The lighthouse
For most of my life, if something was wrong I thought about it.
Work out why, trace it back, work out where it's going. Then you're safe. Twenty-six years of assess before you act, and before that I was probably like that anyway. I got good at it.
Never once stopped my chest going tight.
That took me years to admit. I could explain what was happening while it was happening. Both things running at the same time, and the explaining wasn't in charge of anything. And this is the part I didn't want, most of the time the thinking was how I avoided feeling it. It looked like facing the problem.
One moment here.
Not so long ago, sat in my car. It had been a heavy few weeks — the kind where everything arrives at once. Chest tight, breathing shallow, and then the loop. I knew exactly what was happening. Knowing made no difference at all.
What changed wasn't a better explanation. I stopped looking for one.
Started paying attention to what was actually happening in my chest and stomach instead. Which sounds easy and isn't. Pressure, tightness, heat coming up. Sitting there and not doing anything about it goes against everything in me. I'm built to act. If I can't act I analyse. Just staying still while something unpleasant moves through felt like negligence, honestly. Like I was letting it win.
But the body isn't asking a question. It doesn't want an answer. It wants to move the energy and find out it's safe.
I'd spent thirty years answering a question nobody asked.
The picture I use is a lighthouse. Something happens — a message, a mood, something old showing up out of nowhere — and it comes in like weather. Instinct is to go out in it. Fix it, manage it, explain yourself, get ahead of it. The practice is staying inside the stone and watching it through the window. Weather's still real. You're not pretending. You're just not going out.
From in there you start seeing worry for what it is. Mine was never about solving anything. It was insurance. If I stay worried I'm doing something, and if I'm doing something I don't have to sit in it.
So if any of that sounds familiar. Before the story starts, find where it is. Chest, stomach, throat, jaw. Just where. Then see if you can let it be a sensation for a minute rather than an emergency — tightness is tightness, it only becomes a crisis when you put the story on it. And then do it or drop it. If there's something honest to do, do it, now, without the armour. If there isn't, drop it. The middle bit, the holding pattern, turning it over, waiting — that's where I lived for years and it costs more than either one.
I'm not going to pretend I do this reliably.
I catch it faster. That's not the same as not doing it. Some days the whole thing comes back and I'm three hours in before I notice my jaw's been clamped shut the entire time. Shorter gap. That's what I've got.
If you're carrying something bigger than this, can't tell what's real, fear isn't easing, thoughts of harming yourself, that needs a doctor, not a blog post. Please ring someone.
I'm Jaime, a somatic and psychedelic integration coach in Malta, in person and online. If any of that sounds like your weather, first conversation's free.
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