134. The story of why we left Spain.

Where we are now and how it happened.

Life has to contract to expand, I can’t live in a constant state of expansion. When life gets hard and everything feels tight, I’m being put to the test. Over the years, I’ve been faced with a handful of decisive contractive moments where I’ve been forced to stop and feel it all. The way my body does it is by crashing.

The day before we moved to France I was as sick as a dog. I went to bed on the 1st of June as usual and woke up on the 2nd half dead. I had a really bad stomach bug, a high fever and every bone in my body hurt. I couldn’t bring myself to speak and sitting up made me instantly want to vomit. It was terrible and C and I were meant to be packing our last boxes to move the following day, on the 3rd of June.

Months before the day of the move, my family and I had gone through a lot and I hadn’t been able to process it. What happened was that we needed to move out of the family home we’d been living in. It wasn’t a nice process, no eviction is. There was a lot of emotional baggage to be unpacked. We’d reached the end of an era and C and I were now without a home and no idea about what to do next. We did what every person does in that scenario, move in with Mamá. This having-to-leave process took place over a year and this led to a lot of stress, which took its toll. I kept moving forwards and trusting that life would show me where we needed to go next, but it didn’t happen overnight. Throughout this period, my body knew that it had to remain strong until we had an answer.

The crash happened when I was one day away from moving to our new home in France. This opportunity fell from the sky when my life was in an extreme state of contraction. Heaven’s doors opened up and we were guided to what would be our heaven on earth. When my body knew that leaving tomorrow was a reality, it knew it could let go and begin to relax. The emotional stress caught up with me and needed a way out. It needed to be felt, accepted, heard and so I spent the whole day at home, lying on the sofa with Mobi the dog, letting my body go through it all. It was brutal and all I could do was cry through the pain and wait for it to pass.

I had a lot of pain from what had happened during the previous six months but I hadn’t allowed myself to feel it until I was forced to on the sofa. Until I knew it was all in the past and I was safe. C and Mamá packed all our boxes and made trips up to the village to get the remaining things from the old house while I felt like I was dying on the sofa next to the dog. C kept bringing me ginger, lemon and honey to drink but my body needed time to process everything that had happened.

The only way out is through and boy was I going through it.

The next day, on the 3rd of June, I woke up without a fever and feeling much better. I showered and felt more like an alive human but still took it slow just in case. Luckily, we had a nine hour drive ahead of us, so I was able to carry on resting in the car and ended up sleeping most of the way. C and I were equally excited and scared at the same time, but I guess those two feelings always go hand in hand.

As we left Spain behind, we were in a state of awe and kept asking ourselves if this was really happening. As we got onto the motorway en route to our new home, I received a bank transfer from my dad with money for petrol. We saw the notification on my phone and we both broke down crying. It was one of the few times I’d seen C cry like that. We were both releasing a year’s worth of emotions and this led us to think about all of the people that support us and love us. We’re surrounded by people that respect us, admire us, care for us, inspire us, help us, motivate us… and that’s what makes a person rich. We left the box full of worry, fear and scarcity in Spain and were moving to our new life surrounded by abundance and love. It felt good to reach the tipping point and understand that while we make plans, life makes other ones for us.

By the time we’d settled in, my health still hadn’t recovered so I spent a lot of time lying in bed sleeping and reading. At that moment, I was reading Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, which probably didn’t help much because it’s an extremely depressing book, but that’s just how it played out. It’s a fantastic book either way.

Time went on and I wasn’t getting any better. The original stomach bug transformed into symptoms I’d never experienced before, even with my track record of IBS. No need for TMI details but I was worried that something was seriously wrong with me. I was scared to have left everything behind to move to this new place for only a few months and still no life-long plan.

It all changed one day when I was sitting in the green leather armchair after eating lunch. I had my hands on my stomach and I closed my eyes to relax and ended up feeling like I wanted to meditate. I began to go deeper and deeper while it all unfolded naturally—which isn’t common because I usually need someone else to guide me through the meditation. I felt strong emotions and saw strange things. The words I kept hearing were “you’re strong enough, let go of fear” while seeing rainbow coloured lights move through my digestive system in the form of a spiral. This energy felt like it was putting my body back into motion. Ever since I’d been sick lying on the sofa, my body felt stuck and like I had no life in me. After the meditation, my stomach started rumbling and I felt different, I could feel things happening. All of the symptoms I’d been having up until then completely disappeared. I couldn’t quite believe it myself and looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem real, but I know it was.

I needed to believe that I can take care of myself and that living in fear prevents energy from flowing. My body was ready for the expansion life was bringing but I was stuck in a state of contraction going against it. I was clinging to my old life as hard as I could, constantly worrying that the same thing would happen again while obviously starting a new path that had nothing to do with my previous experiences.

Life needs to contract, and sometimes in extreme ways, for us to be propelled forwards. When we live in a state of comfort, we rarely feel the need to push ourselves to experiment new things because we’ve found stability and feel a false sense of control in our comfort zone. In the previous house in Spain, I was putting down deep roots and if the Universe hadn’t forced us away, I never would’ve pictured living in another place because we were comfortable and used to it. C and I both believed that where we lived was the most beautiful place on Earth. That our small village was the best one. That our allotment was more than perfect. That the views from the terrace were the best in the whole of the world. Until we met our new home in France.

The countryside here is vast open land, full of big oak trees and cows that graze in the fields. The home we’re living in is the nicest one we’ve lived in so far, it has slanted ceilings with wooden beams going through them and little windows in the roof looking out to the treetops—details we always dreamed of. We have a garden full of flowers and old trees. The field next door is full of baby cows that run to the fence to say hello whenever they hear us in the garden. We only share our tiny road with one other house and we have the sweetest, dreamiest neighbours.

When we thought that life couldn’t get any better and that we’d already won, we were expelled because we needed to learn that life can indeed get better. All of those dreams we had that seemed like too much to ask for or too impossible to become true, can happen. They did happen.

The owner of this house is an angel in a human’s body, he’s the sweetest, kindest soul and taking care of his beloved property is an honour. The incredible things that have happened while living here goes to show that sometimes having to crawl through the eye of a needle can lead you to a magical undiscovered world. I needed to go through that to be birthed into this new state of abundance and beauty, which I’m sure won’t last forever because nothing lasts forever.

The life we have here is a dream come true, but one day it will end and we’ll find ourselves in a different chapter of life feeling similar feelings to now, as we have before. Life is full of cycles. But none of that exists yet, all I have for sure is the life I’m living today, and that’s a blessing that needs no disguise.