iMy mind healed. My emotions healed. My spirit is unshakable. And yet the body is still presenting the bill. This is what no one tells you about healing
I have been doing the inner work for years. The therapy, the Reiki, the hypnotherapy, the shamanic healing, the yoga. I have gone into the darkest corners of myself, and I have come back. My mind is clear. My emotions are steady. My spiritual ground does not move.
And yet — my body keeps breaking down. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why. And then I started to trace it back. All the way back to before I was even born.
THE BODY THAT ARRIVED ALREADY CARRYING SOMETHING
When I was undergoing hypnotherapy studies and sessions, I found a memory I didn’t know I had. I was in the womb. I could feel my parents’ stress — their conversations about money, the weight of their worry. I was born feeling like a burden. Feeling responsible for their monetary issues.
The body absorbed that before it had even taken its first breath. Before I had a name. Before I had a choice.
THE BODY THAT KNEW FREEDOM — AND THEN LOST IT
The first six and a half years of my life were nothing short of being a princess. Running in the open, exploring nature, and being amongst trees. I had a little make-believe kitchen under one of the trees in our house. My body was loose and free and fully in the world. I didn’t know then that this was what safety felt like. I only knew it after it was gone.
At six and a half, we shifted cities — without any heads up. We left behind the beloved house, the city, the trees, and the open. We shifted to somewhere smaller. A conservative city, and staying in a small room. And within seven or eight months, my father was gone.
“The body that had known only openness was now bracing. And it never fully stopped.”
I became the rebel. I made all kinds of decisions that took me further into darkness. I didn’t know I was just a child whose ground had disappeared overnight. The body held the grief, the shock, the anger — all of it — while I got on with surviving and managing.
THE BODY THAT LEARNED TO SURVIVE, NOT LIVE
At twenty-five, I moved to Mumbai. A different kind of life. I felt that all the eyes were lifted from me, but the demons were still chasing. I learnt to survive in the film industry, with a few incidents here and there. Never felt at home in that industry. The body kept going and Kept managing.
I met my husband on sets. He was a simple guy, and I was the most complicated one. We found our way to each other — through breakups, through difficulty — and got married two years after we met. And for the first time in a long time, the body felt some ease.
THE BODY THAT CRACKED OPEN
When I got pregnant, light entered my heart. That is the only way I can describe it. My son arrived, and something in me cracked open in the most beautiful way. But also in the most confronting way.
Because when that kind of pure love arrives, you cannot keep anything in the dark anymore. All my demons started to rise. I realised I had to address them so I could be present for my son. I could not pass this on. I would not.
“I grew up with my son. He became my teacher. Reiki, hypnotherapy, graphology, yoga, art therapy, angels — they kept the light coming my way.”
It was the toughest process. And the most rewarding. I started to become more present, clearer. I was finally being more present in my own life.
THE BODY THAT SENT THE FINAL WARNING.
Then came the cancer scare. Everything sorted itself out in the end. But ever since, the body started to break down time and again. The fibroid in the womb just wouldn’t go. My practice was stable. I had started to teach. My mind, my emotions, my spirituality, all of it was solid.
But the body couldn’t keep up.
And I know why. I know it is the result of not having rhythm in my life until very late. Of decades of absorbing — the prenatal fear, the sudden losses, the years of surviving in places that were just too much for me to take in. The body kept going, just being a companion, faithfully, the whole time. While I was busy healing everything else.
This is what no one tells you about healing. You can do all the work. You can clear the mind, steady the emotions, and build an unshakable spiritual foundation. And the body will still hold what it held. It will wait. Patiently, stubbornly, until you finally turn towards it. But it will also start to fall apart because everything has closed in on it. And it finally gives up.
So it needs care. The rhythm. The gentleness.
Not someday. Now.
The kind of repair and maintenance that I have given everything else in my life — except this.
I am not saying this from fear. I am saying it from the same clarity that has been hard-won across five lifetimes.
The body has carried me this far. Now it is my turn to carry it.
— Swati