🎧 If you’d rather listen, press play above and I’ll read it to you.

My baby and I have been co-sleeping for over a year.

I didn’t plan it this way. We had a crib we intended to use, but once the reality of her sleeping depended so much on me, those plans quickly shifted.

When she was very little I kept her in the bedside crib as I slept.

As she grew bigger, I realized that co-sleeping just made way more sense.

It felt instinctive to hold her close.

When she stirred, all it took was a small turn and there I was, nursing her back to sleep.

No one can prepare you for this reality.

You just find what works.

The sweetness of it all soothed me too.

Not just the warm hormonal wash that comes with nursing.

The immense relief of being able to nourish her after weeks of working hard to get my milk to flow at the ripe age of 46.

When she was born we decided it just made sense for my husband to leave the bed as his tendency to snore was inevitable, and when he drifted deeply into sleep he’d often toss which we were afraid would also wake her.

Something we both definitely did not want.

And so…we’ve been sleeping apart for now.

Unfortunately for us sleep had always been one of the most intimate places we could find each other.

Spooning side by side, we’d lie together.

Our favorite ritual to add to this: listening to the sounds of Tibetan Singing Bowls.

There, we’d drop into the absence of needing.

Just being. Breathing. Finding each other in a pool of quiet space.

Now, moments like that are found in the day-to-day drop-ins we endeavor to take when the taking asks.

A kiss in the kitchen. A cuddle on the couch. A hug that lingers. Reaching for each other whenever we can.

Because night is her’s now.

This small angel learning the ways of sleep through repetition and the contours of my body’s edges.

And somehow, the bigger she gets, the more strategic she’s become at keeping me there.

My very committed little spoon.

Throwing arms down across my chest. Legs reaching sideways to cover my thigh so if I even think of moving, her nervous system sparks awake effortlessly… closing the distance before her eyes do.

Some days I feel trapped.

Other days, I wait it out.

And some days I just collapse and meet her in that cozy seam between waking and milk.

But mostly…. I am in awe of her.

The way she’s figured it out.

How to use her body to keep track of mine.

I know I will miss this.

These moments of closeness.

The serene depth of her body’s surrender.

That distinct lilting sigh she wakes me with, like a bird lifting off and then quietly touching ground.

But I also miss the freedom of turning the other way.

The ability to reach for my husband in the dark.

To hold him in that stillness that lifts us both into what feels like one breathing body.

That practice became our way back when the day ran hot—when dishes stacked, deadlines loomed, or some sharp sentence hung between us.

We would curl close, listen to the bowls, and let our breathing slow until the room felt wider.

And I think that’s the strange part.

I don’t want to rush this time with my daughter.

But I also miss what came before it.

Both are true. Neither cancels the other out.

And so we find each other in the moments of passing.

Small touches that say: I’m here. I see you. I haven’t forgotten.

In the dark, I’m hers.

In the soft hours before and after, I try to be ours as best as I can.

Perhaps that’s what motherhood does. Asking us to live somewhere inside the paradox of what once was, what is, and what we know will one day be gone.

In the meantime, I’m learning this other language that doesn’t require my mouth to move.

The language of pressure and proximity. The syntax of breath.

Some nights I fail at grace.

I get irritated at the kink in my neck. I spill onto him, or he spills onto me a sigh that sounds like blame.

I snap inwardly at the fact that everyone seems to be getting what they need from my body except for me.

I wish I could just have one last minute to complete my thought, before she calls me back again.

I want to belong to myself long enough to remember what it feels like to roll away without apology.

And even as that want tightens in my chest, another truth rises to meet it.

Because I know deep down how ridiculously lucky I am.

That these moments, will not last forever.

And that reality, helps tilt my axis back to gratitude.

As she sighs, stretches her arms out…

Open as sky, warm as skin.

I tell myself as many times as I can.

That the bowls will sing again.

That our bodies will find their way back.

Until one day, I will turn towards the shape of the man I have missed, and we will listen again, to the bowls, to the breath.

To the quiet that once felt impossible.

For now…. she still reaches for me in the dark.

And I am still there to answer.

