Rewind
Late July 1980. I'm trying to fall asleep on a mattress on the floor in the crawl space of my grandparents’ attic apartment in New Jersey. It’s hot and humid, and sleep feels impossible.
In the kitchen just off our makeshift sleeping arrangement, the grown-ups are talking End Times. The Rapture, I hear my uncle say, could happen any day. Bar codes are being added to grocery packaging even as we speak, and those odd new lines could even be a kind of mark of the Beast.
I wipe away a bead of sweat before it stings my eyes again and wonder if the cereal boxes are now secretly satanic. I’ve been looking forward to American cold cereal ever since our last furlough four years ago.
But scarier than evil-tainted Lucky Charms is a constant and deeper fear: what if I’m not really and truly “saved”? And what if Jesus comes back and I get left behind? I know, from my parents, you only need to be saved once, but I always worry I haven’t done it right. So I’ve become saved too many times to count since that first time when I was four.
Eventually, I remember something that, for the moment, helps everything: Grandma’s cinnamon buns. She taught me how to make them a few years ago when my grandparents came out of missionary retirement and lived down the street from us in Temuco. And earlier this evening, she pulled me aside at the kitchen counter to lift the terry cloth towel off the big Pyrex pan where the gooey, poofy, cinnamon-y rolls were rising.
The air in the crawl space is still not cool. But the fans’ hum is lulling me, and the comfort of Grandma’s cinnamon buns finally helps me sleep.
I didn’t have words for it then, but at twelve years old my body was holding so much fear while I lay in bed trying to be okay with terror curled in my gut.
Fast forward
This past year, I’ve been coming out more visibly as someone who grew up in a fear-based system—a religion where obedience equaled love, and the body didn’t get a vote.
Leaving that world wasn’t a tidy deconstruction. It wasn’t a rational debate between my intellect and my theology. It was a breakdown.
Yes, it took a breakdown. In my late teens and then again in my early twenties, I was hospitalized. My nervous system unraveled—panic, eating disorder, suicidal spirals—long before I had the language to name the system that had shaped me.
By my late twenties, the choice was:
Keep “belonging” in the high-control, fear-based world…
OR
Turn toward the only compass I really had: my body
Bringing it home
Someone once told me: You can’t hate something you don’t also care deeply about.
At first I thought, no way. But it stuck. And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
I was used to hating on my body. Punishing it. Starving it. Stuffing it. Silencing it.
It wasn’t because I didn’t care. It’s just that I’d been taught that care equaled control. And that my very own body could be the thing that got me in trouble and took me to hell.
No wonder I tried to manage every bite, every pound, every urge—calling them sin, feeling ashamed.
I thought of my body as a thing I had to master. (And I don't use that word lightly.)
Today? My body is an ally. Not perfect. Not always comfortable. But astonishingly loyal. And always trying to help.
When I first started turning toward my body with curiosity, I could only name how much pain I was in.
These days, I can notice signals way before they become breakdowns: the tightness in my throat, that heaviness on my heart, a wave of fatigue, this yawn…
Pain, panic, and anxiety are lousy roommates—but they’re excellent messengers.
That sinking in my belly tells me when I’m about to abandon myself by saying yes instead of a more truthful no.
That heaviness on my heart is letting me know how much I love someone from whom I’m estranged.
Dear Reader, what would it be like to go through today being more friendly and curious—and a little less judgy—toward your dear body?
Hit reply and tell me if any of this lands. I love hearing from you!
xo,
Heidi
PS: My clients in the Jumpstart nervous system program get so good at listening to their bodies—and we get to watch their lives change from the inside out.
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