showing up for yourself

There are moments when coming to therapy feels like too much.
When you'd rather stay home and quiet everything that asks you to feel.
Those moments are familiar — and often, they are where the real work begins.

In Gestalt therapy, we speak of responsibility not as blame, but as the quiet power to respond —
to what is here,
to what hurts,
to yourself.

The therapist can give you support and walk beside you, but not for you.
Like in dance, the teacher can show the movement, but your body must learn it.
You must arrive, repeat, practice.

Yesterday, in a movement class, we explored something called a 'puzzle movement': three gestures in sequence that involve shifting your weight while on the floor, which can be repeated, combined and transformed. You can slow them down, change their speed, perform them with another person. 

But before all of that, you have to learn the movement itself.

It sounds simple, yet it isn't.
The puzzle of 'puzzle movement' lies in finding your own fluidity as you shift your weight,
from left to right and back again,
hands and body twisting, legs following.

I felt tired at one point — close to quitting, even a little frustrated to see how easily the teacher could do it while I couldn't. And then, she said,

"You have to keep up. It's the only way. This part I can't help you with — you have to do it on your own."

A few hours earlier, I had been speaking with my client about the importance of commitment in therapy.
Not commitment as pressure or perfection,
but as a meeting point:
between what we want and what is possible right now,
between the support offered and the effort required,
between being guided and learning to guide ourselves.

Sometimes therapy is exactly that — arriving again,
even when it hurts, when words don't come, when you'd rather not.
Because healing doesn't happen in the perfect sessions;
it happens in the returning.
In staying just a little longer with what you'd prefer to avoid.

The work is not to make the pain disappear,
but to meet it differently —
with breath, with presence, with honesty.

And every time you show up, you are already learning the puzzle.
You are already dancing your way back to yourself.