Owning Every Step – A Journey Into Sovereignty

She caught my eye as the bus idled at the stoplight. It wasn’t her slightly outlandish clothes – one becomes anaesthetised to quirk in Edinburgh during August – it was the way each step she took seemed a weary yet inevitable risk that the ground wouldn’t rise up to meet her where she stood. Her pace was slow, her gait heavy and hesitant, the full sole of her foot connecting with the pavement simultaneously. No lightness, no bounce, no spring. Just the weighty awkward movement of a woman who appeared to no longer trust the earth beneath her feet.

As I sat and watched her making her slow way past the shop windows, the stationary traffic and the confused tourists huddled around their maps, I was reminded of last year, and my own loss of faith that the ground would support my step.

Over 3 months of pain, fear and aching bewilderment left me unsure of myself. Leaving my apartment after being more or less housebound became an effort. For the first time in my life, I withdrew. I pulled back, avoided social situations and felt acutely uncomfortable being visible in any way.

I felt raw, incredibly tender, and almost unbearably vulnerable. But I knew that while I needed to be exquisitely gentle with myself, I also could not stay in this place of withdrawal. I needed to move on. I needed to heal.

On reflection, I can now see that my selfie practice was born out of this. I needed to get to know myself again, and I needed to raise the veil I was hiding behind. I needed to show you my face, as much as I needed to show it to myself.

This was my first step.

The second step was taken earlier this year when I realised that the issues that I’d had with my hip and pelvis that had caused the pain in the previous summer had actually changed the way I walked. It had, quite literally altered the way I moved through the world.

I had developed a full-on womanly wiggle. My hips swayed noticeably from side to side in a way that they hadn’t before. And it made me excruciatingly self-conscious. My walk drew attention to my sexual expression of self, when all I wanted to do was hide and not be noticed at all.

So I tried to correct it. I suppressed the sway, watered down the wiggle… and found that I could barely put one foot in front of the other without tripping myself up!

I was over-thinking every step until something that I’d been doing since the age of 1 had become some kind of complex manoeuvre. Fluidity eluded me until I’d rendered myself all but frozen.

At this point I arranged a session with Lindsay. A Body Harmony practitioner, it was Lindsay the summer before who had helped me to kickstart my healing process. She got me back on my feet, so I knew that she was the one who’d help me find my rhythm.

We spoke for an hour over Skype focusing on my hips, my knees, my ankles, the soles of my feet, and together we made revelation upon revelation concerning balance, visibility, sexuality and the connections between my masculine and feminine selves. She helped me to listen to my body and she held a space for me to fully embody the changes that had occurred over the past 12 months.

I felt like a woman unleashed, when the only thing that had been holding her back was herself.

The importance of comfort in one’s own skin cannot be underestimated. The confidence to inhabit your body is reflected in a myriad of ways – your own personal sovereignty expressed in every single step.

And so I watched this lady making her plodding, stilted way, and sent a wish out into the vast all that is that all women would step out into the world with grace and strength and purpose and trust and joy and self-belief. Because it is for us to determine how we journey through our lives. Choose well.