If you’d like to listen to the sounds of the singing bowls we used to fall asleep to, I’ve dropped the 33 Bowls Breathe album below.

The Embodiment Guide

There is a river in the throat
that does not begin with sound.

It begins beneath language,
where breath first learns
whether it’s safe to rise

Or better to rest.

A listening corridor.
A bridge of bone, nerve,
and all the truths
kept warm by the body

until the voice was ready.

Here, the mind sends its stories.

Here, the heart sends its weather.

Here, roots remember
what it means to belong
without disappearing.

Your throat isn’t only where you speak.

It’s where your inner world
asks permission
to touch the outer one.

It’s where silence becomes
medicine or exile.

Where a swallowed no
can become a boundary

between you and yourself.

Where a tremble
can become a song.

Where grief, pleasure, anger,
prayer, and laughter

all wait at the same gate
wearing different names.

Open slowly.

Let breath soften
into the walls of staying small.

Let the hum be like vine,
speaking only what is real enough
to take root.

And when this passage opens,
may your voice return as presence.

May it carry the mind,
the nervous system

,
& the body

as one living current.

May truth move through you.

Clear.
Ancient.
Unapologetically alive.

The Embodiment Guide

From the very beginning, she’s always loved sound.

Little coos, babbles, explorations

Testing tone, rhythm, vibration

And volume. So much volume.

Discovering what her voice can do, not just what it can say.

So when the growling started, it wasn’t entirely out of character.

But still…we were not prepared.

It came out of nowhere.

A low, steady, surprisingly committed grrrr…

from a very small human.

I remember looking at my husband like,

Is she… growling?

And then we both started laughing.

It was unexpected.

And yet so… serious.

Like she just decided,

Yes. This is what we’re doing now.

At first, it was just funny.

But then she did it again.

Standing there, wobbling, concentrating

Eyes narrowing with a new kind of purpose.

Grrrr….

So we met her there.

We growled back.

She paused. Looked at us.

And then…grrrr…again.

Stronger this time. Intensely committed.

And just like that, we were in it together.

This strange, joyful, completely wordless conversation.

Growl.

Response.

Growl again.

And laughter threaded all the way through it.

No right way. No wrong way.

No need to shape it into something more appropriate or more understandable.

Just sound.

Expression.

And play.

And yet, underneath the play, something deeper was happening.

I could see it in her tiny body.

Each time she made that sound, she gathered herself

Poised, allowing the vibration to organize, stabilize,

Her legs pressed more firmly into the ground.

Her torso ignited

Her focus sharpened

With her arms bracing inward

Her face quickenning into something fierce and focused.

She wasn’t just making a sound.

She was taking up space with each tiny growl.

And when we joined her

There was no… “you can do it.”

No cheering. No instructions.

Just us growling back. And you could feel the effect.

What started as something that made us laugh.

Became something that made her more sure of herself.

More willing to try.

More grounded in her body.

More confident.

We often think of confidence as something that comes later.

Built through words, encouragement, achievements.

But watching her, I’m reminded

It begins right here.

With this tiny warrior discovering her roar.

It’s not something we taught her.

It’s something she found.

There are forms of communication we forget as we grow older.

Sounds we stop making.

Ways of expressing that feel too strange, too raw, too unrefined to explore.

But they don’t disappear.

They wait for the right moment to unearth themselves.

What I felt in those moments wasn’t just connection to her

but a remembering within myself.

A place where voice isn’t about being understood…

it’s about being felt.

Later, of course, it would dissolve.

Into laughter. Into babble. Into something more familiar.

But for those precious moments—

We met somewhere older than language.

Just us.

Growling.

And somehow, becoming more ourselves in the process.

The RAH sound is something I’ve explored with clients for years... the way it moves through the throat, organizes the body, brings someone back into themselves.

I wrote about it publicly for the first time last week.

But this moment with my baby happened months before that. It’s not quite the same sound... but the intelligence behind it... I’d seen that work too many times to count. I just hadn’t put it into words yet.

I wasn’t teaching her anything that day, just growling back.

But maybe that’s the point. The body doesn’t wait for the writing. It’s already speaking.

