To Wrestle the Wind

For the past five weeks, I’ve shared this story as an anchor for our moving meditation in Somatic Sessions and every time I share it, I feel it land in the room in a way that brings relief. Because I want the same relief for you regardless of your attendance at class, I decided to bring it here, too. As you read, know I am sending you a sincere wish for your own freedom from the impossible tasks you’ve undertaken - take tender care, sarah

In the late spring of 2024, my youngest son endured a trauma most people can’t begin to imagine. In some contexts, I do share the details of that experience, but over time, I’ve realized that it’s his story to tell when he’s ready, so I won’t do that here. What I will do, instead, is tell you about the intersection of his life and mine, the place where his pain crashed into my perpetual sense of responsibility and sent me careening down a path that neither of us believed we’d be walking, a path that has since opened a world of possibilities for us both.

But before we talk about that intersection, we need a little scene-setting. What good is a story if you don’t know the details that surround it?

So, the scene: first there was The Trauma, and then after The Trauma happened, my boy “crashed out,” as the kids say. The details of that crash out aren’t really relevant, but for the sake of the story, I’ll say it like this:

My son survived, but he was not there anymore. He’d been obliterated. Splintered into a million little pieces. And when I looked in his eyes, I didn’t recognize what I saw. In the immediate weeks after the trauma, he’d come home from time to time, but only to sleep after days of being awake. No matter the time, I’d open the door and show him to his bed. I’d sit with him and listen to his shattered heart try to make sense of his pain. I’d watch him make faces I’d never seen before which is a devastating thing to experience when you’ve studied a face every day for 18 years, when you know that face better than you know your own.

So there we were - me and my boy - deep in the trenches of something neither of us knew how to navigate - and in spite of my decades of therapy and powerful capacity for healing, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

Wait, that’s not accurate. It was more than that. It’s not just that I couldn’t catch my breath.

It’s that I couldn’t breathe.

The constant terror with which I lived had seeped into the delicate tissue of my lungs and once there, had turned to stone, freezing me in place and only allowing enough oxygen for the most basic sort of survival: sleep (a little), shower (when required), eat (enough to survive), pay the bills (to keep the lights on), pretend to work (to pay the bills), and then wait to see if he would survive. Every day, every hour, every minute consumed by a sensation I had never known in my 45 years of life.

What was that sensation? I’m still not sure how to articulate it.

The desperation of the drowning is the only phrase that comes to mind - a flailing kind of resistance to what I believed to be inevitable coupled with a deep belief that if I could just swim out to get him…..

During those days, I often recalled the time my former husband told me a story about the danger of rescuing the drowning, about the way a person is likely to drag a rescuer underwater in an attempt to save themselves. The ex-husband shared the story in an effort to rewrite the narrative about his abandonment as something sacrificial, but as I watched my boy gasp and flail in those rough waters, I let the story run through me differently, realizing that whether or not a rescuer has any regard for their own life depends on who is drowning.

Take me, I’d plead every day. Not him. Let him live.

Much to my disappointment, that particular prayer was never answered. Today, I’m grateful for the silence.

We went on this way for many months. There were moments when he’d start to swim back to shore and moments where I’d find my feet on dry land, but in general, we stayed locked in. Him, flailing; me, swimming to his side even if it meant he held me underwater; both of us, tethered to each other, committed to our collective end, whatever that end might be.

But then one day, I decided I didn’t want to die. Just like that. I decided that I needed to learn how to breathe again even if my boy never took another breath, and so that’s what I did. I swam back to shore.

There were so many things that contributed to this clarity. In the week after The Trauma, my oldest child told me she was pregnant and invited me to walk alongside her as she brought this new life into the world. Maybe it was the day I saw that baby on that screen that saved me. Maybe it was the sound of his beating heart. Maybe it was the studio and the fact that every Saturday, there were people waiting to practice with me, to move the collective sensations of being human through our bodies. Maybe it was all of this and a chorus of unseen forces conspiring for my good, for the good of my boy. I’ll never know exactly and I don’t need to know. All that matters to me today is this:

I swam back to shore and got the help I needed to stay anchored in place so that my boy would have someone on solid ground should he ever decide that he, too, didn’t want to die. And that’s where I stayed - where I still stay - to this very day.

But getting there took some doing, as they say. I needed more help than I’d ever needed in my life because the strain of my circumstances exceeded any situation I’d ever encountered. To that end, I found myself back in the mountains in Boulder, Colorado, working with the woman who had helped me find my way the year before, knowing that the only way I’d survive was to tend to the terror in my lungs, a task I needed guidance to complete.

