to understand what was underneath.

I still feel anger. I still feel sadness. I still get things wrong. I still push myself too hard.

I am still learning.

But I am beginning to understand that showing up for myself is very different from pushing myself.

For a long time, I confused the two.

I thought exhaustion meant dedication. I thought saying yes meant generosity. I thought constantly doing and creating meant I was moving forward.

Now I am learning another way.

I am learning to value my time.

To say no without guilt.

To say yes with intention.

To focus.

To finish.

To complete.

And perhaps that is why this season feels so important to me.

There is a season for beginning, but there is also a season for ending.

A season for closing doors, clearing space and recognising what we no longer need to carry with us.

We speak so often about becoming something new, but sometimes becoming begins with completing what came before.

I think that may be what I am learning now.

That life is not always going to be easy. Healing is not always going to feel beautiful. We will face obstacles, uncomfortable truths and parts of ourselves we would rather avoid.

And perhaps that does not mean we are doing something wrong.

Perhaps that is part of it.

Real change takes time.

It takes practice.

It takes patience.

And it asks us to keep returning to ourselves with as much kindness as we can.

Because beneath so much of the work, perhaps that is what we are really doing.

Returning.

To ourselves.

To each other.

To love.

And maybe completion is not only about finishing what we started.

Maybe sometimes it is about allowing an old version of ourselves to come to an end, so there is finally enough space for something new to begin.

It is not easy.

Maybe it was never meant to be.

Maybe it was meant to be lived.