There was a time when my body stopped feeling like a place I could trust.

It happened in a single moment, the kind that divides life into before and after. A bike accident. Impact. Shock. Pain arriving faster than understanding. In that moment, everything I thought I knew about control disappeared as I hit the ground. Afterward, my body was still mine, but it was no longer predictable. It could fail me. It could be hurt. It could be taken from ease into injury without warning.

But in truth, the accident didn’t begin anything. It deepened something older.

It took me back.

To a childhood where safety was not a given condition, and letting go was not something I had learned how to do. I was hypervigilant for as long as I can remember – prepared, alert, always adjusting, always scanning. Not because I chose to be, but because it was how I stayed steady in a world that didn’t always feel steady itself.

So I learned early that surrender was not safe.

And without realising it, I carried that forward into adulthood. I mistook vigilance for strength. I mistook control for safety. I mistook adaptation for limitation.

Then came the accident – and it confirmed everything my body already believed. That it could be fine one moment and broken the next. That preparedness was never enough. That control had limits I could not see until I was already falling.

After that, surrender became even more impossible. Because surrender, once you’ve been hurt, can feel like forgetting what protects you. Like letting go of the only thing that might keep you intact.

So I didn’t.

Not just physically, but in all the quiet ways life asks us to release. I held on emotionally too – in relationships, in rest, in asking for help, in anything that required trust in something outside of myself.

I didn’t notice I was doing it. I only knew I felt safer when I stayed slightly braced, slightly prepared, slightly in control.

For a long time, I thought this was just who I was. Careful. Controlled. Unable to let go in the ways other people seemed to manage so easily. I didn’t question it because it felt like truth. I had never learned how to fully trust myself –  not my body, not my balance, not my capacity to catch myself if I fell.

And then I tried to do a handstand.

It was simple, almost ordinary. A moment that asked nothing more than an experiment in balance. But the moment I lifted my legs, something familiar happened. One leg found the wall immediately. The other searched for air, for space, for the possibility of lifting fully. But I didn’t let it. I couldn’t. There was no trust that I would stay up without contact. No internal sense that my body would hold me if I let both points of support go.

So I stayed there – half inverted, half anchored. One foot pressed into the wall, the other reaching upward but never fully released into the unknown.

And I realised that this was not just a physical hesitation.

It was the same pattern I had lived in for years.

Not trusting that I could hold myself. Not trusting that the ground, internal or external, would be enough without something to brace against.

In that moment, the handstand was not an exercise. It was recognition.

This was how I had always lived.

One part of me reaching for freedom, expansion, possibility. Another part refusing to let go of contact, because contact had always meant survival.

And yet, something shifted while I stayed there.

I didn’t force myself out of it. I didn’t push both legs away from the wall. I didn’t turn it into failure. I simply noticed what was happening: that I was not broken for needing support. That I was not weak for not fully releasing. That my body was doing exactly what it had learned it needed to do in order to stay safe.

And in that noticing, something softened.

I began to understand that trust is not a single act of surrender. It is not a leap into nothing. It is something built in layers – negotiated between safety and risk, between what is known and what is not yet safe enough to release into.

There are moments in life that invite full surrender. And there are moments that ask for contact, for grounding, for one point of stability while the rest is explored. Wisdom is learning the difference without turning it into self-judgement.

For a long time, I thought my inability to let go meant I was closed. But now I see it differently. I was not closed. I was consistent with what I had learned. I was adaptive in a world that had taught me, through experience, through impact, through repetition, that certainty could not always be trusted.

Recovery, then, is not about becoming someone who trusts without hesitation. It is about slowly expanding what trust can feel like in the body. It is the re-learning of safety in small increments. The return of choice where there was once only protection.

It is discovering that the body is not only something that can be injured, but something that can re-learn steadiness. That not every imbalance becomes collapse. That support can exist without total surrender. That it is possible to stay in relationship with uncertainty without being consumed by it.

And so I return again to the handstand.

Not as metaphor imposed from outside, but as something lived from within.

One foot on the wall. One foot reaching.

Not a failure to balance. Not an inability to let go. But a truthful expression of where trust currently lives in me.

And maybe that is what healing looks like after everything has been disrupted: not the sudden arrival of complete surrender, but the gradual permission to not rush it.

To stay half in contact, half in possibility.

Until, slowly, the body learns that it does not have to choose between safety and freedom – it can learn how to hold both.

 

As I walk through the park, I find myself reflecting on the year 2020 – when COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation, and how it felt as though the world changed almost overnight. There was no warning that felt sufficient, no gradual easing into it  – just a quiet, collective shift that altered how we lived, moved, and saw one another. The familiar became uncertain, and the ordinary suddenly carried weight.

Back then, stepping outside felt like both freedom and risk. I became acutely aware of my place in the world, of the space between myself and others. Every passing stranger was no longer invisible; we acknowledged each other through careful distance, small adjustments, silent agreements to protect not just ourselves, but one another. It was a strange kind of togetherness – one built on separation.

What that time reminds me, even now, is how quickly a life can narrow. The world we had known – full schedules, open movement, assumed futures, contracted into something much smaller. As I walk here today, noticing the continuity of the park and the ordinary movement of life around me, it strikes me that this kind of sudden shift is not unique to a global pandemic. Lives can change in a moment in countless ways – through illness, loss, unexpected news, or events that stop us in our tracks and alter our direction entirely. COVID was simply a shared experience of something deeply human: the loss of control, the confrontation with uncertainty, and the need to adapt.

Now, as I continue walking through this same park, the urgency of that time has softened, but its imprint remains. The world has opened up again in many ways, yet something in me has stayed changed.

In the work that I do, I am reminded again and again that each of us encounters moments where life, as we know it, is suddenly thrown into disarray. Clients speak of the point at which everything shifts – when the trajectory they had imagined for themselves quietly, or sometimes violently, changes course. There are the more recognisable losses: a job gone, a relationship ended, the death of someone deeply loved. But there are also the moments that may seem smaller from the outside, yet carry just as much weight – the musician whose bows are accidentally broken, the loss of a much-loved animal, the unexpected diagnosis that arrives without warning and reshapes everything that follows.

What unites these experiences is not the event itself, but the way it stops us – the way it interrupts the flow of a life we thought we understood. In those moments, we are confronted with what we cannot control, and often cannot yet make sense of.

Most of us struggle with uncertainty. Yet part of my work is to gently remind clients that uncertainty is not an interruption to life, it is woven into the fabric of being alive.

So as I reflect on this,  I find myself returning to a quiet understanding: that whatever happens to us, however suddenly life changes, we are asked, again and again, to meet what comes.

To notice what we lose, but also what remains. And sometimes, what emerges that we could never have anticipated.

What I know is that there will be moments for all of us, when everything feels undone – when the ground beneath us no longer feels steady, and the life we knew seems out of reach. In those moments, it can be hard to believe that anything solid still exists.

But perhaps it is here that something else begins. Not certainty, but trust. A trust that, even in the midst of disarray, we can find within ourselves a willingness, however small, to begin again.

And we do not have to do that alone.

Therapy can offer a space where someone walks alongside us through that uncertainty. A space to make sense of what has been lost, to gently recognise what remains, and to begin, piece by piece, to rebuild meaning. To hold hope, even when it feels distant. To find it, even in the places that feel empty.