There is something strangely easy about forgetting that life is finite.
We know it, of course. Intellectually, we understand that one day our time here will end. And yet most of us live as though there will always be another day to do the things we long to do, to say the things we have been holding back, to become the person we feel ourselves becoming somewhere underneath everything we have learned to be.
We postpone our lives. We wait until the timing is right, until we have enough money, until the children are older, until the relationship changes, until the body changes, until we feel more confident, until we have healed enough, until somebody gives us permission. And then, without necessarily noticing it, years pass.
I have spent more than twenty-five years working with the body, and one of the things I have learned is that the body often knows long before the mind is willing to admit something. It knows when we are living against ourselves. It knows when we are holding back. It knows when we have said yes while everything inside us was saying no. It knows when we are staying somewhere because we are afraid to leave, and when we are moving forward because something deeper is calling us.
The body is not simply the physical structure that carries us through our days. It is the place where we experience our existence. Where are soul resides in. The sacred Body Temple. The Altar. The other Day I have heard a sentence in a Documentary called “Suviving Death”: If you a Christ you believe in the Soul. I can highly recommend it.
Every relationship, every decision, every fear, every desire, every moment of joy happens through this body. Our breath changes when we are afraid. Our chest opens when we feel safe. Our stomach contracts when something doesn’t feel right. Our energy shifts when we encounter someone or something that resonates with us. We often call these sensations intuition, instinct or knowing. I call it one of the many ways in which consciousness speaks.
And perhaps this is why coming back into the body is such an important part of healing. Because healing is not only about understanding why we are the way we are. We can understand ourselves endlessly and still remain disconnected from our actual lives.
At some point, insight has to become embodied. We have to move from knowing to experiencing. From analysing to feeling. From searching outside ourselves to becoming intimate with what is already happening within. This is at the heart of my work with UMA Healing.
I am not particularly interested in creating another version of you that is more polished, more spiritual, more successful or more perfect. I am interested in the human being underneath all of that. The one who existed before s/he learned how s/he was supposed to be. The one who can still feel what is true, even when the world around her/him is loud.
For me, healing is not about becoming someone else. Remembering the parts of yourself that became quiet because they were inconvenient. Remembering desires that were put aside. Remembering the intelligence of the body. Remembering your capacity to feel. Remembering that you are not only the roles you have taken on, the expectations placed upon you or the stories you have inherited.
There is something profoundly liberating about remembering that we have a finite amount of time. Not because this should make us crazy about achieving more, but because it can bring us into a completely different relationship with what is already here.
If you knew that you had only a limited amount of time left, would you still spend your mornings worrying about what other people think of you? Would you have the same problems? Would you continue to live inside a relationship that has been asking you to abandon yourself? Would you continue postponing the work that makes your soul feel alive? Would you keep saying that you will rest when everything is finished, knowing that everything will never actually be finished? Would you continue making yourself smaller so that other people can remain comfortable?
Or would something inside you begin to rearrange?
Perhaps you would realise that some of the things you have been treating as urgent are not important at all. Maybe you would call the person you love. Perhaps you would finally create the thing that has been living inside you for years. Maybe you would travel somewhere you have always wanted to see. Perhaps you would leave.
Maybe you would stay, but with a different level of presence. Perhaps you would simply stop rushing through the ordinary moments of your life.
Because this is the paradox: we often imagine that living fully requires extraordinary experiences. We think we need to travel further, achieve more, transform ourselves, build something bigger. But perhaps living fully is much simpler.
It might be being completely present while your child tells you a story. (How often I say wait or later as a mother, I feel sorry….)
It might be feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin instead of thinking about the next thing you have to do. It might be allowing yourself to dance without caring how you look or let the dishes uncleaned for a while. It might be sitting quietly and actually noticing your breath. It might be saying what you mean. It might be allowing yourself to feel grief instead of immediately trying to transcend it. It might be laughing until your stomach hurts. It might be falling in love again with your own life.
Spirituality, for me, has never been about escaping the human experience. It is about becoming more deeply present within it.
The mystical does not exist somewhere far away from the body, from relationships, from sexuality, from grief, from pleasure, from uncertainty or from the very ordinary complexity of being human. It exists within our capacity to meet these experiences consciously in your daily life. This is also why I believe that spiritual work needs embodiment.
We can read about consciousness. We can learn about energy. We can explore the Akashic Field, ancient traditions, mysticism and the unseen dimensions of existence. We can gather an enormous amount of knowledge. But eventually we have to come back here.
To this breath. To this body. To this moment. Because this is where your life is actually happening.
The question is therefore not only what your soul wants to learn, what your purpose is or what your next evolution might be.The question is also: Are you actually here for your own life? Are you present enough to experience it? Are you listening closely enough to know when something is no longer true? Are you brave enough to change when you know it isn’t?
Are you allowing yourself to receive the beauty that is already here, rather than constantly moving toward the next thing? Are you stopping to smell on the flowers?
There is no perfect moment when you finally become ready to live. There is only this one. This moment. The Now.
And perhaps that is the invitation hidden inside the uncomfortable truth that we are not getting out of here alive. Not to become more productive. Not to squeeze more experiences into our lives. Not to create another list of things we need to accomplish before we die. But to become more intimate with the life that is already ours.
To stop treating our existence as a rehearsal. To stop waiting for permission. To stop postponing ourselves. To listen. To feel. To choose. To love. To create. To rest. To move.
To be here. FULLY.
Because one day, this body will no longer breathe.
And when that day comes, perhaps the question will not be how much we achieved, how much money we made, how beautiful we looked or how many people approved of us.
Perhaps the real question will be much simpler:
Did you actually live the life that was yours?
We don’t get to know how much time we have. But we do get to choose what we do with the time that is here. And perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of healing:
Not becoming someone new, but finally becoming fully present for the person you already are.
The death of someone we love has a way of bringing us back to what truly matters. It reminds us that time together is not endless, and that perhaps we should give more of ourselves to the people we love while we still can. I often think about this in my own life, especially when it comes to my son. He has three months of school holidays, and there is a part of me that feels sad knowing that I cannot simply put my work aside and spend all of that time with him. I am very aware that these long summers together are something I will not have forever. At the same time, as a single mother and the sole provider, I cannot always choose time over work. There are bills to pay, a business to run and a future to create. I hold that tension with me.
Perhaps this is also why I have become more conscious of how we spend the small moments we do have together. Leave the conversation in a good place. Don’t go to sleep in anger. Say what needs to be said. Apologise when you need to. Tell the people you love that you love them. We simply do not know whether there will be another opportunity to sit across from each other, to have that conversation, to reach out, or to say goodbye. Life does not give us that certainty. And perhaps remembering this is not meant to make us fearful, but to make us more present. To choose love a little more often. To put down the phone. To listen. To be there. Because in the end, it is often not the amount of time we had that stays with us, but how deeply we were there for one another when we had it.
Love,
Uma
Join the inside. Move the insight.
Sessions are available in person in Mallorca and online worldwide. To learn more or book a session, visit my Offerings, Retreat & Training sites.
