What are we, if not water?
7 October 2026One of the hardest things of the last years has been the feeling of being split, and never fully present for what I was doing. On the one side, deepening into my somatic work and my work with women. On the other, pulled in other directions, towards survival, towards making my ends meet.
When we feel that split, it's the split between our soul, our heart, our mind and the creative centre of our body, our cosmic womb.
That difference can be suffocating. That own dissonance between ourselves and our own inner self can be the prison. And so many of us live in that prison.
Not long ago I said it to my mother. This is what I do. I help women to fall in love with themselves again, to find the depths of themselves that have been lost, forgotten, deeply buried in the soil of the earth.
To say that with my full heart is freeing.
And it hurts, to know how much had to crack open inside of myself to be able to get there. How much unknown continues to be part of that unravelling.
And the reverence in coming home. Coming to the soil, coming to the depths, and knowing that I don't know.
Part of the yielding is to yield into the unconscious, which waits for things to emerge. It is full of life force. The water passes through the rocks that look like a boundary, yet she shapes around them, moving herself and shaping the rocks.
What is life, if not water? What are we, if not water?
In the practices, this is the rhythm I call Yielding. It begins on the floor, with the whole weight of the body given to it.
Feeling the expansion of the body, and yet the anchoring of the body as the floor supports.
Micro movements go deeply into the vessels of our body, moving whatever is there, unlocking energy, energy in motion. Letting the emotions that are within us move and process and alchemize.
Because that's how our body knows. Our body knows through movement, our body releases, our body processes, our body synchronizes into the environment around.
The split can be most devastating the older we get. In menopause, after menopause, when the question becomes what is ours to do, and where we belong, when we are no longer seen.
It can pull us into wanting the outer world to soothe it. Through consumption, through relationship, through new ideologies and methodologies.
The split can only be mended by weaving ourselves back. Weaving our memory back together to who we truly are.
Sometimes the weaving begins with the hands. The moment that we touch our womb, bring our attention there, things begin to move, both within our psyche as well as in our heart.
Our creative force, right at the centre of our body, is one of caring wisdom, whether we're bleeding or not bleeding, whether we have birthed children into this world or not. Our body is far more receptive, far more of a communicator than our mind.
May we remember.
Yielding is one of the seven rhythms in Rhythmic Movements. The library opens on Sunday 1 November, every practice filmed for you to come back to, again and again. Rhythmic Movements
Tell me, where do you feel the split in your life? And where, lately, have you felt whole?
Hit reply. I read every single one, and your experience is part of how I understand this more fully.
with warmth,
Anna Teresa