Day 30: Pressure Is A Portal

30 Days Of More

🌀 This post is part of 30 Days of More — a somatic money challenge designed to expand your capacity to hold and receive more money with less resistance. Each day includes a practice to help you turn your big feelings into fuel for big money. Free subscribers receive the daily posts and weekly money challenges, and paid subscribers get access to the somatic practices and integration journal prompts. If you’re ready to go deeper, upgrade here.

There is a song I love called Dying by the Bengsons, and the lyric goes like this:

You think you are dying, but you are being born.

When pressure lands in the body, it tells you very clearly: I cannot handle this. I cannot do this. I want to give up.

The thing I always used to do when this sensation came up was try to create more space. Obvious, right? If you’re feeling pressure, you try to relieve it. You move away from it. You stretch the timeline, cancel the thing, pull back, create room to breathe.

And sometimes that is the medicine.

But often, what I’ve found is that when I move away from the pressure too quickly, I don’t just escape the sensation, I escape the transformation too.

Because pressure has the potential to change us.

I remember feeling intense pressure during my trip to Mexico last year. I was speaking on an international stage, in front of the most embodied, incredible women, and had been given this opportunity on kind of a short timeline. Not only that, my family was traveling with me, which added another layer of pressure. I wanted to show up fully for the opportunity and also for my husband and son.

I felt so strapped for time and kept trying to work myself out of it. Asking for help, asking for space, moving my body, trying to keep all the balls in the air - business, event, family, self.

But what finally cracked the pressure open was acknowledging the truth that I was restricted. I wasn’t as free or available or as well rested as everyone else at that festival.

Many of the women, including the other women speaking on stage were not mothers, and the mothers that were there did not have their children with them. My time wasn’t the same as theirs, I had different circumstances.

This wasn’t a problem once I let myself honor this truth.

And when I did, the wall of pressure that had been collapsing in on me did the opposite. It opened.

The download that came through was that stuckness was my body asking for stillness. There was a belief running underneath all of it: I have to move in order to create movement. But the truth was the opposite.

The stillness was the code.

Here’s what I want to offer you about pressure, because I think this is the edge so many of us are sitting on right now:

Pressure is not necessarily the sign that something has gone wrong.

Pressure is how diamonds are formed. Pressure is part of birth too. The pressure is the portal.

And when we resist it, rush away from it, or try to escape it immediately, we may also resist the transformation it is trying to deliver.

If you are feeling right now like you cannot handle what is in front of you, what if you are not supposed to handle it the same way you always have?

What if I can’t do this is not failure, but the body recognizing that the old way of being can’t carry you where you’re going next?

What if the breaking is part of the becoming?

Today, let yourself be here. In the stillness. In the pressure. Exactly where you are right now.

And if you want a practice to help you meet the pressure and stay present with the sensation instead of immediately trying to escape it, I’m sharing the somatic practice tomorrow for paid subscribers. It’s one I keep coming back to when the demands of life feel like too much.

🌀 This post is part of 30 Days of More — a somatic money challenge designed to expand your capacity to hold and receive more money with less resistance. Each day includes a practice to help you turn your big feelings into fuel for big money. Free subscribers receive the daily posts and weekly money challenges, and paid subscribers get access to the somatic practices and integration journal prompts. If you’re ready to go deeper, upgrade here.