Coming into Relationship with Myself

Recently, I was told I have a polyp on my ovary that needs to be removed.

It wasn’t the diagnosis that unsettled me most. It was being asked to make decisions about my body while noticing my nervous system scatter. A mix of sympathetic charge and dorsal shutdown led me to freeze. I couldn’t think clearly. My body felt far away from me.

Later, when I shared the decisions I needed to make with Kim, she asked a simple question that I couldn’t answer:

“What does your body say?”

Noticing that I couldn’t respond, she asked another:

“What’s your relationship with your body?”

The honest answer?

Especially when it comes to my ovaries, I don’t really have one. If anything, I realised I’m a bit pissed off with them.

After two miscarriages, there’s a story I’ve been carrying that my body, and particularly my feminine organs, let me down. I’ve dismissed them, ignored them, even resented them. They felt inconvenient, overly feminine, and out of place in the many masculine environments I’ve spent much of my life navigating. Somewhere along the way, they became something I tolerated rather than related to.

That realisation became an invitation.
Not to fix, hate, or ignore my body.
But to come into relationship with it.

Relationship with self is not a single thing

Through years of personal development, including the foundations I gained through PRH, I’ve learned that I am not one flat, singular entity.

There are many aspects of me at play in any given situation:

• my body
• my intellect
• my sensibility and emotional life
• my deep conscience
• my being

Relationship with self is multi-dimensional. You can be deeply connected in some areas and quietly disconnected in others, without realising it until something brings it into focus.

This particular moment highlighted a specific rupture. A broken relationship with parts of my body that hold femininity, creation, loss, and grief.

Accepting the invitation to come back into connection with these parts allows me to become a more dynamic being. It opens up more of my own possibility to be discovered.

And that matters.

Being and doing are not the same

This reflection comes alongside another area of growth around self-worth.

What’s becoming clearer is the distinction between:

• who I aspire to be
• what I aspire to do

Who I aspire to be sits below the iceberg, largely unseen but foundational.
What I aspire to do sits above the waterline, visible, measurable, and often critiqued.

Who I aspire to be includes:

• warmth
• integrity
• love
• joy
• conscious, intentional living
• the courage to question and challenge the status quo
• a deep desire to support people and teams to work, and live, more intentionally

Over the last year especially, I’ve discovered a new quality of self-love. Not the performative kind, but the practical kind. Wanting to genuinely look after myself. Trusting that my body is wired to support me, not sabotage me. That it wants me to succeed. That it wants me to thrive.

What I aspire to do - building The View Looks Good, coaching, team and community-building, strengthening my marriage, supporting my child’s development, and looking after my body - is informed by that deeper being. When I’m unclear about who I am, my doing becomes strained. When I’m grounded in who I am, my doing carries clarity, confidence, and coherence.

That’s why coming into relationship with self matters so deeply.

Connecting with who I aspire to be has allowed me to be more gentle with myself. It has helped me make choices about my procedure that support a deeper relationship with my ovaries. It has encouraged me to follow through because I do care for myself. And it has given me the opportunity to heal the part of me that was angry at how my body had let me down in the past.

The joyful and courageous part of me wants to speak about this openly, to give other women permission to come into relationship with their feminine organs too.

A nervous system-first way of getting to know yourself

From a nervous system-first approach – what we teach at The View Looks Good – coming into relationship with yourself starts simply.

First: awareness.
Becoming aware of:

• physical sensations in the body
• the quality and nature of your thoughts
• your emotional landscape

The tone of your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations tells you which nervous system state you are in. It gives information about whether you’re in a ventral, sympathetic, or dorsal state. It lets you know where to heal, shift, grow, or move. Getting caught up in the actual content of thoughts can be misleading.

Second: observation without judgement.
Wherever you are is not wrong.
It’s not right either.
It simply is.

This is about noticing what’s present without adding a second layer of criticism or shame. Instead, we meet ourselves with compassion, curiosity, and the courage to explore.

Third: response, not reaction.
When difficult thoughts or sensations arise, the ones that sound harsh, arrogant, fearful, or unkind, or that are hurtful, even painful, we don’t make them mean that’s who we are.

Instead, we let them tell us something simpler and more useful:

Something in me is unsettled.
Something is disconnected.

From there, we can ask:

• What do I need right now?
• What would help me reconnect?
• What space, action, or gentleness is required?

Coming into relationship with yourself isn’t about perfection.

It’s about noticing disconnection and learning how to return.

Again and again.

This experience with my body hasn’t been a setback.
It’s been a reminder.

A reminder that relationship with self is alive, evolving, and worthy of attention, especially in the places we’ve ignored, judged, or quietly blamed.

If this reflection resonates, we’d love to welcome you into the community, where you can access courses, coaching, information, and practice groups to support you in building a deeper, more compassionate relationship with yourself.