Collapse awareness in the body
Collapse begins in the body. It shows up in how we breathe before we can speak about it. In the deep knowing that beneath the surface of our responsibilities and routines, our very foundations are crumbling. It shows itself in the unexplained fatigue, in the sudden stab of grief triggered by a smell, a birdsong, a half-remembered summer where the balmy air was surely much thicker with insects than it is now. For a long time I thought I was just tired. I thought there was something wrong with me. Something defective, even. I kept trying to name my symptoms while also knowing the diagnosis belonged elsewhere, to the system, not to me. It was simply my body fighting back, trying desperately to be heard.
I am learning to listen now, slowly. I'm still utterly gripped by the relentless pace of capitalism and all it demands of me to keep myself and family alive. Constantly treading water threatening to engulf me. Pause for too long and I will be lost to the depths, leaving the open mouths and outstretched arms of my children behind.
And yet, I push back against the paradigm. I try to centre care when I can. Not because I'm disciplined, but because my body demands it. Back pain, migraines, panic attacks, internalised rage, emotional collapse... The costs of override become too high. The anxiety, the flatness, the grief with nowhere safe to anchor, these aren’t signs of personal failure, they're messages. The body’s response to an unbearable volume of knowing.
“The costs of override become too high.”
To be collapse-aware is to live with a kind of doubled vision. One part of the self continues on with the grocery lists and school pickups, while another is tracking the slow-motion toppling of a world order that we know we can't stand, and yet we cannot imagine surviving without. There is no neat split. The knowing bleeds through. It stains the day. And the nervous system, already stretched from old wounds, intergenerational silences, and a culture that confuses urgency with worth, snaps.
It’s easy to believe this means we are broken. That we need to become stronger, clearer, more regulated, more focused. But that is the same logic that brought us here, the idea that we must be perpetually functional, that our worth is bound to our capacity to keep going. I think often of how hard I’ve tried to be reliable in a world that could not offer reliability in return.
Collapse awareness in the body asks for something else. A deeper kind of willingness. To repattern from the inside out. To rebuild trust with the self. To let capacity arise through contact, through warmth, through presence.
There are days I still want to deny what I know. Still find myself reaching for distraction, for performance, for well-trod roads that lead somewhere safe and certain. But more often now, I pause. I allow the tremor in my hands instead of suppressing it. I rest not because I have “earned it”, but because I am part of a world that needs more people whole.
This kind of listening is a practice, but it is also a surrender. Letting the body speak. Remembering it is not here to be subdued or transcended. It is a companion in the dark. A sensor for our hearts, an altar for our soul, a bridge to the new world…
I am learning to recognise the difference between collapse as external circumstance and collapse as internal disintegration. I am learning to let the latter guide me back to the former with more humility and less illusion.
There is no map, but there are signposts. There is the way breath sits either shallow and high in my chest, or deep and low in my belly. There are days that have rhythm and intentionality and there are days where I willingly submit to the numbing of the screen and let life around me descend into chaos. There is the deep, persistent, desperate ache for some kind of coherence.
The more I learn to stay with what hurts, the more I sense the possibility of something else. A different kind of awareness. One that doesn’t run on panic, performance, or pharmaceutical override. One that remembers its deeper belonging to the flesh, blood and soil of the more-than-human world.
Perhaps that is where capacity truly begins. Not with a plan, but with the willingness to feel again. With the courage to name what has always been there. With the slow, sacred labour of returning to the body over and over as a place worth inhabiting. The only place worth inhabiting, in this lifetime.
And still, the world bleeds. We witness children starve in Gaza through the glow of our smartphones. Hollowed eyes, bloodied blankets, soft mouths frozen mid-cry. We carry these images into our kitchens and bedrooms, not knowing what to do with them. Not knowing how to hold the grief.
The ice melts. Extraction deepens. The machine keeps humming. And we are asked to carry on, as if we haven’t seen what we’ve seen, as if we are meant to bear it alone.
“How is it that we’re not all wailing in the streets?”
Who are we serving by pretending everything is okay all the time?
If the body flinches, let it. If the heart breaks, let it. And if something rises up with the rage of a thousand suns and says, this cannot be the way, we must trust that, too.