I write to you trying to stay close to what is happening in this moment.

May was the month of water, and it also marked the passing of my most important teacher and mentor, Yamuna Zake, creator of Yamuna Body Logic and Yamuna Body Rolling.

I am just beginning to process the grief and cope with the reality that she is no longer with us. She was a legend in the healing world and laid a foundation of wisdom for so many of us.

A swami in Israel gave her the name Yamuna, which was rooted in Emunah, the Hebrew word for faith, belief, and trust. Yamuna is also a river in India, which is also why it felt so fitting for her since her work moved through the body the way river water does. Finding every place that had been waiting to be reached. And somehow, you never felt it coming until you were already there.

Last month, water became the theme within The Embodiment Guide.

I thought I was exploring it through the body: warmth, skin, surrender, buoyancy, the way water teaches us how to be held.

And then she passed after a short terminal battle with a rare from of cancer.

Now I understand that water was not only a theme. It was a threshold into both an ending and a beginning. This grief is collective in a way I have never experienced, because it touches so many of us within the healing community.

Since her passing, there have been so many heartfelt messages of love and connection, and so many stories of how she dedicated her life to sharing her work and helping those who needed it.

This month, I had planned on moving into voice and resonance and the emotion that it holds.

It feels karmic and fitting that this month I am laying the foundation for this key theme and bridge to the heart as I work through sharing my own work, while also processing all that was left unspoken between us.

I was able to share a message of love in her passing, but there was so much more I wanted to say. That is something I will have to live with, and hopefully continue to soften through grief, through connection, and through those who knew her so well.

What I received from her was not only a method.

It was a way of seeing and feeling.

She taught me that the body has logic and order, and that even the most primal layers are included in that intelligence. She taught me that bones are a living matrix, and that with the right touch and intention, the body could begin to unfurl toward embodied freedom.

She helped me learn this through her hands, her guidance, and the precision with which she shared what she knew.

That posture carries history. That pain is its own teacher. That touch can reveal what words have not yet reached.

And whether or not we were close at the end of her life, that way of seeing and feeling lives in me now.

Perhaps I am only beginning to understand it.

I had a complicated relationship with her and, unfortunately, had lost touch with her in the last years of her life. This was very painful to me in ways I still find difficult to express in words.

The rupture between us never erased the love.

It only made the grief more layered.

There is grief for what was lost, grief for what was never repaired, and grief for the younger part of me who still longed to be seen by her.

It was not only the loss of her gifts, but the loss of her presence. Her smile. Her ability to see your pain through how you held yourself, and also your humanity.

Becoming a mother has made this grief land differently.

I am beginning to understand lineage in a new way now.

What we receive. What we carry. What we soften. What we choose not to repeat. What we allow to become more loving through us.

I know in my heart that her work will continue to color everything I do, and I want our connection to become clear and filled with love as I move through this next chapter of my life.

I feel her as grief begins to move. I sense her close by as tears fall.

This is the essence of true resonance.

It is deeper than words. It carries many tonal colors, both dark and light. Underneath all of them is the ache and joy of connection. The deeper we love, the more those colors can flow, and the deeper the ripples can move through our hearts.

Some teachers do not leave us all at once, they become part of our own current.

They move through the patterns we inherited, the questions we keep asking, the practices we return to, and the way our hands begin to know things before the mind can explain them.

Yamuna was the river, and in many ways, she still is.

Her work moved through bone, breath, ball, touch, pressure, instinct, and presence. It was precise, but never merely technical. It was anatomical, but never separate from soul. It was about the body, but also about the life that wanted to come through the body more freely.

That is what I am sitting with now.

Not only what she taught, but what she transmitted.

Not only what I learned, but what I am still learning from the imprint she left in me.

This month, I will be dedicating my writing to the impact she made on me. I want to honor the way her work shaped my own, the way her teachings still move through my hands, and the way her presence continues to reveal itself as I step more fully into my own voice.

I do not want to flatten her into an idea of perfection. That would not feel honest. It would not honor the complexity of real love, real mentorship, real lineage, or real grief.

