“When the soul needs to expertise one thing, she throws a picture of the expertise out earlier than her and enters into her personal picture.” ~Meister Eckhart
For many of my life, one thing in me felt off—misaligned, an excessive amount of, not sufficient. I moved by the world attempting to repair a factor I couldn’t title.
Then, a fantastic chapter emerged the place I now not questioned myself. I met my husband—and thru his love, I skilled the life-changing magic of being seen. His presence felt like daylight. I softened. I bloomed. For the primary time, I felt secure.
Shedding him to young-onset colorectal most cancers was like watching that daylight disappear. Along with his final breath, the security I had lastly discovered evaporated. And within the lengthy, aching months that adopted, I started to mirror on all of the environments I’d moved by—childhood, adolescence, maturity, relationships—as gardens. And myself as a plant, both nurtured or wilting relying on the circumstances and my particular person structure.
His absence clarified the sort of care I had—and hadn’t—identified.
I used to be by no means faulty. I’m a being with particular wants for thriving—simply the fitting gentle, language, and nourishment required for blooming.
Once I look again, I can see that whereas my fundamental wants—shelter and meals—have been met, I didn’t perceive what it meant to really feel emotionally secure or deeply seen. I cycled by limitless loops of What’s flawed with me?—by no means realizing I wasn’t damaged. I used to be simply attempting. Surviving.
Presence. Attunement. Emotional security.
These aren’t issues you possibly can title as lacking whenever you’ve by no means identified them. Not as a result of anybody was overtly merciless however as a result of nobody had ever been taught to ask, What sort of care does this explicit being require?
People don’t include cue playing cards. No tags that say, “partial solar, low stimulation, day by day emotional attunement.” We enter this world as mysteries.
My mother carries a sixth sense along with her crops. As if she will scent it, she is aware of after they want water or tending with out even taking a look at them. She is attuned to her backyard in methods I solely skilled years later with my husband.
After he died, I longed for the sort of care we cultivated collectively—the best way he might sense what I used to be feeling with out taking a look at my face. The best way my coronary heart used to sing when he checked out me. The best way he listened.
My relationship with my mom has been tenuous at greatest in maturity. However after my husband handed, I noticed her attempt—within the methods she knew how. Fixing. Filling area. Masking the ache with doing. On our occasional cellphone calls, she’d discuss her crops: who was dry, who wanted new soil, who was prepared for a much bigger pot. No efficiency. No expectation. Simply consideration.
I acknowledged in these moments that she couldn’t supply me the sort of gaze she gave her crops—and for the primary time, I understood why. Her care was actual. She’d simply by no means encountered a plant like me earlier than.
Earlier than I met my husband, I’d already been dwelling in survival mode for years—self-medicating within the wake of emotional upheaval and familial disaster, eroding what little belief I had in myself. His love opened one thing in me I hadn’t identified was doable: security. And after he died, I needed to be taught what security meant in my physique at this stage of my journey.
Most of us are raised in environments formed by inherited urgency, unexamined patterns, and a generational lack of curiosity. There is no such thing as a fault right here, however there’s consequence.
The physique, in its knowledge, retains rating. It holds unmet wants and unstated truths like a second pores and skin.
And it’s usually after we encounter a metaphor—one which mirrors our interior expertise—that one thing in us exhales.
That metaphor turns into a type of attunement. Not an answer, however a shift. A felt sense that perhaps nothing is flawed—solely unrecognized. It doesn’t repair the previous, however by meaning-making, the physique is ready to relaxation. To breathe.
We communicate of regulation prefer it’s a way. Breathe like this. Transfer like that. However usually, the truest type of regulation is recognition.
One thing outdoors of us that echoes what lives inside. A melody in our favourite music. A narrative. A metaphor that reminds us: You aren’t alone on this form.
And in that second, the physique softens. The cost lifts. We’re seen.
That is why metaphor issues. Not simply as artwork, however as medication. As orientation. As survival.
Once we are mirrored—by a music, a portray, a stretch of sky that appears precisely how grief feels—we’re granted a sort of coherence. Our expertise, as soon as scattered or silenced, is gathered into type. And type is one thing we will maintain.
Typically, it’s not the literal circumstances that make us really feel secure. It’s the resonance. The reassurance that somebody, someplace, has identified the same ache.
Even when the trail is completely different, the terrain feels acquainted. And that familiarity turns into a nervous system providing—a tether again to self when the bottom feels too distant.
The metaphors that make us human are sometimes refined. Troopers of our instinct: they arrive as intestine emotions, patterns, pictures, or melodies we preserve returning to. The ocean. The desert. A cracked shell. A single tree that blooms late each season.
They take root in us slowly. After which at some point, with out even realizing it, we see ourselves mirrored again on this planet—and a way of belonging begins to ripple by our inside panorama.
Viktor Frankl as soon as wrote that “those that have a why to stay can bear virtually any how.” He understood what trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté have continued to light up: that struggling, when given that means, turns into bearable.
Not erased or justified however metabolized. Held. Breathed into.
That means doesn’t change what occurred. It modifications how what occurred lives in us.
That is the place metaphor turns into extra than language. It turns into a vessel—for ache to maneuver by. A body sturdy sufficient to carry the unnamable.
Frankl discovered this reality in a focus camp. Van der Kolk discovered it in our bodies that refused to neglect. Maté discovered it within the tender ache beneath habit and sickness.
I discovered it in my mother’s backyard.
And I preserve discovering it—in metaphors that arrive like lifelines after I don’t know the right way to clarify what I’m feeling.
These metaphors don’t heal the wound, however they offer it type. And type permits grief to grow to be one thing we will stay beside, one thing we will combine as a substitute of suppressing.
Metaphor isn’t one thing we create in isolation. It’s one thing we obtain—by goals, by symbols, by the quiet choreography of the pure world.
A chicken displaying up at your window. Track lyrics that title precisely what you wanted to listen to. The form of a tree that mirrors your individual posture in grief.
These aren’t simply coincidences. They’re collaborations. The world, whispering again: I see you. I’m on this with you. In that echo, we discover compassion—for the ache, for the trail, for ourselves.
We like to consider ourselves because the authors of our tales, however extra usually, we’re co-writing them with one thing bigger. With the panorama. With our ancestors. With the power of what’s unresolved and aching to be tended.
Metaphors arrive from this dialog—between the interior and outer, the seen and unseen. They root us within the relational material of existence.
That is what it means to be human. Not simply to really feel, however to acknowledge. To witness ourselves mirrored in a leaf, a line of poetry, a stranger’s eyes. To belong—not as a result of we match a mould, however as a result of one thing on this planet has formed itself to fulfill us precisely the place we’re.
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Maybe the extra sincere query isn’t “What’s flawed with me?”
It’s “What formed me?”
“What circumstances was I sprouted inside?”
“And what have I realized in regards to the sort of soil, daylight, and care that permit me to bloom?”
What symbols discovered me alongside the best way?
We’re beings of sample and story.
Metaphor is how the soul speaks again.
And that means is the thread that carries us residence.
About Ayla Casey
Ayla Casey is a author, grief information, and integrative well being advocate exploring what it means to self-resource by loss and hardship. Her work facilities the physique as a portal to wholeness, reminiscence, and belonging. She is the creator of Alchemy for Human Hearts, a storytelling platform for grievers, caregivers, and creatives, and writer of The Little Guide to Bear in mind, a free companion for grief tending and voice work. Her choices stay at www.alchemyforhumanhearts.com.