Vanessa Peare

I started off as a small girl. As I grew I kept myself small.

I avoided doing anything that might end in isolation. I imagine, in the beginning, I must have known that I wanted to speak, but didn’t, that I wanted to shout, but didn’t. That want blended into normal. I climbed into my box and stayed there. It would have been fine if it hadn’t come at the cost of stepping over my own boundaries again and again with the objecting, resistant feelings and the angry and sad emotions shoved down and left stewing with the lid tightly on. So tightly, I lost touch with them.

As an adult, I didn’t know how to recognise those feelings of resistance, objection, frustration and anger. So afraid of what was stewing in the depths of myself, I would minimise the feelings, minimise myself so that nothing could disturb what was down below and I could keep the lid safely on. The risk was too great. 

I thought I was keeping myself safe but, in fact, I was keeping myself small.

I can’t pinpoint when it changed, but I know when the world saw it. I had lifted my head from the cloud of early motherhood when my youngest was 3. I started yoga, which led to a teacher training with David Curtis and introduced me to Somatic movement. Somatic movement was a slow and delicious modality that gave me the time and space to feel into myself. It started with muscles and joints and finding space where there had been none (in more ways than just muscular). The exploration became more detailed, feeling into the connections between one part of me and the next, almost down to a cellular level and all the way out to something more wholesome, more full. Feeling the entirety of myself, in a way I never knew before. We were instructed to go this slow so we could sense deeply. When I slowed down, time slowed down with me. Everything went quiet and it was just me, sensing into my body. It was like finding pieces of a puzzle that I had brushed, jumbled up under the couch. I remember the day after my first weekend workshop, standing in my garden, feeling the wind blowing over and moving the hairs on my arms. I felt so alive, so clear in myself and so connected. I wondered, if I could feel this pleasure from just standing in the garden imagine where this could bring me.

A year and a half later, Brian Ingle, who was the Irish Somatic Movement trainer, was back in the country. I booked in for another weekend and 4 weeks later, I was in Russia in the first module of the training. Not because I wanted to teach, but because I wanted to roll around on the floor for 10 days in pure bliss. When I told my parents my dad said, ‘and she didn’t even ask me.’ That was the first time he recognised that I hadn’t looked for his opinion or approval. I was thirty seven. I realised at that moment I had been deferring to other people to help me make my decisions, forever. It felt fantastic to be so clear, to know what I wanted, and to be free of thinking that someone else knew better. I was so sure that this training was for me. I trusted in myself and what my body was telling me. 

This was the beginning of understanding the intelligence that I have living inside me, deep wisdom, accessible at all times. I spent more and more time in my body, not just in a formal practice but also throughout my day, learning myself, my signs, my needs and how easy they were to satisfy once I knew what they were. I was building a relationship with myself and it felt good.

I completed the 2 year training, assisted on the next two and was teaching yoga and somatic movement classes all through that time. I divorced, bought a house, established a new life and had these two practices for support, for which I am so grateful. These practices were giving me space and a more embodied way of living daily life. As a result I spent less time in my head. But these practices weren’t addressing my emotional patterns or the way I saw life and my role in it. I couldn’t see the story that I was playing out so often. I was definitely empowered in a way I hadn’t been, but the habit of playing small, undermining myself, giving too much of myself away was so well practiced that it was still active and I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t until I met the dance that these things became more clear.

I joined a dance co-op. I loved it and the community it introduced me to. A couple of months later I received an email as I was walking through my front door. It was from a mailing list I had unknowingly signed up for. Having never paid any attention to the previous emails, somehow I knew that this was a life changer. I sat right down on the stairs and read it. Two days later I was booked into a 10 day Movement Medicine workshop in Budapest. I did not defer to anyone!!

It was called Initiation and like all good initiations, it was challenging, unknown and full of treasures. I found more pieces of my puzzle. 

The teachers, David Mooney and Yasia Leiserach, asked us to explore the icky sticky feelings of life. For me, amongst those were the joy, pleasure, and pure glory of being alive. We danced with these feelings, the easy and the not so easy, felt them, let them take up space, gave them life and let them move through us. No suppression, no drama, just recognition, honour, allowing, and letting go. These 10 days led to a year long Apprenticeship program during which I found one of, and possibly the most, limiting stories that I have been living through my life ……

If I am not ALWAYS happy, helpful, and compliant, I will be thrown out at the side of the road and I will not survive.

The piece that gives me the shivers most is being ‘compliant’ but the others have been equally damaging. I have played it small again and again. I have turned up in ways that have cost me and the relationships that I was trying to serve. Seeing this pattern was painful, the subtle magnitude of it.  Stepping out of it was glorious. I continue to fall back into it and step out of it again.

Every time I say yes for myself, it is fantastic. Even when it is small I take note and celebrate.  While I will always be discovering and rediscovering the blind spots that I have, in my life now I get to feel it rather than think it. I get to move it rather than solve it.  I get to love it rather than fear it. In the dance I let the music wash over me, let the rhythm take me, let myself be guided so that I can let go of the working, the trying, feel myself and dance. 

My Supports

In the midst of all this I continue to support myself with Organic Intelligence (and studied it to coach with it) and I have consistently had Ashleigh Tobin as my own coach and natural health practioner. She has too many qualifications for me to name but her authenticity and ability to see me, often when I can not see myself has been a bed rock and a huge part of my growth. I also love my Tuesday morning online class with Maire NiG of Feminine Sexual Alchemy, another body based, connecting to the elements, practice. And of course the most empowering of all this is how I integrate it all into my day, my lived experience.