Her name is Katie and she’s been at this somatic work for decades, long before it was Instagram-able. She is a wise guide and a trusted source of safety for me, so once I got to her, my body knew what to do, as bodies typically do when they have enough safety. We spent the morning just letting me unwind. I wept. I wailed. I felt what had been bottled up since the night my son called me screaming, and then, as the waves of emotion started to subside, as emotions typically do when they’re allowed to move through, we started to work with the parts of me that were still locked up. In this case, those parts were all wrapped around my relentless sense of responsibility for things far outside of my control.

Things like the health and happiness of everyone I’ve ever loved. The safety of my grown children. The depth of meaning every person derives from their experience in the studio. Whether or not my son would survive.

You know… the little things.

Now, I’ve talked about these things in therapy for as long as I can remember, but when we work with these patterns somatically, it isn’t about an intellectual understanding or an ability to articulate the problem. It’s about working your way toward a felt sense of freedom from the pattern, and on that task, I was stuck. Of course I know I can’t be held responsible for the health and happiness of everyone I’ve ever loved, but tell that to my body. Tell that to my racing mind that wakes me up in the middle of the night and ruminates over every choice I’ve ever made. Tell that to the terror.

And so realizing we were stuck, Katie wisely asked me to stand up and walk the land with her, inviting some literal movement to the places that wouldn’t budge. I complied, ready to stretch my legs and come at this from another angle, until she added a little assignment for me to complete on our walk:

“I want you to look around on the land while we walk and find something that feels like your family.”

To which I responded, “Huh?!?”

She tried again, adding that we were looking for something that feels like the experience of relentless responsibility for things outside of my control, but still, I was stumped. What could I possibly find on these tree-studded hills that would be capable of making me feel that way? If anything, this stretch of land was one of the few places that felt like freedom and with my real life some 800 miles away, I couldn’t imagine finding anything that could feel as suffocating as all of that.

“Like a family of rabbits?” I replied. “Am I looking for bunnies? Squirrels? I need more direction.”

“Maybe,” she answered. “Let’s just go see.”

Now, I’m a straight-A-student kind of girlie and I hate not excelling at any assignment - especially therapeutic ones - but I humored her nonetheless and went on her silly nature walk, completely convinced that I would come back empty handed. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

It took less than two minutes for us to turn a corner and run smack into a 70-foot tree that had fallen, its roots lifted from the ground in which they had once thrived. My body stopped walking. My chest got heavy. My breath caught in my throat.

“Here,” I said. “It feels like this,” pointing to the tangled web of roots in front of me.

The root system of this tree was enormous, stretching wide past my wingspan and at least a full foot taller than my frame. It was the size of it that moved me most. I felt small standing there. Small and somehow overwhelmingly responsible.

We started to work with those sensations, Katie guiding me gently to just notice what I felt, and eventually, I landed on this image:

A very small, very young Sarah in a dirty calico dress and a tangled mess of blond curls falling over her shoulders, trying valiantly to hold the trunk of this tree up with her tiny hands. Even now, all this time later, the tenderness I feel toward that little girl brings tears. Can you imagine the kind of courage it took to run under that tree as it fell? I can. She and I both know it well. I’ll bet you probably do, too.

So, I offered this image to Katie and she asked me what I noticed, to which I replied:

“There is NO WAY that little girl could have ever held up that tree. That was never her job. It was always an impossible task.”

And that felt good to say. Like truth. Like the kind of truth I could apply to all sorts of things, including the impossible task of saving my son. But then Katie added something that shifted the ground underneath me and has been shifting me ever since:

She said, “Yes, there’s that. And also,” she added, “it was never her job to stop the wind.”

It was never her job to stop the wind.

Shut. Up.

And I swear to you, the wind picked up all around us; or maybe I just noticed the sensation of it on my skin; either way, what followed was a rush of relief unlike anything I’d known before. I felt it physically, but knew it everywhere.

Because that was it all along. It wasn’t just that I’d spent my life trying to catch the trees from falling or cleaning up the debris in the wake of their collapse. Sure, I’d done those things, too. But the real weight, the real sense of relentless responsibility that shakes me awake in the middle of the night is the belief that I am also to blame for the wind, and if I don’t do something to stop it, then everything that follows is also my fault.

Talk about an impossible task. One for which I am daily becoming less responsible.

Eventually, I made my way off that mountain and back to my life. I wish I could tell you that I came back cured, but lifelong patterns are rarely undone in a day. What I will tell you is this:

Every time the wind kicks up around me and I’m well enough to notice it, I turn my palms up in a posture of surrender, a little reminder that I get to right-size my sense of responsibility if I choose to. On some days, I do, and on others, I don’t, but on every day, I carry with me a body that remembers a moment on a mountain when a little girl gave up wrestling with the wind; and so on every day, I carry with me a bit of hope that the freedom for which we long is available for us both.

So I hope. So may it be.