When Family Hurt, Water Held Me

This is a story about personal grief, family, and the lessons water holds when words fail. I have Pneumonia, 3d time within 1 year. Pneumonia doesn’t return without a message. In the body, pneumonia is not only inflammation. It is water that cannot move freely in the lungs, spaces meant for flow. In my body, it carries grief that never fully found a place to move. This time, it led me straight into family wounds I thought I had already understood.

---

When Grief Has Nowhere to Flow

Family has been a big theme for me lately, not as an idea and not as a story I tell myself, but as something that lives in the body.

Over the past 24 hours, many threads came together. Not gently, not politely, and not in a way that could be neatly explained. They came together through my lungs.

I have pneumonia again, the third time in one year. When something returns like that, it is no longer a coincidence. The body is not repeating itself out of bad luck. It is trying to speak.

Lungs are often connected to grief. Not loud grief or dramatic grief, but the kind that is held quietly. The kind that learned to survive by staying unspoken. And this time, I couldn’t ignore it anymore. What am I grieving so deeply?

---

When the Body Repeats Itself

Yes, I’ve been through intense experiences recently. Moments that stretched my system beyond what felt familiar, energy that moved fast and far.

It would be easy to explain pneumonia as an overload, as the body is asking for rest after too many energetic shifts too quickly. That explanation wouldn’t be wrong, but it wouldn’t be complete.

The body does not repeat itself randomly. Repetition is not a mental habit; it is a physical one. Water repeats until it can move differently. A river returns to the same bend again and again, not because it prefers it, but because something in the terrain has not yet shifted. Until it does, the (inner) water keeps flowing in the same pattern.

The lungs are tidal spaces, places where water, air, and rhythm meet. When flow is restricted there, the body does not escalate. It repeats, not as punishment or failure, but as an invitation for movement.

---

Watching People Build a Band

While resting in bed, couching, being feverish and tired, I allowed myself something simple: Netflix. No productivity, no justification.

I started watching the series Building the Band. The format is unusual. Singers cannot see each other; they hear only voices. No faces, no visual cues, no image to lean on. They form 6 bands without ever meeting. Each singer prepares alone, with no shared rehearsal, and then they meet for the first time on stage, in public.
What happens every time is pure magic. You can see there was already an energetic field before they met.
Absolutely must-see series, if you love music and co-creation.

Bravo to the format that dares to challenge the music industry that is ALWAYS in control of forming the band and the format. Now the artists do it by themselves. And a band becomes successful, even though it would not have been approved by the industry.

What struck me during every episode wasn’t just the music and the emotions. It was the answers they gave when asked why it mattered.

Again and again, their answers returned to family. Parents who believed in them, siblings who stood by them, grandparents who had been quiet anchors. Over and over, they mentioned their mother, simply and casually, as if it were obvious.

“My mother always told me to follow my voice.”
“My mother believed in me before anyone else did.”
“My mother made sacrifices so I could be here.”

Listening to them, something in me tightened. Not because of envy, but because of absence. I felt an ache that had been waiting quietly for a long time.

---

Strength, Flow, and My Mother

When I was competing as a white-water kayaker, there was a moment before every race that mattered more to me than the start itself. I was already in the river, feeling the current move around my body. That mattered because I wasn’t trying to control the water. I was inside it.

Only later did I understand how deeply familiar that state was.

Before we are born, every human being develops in amniotic fluid, the liquid environment inside the womb where the body forms. The body is continuously held, movement happens without effort, sound arrives through vibration, and there is no separation yet between inside and outside. This is where the nervous system learns what safety feels like, not as thought or memory, but as a bodily baseline.

In the river, my body returned to that state, not consciously, but physically.

And there I spoke to my mother for the first time during the most important competition of my life. She had already died by then. She never saw me become a national champion, and that mattered more than I had ever allowed myself to feel.

I didn’t speak to her to change the outcome. I spoke to her because I missed her, because I wanted to feel held, and because I wanted her to feel proud. And the river held me when she could not.

I wasn’t the strongest competitor that day. Others were technically better. But I stayed steady. I didn’t force anything, and I didn’t push. One by one, others fell away, and I remained.

That was how I won the Dutch Championships. Not because I was exceptional, but because I stayed regulated. Water didn’t make me extraordinary; it kept me aligned. Sometimes, alignment is enough. My prayer to my mother 2 minutes before the start created the frequency within me to win.

