The Lamp Within the Body Letter One: Listening to the Body

Dear friends,

There is a particular kind of stillness that arrives not because we choose it, but because the body insists.

And so it is that across the next nine Mondays, I will be dropping a letter here about living faithfully inside complex health.

For many years I have lived with symptoms I could not fully name.

Fatigue that did not match my schedule.

Inflammation that felt disproportionate.

Moments where my mind felt clouded, as if moving through early morning fog long after the sun had risen.

Recently, in a season of deeper quiet, I was given language for some of it:

My moderate sleep apnea and my REM atonia, my specialist gently suggested could well be key indicators to the disrupted sleep and neurological strain quietly influencing my immune and neurodegenerative disease responses for years. Not as a dramatic event. Not as a sudden collapse. But as a slow undercurrent.

Words like that at first felt clinical and heavy but somehow beneath them, something else stirred relief for me.

Because naming is not the same as surrendering.

Sometimes naming is the first act of stewardship.

And so in the sacred art of simply being, I sat with that.

Not in fear, but in recognition.

The body keeps its own journal.

It records what the mind overrides.

It whispers long before it cries out.

For a long time, I worked faithfully, mothered deeply, created steadily, often pushing through what I thought was simply tiredness. Women of my lineage did the same. Meek but not weak. Carrying on because that is what was required.

But listening is different from enduring.

Listening asks:

What if the body is not betraying me?

What if it has been protecting me?

What if these symptoms are not enemies, but signals?

In the quiet of my studio, surrounded by canvas and light, I realised something tender:

The very practices I developed to survive seasons of overwhelm ~ prayer, art making, journaling, structured rest were and are still not indulgences. They are intelligent responses.

My specialist was curious about this.

Even impressed.

That surprised me ~ so many specialists have laughed or written those practices off.

The creative life I have built is not separate from my health.

It may very well be supporting it.

This shifts the narrative.

I am not a woman drowning in diagnosis.

I am a woman learning to steward complexity.

To live proactively does not mean fighting my body.

It means partnering with it.

It means adjusting rhythms.

Honouring sleep.

Designing studio days that protect energy instead of depleting it.

Allowing rest to be wisdom rather than weakness.

It means understanding that slowing down is not giving up.

There is grief in realising how long something has been quietly shaping you.

But there is also dignity in choosing how you move forward once you know.

And so this is where I begin this series.

Not with despair.

Not with medical overwhelm.

But with listening.

Because listening is an act of hope.

When we listen, we assume there is something worth hearing.

When we listen, we believe the story is still unfolding.

When we listen, we light a lamp rather than curse the dark.

If you are living inside a body that feels complex, misunderstood, or unpredictable, perhaps the invitation is not to silence it, but to sit beside it.

To ask gently:

What are you trying to tell me?

How can we move forward together?

The Sacred Art of Simply Being has always been about presence.

Now it becomes presence within the body itself.

And that, too, is holy ground.

“May the lamp within us burn steady, even as we learn the language of our own bodies.”

If this letter has touched your heart or perhaps it does a close friend or loved one, please share it.

xox