Walking along the beach in Marbella, I found myself thinking I belong here. I felt a clear sense of belonging to that place, and even more so to the version of myself it allows me to be. Marbella combines luxury and attention to detail with a natural, healthy life spent largely outdoors, and leaves room for both simplicity and refinement. In that balance I meet an image of myself I recognised as my own a long time ago, one that there matches the life I’m actually living.
Recognising yourself is a particular feeling. The body relaxes and choices become simpler, because there is no longer any need to keep negotiating between what we feel and what we do. Many people experience it while travelling and file it away as a pleasant memory, something that ends once they are home. I believe it deserves far more attention, because it holds precise information about who we are.
A few days ago I shared the story of a client of mine, an ambitious professional who came back from a trip and began to look at the company where she has worked for years with growing impatience. What happened to her is very common. Away from our usual surroundings, the nervous system steps out of the automatic patterns that govern daily life for a while, and parts of ourselves that had been pushed into the background resurface, such as vitality, curiosity and the need for space. Once we return, the contrast with the familiar environment reveals a distance that habit had quietly absorbed.
The unease that comes from this distance is often treated as a problem to be solved quickly, either with an impulsive decision or, more often, by slowly slipping back into the anaesthesia of routine. After a few weeks the feeling fades and everything seems to go back to normal. That unease, however, signals a mismatch between our inner self-image and the reality we are living, and as long as the mismatch remains, it keeps surfacing in other forms, as tiredness, irritability, a loss of enthusiasm or the sense of living below our potential.
In my work I see every day how much of our identity operates below the level of awareness. The unconscious image we hold of ourselves shapes what we perceive as normal, possible and sustainable, and the nervous system tends to treat what is familiar as safe, even when it no longer fits. This is why we stay for so long in environments, relationships and roles that no longer represent us. The place where we recognised ourselves shows us a broader configuration of who we are, one already present as potential, which the body was able to experience for a few days.
The more useful question, then, is about who we were in that place, how we moved and made choices, what we found acceptable and what we were no longer willing to put up with. For me, Marbella was first of all an inner state I recognised as my own, and only later did it become a tangible part of my life. The work lies in making that state increasingly familiar, until it is integrated into the body and into everyday life, so that outer choices become the natural consequence of a new inner organisation.
This is the direction my client and I are working in, integrating her professional ambition with the freedom and vitality in which she recognised herself. Whatever shape her future takes will grow out of this fuller vision of who she is.
If you have recently felt that sense of belonging, on a journey, in an encounter or through an experience, and on returning your life suddenly felt too small, treat it as valuable information. If you would like to understand what it is pointing you towards and how to bring it into your everyday life, you can write to me through the contact form to explore working together.