How I Awakened to Love After I Broke My Foot

This is a personal account of how that happened, and of the experiences that slowly reshaped how I understand connection, intimacy, and what it means to stay with myself over time.

For most of my adult life, I lived with an anxiety I didn’t know how to name. I thought I was depressed, broken, or that something was fundamentally wrong with me. I was in and out of therapy for nearly thirty years, beginning in my early twenties. Yoga and meditation helped me cope, helped me function, but they didn’t yet reach the deeper relational patterns underneath.

I eventually married, and somewhere along the way I stopped tending to myself. I believed loving another person meant giving them everything, including my grounding, my ease, my sense of self. About fifteen years in, the relationship collapsed. We tried therapy early on and again near the end, but by then the rupture was too wide.

When I left, I thought I was choosing freedom.

Freedom, at the time, looked like dating apps, casual intimacy, daily workouts, and a steady fog of distraction. I told myself I was fine. I wasn’t. I accepted that I wasn’t “relationship material” and tried to make peace with it.

Then, on St. Patrick’s Day in 2018, during an obstacle course race, I slipped off the monkey bars and shattered my right heel. Seven fractures. Surgery. Months of immobility. Lying on a gurney on my birthday, just before anesthesia, I had quietly hoped I wouldn’t wake up.

I did wake up. To pain, to slowness, to being utterly alone with myself.

During the long recovery, something cracked open alongside the bone. The distractions fell away. The seduction of disappearing returned, but this time it felt less like a wish to die and more like a call to change. I reached out for help again and was matched with a therapist who held steady while I obsessed over relationships and meaning. When I found Authentic Relating, she encouraged me to follow that thread.

That thread led me back into my body.

Through authentic relating, tantra, and embodied yogic practice, I found spaces where feelings were welcome and nothing had to be performed. My nervous system softened. Yoga and meditation returned, this time alive and relational. I quit painkillers. I worked with teachers and coaches who helped me integrate what I had split off in myself. By the time the world went into lockdown in 2020, I was more at ease being alone than I had ever been. I eventually formed a weekly men’s group, initially to support myself, and then to help others learn how to be with one another more honestly.

This is why I write about relationships the way I do.

I’ve learned that the body and emotions are inseparable. That awareness and feeling, structure and softness, what we call masculine and feminine, are not ideas but lived dynamics. When they’re divided, life contracts. When they’re integrated, something matures. Before my injury, I was living inside a narrow, toxic version of masculinity that denied tenderness and receptivity. No wonder I wanted to disappear.

Since then, through years of practice and study, including retreats with Eckhart Tolle and training in applied Attachment Theory, I’ve learned how to live, and now support others, from a more integrated place.

This space is where I’ll reflect on relationship, embodiment, and the slow work of integration.

These are the threads I’ll be following here.

Let’s see where they lead.

Guest Blog by Hans Morgenstern

Learn more about Hans by visiting his directory listing here.