This week, my husband and I walked the beach, 👫the way we do many mornings.

At the end of this familiar stretch of beach, we reach a natural stopping point where there is a man-made rock wall. 🧗‍♂️

The tide was very low. Low enough that we could get into an area that connects the beach to the sound. This area is typically under water, so we took the opportunity and went in to explore.qwe

My first reaction was “the face.” 😑

It smells marshy. It looked messy. Dirty, even. Shells scattered everywhere with hermit crabs backed down inside them, starfish washed up all over the sand, waiting it out until the tide turned. 🌊

My word for it was … grungy.

That’s the honest version. I was standing in the most alive square yard of that entire beach, and what came out of my mouth was that somebody ought to clean it up.

My husband said something profound, though (he’s a psychotherapist … that’s what he does), “Life is messy.”

And then the part I’ve been carrying around for days. Even when life is messy, there’s beauty and richness to the life.

He’s right, and it took me most of the walk back to admit it. 😩

Because the only reason I could see any of the mess was that the water was gone. That stretch sits under the ocean nearly all the time. The hermit crabs are there every day. The starfish are there all year. All of it is going on every single day of my life, whether the tide lets me LOOK at it or not.

The mess was just the part I could finally see. 🧐

I have spent my whole career watching women do to their bodies exactly what I did to that beach.

Something surfaces. Sleep goes. The gut goes sideways. Skin, mood, cycle, energy, pick one, and something that used to work stops working. 😓

And the first instinct, mine included that morning, is that it looks bad and it ought to be tidied up.

So we suppress it. We put a bandage on a festering wound so it isn’t so unsightly. ❤️‍🩹

Think about what a healing wound actually looks like. Red, swollen, hot, and then a scab that is uglier than the original cut ever was. Every bit of that is the repair, running on the surface where you have to look at it.

Your body does not have a tidy setting. ⚙️

So, I get it. Symptoms are uncomfortable, and they are inconvenient, and they almost always arrive in a week you had plans. Nobody wants to be told that the thing making them miserable is the thing working.

But the symptom is the hermit crab. 🦀It is the sign that something has been living under there, going on without your permission, for a good while before you ever noticed.

Don’t make it look tidy. Find out what’s underneath it.

That is most of what we do inside the StressLess Sanctuary. Not smoothing the sand over. Standing in the messy part while the tide is out, working out what your body has been managing on its own without telling you, and then dealing with the root cause of it instead of the surface of it.

It’s Sunday morning, and I still think that stretch of beach looked grungy.

I’m also still thinking about it, 🤔 which tells you which one of us was right.