---

A Question From Another Culture

This morning, a man I know through Facebook called me. We had never spoken in real time before. He is my most loyal fan on Facebook. ALWAYS likes and comments on my posts, and we regularly send DM’s
He called because he heard I was sick, and then he asked a question that landed deeper than he probably realised:

“Who is taking care of you?”

And he asked another question, “Why is family not so important in Western cultures as it is in Africa?”

I explained that my children weren’t here, that one isn’t even in the country, and that another would come in a few days. He was genuinely surprised.

I could not immediately answer the 2nd question, but then it daunted. We are too busy chasing the money we need to maintain the life we believe we love to lead.

In his culture, care flows automatically. Family steps in without discussion.
Later, I realised the difference isn’t emotional, it’s structural. Care used to move like water. Now it is managed through systems and medication.

Systems and medicine keep bodies alive, but they don’t replace felt connection. When care stops flowing, love doesn’t disappear. It becomes contained.

Back to my friend; he NEVER asks for anything. He is always genuinely interested in how my life is going and how I am doing.  And yet I know his life is not easy, so I sometimes support him. For example, when his cooking stove was stolen from his hut, he could no longer cook. Family need not always be a bloodline.

---

What Family Really Is

We value family deeply, and because of that, it hurts deeply. We want their attention, their approval, their happiness. We want to be seen by the people we love most.

But family also holds our highest expectations, and therefore our deepest triggers. With family, the wounds go straight to the core.

Everyone looks through a different lens. Everyone has different coping styles, different capacities, and different limits. Family has a unique ability to touch the core of who we think we are.

That word matters. Think.

Family shapes us, challenges us, and builds resilience. This is not accidental.

I know my soul chose my parents, not because it was easy, but because it was precise. Certain patterns could only be met there. Certain lessons required exactly that dynamic.

And I know my daughters’ souls chose me, not for perfection or comfort, but for the experiences, mirrors, and growth we would shape together.

This is why family touches us so deeply. It is not random. It is intentional at the soul’s level.

But family does not entitle us to love, and love does not require reciprocity to be real. I can love people even if they don’t love me back. That does not make me better, nor does it make them worse.
And everybody shows love in a different way. Depending on how far away they have moved from love.
Depending on how much they actually love themselves.

The idea that family equals obligation is a societal conditioning that developed when survival depended on it. It is not a truth of the soul. It is not a law of love. And once that conditioning loosens, something else becomes possible.

---

What I Am Grieving

I am grieving many things at once. My parents were not present for much of my life or my children’s. They were leaving their bodies when I became a mother. When I needed guidance and correction.

I did not receive love in a way that was fully safe, not because they didn’t care, but because they carried their own unhealed patterns. Because of that, I could not always pass on love the way I had wanted to my children and the other people I loved.

This is something I grieve deeply, not with blame or shame. Grief is not meant to stay inside the body; it is meant to move. Tears are water completing a cycle that words cannot finish.

---

Water, Source, and Connection

The answer didn’t come through thinking. It came while I was sitting on the couch, watching snowflakes fall past the window. Snow is rare in my country. I watched it for a while, and I felt it calling me.

I heard the medical whisper; it is not good to go outside in the cold when you are sick. And especially it is not good to breath in the cold air in the lungs when having pneumonia.

I decided to go outside anyway, because I trust my body.

I went outside in my pyjamas, closed my eyes, and let the snow touch my skin. Cold, gentle, abundant.
I felt the caressing softness of the snow melting on my face.

I felt held. And then I saw myself floating down a river, past all the family relationships I am grieving. And I noticed something crucial.

I was still being carried, and I flowed past all of them. None of them stopped the river from flowing.

Now you might think this is metaphorically, but also literally the source river (the living, loving flow frequency coming from source to you every nano-second, keeps on flowing. Are you open to connecting with it?

---

Returning to the Water

I am not writing this because everything is resolved. I am writing because something has softened. I feel peace.

Water didn’t fix my family history. It did shift my perspective and my dependence towards it. It reminded me that connection does not depend on form.

Water moves anyway, through rivers, through breath, through tears. Families do not own love. They teach us about it if you are willing to see through the pain they can cause.

And when grief is allowed to move, it does not weaken us. It returns us to flow

---

What’s next?

Go to the FREE menu and check whether you want to learn more about water.

Do the quiz and find out what water flow type you are

Start clearing, cleaning and energising your water

Check out some of the webinars I gave

Read other blogs

Join my YouTube channel

Or join my free community

If you go to contact-page, you can schedule a free 15-minute call to find out how I can help you with advice about one of my coaching programs, a product in the shop or one of the water healing retreats and trips