How hands-on bodywork helped me re-gather and re-root

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We were one of the many thousands of people who decided to move house during lockdown. In this article, I am picking up the strands from Louise Chunn’s posting on 1st September 2021 about her house move, Guy Gladstone’s Top 10 tips to help with the emotions of moving house and weaving into those strands the role hands-on therapy played in helping me find my footing when the ground shifted beneath me.
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We had lived in our previous home for 18 years. Although we knew we had outgrown our place quite a few years ago, it took the pandemic, the lockdown and the stamp duty holiday to facilitate our move. At first, we were delighted to be moving out and we looked forward to moving from commuter town to the countryside in East Sussex. We grew up abroad and our work also took us to different countries so we treated the move as largely a logistical challenge. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The reality was, beneath the logistical challenges were layers of history melded together by and the highs, the lows and the routines of life. Each round of clearing things out involved repeatedly asking ourselves the questions ‘do I still need this?’, ‘will I ever use this again?’ and the sub-text ‘does this still have meaning for me?’ Layered on top of these reflective and sometimes emotional moments, we were still navigating our way through the day to day business of living within the context of a national lockdown and majority of interactions being conducted virtually. 

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