When Your Body Speaks: The Wisdom Hidden in a Summer Stye
Five weeks on the East Coast. Five weeks of reconnection, celebration, and memories. Five weeks that ended with my body delivering a message I couldn't ignore—right there in my eye.
The stye appeared just before my 40th reunion weekend, angry and insistent. As I pressed hot compresses against my swollen eyelid, I felt the familiar frustration of a body that refuses to cooperate with our plans. But somewhere between the third compress and my muttered complaints, a deeper truth began to emerge.
My body was speaking. And I needed to listen.
What I thought was simply a summer adventure had become something far more profound—an unexpected pilgrimage through the landscape of my own life. Each visit, each gathering, each embrace was a doorway into memory:
The memorial service for my childhood neighbor's father, where decades collapsed into a single moment of shared grief and gratitude. The afternoon with my mother's best friend and her daughter—our childhood foursome reunited, carrying the weight and wonder of all the years between then and now. The celebration dinner with my dear friend before his move to Mexico, toasting not just his new chapter but the beautiful constancy of friendship that transcends geography.
Then came the reunion—walking into a room full of faces that knew me when I was seventeen, when the world felt infinite and terrifying in entirely different ways. And woven through it all, precious hours with my parents, their 85th and 90th birthdays approaching like gentle benedictions on a life well-lived.
I hadn't planned this retrospective tour. But life, in its infinite wisdom, had orchestrated something I didn't even know I needed.
When the Body Becomes Oracle
"Of course you had a stye," my mentor said when I shared my story. Her words stopped me cold. "Looking at your life, your history, your memories—that's powerful, profound work. Your body is responding to all that seeing."
How had I missed this?
The eyes—our organs of perception, our windows to understanding. When they rebel, when they force us to pause, perhaps they're asking us to examine not just what we're looking at, but how we're seeing.
The Questions That Change Everything
As I sat with this revelation, questions began bubbling up from some deeper place of knowing:
What happens when we spend weeks looking through the lens of memory?
When we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of people who knew us decades ago? When we witness the beautiful, heartbreaking passage of time written across beloved faces?
Is there something about looking back that our souls need to process before we can look forward?
Something about honoring where we've been that prepares us for where we're going?
And what about the things we spend our days looking at now?
Our screens, our to-do lists, our reflections in mirrors that show us only surface truths? What would shift if we looked more intentionally at beauty, at possibility, at the faces of people we love?
Here's what I know: I'm in my second Saturn return—that cosmic invitation to shed old skins and step into new truth. Everything feels simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating. The comfortable patterns that have carried me this far are dissolving, making space for something I can't yet name.
Sometimes I feel fierce and ready, prepared to walk boldly into whatever comes next. Other days, I want to pull the covers over my head and pretend change isn't coming. Both responses are holy. Both are human.
The stye has healed, but its message remains: Pay attention to how you see. Honor what you've witnessed. Trust that your body knows things your mind hasn't caught up to yet.
An Invitation to Look Deeper
Have you ever noticed your body speaking when words weren't enough? A tension headache during a difficult decision? A stomach ache when something felt wrong? A stye when you've been seeing too much, too deeply, too fast?
What if these aren't inconveniences to push through, but invitations to pause and listen?
Your body holds wisdom that your busy mind often misses. It never lies and is all knowing. It knows when you need rest, when you need to process, when you need to slow down long enough to integrate all you've experienced.
As we navigate our own seasons of looking back and stepping forward, perhaps the kindest thing we can do is create space for both the seeing and the integrating. To honor the profound work of witnessing our own lives, and to trust that even our physical responses carry meaning worth exploring.
Because sometimes the most powerful insights come not from looking ahead, but from finally understanding what we've been looking at all along.
What is your body trying to tell you? What would change if you listened?
