Trust your body

Life happens. Love, too.

Anna Cley
4 min readFeb 14, 2021

“poom-poom-poom-poom-poom-poom”

“po-poOm……po-poOm…….po-poOm…..”

The doppler reveals the beats, drumming at 160–170 bpm.

It’s the heartbeat of our baby, overlapping mine. We hear it for the very first time. It’s the most beautiful and miraculous music I’ve ever heard. I laugh. My shimmering belly makes the doppler sound loud, losing the heartbeats. I laugh more. I cover my mask and my mouth to stop laughing. Now the doctor laughs, too. Tears of emotion are rolling down on my left cheek. Our baby is here with us. I breathe deep to calm down, refraining from giggling so we can hear the heartbeats again. Baby is so tiny and already so strong.

So far, pregnancy has been the most terrifying experience of my life. The baby came to us by surprise, turning our world upside down. Mine, in particular. Dealing with exhaustion, changes of body, intense emotions, and other fun symptoms, I’ve had to delay all of my projects.

I lost myself in translation, not knowing who I am anymore, only remembering who I was.

A pastel I drew in my teenage years, twenty years ago.

“I’m going to ask you only one thing. Trust your body. We’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. Your body knows. Trust it.”

After 2 months of pregnancy, I met my maternal health advocate. Finally someone who truly understands me. The most disruptive part of pregnancy is that you’re not in control anymore. And you’re not in control of anything: not your body, not your emotions, not your schedule… absolutely nothing.

I just entered the secret community of moms, as a total apprentice and with zero preparation. I’m a baby carrying a baby. A new cycle begins that I know nothing about.

“Trust your body.” Here is something I could have said myself before, but never at this level of understanding. When I teach others how to breathe, all I do is help them to remove the layers of fear and stress accumulated over the years. To breathe well, and healthy, we “just” need to come back to our original breathing, from when we were born: free, full, flexible, confident.

Our body tells us a lot. Yet, we tend to put our mind first because our mind can’t explain what we feel. How do we forget so quickly to trust our body? We hold so much knowledge already when we come to the world… But no one is here to tell us we know how to do things. Instead, we’re told we know nothing and have to learn everything. Then we learn from others and we absorb the outer world, pushing down our inner wisdom instead of combining it all together. But recent studies start to show that infants already know a lot. I’ll refer you, for example, to the 2020 documentary “Babies” currently available on Netflix.

When I met my partner and dad-to-be, I felt an immediate pull toward him. I rejected it right away, thinking with my analytical mind. I had enough heartbreaks and disappointments in my past. But I kept crossing his path, and every single time, I felt a pull in my solar plexus. It was so strong that I had to acknowledge it. Somehow, I knew he had an important role to play in my life and I had to find out what it was. It took five months between the first encounter and our first conversation. Our emotional and intellectual bond was obvious but the circumstances did not play in our favor. It took another six months between our first conversation and our first kiss.

This wait taught me a very important thing: To trust my intuition a lot more!

Antelope Canyon, September 2018.

There is so much that we know, that we “feel”. Often times, our body tells us right away: it’s a knot in our belly, or an unexplainable excitement. Yet because it’s not rational, we just don’t listen. It’s weird to be so closed to our inner guidance when the mystery of life is all around us, and very real. There is no rational explanation to the soul that’s incarnating in my upcoming baby, no rational explanation to the first heartbeat. The miracle is here. All the time.

The miracle flies above us with the birds, blooms in the spring, and shines on our Earth.

It’s a love story between us and the invisible. Life chose us already. Every time we trust our body, listen to our intuition, we choose life back. Every time, we choose love back. We can’t explain that we’re alive, but we are here, and we don’t question it. Why should we question our intuition then?

So, let’s all give a little more space to the silence between the heartbeats, to trust our body and listen to our inner guidance.

I wish you love, lots of love, today, and for the rest of your life.

For music, projects and more, visit AnnaCley.com

To learn about “The Journey of the Heart”, visit TheJourneyOfTheHeart.com

Empowering children and youth impacted by trauma: visit Vocalise.org

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