She Felt How Tired She Was

I want to tell you about an incredible room I was in this week.

Twenty-five women. Different ages, different countries, different industries. Women who lead hundred-million-dollar investments. Women who own fashion brands. Women who have spent careers working on gender and inclusion across the African continent. Women who have fought their way into rooms and been uninvited back out of them.

The dinner was convened at the margins of the biggest business conference in Africa. Not coincidental — intentional. A gathering of women who know what it means to be at the sidelines of something, even when you're too capable to be anywhere but the center.

Before the agenda began, I led a short centering. Three breaths. Body weight on the chair. The cycle of breath going in and out. The presence of themselves.

It took less than five minutes.

Afterward, one woman came to me. She said: When you guided those three breaths, I felt myself relax and I realized how tired I was.

She didn't say it with distress. She said it with something closer to recognition.

I keep thinking about her. About what it means that it took three breaths - in a room, surrounded by other women's presence for her to feel something her body had been carrying for months. Perhaps years.

This is not a story about that woman being unusual. This is a story about how ordinary her experience is.

I want to say something that might be uncomfortable.

We speak a great deal about women being exhausted. And we are! Genuinely, structurally, historically exhausted. But I think there is something underneath the exhaustion that we are not quite naming.

Contraction.

Not tiredness, exactly. The body in a state of sustained protection — shoulders forward, jaw set, breath short and high. A readiness that never gets to resolve. Not because women are doing something wrong, but because the environments we navigate require it. You walk into certain rooms already prepared to prove. Already calculating how much space to take. Already managing how your presence lands.

Over time, that preparation becomes the posture. You stop noticing you're doing it.

And here is what I find devastating: the contraction that protects us is the same contraction that closes us off. From receiving. From guidance. From the intelligence that lives inside us, below the shield, below the strategy. We become very skilled. And very closed.

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After the centering, one of the conveners continued the evening. Without deciding to, I don't think she decided to, her voice slowed. Deepened. The pace changed. The field in the room felt different. More spacious. More direct.

Three breaths. That's what it took.

The woman who felt her tiredness for the first time didn't stay in it long. The dinner continued. People arrived. The agenda moved. She went home, I imagine and was at the main conference at 7am the next morning.

But she knows something now that she had been carrying without knowing it. That is, in fact, where everything begins.

What I find myself turning over is this: what do we lose — collectively — when women are walking around in this state? Not just individually diminished, but collectively impoverished. When the intelligence available in our bodies is inaccessible because the body is in protection mode.

What becomes possible when it isn't?

I don't have a complete answer. But I am beginning to think it is more than we have imagined.

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Another pondering question and I am curious where it lands for you? That's where I am with it. Where are you? Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.

with bliss and intention,

Anna Teresa