A Heart Light
as a Feather
I woke up this morning heart heavy.
Sad. Mad. Grieving a relationship that was complicated long before it ended, my relationship with my recently deceased mother.
We were never close. But she loved me as much as she could from where she was. And I have had to sit with both of those truths at the same time.
Someone once said that growing up with a pathologically narcissistic parent creates a very specific kind of wound. Not the kind you can see. The kind that lives in the body. The kind born from never being validated in your experience, your emotions, your reality.
You learn early that your feelings are not safe to have. So you hold them. You compress them. You turn them into weight and carry that weight for years, sometimes decades, sometimes a lifetime.
I know this weight. I have lived in it.
This morning, something cracked open.
It occurred to me that I have been living from the past. That all of the heaviness, the grief, the anger, the longing for a mother I never quite got to have, was holding me. Suspended in time. Like a fly in amber, preserved in a moment that has already passed.
And I thought about the ancient Egyptian concept of the heart being weighed against a feather after death.
Freedom, they understood,
lives in a heart light as a feather.
We have an enormous capacity to hold pain. The human nervous system is remarkable in that way.
But here is what nobody tells you: when you have spent your whole life attuned to pain, you stop making room for anything else. You find it in the shows you watch, the drama in your friendships, the suffering of the world. Your system becomes fluent in it. Addicted to it, even.
The attachment to that pain becomes identity.
It becomes meaning.
It becomes the story you tell yourself
about who you are and why your life
looks the way it does.
I am this wound. This wound is me.
But it is not your truth. It never was. As long as we believe it is, we stay stuck, rerunning the same chapters of a story we never chose to write.
So today I am making a different choice.
- I am going to put my past down. Not because it did not hurt. Not because it was not real. But because I refuse to let it be the whole of me.
- I am going to dance free with my mother's spirit, to her favorite records, the ones she lost her zeal for somewhere along the way.
- I am going to forgive her. And forgive myself.
- I am going to expand my capacity to hold joy. Play. Real freedom. In this body. In this life. Right now.
If you are carrying weight that is not yours anymore, or even weight that was yours once but does not need to come with you into what is next, I see you.
You do not have to white-knuckle your way through grief. You do not have to perform healing. You just have to be willing to put it down.
One moment. One breath. One choice at a time.
Your heart was always meant to be light.
From Heaux to Healer:
A Survivor's No-Bullshit Guide to Healing Trauma and Coming Home to Yourself
What Tori shares in this post, the weight of the mother wound, pain mistaken for identity, the daily choice to put it down, is the lived experience behind her book. From Heaux to Healer is the unfiltered account of the healing journey that brought her here, and a practical guide for anyone ready to stop surviving and start returning to themselves.
Read more about the book →![From Heaux to Healer by Satori Adekoya](https://thecocoonhealingretreat.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Heaux-to-Healer.png")
This is the work we hold space for
at The Cocoon.
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