What I want is something more truthful.

To let the love remain.

To let the pain soften.

To let the gratitude deepen.

To let what was unresolved become part of the prayer, rather than something I keep trying to solve with my mind.

Perhaps this is where resonance begins.

Not in having the perfect words, but in allowing what is still alive in the body to vibrate honestly.

And so I offer this month to her.

To the river of her life.

To the many bodies she touched.

To the wisdom she gave so generously.

To the parts of me that still grieve what was lost.

To the parts of me that are ready to carry forward what remains.

And to the mystery of how a teacher continues to teach, even after they are gone.

I want to leave this here as a prayer along with an image of the river behind my home where we will soon be planting a river birch in her honor for what was spoken, what was unspoken, what was held, and what can now be released.

The Ho‘oponopono Prayer:

I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.

This essay is paired with a downloadable somatic ritual guide called The Ungrip, which you will find linked at the bottom.

It’s a gentle practice for unwinding tension from the hand to the jaw, especially the kind that can gather in the body from holding, feeding, scrolling, and caring.

Because sometimes the context for the work isn’t only in the words.

It’s in the practice.

It’s 5:42 a.m.

My baby has just drifted back to sleep, her soft percussive sigh the sound of final surrender.

In these early months…

This is our island.

Just her, breathing deeply against the warmth of my chest. The weight of her melting, a slow current of heat and trust settling deeper into my ribs. The way time dissolves into something softer than sleep, quieter than thought and more precious than anything I could ever name.

It thins into a hush that carries us just offshore from the tide of the day. All that matters is this small gravity between her sternum and mine, the metronome of our ribs remembering one rhythm. One love.

I don’t move. I don’t want to.

I know that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

And yet…

Even here, on this small island of warmth, a whisper of reach begins to gather in me. My right thumb twitches to type. A dull tension kinks from my wrist toward the crook of my neck. My shoulders carry the tenderness of a body that has been holding, bending, nursing, and folding itself around another life with a devotion it never had to learn.

It’s taken me three days to get these first few sentences down.

And honestly? That feels like the perfect way to begin.

What the Body Already Knows

I came to motherhood the long way. Five years and IVF cycles that left an ache not just in my heart but also in the core of my bones with hormone storms that left them a little less sure beneath me.

But finally, after 5 long years, it culminated in a birth that stretched over four days and ended in surgery.

And after all of that… she arrived.

Helpless and hopeful. Tender and strong. Making a quick recovery from all that tension that led her to being born.

As if the world itself exhaled for her.

I, on the other hand, learned something I can’t unlearn. That the body carries what the mind can’t yet bear. It holds. It braces. It keeps on going, standing night watch for years, waiting for the smallest break in the pattern.

And when she finally came, it was proof that hope was not a false promise. It was love born as ignition. A fierce, reorienting fire that I hadn’t known was waiting.

As the axis within me shifted. So too did my body, which had been holding on for so, so long. Suddenly it knew exactly what it was holding out for.

My little miracle.

And slowly, steadily, this returning is becoming the most important practice I have.

The Mirror She Holds Up

I feel it in my body before I can think it. My shoulders soften. My jaw releases. Something old and practiced that has braced for years loosens without permission…

Just like that.

Her eyes follow the smallest shifts in me. A flicker of emotion. A softening around my mouth. A small tension lingering.

She’s teaching me in these small exchanges. As her little hand traces the contours of my face, I can feel something land in me in a completely new way.

This is what the bond does. Forging, moment by moment, a repetition that becomes ritual and touch that makes a habit of trust.

She doesn’t need perfection from me. She just needs presence. And in learning to offer her that, I find softening. I waver in moments. Sometimes distracted. Yet somehow primally tethered to her tender cues in ways I could have never imagined.

In the mirror of her gaze, I feel my life quietly rearrange itself. She isn’t just learning how to be in this world. She’s teaching me how to be in it with her in it too.

The Oldest Technology

Something is different now. Not just in how I see her, but in how I experience myself.

A hidden dial has been turned up deep in me.

The world is still there, but everything is filtered through this vast connective maternal field.

