Everything I've Birthed Within These Walls

I haven't given birth to a human baby in this house, but I did bring one home fresh from the hospital when he made his debut 10 days early.

I'm in a little season of time travel back to when my ex-husband and I decided to move to Bend in 2015, when I was pregnant with Soren. We came up to look at houses and put an offer on one that had sat for months, dropping its price because it wasn't moving. We were so excited about it. We'd never owned a home and couldn't swing buying one in Los Angeles.

When we submitted the offer, our agent reported back that out of nowhere there was an all-cash offer from another buyer.

We didn't get the house. When I received the news, I grieved.

The next day, our agent sent me some listings, and one of them I remembered seeing months earlier online. We'd clicked through the pictures, and it was just kind of weird, and we'd totally written it off. But because we'd lost the house we wanted so badly, I was open to looking at whatever he'd lined up.

I followed him into a neighborhood and remember thinking, "wait, this is a sweet neighborhood, this can't be where that weird house is."

We pulled up to a pea soup green house with a heinous overgrown yard. The house was sad, but the houses around it weren't.

We walked in and everything was beige. But I knew. (I'm getting choked up as I take myself back there.)

It had been vacant for 14 months.

It was waiting for me.

We put in an offer and it was accepted. My former father-in-law, a master craftsman, flew to Bend from Maui when we closed and started tearing things up before we moved in.

We slowly made it more ours and breathed a new kind of life into it.

On July 11th, we'd lived in the house for only a week when I realized I was leaking amniotic fluid. I wasn't in labor, but I'd sprung a leak 10 days before Soren's due date. Soren arrived the next morning.

I outgrew a few things while living here. Like my marriage. And being underweight.

Within the walls of this home, I came home to myself.

This was always meant to be mine, a sort of white hole (like a black hole, but I like white). It's been safe when I've fallen apart, and it's been strong when I've stretched. It's been like a chrysalis. I entered it as one person and became another in its rooms.

I've birthed myself many times here.

I've birthed death, divorce, profound love.

I've birthed ideas and dreams.

And I birthed Soul Forward Method, which was only able to come through because of everything that came before it.

The level of love and gratitude I have for this home can't be captured.

There were moments I feared I'd lose it as I was in the portal of pivot upon pivot upon pivot with very little connection to a foundation, as I followed the lead of SFM.

She has required so much. And I've continued to trust and do what needed to be done. The refinement has been next level, beyond discomfort, so many times that it no longer bothers me. I'm not distracted by things that used to take up my mental space because I don't have time to be.

Every time someone comes through Soul Forward Method and I watch them remember who they are and lock into an entirely new version of themselves, I know the sacrifice has been worth it.

Another birth within these walls.

You know how when you give birth and at times you think, "I changed my mind, I don't want to do this anymore," but then the baby is born and you're like, the hard part is over, and then it's all kinds of beauty and magic and challenge and a whole new world to navigate?

That's where I'm at.

I'm in a new phase of life that's different than anywhere I've been.

The new era is activated.