Returning to My Body, Again and Again
About 15 years ago, I was diagnosed with a lumbar disc bulge.
I still remember what the doctor told me at that time — that I should stop dancing.
And I believed it.
Because dancing was not just movement to me.
It was joy. It was expression. It was life itself.
But slowly, my body became painful.
Walking for more than 15 minutes felt like a challenge.
It became a long period of chronic pain and limitation.
After giving birth, the pain reached its most intense stage.
And for a while, I truly felt that dancing might no longer be part of my life.
But something inside me never fully accepted that ending.
Even though I was living with pain, I began to gently reconnect with my body again — step by step, breath by breath.
I started to study yoga more deeply, not just as movement, but as a way of understanding the body, emotions, and nervous system.
And slowly, something began to change.
Today, I still experience chronic pain at times.
But I am no longer controlled by it.
I dance again.
I practice yoga again.
I move, I explore, I listen.
Not because the pain disappeared,
but because I learned how to be in relationship with it.
Through years of practice and experience, I’ve come to deeply understand something:
We cannot change nature itself — we can only learn to move with it.
As Daoist philosophy teaches, we follow the way of nature, not against it.
And yet, within that flow, there is still immense personal possibility.
When we believe in that possibility — and take consistent, gentle action — something always begins to shift.
Years later, when my father was diagnosed with heart blockage and colorectal cancer, I was already deeply immersed in yoga studies.
Without hesitation, I continued my training into cancer yoga and trauma-informed yoga, exploring the connection between emotions, the nervous system, and physical illness.
At the same time, I began to understand my family history more deeply, and slowly started to see why my father had lived and behaved the way he did.
It was not an easy process.
At times, it was painful and confronting.
But it was also deeply transformative.
Life kept breaking me open — and I kept rebuilding, again and again.
And through this process, I learned something simple, but very real:
Healing is not about becoming perfect.
It is about learning how to stay present with life — even when it hurts — and still choose to move forward.
Thank you for reading this small piece of my journey.