Even when I sleep, I’m not fully gone. There’s a part of me hovering just beneath the surface.

aware

attuned

ready.

Deep inside my brain the reticular activating system is in full gear. The brain’s gatekeeper of wakefulness and a neural network in the brainstem that decides what gets through and what falls through the cracks.

During this postpartum it’s exquisitely retuned. Hormones like oxytocin and shifting estrogen levels, plus new wiring between the amygdala, thalamus, and cortex, bias the weave of the brain towards connection and protection. Filtering the world for what matters most…

her breath

her swallow

her eyes as they look for me.

This, too, is part of what research now makes plain: new mothers’ brains are reshaped through neural remodeling, a profound reorganization that tunes circuits for empathy, vigilance, and pattern recognition.

And I can feel it too. Not just in how quickly I register her shifts, a change in breath, or a flicker of discomfort before it becomes a cry, but in how quickly I’m learning to register my own. The tension gathering in my jaw. The moment my breath shortens before I’ve consciously noticed I’m holding.

A brain reorganized for connection doesn’t just look outward. It starts to read inward with the same precision. And what I’m discovering is that the two are inseparable.

When I drift… attention-thining. Eyes slipping into the phone. Drawn to the flicker of patterns. And curiosity of the world just beyond. This is the reticular activating system, too, shifting the texture. A slight tilt of the field. And my body knows it before my mind does.

Coming back is simpler than I expected, though. A breath that drops into a more even flow. A hand that makes contact. Eyes that land and stay.

And when I return to myself, she feels it too.

This attunement. The oldest technology we have, born of the body.

She’s teaching me this. In the quiet moments and in the not-so-quiet ones.

In every small return.

This Thread We Weave

I think about what I want to pass forward.

A mended thread in a line that taught its women to hold and hold and hold. My grandmother’s shoulders. My mother’s hands. My own wrists as they learn to unclench from all the demands.

Let her inherit a body that believes it is safe to rest, to ask, to be fully met.

As I do this work, may her work be different.

It’s what I’m practicing now. Every time I choose to feel her weight instead of reaching for the phone, every time I let her gaze land somewhere behind my eyes and stay, every time I breathe slow enough so that she can borrow my calm. I am doing the work.

The work of remembering.

So I put down the phone. Feel the weight of her, the tide of us. The day can wait… just a little longer.

On this small island as we arrive.

If this piece stirred something in your own body, I created a small somatic ritual guide to accompany it.

The Ungrip is a gentle hand-to-jaw release practice for the tension that can gather from holding, feeding, scrolling, and caring.

It’s not meant to give you one more thing to do perfectly.

It’s simply an invitation to return to your body with care.

Get the guide

And because this piece is arriving on Mother’s Day, I want to leave a small note here for the mothers who are often holding more than anyone can see.

With warmth and rooted presence,

Megwyn 🌿

Signal and Skin is a somatic journal exploring what it means to live in a human body within a hyperconnected world.

My shoulders contracted like a fist closing around the top of my spine, held there by a reflex to protect with no way to release it.

.

.

I had wanted to experience everything.

A natural, unmedicated birth.

So there would be nothing between me and what my body knew how to do.

I wanted to be awake inside it.
To meet whatever came and be changed because of it.

As an embodiment guide…

I had spent so much time learning to trust the body’s intelligence. To move toward sensation rather than away from it. I knew, in a cellular way, that our bodies hold a capacity most of us never get to discover.

I wanted to find mine.

When the labor began… Finally, after days of trying to nudge it along… I welcomed it. All of it.

—

My sister working macramé into a small toy for the baby. She was not able to stay for the entire birth as she had flown in too early but managed to make this small token of love — a gentle reminder that my baby would soon be born and that play was imminent.

My husband was there, anxious and overtired, trying to steady himself from the lack of sleep and the unseen demands of this experience. My doula held a calm, unwavering presence, a lightness that helped to shutter any lingering fear of the unknown.

When the contractions finally came. Everything fell away.

I began to move. Guided by a force that ached but was also purposeful.

