a reflection
It’s easy to show transformation photos and I confess I get a real kick from seeing that almost 12000 people have read the note I posted here and my subscriber count has more than doubled over the last month.
But, today, I want to take you back to the day that everything changed for me, the day the total transformation of my life began, without me even knowing it or choosing it.
I am lying in bed. I have been in bed for 22 hours out of every 24 for 6 months. The teaching career I loved so much is gone. I am depressed.
I have already climbed back from more than one life.
From ME, the chronic fatigue that ended a legal career in Edinburgh.
From back surgery that removed discs from my lower back and a bone spur from my sciatic nerve, after eighteen months waiting in pain so intense I ended up with a morphine addiction to break.
From starting again at university at forty-three and walking out at forty-seven with a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics, proud, certain, alive.
I loved my job and loved the Head of Year job that followed. I thought I had found my vocation.
And now here I am, flat on my back once more, destroyed by a fatigue so complete that the teaching I loved, the classroom, the kids, the pastoral work that was my calling are all gone.
I can’t go back.
I can’t even get out of bed.
And the thought that comes is not dramatic. It is devastatingly quiet.
I don’t know how to live any other way. I have tried so hard. I have pushed myself so hard.
I pushed through illness, through surgery and recovery, through going to university while my kids were teenagers, I pushed through fear and exhaustion.
I kept pushing until what seemed impossible became possible. Then I pushed a little more from possible to excellent.
My whole identity was built around being great at everything I did, being helpful, being busy, “having it all”. The woman like the Duracell bunny who could keep going. I just kept pushing myself until I literally collapsed.
Not once, TWICE!
So lying here in bed, I can’t see any other way of being. I did not know how to reinvent myself again. I realised with utter clarity that I did not know how to live.
I can’t do this anymore.
But, I have two kids that I adore. I could not and would not take a step towards leaving them. But I remember lying there with an exhaustion and a despair so deep that I wished I could simply stop breathing. That my body would quietly cease, on its own, so they would never have to carry the pain of thinking I had chosen to leave them.
If you are reading this from somewhere near that place, I want to say: it did not stay there. Please tell someone. Please tell me, even.
My story did not end there because I noticed something so obvious, something hiding in plain sight that changed everything.
As that thought developed about wanting to just stop breathing, I realised it was not under my control. I could not stop it.
The next breath just came, and the next and the next. They just kept coming. The breath did not ask my permission. It had nothing to do with my will.
And then the second realisation dawned as I understood something else.
I had not started it either.
I did not decide to take my first breath, on the sixth of June 1962, at thirteen minutes past eight in the morning.
I did not choose to be born. I did not choose my parents, the time and place of my birth and so I did not choose any of the conditioning that had led me to be a Type A, people-pleasing workaholic.
And I was not choosing, in that moment, to keep breathing.
The breath was not mine to begin or end.
Something was breathing me. Something was aware of the breath going in and the breath going out, rhythmic and certain unlike the chaos of my mind.
It was not an idea.
It was a knowing that moved through my whole body.
I had spent my life believing I was the one holding everything together.
That if I stopped striving, everything would fall apart.
But underneath all the effort, underneath every version of myself I had worked so hard to create, something had been carrying me all along.
I had no idea what it was but I felt it and strangely I trusted it. I realised I did not have to know how to do life.
I am being breathed.
I write it in the present tense because it did not stop being true when I got out of that bed. And I did get out of bed. I flew to Lanzarote with my daughter and sat in the sun.
I went to see a puppy with my son and brought home her sister Bella.
Small things. Ordinary things. The first ordinary things in a very long time.
I am still being breathed.
The breath moving through me as I write these words is the same breath.
The one I did not create.
The one I do not control.
I am being breathed.
And you are being breathed too.
Beneath all our striving there is a quiet intelligence, a deeper rhythm.
Listening to that intelligence and following its whispers is what led me from the broken, depressed suicidal woman I was in 2016, to the calm, radiant, joyful woman I am today, sitting on her patio, pausing from reading her Bella Grace magazine to write to you.
This is what I call “slowing down to the speed of Grace”. Seeing that the same Grace that grows flowers from seed and oak trees from acorns is living us too.
Knowing too that I have no clue what it is and yet everything I have built since that day in 2016, every word I have written, every podcast I recorded, every woman I sat with at her own threshold, every moment spent listening for what is beneath the noise, has grown from that realisation.
I only have to listen and to take the next step that shows up. To be open to write what wants to be written. Like this poem, for example.
When it appeared in the pages of my journal, I did not understand what was happening. I only knew that something in me was beginning to see differently. Most of me was royally pissed off at it telling me there was nothing wrong when my whole f***ing life had imploded.
Looking back now, I hear the voice of the Seventh Sense, the part of me that always knows.
Perhaps it is a voice you recognise too.
a poem
There Is Nothing Wrong
Can you see it, my love? You are beginning to wake up. Can you see what we have done together? You are ready to trust. Can you see the perfection of all the things you fought so hard against? The pain of losing it all, the loneliness of chronic illness, the stripping away of all you thought defined you. You are beyond definitions. The joy when the mind agreed that it was right, the pain from thinking things have gone wrong. There is nothing wrong. Nothing can ever go wrong in this perfection. You are standing, now, on the threshold, knowing that your arrival here is inevitable. In the quietness of your mind, in this vast still place where you belong, from which you came and to which you return, you know the truth. There is nothing wrong. I will whisper it, in songs of love. I will shout it, through screams of pain. There is nothing wrong. The heart slows, the mind stills, the eyes open, blinking in this new reality, as old as time. Trust all that comes, love everything that arises as though you chose it. Because you did. © Susan Telford
an invitation
This Sunday, I would like to invite you to join us for The 100th Woman Project, our free monthly meditation circle. We meet at 5pm BST (noon EDT, 9am PDT.)
This is a space to slow down, breathe, and remember that we are not separate from one another. We will sit together in stillness, practising compassion and presence, and allowing ourselves to become part of the wider field of healing that is always available.
If you have not been before, click the button to register
what nourished me
I am loving Gift from the Sea, our current Reading at the Speed of Grace Book Club pick.
I recognise myself in these words:
One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
What a wonderful description of letting go and living in the moment!
Below, for paid members: my Summer guided meditation, a few minutes to stop holding everything together and notice the breath already carrying you. Plus what I hear in that poem now, ten years on, that I could not hear when I wrote it, as well as this week’s questions and practices in the Reading at the Speed of Grace member chat.
If Grace Notes kindles something in you, this is where the deeper work lives.
With much love,
Susan 🌹
If anything here has touched something tender, and you are:
in the UK, the Samaritans are there on 116 123, day or night.
In Scotland, Breathing Space is on 0800 83 85 87.
In the US, Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is on 988