One of the things that really excites me about my work is the way it unlocks people’s real dreams. It’s like they can suddenly access the part of them that really wants to connect more with who they really are. Whether that is connecting more with animals, making that trip to the ancient site of their soul, do that course or.. dance that dance their soul knows.
For me it was flamenco. The dance means freedom for me, overcoming and becoming at once and when I first started, I felt nervous performing and wearing the outfits but this is something my soul knows and now when I do it there is pure ecstatic joy. Nothing less.
I had I suffered a life-changing accident in 2020 when my left foot was so damaged that it wasn’t certain it would survive. I was taken in an ambulance holding my left foot together with a tea towel of all things. When I loosened my grip my blood flooded the floor and I can’t describe the strangeness of the feeling that something that was really distant that used to be part of me and I was holding it in my hands. The surgery was done quickly without much discussion as it was an emergency situation and the pain at once absent as well as excruciating. I can’t quite describe it better than that.
I was given a clear message that the nerve damage was so bad that I wouldn’t be able to use it again. My life fell into a very difficult spiral as I was in the middle of studies and I adjusted to my new life alone in a disability apartment very separate from my old life and dreams.
It was the emotional aspect of healing that I struggled to really move on from. I didn’t know at the time but I was experiencing soul loss from the accident, when part of you that isn’t able to process what is happening shuts down and leaves the soul until it is brought back in a safe way.
I realised I had to be really ok with where I was at but I really wasn’t. I remember sitting in the shower, not wanting to look at my foot that was stapled onto my leg. I was sitting as I couldn’t’ stand and I don’t know how long the time was that passed but there was something about the water flowing over me that I really enjoyed, I was craving this kind of a flow. Movement where so much had been stuck and limited felt so comforting.
My new way of walking, lifting my hip to avoid falling over my foot repeatedly meant that my right shoulder was extremely tense and imbalanced. All of the adaptations I had to make in my movement meant that at the worst times I was unable to dress myself my pain was so bad. My whole body had taken a real hit but the real damage was that I felt so broken and lost inside. No one could really understand the emotional and soul aspect of what I was going through so I thought I was making it up. I became very pragmatic and got myself through my studies and that included a stay in Lille and Granada, I also had a voice in my head that was showing me exercises to do and my dreams became incredibly vivid and instructional.
It was through my dream world that the healing first started, I dreamed about nerves waking up from an accident not knowing where they were. I notice now that I remember witnessing the feelings experienced by the nerves (the physical aspect of the body) but not my own emotions around the accident.
I know that I went into the operating theatre unknowing and non consensual that day. I felt my ankle like a distant planet. There is so much I have learnt about the cells healing and from this realisation, I knew that my ankle wanted to be welcomed back to my body, not as my bad ankle but as a heroic voyager coming home. She wanted to be massaged and loved, circled and she wanted to dance.
I was in Granada and walked into a cave with some friends. I had no idea about flamenco but a woman was dancing flamenco. The emotion I felt and the emotion in her body expressed. I connected captivated. The emotions expressed are pure coherence inner and outer. The face, the blood, the soul all to be witnessed. That was my path. I squeezed my swollen foot into a leather shoe with nails on the heal and that was that.
I was dancer who couldn’t walk.
But the emotions were spoken and that was enough.
Ten years later I still dance, walk, run and my body has guided me each step.
When I enter into healing space with my clients it is their ’flamenco moments’ that I really hear. I know that beyond every aching hip, heart or lost soul, there is another life waiting to be lived. I call this the soul’s truth. When I dance flamenco, every part of me smiles. I feel alive and grateful for learning to walk again and dance. For me, it is never just about healing to overcome something, it is about stepping into the life that feels like a distant dream, Yet, when it is stepped into, we realise it was made especially for us and no one else could live it like we do.