Special Guest Video
Kristi Keller of Wildhood Wanted gets real vulnerable and shares her fear of traveling after enduring a trauma while away from home while TeriLeigh shares her own story of being unable to attend the funeral of a close family member because she was backpacking through Europe in the 1990s.
Storytime
“You need a shower!” Pedro the parrot hollered at us from the backseat as we passed yet another closed gas station with a sign that read “no more gas.”
K added another tick to her counting list. 37 times Pedro had told us to take a shower. 12 gas stations without gas. She giggled. I laughed too, hoping she couldn’t detect my anxiety. We’d been in bumper to bumper traffic for over 12 hours.
I escaped Hurricane Irma in a Prius named Alice with a fourteen-year-old teenager, my shiba inu, two parrots, and twelve lemon tree seedlings.
It was September 2017, and Hurricane Irma was set to hit landfall in less than two days. When the evacuation orders came through, the kid and I packed up Alice. I sat down in the driver’s seat after making sure all the family photo albums and heirlooms were safe inside the washing machine and everything in the house was unplugged, I felt like my body was six times its natural weight.
Three hours into the drive, K’s mom called from Italy to ask why the cameras at the house weren’t working. I told her I unplugged everything in the house, cuz that’s what the hurricane evacuation list said to do.
Can you go back?
I refused, and she wasn’t pleased. All my people pleasing alarms went off, and my hips sunk another few inches into Alice’s bucket seat.
“It’s okay, I don’t want to go back either,” K assured me.
I drove Alice for over 13 hours on one tank of gas. For the last two hours, K joked in puns on speaker-phone with my then-boyfriend-now-husband (back in Minnesota) who searched the internet and called gas stations on party-line to see if he could direct us to one that did still have gas.
Finally, at 2pm, we fueled up in backwoods Georgia and stopped for the night in a Motel Six so shady that we slept in our sleeping bags on top of the cheap nylon bedspreads.
The next morning, I could barely move. My hips felt like they each butt check was a bowling ball, and had locked into place.
Traveling is supposed to be an exciting time, a fun time, an adventure. But evacuating from a hurricane filled me with anxiety like I’d never felt before. So many what-ifs floating through my brain sent buzzing anxious energy through all my nerves, evidently landing right in the base of my pelvis. I felt like an old woman.
I’m a yogi, how is this possible???
I crawled into child’s pose on my yoga mat. K still sleeping soundly with Sukha while Pedro and Pepper chattered away happily in the bathroom with the shower on full blast.
And I cried.
Big wet silent hip-pain tears.
I stayed there, in child’s pose, rocking my butt from side to side, begging my body to cooperate. Praying to Goddess to get me through this.
That was the extent of my practice that day.
Just one pose - I just wanted to be a child again.
But instead, I accepted my fate as the grown up in the room. And damnit, this grown-up was gonna give this 14-year-old child the adventure of her lifetime!
While my insides churned with anxiety, K woke with a sense of wonderment and excitement. I worried about where we would go next, and how long we might have to stay, and how I would pay for it all. She asked me if we could find some small town coffee shop for breakfast, and go find her favorite sushi place in Atlanta, and maybe even spend a day in Savannah?
We found the coffee shop, and it was next to a park with a giant playground. After egg sandwiches and espresso, she nudged me to go on the swings with her.
Pump after pump, K giggled.
And slowly, one pump to the sky at a time, my anxiety transformed.
K’s excitement was contagious.
Why was I so worried? I had traveled tens of thousands of miles across America by myself, this time I had companions! and fun ones at that! This should be fun, not daunting. The hard part was OVER!
Over the next three days, we explored various backwoods drives through Georgia, stopping to take pictures of anything and everything that looked interesting. We had a true Americana road-trip adventure before eventually landing in the guest bedroom of a long forgotten college friend in Buford GA for two weeks before the evacuation orders were lifted.
Every year, since then, around the first week of September, K texts me pictures from our adventure and tells me it is still one of her favorite memories.
(the kid, the two parrots, and all 12 lemon tree seedlings made it back to Florida safely)
Lesson
Physiologically, the feelings of anxiety and excitement behave exactly the same in the human body. Whether you are excited about the unknown surprises that await in some fun adventure, or you are anxious about the uncertain what ifs that you don’t think you can handle coming at you, your body responds the same.
The heart rate increases.
Breath rate increases.
Blood pressure rises.
Restlessness occurs.
Adrenaline and cortisol hormones flood the bloodstream.
The only difference between anxiety and excitement is. . . your thoughts. Your perception. Your attitude!
Thank you K, for shifting my attitude.
Homework
All fears usually live under the umbrella of one ginormous crippling fear. . . Uncertainty. When you get so caught up in the worries of what might be, the uncertainty of the future, you can’t move forward. Where does this crippling fear land in the body, usually the HIPS. And what that means is, not only do you have a hard time mentally moving forward, but your hips stop you from physically moving forward as well.
The homework this week helps you to stretch out those tight “what ifs” that lodge themselves into the deep corners of your pelvis and make you walk like you have a stick-up-your-butt. As an added bonus, it will likely help you shift from fear/anxiety mode into excitement/adventure mode.
🔒 Mini-Course Mini-Lesson #1 - How to Be Okay with Uncertainty & Unknown
This short MindfulSense stretching practice video helps you to let go fears of uncertainty and release tightness in your hips.
Resources
If you really like my stories, I have more.
Check out my other two publications:
Words are Spells 🔮
The 🧙🏼♂️Hobbit & The 🦉Owl
💜Heart Research💜
If you’ve read this far, I absolutely adore you as one of my loyal readers.
Thank you! I gush my gratitude to you.
I have a favor to ask. . .
I am gearing up to launch something new here on Substack in 2025, and I need your input.
I’m looking for 20-30 individuals to participate in a 15-20 minute conversation with me about new project (shhhh…it’s not public yet). You can click this link to book, and I’ll give you a 10-minute mini-reading as a token of my gratitude.
