I have been having pain in my left hand.
It has been so bad that I have not been able to grab anything. A cup. A doorknob. My own hair, some mornings. And to make it worse, it is my left hand — my dominant hand. The one I actually need.
I went looking for the obvious reasons first. B12. Vitamin D3. The kind of deficiencies that explain so much and are so easy to check. Both came back low, and I started correcting them. But something in me knew the pain was not only that. It rarely is.
So I went further in.
Unravelling What Was Underneath
What I found, slowly, was that my system gets deeply affected whenever anything is not smooth between my sister and me. Not just affected — affected more than I expected. Anything that touches her seems to touch me harder than it touches her
I sat with that for a while. And then it took me somewhere I did not expect. Into a past life, where I had not taken responsibility as the younger sister. Where I had abandoned her.
It felt real in the way these things sometimes do — not like a story I was inventing, but like a memory surfacing from somewhere I do not usually have access to. And what I understood was that in this life, I have been holding on too tight. As if gripping hard enough now could undo whatever I had failed to hold onto then.
The Conversation That Changed What I Was Looking At
Around the same time, I had a conversation with a friend about rest. I wrote about it in my last piece —natures-wisdom-on-rest how she told me, plainly, that it might be time for me to rest before I begin the next chapter of my life.
I did not fully take it in when she said it.
But sitting with the pain in my hand. I realised the hand was not just injured. It was helping me.
I have been doing too much. Taking on too much. Holding too tight, not only to my sister across lifetimes, but to everything — the teaching, the building, the writing, the constant giving. My hand simply stopped being able to grab anything else.
It was not really pain,. It was release. My own body, loosening a grip I had refused to loosen on my own.
What the Body Knows Before We Do
I find this both humbling and a little funny, in the way truth sometimes is. I can talk about surrender in a workshop. I can teach releasing to a room full of students. And still, it took my own hand refusing to close around anything for me to actually feel what I had been asking everyone else to understand.
The body does not wait for us to be ready to listen. It simply stops doing the thing we are no longer meant to keep doing,
My hand is still healing. I do not know yet whether the past life piece is something I will ever fully understand, or simply something that gave the pain a shape I could work with. What I do know is this — I was holding too tight, in this life and maybe in others, and something in me finally said no more.
I am trying to let my hand teach me what my mind has been slower to learn. Some things are not meant to be gripped. They are only meant to be held gently, or let go of entirely.