My body will know how to die.
13 September 2026 · The intelligence we were told not to trustLife has been more than busy.
It has been abundant like a good summer Harvest. Colorful with vegetables and fruits ready to be made into compote and preserves that will be enjoyed during the cooler months.
Are you seeing the delights among the busyness? Does it move you towards experiencing more of life? More of the pains dancing with joys?
I want to tell you about the Harvest and the commitment of eight women who showed up across eight weeks to examine their relationship with money, worth, receiving and reciprocity. But we have one more week to go. I'll share once the container closes. If you missed it and know you want to participate in the future — be the first to know the coming dates.
What I do want to tell you about is living intelligence.
The intelligence of our body.
The intelligence in our body that knows how to die.
The intelligence that knows how to give birth.
The intelligence of our heart that knows how to grieve and love again.
My body will know how to die
Have you ever thought about that?
I have been thinking about it for a few weeks now. Since Silvija Tomčik first said it during our conversation on the YINtentions podcast.
Silvija then said: "My body will know how to be sixty years old, if I live to sixty years. My body will know how to age. So the things that I did not go through in this life, my body will know how to do that."
This reflection has me coming back to the innate intelligence that lives in each of our bodies - the intelligence of death, the intelligence of ageing, of birthing, of heartbreak and of love.
If all of that intelligence is within our body and we live it without thinking about it - why have we built entire industries to optimise these natural processes?
To say my body knows. To say she already knows is saying I know. And I see all around me the places where we keep outsourcing that knowing. Fearing our own knowing. Fearing that it might be right without scientific proof. Fearing that we might be right and be ostracised for it. Is it really a fear that my body might not know how to die, how to give birth? Or is it fear that it won't do it the way the media, the doctor, the family, the beliefs have told us one should?
The intelligence stripped into minimal perspectives of possibility.
Yet the intelligence is both universal — your body will know how to die — and entirely particular in how exactly it will happen. Somewhere along the line of shutting down, breathing becomes highly irregular, often featuring long pauses or a noisy rattling sound in the throat. Blood circulation slows drastically, causing the hands, feet, and legs to feel cold to the touch and develop a mottled, purplish colour. You will fall into a deep, unresponsive sleep as the heart weakens and the major organs completely stop functioning. This can take milliseconds or it can take several days.
The body does this without being taught.
The same is true of a woman's body knowing how to give birth.
It knows the sequence, the timing, the hormones in their order, when to open and when to wait and when to bear down. It knows how to stop if the room is not safe — which is not a malfunction, it is intelligence. It knows how to do this whether or not the woman has read anything, whether or not she has been taught, whether or not anyone in the room believes she can.
Yet around this knowing, we have built one of the most heavily supervised events in human life.
I have not yet given birth and I have no doubt that my body will know how to do it. But this is part of a reclaiming - because most of what we have been taught is that others know better. They wear white coats. They've seen so many births. And it's true: there are women alive because of a surgeon. Babies alive because someone was watching a monitor. I am not writing a case against intervention.
I am ready, however, to claim that in the West we are programmed to want everything fast. A birth that takes its own time is the least Western event there is - which may be exactly why we cannot leave it alone. Why we have all the expertise telling a woman how she should give birth, on someone else's time.
Birth is where the body's competence is least deniable. And we supervise it anyway.
What this keeps bringing me back to is that most of us have never practised trusting the body with anything small, and therefore do not trust it with the largest things.
And as Silvija says, this includes the heart. "My heart knows how to grieve, how to hope, how to fall in love, how to fall out of love, how to begin again."
Not I will learn to grieve. Not I will work on loving again. My heart knows how.
Which is the same as trusting our body- and it is either wildly naïve or it is the most practical thing anyone has said to me this year (after a heartbreak myself). Some days I think one. Some days the other. Sometimes both before lunch.
Silvija concluded with this: "Trusting what I have been given in this life. And what I have been given is this body, this heart, this mind, this soul, this spirit."
I know this is also what I live. Trusting what I have. The body, the soul, the mind - in this life, with all its experiences and all it has taught me.
Tell me, what are you learning to trust about your body? about your heart? about your mind?
Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.
You can hear the whole conversation with Silvija here - it is called My body will know how to die. Silvija is also hosting a three day workshop in October 2026 in Zagreb, Croatia on moving with our emotions, check out the details here.
with joy and deep reverence,
Anna Teresa
Happening in the Yin Rhythms world
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🌶️ 1:1 Sensual Somatic Coaching - I'm reopening my one to one work again for a selected number women who've been desiring to dive into the power and intelligence of their body. Reawakening the lover within them that alchemises life by being her self rather than by creating a longer to-do list.
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