Reflections: Embodied Becoming Through Seasons

Breath, Body, Season, and Becoming as Human Rights Praxis
The body holds what I am learning.
Breath carries what I cannot always name.
This work is not about mastering knowledge.
It is about learning how to live it, while I am still inside it.

Grounding
Indigenous ways of learning understand knowledge as relational, embodied, and contextual.
It emerges through a relationship with land, story, community, and self.
It cannot be rushed without consequence.
Seasonality teaches the same.
There are times for growth and times for rest.
Winter is not a failure. It is conservation.
Spring is not a resolution. It is a possibility.
Yoga reflects this.
It is not about achievement.
It is about the relationship with breath, sensation, and change.
Practice shifts with capacity.
Learning is cyclical, embodied, and relational.

🌱 Early Spring: Survival and the Seed of Learning
My relationship to education began in early spring, not abundance but fragile emergence.
I was a single mother raising my son while completing my Bachelor of Social Work.
Education was not about self-discovery.
It was about Survival. Safety. Stability.
This was seed time.
Quiet, practical, necessary.

☀️ Summer: Advocacy, Endurance, and What the Body Carries
After graduation, I spent decades in child advocacy.
This was summer: intense, outward, sustained.
Advocacy required presence.
It meant holding stories of harm without turning away.
Witnessing is not neutral.
It changes you.
The body keeps a record.
Summer teaches endurance.
It also reveals the cost.
Like holding a posture too long, advocacy without release creates strain.
This work names that.

🍂 Autumn: Rupture and Letting Go
Autumn arrived through rupture.
Divorce and professional destabilization unfolded together.
What is often framed as personal failure is also structural loss, relational, economic, and identity-based.
My body knew before I had language for it.
Breath shifted.
Ground moved.
Autumn asks for release.
This was the beginning of letting go, of identities, roles, and ways of holding myself that I could no longer sustain.

❄️ Winter: The MAHRSJ and Learning in the Dark
The MAHRSJ is winter.
Not expansion. Contraction.
I moved through it carrying years of advocacy, grief, and collapse.
At times, I was uncertain if I belong.
Fear was present.
So is impostor syndrome.
Winter strips performance.
Expertise no longer shielded me.
I sat with harm, history, and myself.
There is no clear resolution.
Only reckoning.
What hold me is the relationship, my cohort, their care, their presence.
Learning here is collective.
Stillness felt different.
And, something began to shift.
Not all at once. Not visibly.
But quietly, the ground was softening.

I relate to learning differently now.
It is something I am beginning to allow, not push toward.
Rest is justified without explanation.
Winter is not finished.
But it is no longer only frozen.

🌿 Spring: Return and What Is Beginning
I have returned to work.
It feels early spring
There is a sense of movement outward again, but with more awareness than before.
I am more aware of my limits.
More honest about my capacity.
There are moments, small and quiet, where things feel more aligned.
Now, I measure my work differently.
Less by output.
More by integrity.
Work feels more like an expression than an endurance.
A way of moving, more aligned with who I am.

☀️ Summer: Strength and Integration
Summer has not arrived yet.
But I can feel where it is leading.
I am preparing for the World Weightlifting Championships in September.
Strength is becoming something I am relating to differently.
Not as dominance, but as a relationship.
I am learning that strength alone is not enough.
Without softness, it becomes armour.
I am meeting myself in this practice: strength with care, effort with rest.

🍁 Autumn: What May Come
I do not yet know what it will hold.
But I am beginning to understand that it may not feel the same as before.
Perhaps it will not be only about loss.
Perhaps it will carry something closer to harvest.
I am not there yet.
But I am beginning to trust that what is being built now may be something I can return to.

❄️ Winter: What I Am Learning to Trust
Winter will come again.
I know that.
But I am beginning to see it differently.
Possibly as an invitation.
A time to gather.
To reflect.
To move with intention.
I am learning that rest is a different kind of movement.
I do not fully trust this yet.
But I am beginning to.

Coherence Over Mastery
This work is not about completion.
It is about coherence.
It honours learning as cyclical, embodied, and relational.
It recognizes that human rights work is carried out in bodies, not just ideas.
This is not separate from scholarship.
It is what makes the work sustainable.