Stretched Beyond Comfort

I didn't expect a trip to teach me this much about my own edges.

Guatemala had a way of stripping things down. No hot shower on demand. No turning a tap and trusting clean water would come out of it. No quick fix when something didn't work — you just sat with it, figured it out, or went without. I'm someone who likes to think of herself as adaptable, low-maintenance, easygoing. Guatemala tested that self-image pretty quickly, and what showed up instead was something rawer: how much of my daily comfort I'd never actually had to think about, and how disoriented I felt without it.

There's a particular kind of vulnerability that comes from not being able to take clean water for granted. It's not dramatic — it's quiet and constant, a low hum of "am I okay, is this okay, do I need to be careful right now." That hum followed me most of the trip. And underneath the discomfort, something else was happening: I was being asked, again and again, to let go of control. To trust. To stop managing every variable and just be where I was.

That's where it got strange, in the best way.

Without the usual noise — the routines, the conveniences, the distractions I didn't even know were distractions — things got loud in a different register. I started feeling like the universe, or something older than me, was speaking directly into the spaces that had opened up. Synchronicities stacked on top of each other in a way that felt impossible to write off as coincidence. I felt my ancestors close, like the discomfort had worn a thin spot in whatever usually separates "ordinary life" from whatever it is I actually believe is underneath ordinary life. I'm not going to pretend I have a clean, tidy explanation for that. I just know it happened, and it changed something in how I understand my own capacity to be stretched.

Because that's really what this trip was: a stretching. Physically, logistically, spiritually. The kind of stretching that doesn't feel good while it's happening and only makes sense afterward, when you can look back and see the shape of what got rearranged inside you.

I'm still integrating it, honestly. Some of what surfaced down there is going to take longer than a plane ride home to settle. And I think that's worth naming plainly: being stretched like that — even when it's meaningful, even when it feels spiritually significant — can leave a person needing somewhere to actually process it. Not just journal about it alone, but say it out loud to another human and have it land somewhere.

If any of this resonates — if you've had your own version of being stretched past your usual limits and are looking for a steady place to talk it through — I'm currently taking online clients in both Minnesota and Texas. I provide sessions in office in the Houston/Clear Lake area. Reach out at 325-603-9322.

Sometimes the most important work happens after the trip, after the upheaval, after the universe has gotten your attention. I'd be glad to help you make sense of it.