Receiving Signs and Messages

I broke twelve bones before I turned twenty.

And although I was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, not one of those injuries came from anything cool. I wasn’t crashing dirt bikes or jumping off cliffs. I was the girl who fell on the school bus and broke her arm. The girl with the never-ending stack of notes excusing her from P.E. The girl with three separate scars on her face from childhood stitches.

“Clumsy” didn’t quite cover it.

A classic example of ignoring signs and messages. Can you believe I went hiking with a broken shin?

Years later, I was devastated to realize that, on some level, I had known all along what Life was trying to tell me. We all have access to that deep knowing, those internal cues, those gut-level whispers. But we have to know how to listen. And often, we don’t. Sometimes the signs are right in front of us, almost embarrassingly obvious, yet we’re terrified to admit what they mean.

Take fifth grade: the school called my mom three times in one week. I broke a bone, fell into a creek, and got a bee sting on my eye, all in the span of a few days. Looking back now, the message couldn’t have been clearer: Wrong direction!!!

It sounds simple when I say it now. But if someone had explained that truth to me back then, everything might have shifted. Today, if something like that happened to me, I would press pause on my entire life until I understood why it was happening.

It is sad to think of myself as that young girl, moving through the world without the guidance of high-capacity adults, without anyone able to help me interpret what my body and experiences were screaming. How did my parents and teachers not recognize the cry for help? The answer is, they didn’t know how to look for that. Because we live in a society that does not recognise that energy is real. We have many words in the English language, for all sorts of things, but very few to talk about energetic realities. This is a clear indicator of the emphasis that people place on the physical and material reality of our world, and the invisibility of energetic reality underneath.

One of the hardest parts of my healing has been waking up to the pandemic of human limitation. I cried over the years I felt I had wasted. Years spent pushing, fighting, and choosing to remain blind. Memories came flooding back: moments when I felt helpless inside my own skin, wishing I knew how to respond when my dad yelled or my sister jeered.

The good news is that intention is powerful. Awareness is powerful. And what once felt like lost potential, isn’t truly lost. It can be reclaimed.

Here’s what I wish I could’ve told that younger version of myself: Life speaks to us. It doesn’t always scream, but it whispers… gently, in moments big and small.

The falls, the injuries, the bruises, the frustrations… they were life’s way of telling me, “Something isn’t right. Pay attention.” We don’t have to wait for the pain to pile up. Life is offering feedback all the time, asking us to listen to what it’s trying to show us about what we need, what we’ve been ignoring, and where we are out of alignment. For example, if I knocked something off the table and it smashed on the ground, I might ask questions like: Is there something here for me to notice? Do I need to slow down? Do I need more support? Is there a way I could be meeting my needs that could help me to avoid injuries and disaster?

If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed, I invite you to pause. Pay attention to the subtle (and not-so-subtle) signs, whether they show up in your body, your relationships, or your circumstances. What is life offering you right now? Can you hear the invitation to shift, to heal, to move in a new direction?

Don’t wait for the metaphorical “broken bones” to get the message. Life is speaking. The question is, are you listening?

And if you’re learning how to listen again, if you’re remembering how to come home to yourself, I’m here to help guide you there. You deserve to feel safe in your own care. You are worthy of receiving the care and love that is your birthright. You are worthy of being the compassionate, loving, and supportive presence for yourself, exactly as you’ve always needed.