I had a beautiful Christmas with my family. The kind that fills the house with laughter, shared meals, and familiar warmth. And yet, as the days quieted and the decorations began to come down, I felt that familiar inward pull that arrives every year at this threshold between what was and what is becoming.
Not resolutions, not reinvention, not even the pressure to become someone else overnight. It asks a quieter question. What within me is ready for healing now? What parts of me are quietly asking for attention, for gentleness, and honesty? What do I love so deeply that I want to tend it with intention in the year ahead?
So often, when something inside us cracks or breaks open, we rush to fix it. We want to sweep the pieces up quickly, make sense of them, and glue them back together before anyone notices the mess. But the body does not heal quickly, and neither does the nervous system. There is wisdom in letting the pieces fall. For us to sit with them on the floor for a while. Noticing their shape, their weight, their history. In allowing ourselves to feel what rises without immediately trying to change it.
Our trauma, grief, illness, and transitions all leave impressions in the body. They settle into fascia, breath, posture, tone, and rhythm. When we slow down enough to listen, the body begins to tell us what it has been carrying and what it is ready to release. Not through force, but through awareness. Not through fixing, but through creating a relationship with ourselves.
One of the most important lessons I have learned, both personally and in my work, is this. Healing is not about the person, the event, or the story we replay again and again. It is about our relationship with ourselves. The meaning we give to what happened. The way we speak to our bodies when they are tired, braced, or afraid. The compassion we allow ourselves when we realize we are not who we were before, and that this is part of our becoming.
In the healing arts, we often witness this moment. A client arrives feeling fragmented, disconnected, and unsure of how they ended up here. And our role is not to rush them forward. It is to sit with them as they remember themselves. To offer presence rather than answers. To create a space where the nervous system feels safe enough to release and the body can begin reorganizing itself from the inside out.
In many of my posts, you will see me use a fire metaphor. 
Fire has a way of clarifying. It burns away what does not belong. Pain does this, too, though we rarely recognize it in the moment. What remains afterward is not weakness, but truth. A body that has learned something. A nervous system that has adapted to survive. Or a heart that has cracked open just enough to let more light in. The body remembers this light, even when the mind forgets.
Fire has a way of clarifying. It burns away what does not belong. Pain does this, too, though we rarely recognize it in the moment. What remains afterward is not weakness, but truth. A body that has learned something. A nervous system that has adapted to survive. Or a heart that has cracked open just enough to let more light in. The body remembers this light, even when the mind forgets.As the new year approaches, I invite both clients and practitioners to move gently with themselves. To resist the urge to rush into transformation and instead ask what WANTS to be tended. What patterns are ready to shift? What parts of you are asking not to be fixed, but to be heard? Remember, you are not broken. You are not behind. You are not too late for your own healing.
You are already in the process of becoming whole, shaped not by what you lost, but by the meaning you give to what you have lived. The body knows how to remake itself when given safety, time, and compassion. The nervous system knows how to settle when it is no longer being pushed. And you are allowed to choose, again and again, who you are becoming from this place forward.
You are not broken where you cracked open this year. Those fissures are not failures, they are invitations. Light moves through the places that learned how to hold, how to endure, how to survive the dark and growth does not come from force, but from permission. From choosing to tend what has been waiting beneath the surface. And from this moment forward, you get to decide what takes root, what reaches for the light, and what no longer needs to be carried.
All My Love, Dear Friends.
Katie Bell - The Body Artisan
