Two Months, Two Weeks, Two Days: What a Twenty-Year-Old Wave Keeps Teaching Me

A personal story about an old injury, a beautiful apprenticeship, and discovering that resilience isn’t a shield, but a speed. One that grows gentler and quicker as we come home to ourselves.

Last weekend I was lying on the table, being worked on by a woman who is walking the same path I am – another apprentice in the lineage of somatic energy work in the tradition of Dr. John Amaral. It was only our second time practicing with each other, and yet there’s already an ease to the arrangement: because we share a methodology and a vocabulary, nothing has to be explained between us. It only has to be met. In this lineage, practitioners describe three energetic styles – spacious, fluid, staccato – and it turns out she and I run similarly, which makes it easier for us to find each other’s fields, to settle into that quiet communication that happens beyond words, and simply stay there together while the work unfolds.

We made our way through the patterns by assessing the active, passive and neural systems and paying attention to the body. And at Adaptation Pattern 7, the one framed as lack of choice when not resourced, to abundance of choice, something happened after I moved back into coherence and had been turned over to lay supine: I felt it and visualized it simultaneously as a laser beam that landed directly in the zero point of my heart, followed by a depth of peace and wholeness. I’ve been carrying this particular pattern since what could be one of its origin stories in my body for more than twenty years.

The wave

More than two decades ago, on the Big Island of Hawai’i, I took a twelve-foot wave with a short break on a bodyboard that plummeted the back of my neck against the sand when I heard a crack and had to crawl my way out, because I was glowing with that naïvete and certainty young people have who feel that they’re immortal. I was there with my brother and two of our dear friends, along with a former medical doctor from a First Nations reservation in Ontario, Canada, who had taken us out by ATV to the isolated Green Sand Beach on the south of the island. It was one of those care-free days that felt like an adventure while it’s still happening.

The wave had other ideas in mind.

I didn’t understand what it had done for years. The injury settled quietly into the fascia across my back, running from left to right, and became a kind of background weather in my life, most noticeable after volleyball, which I gently told myself was simply what playing resulted in. And I want to be fair to myself here: I wasn’t ignoring my back. Over long stretches of those years I devoted real time and care to it with holistic chiropractic work for scoliosis and other issues, appointment after appointment, year after year. But this particular pattern didn’t yet have a name, nor a resolution. The care I knew how to seek was tending the structure around it, faithfully, while never quite reaching the core issue itself. That’s the part I most want to be honest about, because it’s the part I now recognize in nearly everyone I love and work with: I normalized the signal. For years, my body filed its little report after every match, and for years, I marked it read and carried on with my beautiful, full life, adventure after adventure.

Three returns

The body kept the file open. It has reopened it three times now, and the three timelines are the heart of what I want to share with you.

The first time was only a few years ago, which means the pattern had run essentially unresolved inside me for the better part of two decades. I was training daily for the Samui Open in Thailand when it flared so intensely that I faltered and collapsed there on the court, without any known trigger. It took two months of deep Thai fascia work, session after painful session, before it fully released. It was the first time in twenty years it had ever fully let go, and the first time I truly understood that the pain I’d been calling normal all those years was actually an archive. Two months.

The second time found me again in Thailand, on Koh Phangan, in the raw and disorienting season after a wellness community resort venture I’d founded came to its completion – a chapter I’ve since made peace with, though my body apparently needed to hold its own closing ceremony. There was craniosacral work, osteopaths, and the long flight home to Los Angeles once I was cleared to travel halfway across the world again, with my back wrapped in care and question marks. Two weeks, that time.

And the third time was just over two weeks ago, here in Hermosa Beach, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday-morning playing volleyball with my girlfriends at our regular women’s morning session, in the sunshine and sand. It arrived during a stretch of days when a few personal parts of my life had felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me, and I know that kind of timing is not coincidence. I stopped believing years ago that this pattern’s returns (or any other) ever are. The somatic energy session I described at the beginning of this piece was my second one after the acute stage passed. Two days.

Two months. Two weeks. Two days.

What the numbers are really measuring

Let me first say clearly what I’m not claiming, because I hold my own story to the same standard I hold everything I publish: none of this is a clinical result, a protocol, or a promise. This is a report from one body, and one body is an anecdote, not evidence.

But here is what I notice, as a woman whose longest-running dataset is herself. The injuries haven’t stopped arriving. Life hasn’t stopped occasionally pulling the rug. What has changed dramatically, tenderly, and in only one direction, is the return time. And that compression tracks almost perfectly with how intimately I’ve come to know my own system: which practices actually work on me and which ones only soothe, who to call and when to call them, what the earliest whisper of the pattern feels like before it becomes a collapse, and how to meet it lovingly in the first hours instead of the sixth week (or year). The somatic work, both receiving it, and now training in it myself, sits at the very center of that knowing. And the honest arithmetic is even starker than this essay’s title: before the two months, there were nearly two decades when I had no clear way to resolve it (or even knew it was an issue). The first real number isn’t two months. It’s years or never, depending on how you count. Then two months. Then two weeks. And most recently, two days.