The body has always known. What it needs now is permission to lead. A site of knowing, not just a vessel of survival. A place where grief can be metabolised, rage honoured, rest made sacred. And the future, however fragile, allowed to begin again.
If any of this has found its way into the tender parts of you, if your own body has been trying to speak, if you’ve been walking around with a scream in your throat, if you are carrying more than your share of knowing and don’t yet have a place to put it, I want you to know that something is stirring.
I’ve been sketching the bones of a new offering, something that might hold the kind of collapse-aware, agency-starved, spiritually serious conversations many of us have been aching for. But I don’t want to build it in a vacuum. I want to build it in conversation with you.
If you’re carrying too much, if you’ve been changed by the last few years, if you’ve been watching the world unravel and wondering what your place in it could possibly be, I’d be grateful if you’d take a few minutes to share what’s alive in you.
There’s a short survey here, and behind it, something beginning to take shape.
(The link button above does not seem to be working on the app so the direct link to the survey is here: https://gabriellefeather.substack.com/survey/3950590)
Thank you for being part of this with me.
— Gabrielle
Thank you, Gabrielle. Your words become both a recognition and an affirmation of my journey these past years. In October 2019, in our living room in the predawn darkness, I witnessed my wife take her last breath. Yes, she had been diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, had a long hospital stay the previous year, and was receiving treatment/care through an outpatient cancer program at our local hospital. But no one expected this — least of all myself. As I wept while calling 911, I also lifted her frail body off the bed, and lay her down on the floor to begin CPR. When the paramedics arrived, they took over. As I watched and I wept, I knew she was gone.
In those minutes, something deep within me also knew that everything had changed. Everything. Whoever I was, whatever dreams I had, whatever goals at work and plans for our impending retirement, were gone. I fell into such a deep and empty chasm ripe with fear and anxiety and this terrible unknowing. But the worst was the absolute absence that crushed my heart. Late that first evening, after planting myself in the middle of our country dirt road staring up into a brilliantly star lit night, I professed to myself, to the universe, to Barbara: “Some day I will understand the meaning of this. Not now — not now.” My journey had begun. I became a grief walker on the pathless path back to my broken open heart. I had entered the mystery of the person I would become in the absence of my wife.
In those initial sleepless nights after her death, as I lay in bed feeling disconnected from the world, from my body, from my heart — something strange was happening. Behind my closed eyes I remember seeing this kaleidoscope of flashing, multicolored lights in a jumbled strand of iridescent filaments. Over successive nights, I became to understand that this was the neurons in my brain firing and re-firing in its effort to reorganize itself. The wonder of holding a complexity of emotions — each night curiosity and awe adjoining anxiety and fear. The other strange thing is I began using a breathing mantra to assuage the waves of anxiety: “I breath in the peace and light of Barbara, I breath out all my fear of letting go and surrender.” Over and over throughout the night. Paying attention to the breath in and the breath out, setting my intention, and honoring Barbara — in many ways this has become my life blood over these past years.
I have learned other practices to help tend to my grief and “The Long Dark” that is descending over us. I live alone with my “Beauty Boy” Buster (a yellow lab/catahoula mix and a gift from Barbara in her last months). He is my dream keeper. He has taught me how to walk and be in the forest. I spend a lot of time in quiet, in solitude — listening, watching, engaging with the beauty of the world, the beauty of the 100 acres of forest I am caretaker of. So much which has evolved into a sacredness of place, as very specific sites where a vulnerable heart has found a conduit to the eternal world and often back to Barbara.
The greatest medicine I have been blessed with is to be able to sit with others who have lost a loved one. Sitting in these healing circles, to be able to witness the sorrow and agony of another whose heart has been broken open, has become sacred territory. I have learned that the compassionate heart has no limits or boundaries, a heart that is ever expanding and always able to hold more. I have learned that healing happens in silence, healing happens when I witness the meeting of another’s tear stained eyes with my own tear stained eyes. Ever expanding, ever more the merging of hearts in grief together.
Your words evoke a deep recognition, Gabrielle. Thank you for the beautiful way you give voice to this.