As the pain began to surge, I knew to invite the sounds. Those low, guttural tones, timed to the peaks of pain to steady the labor and move it along. had read so much about these moments from Ina May Gaskin. Her Guide to Childbirth had found me at exactly the right moment. Midwives had always known about these sounds. My doula was no different. The moment the contractions began, she helped connect me to the ferocity that would keep me going for the next three days.

She didn’t explain it. She just knew. And that kind of knowing, in moments like these, is its own form of medicine.

And still. Nothing had prepared me for what it actually was.

The sound didn’t calm me. It ignited a force I had no word for.

—

Primal, total, already mine.

Each low tone moved through the contraction rather than against it, giving my nervous system something to follow. The pain didn’t disappear. But it became a wave that I could lean into, a vibration to ride. They also help the cervix to naturally soften.

I thought: so this is what the body already knows how to do.

There is something a hospital environment does quietly, without meaning to. It raises the social stakes of sound. Women learn to manage themselves. To keep it contained. To perform a version of labor that doesn’t disturb the room.

I was grateful my doula was there, and my husband was present holding space, and that my own years of somatic practice had given me permission I didn’t know I’d need. Permission to be loud. To be primal. To let the sound do what sound has always known how to do.

But labor stalled. Then started again. Then stalled.

My baby’s heart, monitored continuously, would periodically signal distress. Positions were adjusted. Medications were titrated up, then paused. Hours passed in the strange suspended time of a labor ward — intense, then waiting, then intense again.

At some point, the epidural. The relief of it was its own kind of surrender.

And then, finally, pushing. And then, the baby beginning to show signs of distress again. And a doctor walking in, having reviewed my chart, recommending a C-section.

I asked for one more chance.

The baby’s heart told us what it needed.

And I understood.

It was my doula who said it, as they were preparing to wheel me in.

She leaned close.

“Remember,” she said. “You wanted to experience everything. And this is everything.”

I don’t have a word for what moved through me in that moment. It wasn’t comfort exactly. It was more like being returned to myself—to the intention I had set, held up so I could see it still intact, still true, even here. Especially here.

She didn’t console me. She witnessed me. And in doing so, she gave me back my agency at the exact moment I thought I’d lost it.

Breath came in at the top of my chest, sharp and thin, and went out just as quickly.

There was a voice.
Mine or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell.
“Keep breathing.”

I was still shaking, but there were seams of stillness between the tremors, and in those seams I could hear her. Soft at first, like a distant gull, then clearer. And then—her cry.

I was still shaking. I kept asking my husband where she was. She was somewhere behind me, beyond what I could reach or see.

My body didn’t know it was over.
It kept running the emergency long after the emergency had passed.

This is the language of the nervous system under extreme threat. The unknown.

And then I heard him.
My husband’s voice, close to my ear.

“She’s perfect,” he said.

And I knew. She was here. She was safe. Everything I had moved through had delivered us both.

I understood something I couldn’t have arrived at any other way.

The body I had brought into that room—the body that knew how to make those sounds, that could lean into a wave instead of fighting it, that had found reserves of endurance I hadn’t known were there—had done everything it came to do.

The outcome changed.

My capacity didn’t.

I had gone somewhere I didn’t know I could go.
That isn’t nothing.
It is, in fact, everything.

My daughter was taken to the NICU while I was sewn back together. I couldn’t hold her…yet.

On the first and second days I could only view her through the glass.

Finally, on the third day, they let me hold her.

And there I hummed and told her that we would soon leave this place.

Her eyes widened.

Her body softened.

As if she had been waiting for exactly this.

She knew me by sound before she ever knew me by sight.

Of course she did.

—

We are not taught that surrender is a form of strength. We are taught that it is the absence of it.

But I have felt what the body does when it finally lets go of what it cannot control. There is something that becomes available in that release. A different kind of power. Softer. More total.

I would not change a single thing.

Not the stalled labor.

Not the epidural.

Not the blue curtain, my chattering jaw, or the operating table.

Not the doctor who walked in at the final moment.

Not the doula who leaned close and told me the truth.

I wanted to experience everything.

And I did.

With warmth and rooted presence,

Megwyn 🌿