There’s something else I’ve been sitting with. The pattern we worked last weekend is framed around choice (the movement from having none to having plenty) and a twelve-foot wave is, among other things, a perfect delivery mechanism for the experience of having no choice at all. I was running an invincibility story that day on the beach; the imprint underneath it, I suspect, was its opposite. Every return of this pattern has arrived in a season when circumstances briefly took the pen out of my hand and my body seems to know, with astonishing precision, the difference between a hard week and a helpless one. The body keeps remarkably specific files. It always has.

The part that isn’t about me

Because here is what I’ve come to believe those twenty years actually were: not a personal failure of attention, but the default setting so many of us are living inside. Most of us live from the neck up. We’re trained out of feeling so early and so thoroughly – rewarded for overriding ourselves, praised for pushing through, raised inside a culture where “I’m fine” is a reflex and sensation is just noise to be managed on the way to the next thing. The disconnection isn’t a character flaw, and it was never yours alone. It’s the water we’ve all been swimming in, especially in the hustle and striving of North America.

And then we wonder, genuinely bewildered, why our signals seem to ambush us: why the career that’s wrong, the relationship that’s quietly over, the pace that’s been unsustainable for years all appear to arrive out of nowhere. They didn’t arrive out of nowhere. They arrived as sensation, softly and repeatedly, for years, in a language most of us were never taught to read or were taught, long ago, to stop reading. My back spent two decades writing me letters in that language. There was never anything wrong with the letters.

And unread letters don’t simply file themselves away – this is what I most want to name, because I’ve watched it run through every domain of life I’ve ever touched, not just the body: signals grow louder. What begins as a whisper becomes a tap, then a knock, then a hand on the shoulder, and eventually, if it must, the brick wall. The volume only turns one way until something in us finally answers. My back began as ordinary post-game soreness I called normal; left unanswered long enough, it took me off a court mid-training, and then it took two months of my life. Careers do this. Companies do this. Relationships do this. Our own hearts do this. The circumstances vary endlessly; the escalation never does.

The real invitation in hearing ourselves sooner isn’t about discipline or virtue. It’s about kindness, and honestly, it’s about cost. A whisper asks only for a conversation. A knock asks for a decision. The brick wall takes months or years, and sometimes it takes precious things that were standing too close when it finally came down. Listening early is simply gentler on our bodies, on our people, and on our plans. Everything falls apart so much more quietly when we answer the whisper.

That, underneath all the vocabulary, is what somatic work actually is to me: literacy. Not something exotic layered on top of an already-full life but something remedial, in the most beautiful sense of the word. Learning to feel again. Relearning a mother tongue we all once spoke fluently, so that our signals become readable again while they’re still whispers, long before they have to become walls or tower moments. The body never stopped writing to us. The work is remembering how to read.

The apprenticeship

Part of why this work has deepened so much for me lately is the practice itself. Not only receiving sessions, but training in the lineage, and now exchanging work with a fellow apprentice who is becoming a friend. There’s a craft dimension to this that I find genuinely beautiful and quietly underrated: two practitioners refining their hands and their presence on each other, each session both treatment and tuition, both giving and receiving woven into the same morning. When the person across from you shares your methodology and runs a similar energetic style, the field between you grows quiet enough that you can actually hear what’s there. Refinement and connection lives inside that quiet. So, I’m discovering, does a very particular kind of trust.

And this is also, honestly, why I bring the body into rooms full of operators and dashboards and founders. I write about signal – about the body filing its report long before the mind is willing to read it – because I ignored a report for twenty years, and then I got to feel, in my own tissue, what happened when I finally opened the file. Most leaders can’t read their signals for the same reason I couldn’t read mine: not because the signals are subtle, but because the connection is down. The framework I teach came out of boardrooms, but the conviction underneath it came off the table. And none of this layer is automatable. The tools we’re all adopting can smooth nearly everything now – our drafts, our decisions, our friction of every kind – but the body archives what actually happened, on its own schedule, in its own patient filing system. Friction was information. That wave certainly was. It simply took me twenty years to finish reading it.

Where this leaves me

Still playing volleyball, for the record. Still on the sand with my girlfriends on occasional weekday mornings. Still, apparently, learning, as we all are in this game of life while we’re here on earth.

If there’s one thing I’d offer from all of this, it’s that resilience turned out not to be a shield – I spent a long time thinking it was, and building myself accordingly. Nothing about knowing my own system has stopped the waves from coming. Resilience, it turns out, is a speed. It’s the time between the impact and the moment you’re standing again. And that time is trainable. Not by toughening. By listening earlier. By knowing your own instrument with real intimacy. And by having hands and practices you trust waiting for you when an old file, inevitably and even lovingly, reopens.

Two months. Two weeks. Two days. The wave hasn’t gotten any smaller. The return trip home has.

I write more formally about the body as the first technology layer of leadership in the Four S framework and its series, and about Leading at the Pace of the Body. For somatic sessions and speaking, start here →.